The Weekend Update...Follow

You assume everyone raids. If you don't, it's not disingenuous at all.

I have two spell sets I use, for grouped fighting, and for buffs. I looked at them to see which ones are level 100:

Legacy of Spikethistles and Mask of the Boosquetender; Perma-buffs (i.e. they're always up) and they add some nice extra buffage. But enough to justify a big jump in price? And then, here's the kicker with these spells: At level 100, we also have Natural Unity, which combines these two spells. And, it's from CotF, so just costs ~960 Marks of Valor. And, I found it in the bazaar for about 1000plat, so didn't even need to farm the marks!

Granitebark Blessing (group version): Again, if you only group, casting the single target version is no big deal.

Lunassuage (group heal): Rank 2 adds ~5% healing over rank 1. Don't cast it enough to make this a big deal.

Again, nobody is saying that the rank 2s aren't better. But if you're not flush with plat, they're not always worth it (or affordable at all, so relative worth is not even the point).

If you raid, then I can see where you'd use more of the spells that I don't really use, and the marginal difference in effect is worth the difference in price. But I'm going to make an assumption here. If you raid, you probably play more hours than the average casual, and you probably have more plat that the average casual. And you probably do more of the final tier group missions that the average casual, where the spell turn-ins drop to begin with. So, for that group of players, yes, just getting the rank 2s right off the bat, price be damned, is more of a no brainer. For casuals, not so much. And the more casual, the more not-so-much it becomes.

Regarding your last post, it's been an interesting discussion, and that weekend was long past, so I don't think we should feel bad about derailing anything :)

Tat

Yes. I'm not disagreeing with that. Well, not much. My point is that the highest damage nukes in each set don't always come at the highest level. They tend to be spread out. I just pointed out the three "claw" spells that wizards get. The highest of the three is the level 103 spell, not the level 105. I'll also point out that the lower max damage spells also tend to be more mana efficient (so your starting premise isn't correct). You trade off more bang for less buck over time (ie: you deplete your mana faster). Yes, if all you care about is burning mobs down, then the biggest bang is what you want. But most of the time (especially if grouping), mana management is an issue. You will help your group out more using your more modest damage spells with greater mana efficiency than using nothing but your biggest nuke.

And again. The "biggest" nukes aren't always at level 105. And even those that are are not always the "best" nuke to use.




Which scale directly with relative damage and can therefore be ignored when just comparing spells. Assuming there's some point at all to all those other spells, then we must assume that they are just as "useful" to the caster. My point is that there is no reason for spells to be more or less expensive based on the level they happen to fall at within a given 5 level range. EQ ought to just use the same expansion wide drops for all of them to be honest. It would be a much simpler and much fairer system IMO.




Um... Ok. The wizards primary shield spell that he'll have up all the time he gets at level 101, not 105. So if this is his "big AC spell buff", why isn't it at level 105 and cost a ton? It doesn't. Your other most used defensive spells will be the Darkmist Guard (that whole line is one I normally walk around with), which is level 103. Or you might want to use Shield of Consequence, which is level 102. There are, in fact, zero defensive spells that a wizard gets at level 105.

Not talking about wizards? Ok. My paladins primary defensive buffs come at level 103 (armor of formidable spirit), and 104 (Brells Stalwart Bulwark, a spell that no one ever asks for or wants, right? That's sarcasm btw). My "doesn't stack with cleric buff" defense is at level 102. I do get my group version of the buff at level 105, but no one ever wants that one (and I'm not being sarcastic this time). Literally the most important spell I got at level 105 was my last stun, and not because it's "more powerful", but because the previous set of stuns cap at level 103, so while I was level 104, there was this odd one level spot where even con mobs (which you can run into when soloing HAs) can't be affected by one of the stuns, which is a pita.

But wait? When do clerics get their big defensive buff? The one that's better than my own buff, and the one everyone asks for? Surety is a level 102 spell, not level 105.


Again, I'm just not seeing any pattern to suggest that level 105 spells are any more "powerful" than any of the other spells in the set you get between levels 101 and 105. They just aren't. And they aren't in any of the other 5 level ranges for the previous 30 levels either. Yet, for some unknown reason, the game still insists on making each level's spell within that range progressively more rare (usually) and thus more expensive. Which makes zero sense. All the spells in a given 5 level set should be balanced to be equally powerful, and should be equally rare and expensive.




Because "best" is subjective. And if it's not universal, then it's "random". So if 1/5th of the classes in the game happen to get the best version of a given spell at level 105, then that does not mean that level 105 spells are universally "better". It means, in fact, that the "best" spells are no more likely to happen to fall at that level than at any other level. Which was the point i was making. You can't just cherry pick the handful of "best" spells that do happen to fall at level 105 while ignoring all the other "best" spells that fall somewhat evenly across all the other levels.


Make sense?

Shrugs... I think the whole spell acquisition system in EQ has always been off the mark, and what it has evolved into is completely unnecessary.

Shouldn't be a plat sink as plat sinks only deter returnees and the more casual part of the playerbase.

