Spells and Skills

[horus]

Based on skill trees (read the other posts regarding ranks, etc). Bear in mind, all the spells/skills listed below are just describing their effects and proper creative descriptions will be added into the help file when they are implemented. The spells below are representative of Priests.

Casting time: the higher the number, the slower it is to cast.
Pre-requisites: the rank of the current spell/skill cannot be higher than the rank of the pre-requisite spell/skill
Critical Miss: Each weapon/attack type has a percentage chance of missing, regardless of any bonuses and levels of the attacker
Success: When casting aggressive spells, the success of the spell is dependent on the spell rank of the caster, the level of the caster, the saving throws and resistances of the victim.

General Curse
Cast: 1
Lowers target's attack by 1 per rank. At mastery rank, target has double the chance of critical miss

Curse Strength
Cast: 4
Prereq: General Curse
Lowers target's ability to deal physical damage by 1% per rank. At mastery rank, a critical miss by the victim will cause the victim to drop their weapon.

Curse Dexterity
Cast: 3
Prereq: General Curse
Lowers target's ability to use dexterity based skills like dodge/phase/parry. Mastery rank will cause the target to have a small percentage chance of receiving full damage when hit.

Curse Constitution
Cast: 5
Prereq: General Curse
Causes target to take more damage from each physical hit by 1% per rank. Mastery rank will cause the target to have a small percentage chance of receiving bleeding wounds.

Aura of Fear
Cast: 3
Prereq: Either Curse Strength, Curse Dexterity, Curse Constitution
Causes everyone in the same room to lower their attack by 1 per rank. There is a small percentage per rank that the attackers will flee. This spell becomes innate at mastery rank.

Heal
Cast: 1
1d6 per rank heal. At mastery rank, there is a percentage chance the heal is doubled.

Advanced Heal
Cast: 7
Prereq: Heal
2d5 per rank heal. At mastery rank, there is a percentage chance the heal is doubled.

Inner Heal
Cast: 5
Prereq: Heal
1d6 per rank heal, however, this is more of an ability to ask for divine help than a spell, so you can heal in silent and no magic rooms. Can only heal oneself.

Full Heal
Cast: 9
Prereq: Advanced Heal
4% heal per rank. At mastery rank, there is a percentage chance of the target restoring all of his/her hitpoints.

[horus]

RESERVED FOR MORE SPELLS POST

[horus]

RESERVED

[Once]

How many seconds is a 9 cast time?

[horus]

10 cast time = 1sec

[Once]

So curse is cast in under 1/10th of a second, and you can get a full heal by spamming every second? Or did you mean 1 cast time is 1 second?

[horus]

Those are just cast times.

The idea is as follows:
Every weapon would have a weapon speed, similar to casting times. Adding into the mix are other factors, like dex and speed etc. As an example, a warrior using a shortsword (weapon speed of 7) might have his attacks as such:-
A.......A.......A.......A (every 10 dots is one second, so the attack occurs after 0.7 seconds).
Now say this warrior wants to use kick (which has attack speed of 5), his attack will now look like this:
A.....K.......A.......A (notice how, the Kick essentially replaces one of the attacks, unlike our current system where we have our usual attacks and kick is just a bonus attack)
Now if the warrior wants to spam the kick command:
A.....K.....K.....K.....K (So the warrior has to decide if the kick command does more damage overall or whether he does more damage just using his weapons. The warrior has to take into account his weapon rank, his kick rank etc

These are just examples with arbitrary numbers, and obviously needs to be tweaked. There will be skills/spells that require some downtime and some that are only once per day usage. I am undecided whether to allow some spells to be disrupted mid-cast, for example, if a priest is trying to cast full heal and during that casting time, he gets hit, that spell dissipates and he wastes his mana.

Bear in mind, HP and Mana will be significantly lowered. Also, the casting times of spells and attack speeds of skills will also be tweaked until we get the right balance.

PS: Damn you for conning me into posting details!

[Once]

I get where you're going with this initial design, but I think we need to flesh it out a lot more to make it implementable.  1d6 at rank 20 is 20d120 or 2400 damage heal at a half second cast rate. That may not be imbalanced for some new HP design, but we need to start thinking now through:

1) Rank progression curves (how do we ensure each rank is valuable but not too uber)

2) Rank costs (What sort of cost is associated with ranking. What sort of strategy do we attribute to earning ranks. Do you just focus like mad on getting to rank 20, or do you want to go to new spells. Are there a limited number of ranks? Or can you just exponentially grow? Does it save over remorts? Why would someone who can level fast ever rank up Heal beyond what's needed to learn advanced heal? What sort of tactics are we trying to encourage?)

3) Damage curves (Presuming this is going beyond just priests we'd need to understand how much time it'd take to kill the average mob, and consequently how many mobs we'd need to kill for a level/rank. How much value is associated for each level (in terms of staying power vs another level))

4) Tactics (Touched on above, how does this play into tactics? What sort of tactics are we asking a player to use? Generally I find typing out scenarios of combat to be quite helpful for this. Klax used to do this a lot when doing examples of his combat system for GW2 when it was getting started on Mudconnect.)


Otherwise good stuff. We've got a nice skeleton here, but I think we need to work on it a bit before we're in a state where we can play with HP, Mana, mobs, etc. I don't think such an overhaul can happen without a lot of planning, and it'll likely require revising how mobs work in general as well as the exp curves.


-Once

[horus]

All info on rank progression, pracs gained etc are discussed in the other thread about skill trees.

The aim is to only provide enough pracs for players to gain 8 ranks in all skills/spells on average. This way, they must decide to either be a jack of all trades, or have masteries in a few spells/skills.

Please read the rest of the info in the other threads.

[Once]

I've read the other threads indepthly actually, and haven't really seen any concrete info on the maths for progression etc. Do you mind pasting it here? I'm not trying to shoot down your idea or anything, to your past points though it's just important that we have a good plan in place for this stuff. Changing to a rank based system like this is not trivial, it's going to take a lot of planning, especially if there's edits to hp/mana/mobs/etc.


Cool idea on the 8 ranks. So out of 20 ranks that puts you at 40%. Does that amount of pracs dynamically scale up as new skills are added? What about if skills get removed?