From the previous thread:
Doesn't look like I'll be able to get to that tonight, but the good news is we now have working elemental focuses. Fire focuses can cast fire spells with more power than a normal focus (but are standard issue for other elements).
Sounds great!
Of course, what Zsijn is talking about is the ordinary trees that you trade to the lumbermill, not the magic ones that you make staffs from.
But I suppose a certain number of the ordinary trees turn into magic ones, so the loading percentage should be about equal for both kinds?
I am also not sure that I quite got the part about the elemental focuses.
How do you assign the fire focus to them? Do a certain percentage of all the staffs get it, or is it based on what kind of tree the staff was made from?
Will other focuses get elemental ice or water to counteract the fire spells?
I'd also appreciate some ideas on which trees should give which elemental modifiers. Please limit it to one modifier per tree.
Like I said, there are 50 different kinds of trees, and some of them are a lot more common than others, which I suppose should influence the value of the modifier.
I could post a list of the trees, but that is not much use without the percentage load.
Which elemental modifiers are available?
Are all the available spells sorted under any of the elements fire, water, air, earth?
Also, like Jaros pointed out, the age of the trees should make a difference to the factor - as well as the level of the players woodsing skill.
I'll break this down into question by question:
How do you assign the fire focus to them? Do a certain percentage of all the staffs get it, or is it based on what kind of tree the staff was made from?
Will other focuses get elemental ice or water to counteract the fire spells?It'll be dependant upon the type of wood. Check "help trees" for a list of magic trees. These I've found out are actually completely different from what are used for lumberjacking. Only about 8 elements in total will get elemental staves: Fire, Ice, Electric, Water, Earth, Air (the newbie element, will make quite nice staves), Spirit, and Death.
When casting within that element of your stave you will get a bonus multi based on: The age of the tree, the skill of the woodsinger, the reagents you used when singing (gathered via crafting), and refinements made to the staff itself.
Which elemental modifiers are available?
Are all the available spells sorted under any of the elements fire, water, air, earth?Essentially any damage spells and any spells currently modified by staves such as Battle Rage, etc will get a benefit if you're using a stave of the appropriate element. This lets you focus on being a specific type of mage. We're currently lacking a lot of the types of spells that do receive bonuses from focusing on an element but I think with time and a little work on Graham's part we could actually see that being part of the gameplay content.
The long term goal here is to make this part of a crafting system and as such these sorts of stave settings will NOT be available to builders. Doing so just encourages yet another arms race as we've seen with damroll, innates, etc for every new zone that comes in. Every single zone will try to push things just a little bit further thereby creating additional balance problems. The Pike is a good instance of this. It's essential that as we build out this feature we focus on how we make crafting more usable by players, how we create a player market, and how we make focusing on a specific element a core piece of gameplay.