Lorewise it made some sense that one NPC in such and such place was the only person that could teach (sell) you a spell (enchanters had this a lot actually), and home city caster guilds should have the intelligence to stop a full array of spells (PoK library should never have needed to be the everything low spot.... should have been the everything odd after the era spot).

Way more spells in the game than is necessary. It's never to late (well when the servers are unplugged I suppose it is) to prune spell lines, consolidate things, remove things and so on.

Oh yeah. It's much much better. I actually really like the tiered spell system, and that they've standardized spell lines within 5 level expansion ranges. There are still a few oddities related to spell levels though. One is the cost difference, which I mentioned above and really don't think should apply anymore. The other is that part of the design involves requiring upgrades for certain spell lines, not because they are inherently more powerful (although most are), but merely to up the level that the spell affects. I see this with two lines on my Paladin. The Calm line, and stuns. Both have a level limit that they can affect. Which would be fine, but it creates "odd" effects while leveling. You don't normally notice this (much), but with the release of HAs, it's become more apparent. Since HAs scale the level of the opponents to your own level (as opposed to any random hunting area, which does not), you can hit odd patches where leveling up actually makes the same HA more difficult, because now the mobs are no longer affected by your current "highest" level of a given line, and you haven't gotten the upgrade in the current 5 level range yet.

Another annoyance is the GOM ability. Again, these are things that only happen as you are leveling, and not once you are maxed, but it can be annoying when your best fire nuke procs a GOM in one level range, but your best ice nuke is too high to take advantage of it. So every level, you're playing mental gymnastics to remember which spell in your firing sequence will pair with which other spell in case GOM fires off. A better way to address this would be to change the granularity of GOM such that it grants the effect to the next spell cast that is within 5 levels of the spell that procced it and not in hard 0-5 level ranges as it is now.

They could similarly have spells like stuns and calms affect mobs based on relative level to the caster, and not based on the spell level/range. Assuming they still want to force you to buy upgrades, simply have the spell stop working once it's more than 5 levels lower than the caster's level. This perfectly manages to force spell upgrades in 5 level chunks as now, but eliminates the "odd" level bumps based on when in the 5 level progression a spell happens to appear.

There's probably a few other oddities, but these are the ones that I have run into directly while leveling characters.

Edited, Jan 28th 2016 1:55pm by gbaji

Bah! But what's the fun in that? ;)

It is interesting to see how different people have different ideas about how spell balancing, pricing, etc should be handled. Or, I guess more correctly, how they would prefer them to be handled. It's a pretty subjective thing.



Yeah. There was some fun to that. But on the other hand, it lent itself to some randomness more or less based on the fact that often the Devs think a spell will be much more or less powerful/useful/desirable than it really is in the game. I guess this is kind of a side step to my nit above. I'd rather they aim for trying to make all spells as balanced as possible in terms of cost vs usefulness than try to figure out which ones are "more powerful" and then make them more difficult to obtain. As the game has grown balance has changed. Spell lines that used to be awesome back in the day maybe aren't now, and some that sucked are great. The idea that a given spell line is still exactly as relatively useful today as it was against content 30 levels ago seems pretty unlikely, and constraining yourself to that assumption going forward is super difficult from a game design point of view.

This also produced some "odd" effects where based solely on what expansion a given spell came out in (back when they still did more than like two expansions per level increase), the method of obtaining said spell could vary radically in difficulty/cost. Which often had zero to do with the actual relative power of said spell. Obviously, the devs spend most of their time focusing on balancing "current" content, so this isn't really as huge a deal as one might thing, but I do recall several times looking up spells and thinking "Wait! I've got to do what to get this spell? But it's less powerful than <some other spell> I'm going to get in 3 levels".



Yeah. This is another oddity. Some spells remain equally powerful/useful no matter how old they are. Which, I suppose, is a nice bonus for players as the game ages, but does somewhat play havoc with the concept of spell cost balance.



That's kind of the whole point of the rank system though. I do get pining away for the "good old days", but at the same time, I recall being annoyed that it was often very hard, if not downright impossible for non-raiders to get some spells. And again, the spells that you had a hard time getting were often somewhat random (and let's not forget the drops were random as well, so you'd have 8 copies of some spell all the classes in your guild already had drop, while the small numbers you were actually looking for seemed to never do so). The Kunark era system wasn't too terrible, since the "common" spells were purchasable, with (in theory) just the more powerful ones requiring you to get via drops, but again the problem was with what the devs thought was "more powerful" versus what actually was. I remember absolutely hating the system in OOW. Very very arbitrary. And again, which ones were placed in the "more difficult" spots were not necessarily in alignment with which ones the players actually wanted most.

The rank I's being purchaseable makes the game a lot more friendly to casual players, while still rewarding more serious ones. I don't think it's a perfect system, but it's at least the best of the imperfect ones they've used so far.

Again, I think the key problem is that you can't make every single spell hard to get, so assuming "some" should be buyable, who decides which ones aren't? Dunno. They just had a terrible track record doing this in the past, which I'm sure was at least part of the reason for moving to the rank system in the first place.