Review of Sorcererous abilites!

The harnessing and manipulation of nether.
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TheCacklackian
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Joined: Sat Jan 25, 2020 3:59 am

Review of Sorcererous abilites!

Post by TheCacklackian »

So having obtained every sorcery ability that is currently available, I intend to test and review each one with my opinions on them each. I have not yet tested them each, so this list will likely be updated as time goes on.

Discalimer: These are all my opinions that I have reached in the time I've had to play with them. Others likely have had more time, and more experience with them! Some of my suggested ideas may not be balanced, I just don't like calling out problems without proposing at least some kind of solution! Overall I love most of these abilities, they are fun!
  • Binding Tendril-An ability with several effects mostly CC so far as I can tell. When it hits the hands, arm, or torso, it applies a bound affect, which stops an enemy from being able to attack you. When hitting the leg, it pulls them to the ground. When hitting the neck, it chokes them and I believe does some variation of energy damage over time, though I could be mistaken, I've not yet been able to use the choke effect for several seconds.
    • Pros:
      Amusing to yoink enemies to the ground.
      When used on enemies with injured legs, grounding them can be extremely debilitating.
      Has inherit rerolls means the ability is very effective with stance dancing.
      Against players who have to manually input commands like stand, the grounding effect can be pretty good.
    • Cons(many of these are more like personal gripes, this ability is fun, just not always useful):
      Very inconsistent, sometimes the bound effect lasts for a decent time, allowing you to reposition. But a lot of them time, it seems to end before you can even finish roundtime, leaving you in a worse position than you started.
      Grounding affect inflicts (almost) no roundtime. This means that at least against npcs, it's useless unless they're leg is already fairly wounded. They will be up and attacking you before your roundtime is over which leaves you at a disadvantage.
      Struggling to break the bound affect gives seemingly 1-2 seconds of roundtime most the time, this leads to a lot of spam when they struggle to break, and makes it very difficult to stance dance them as they won't experience much if any roundtime.
    • Ideas:
      Grounding-Against NPCs only, make the grounding affect inflict at least some roundtime(preferably enough time so they won't stance dance you when you suceessfully cast but are put into roundtime), or even stun/stagger/unbalance them in the way that dirtkick does. This would make it a decent CC. Other than that, it works pretty well.
      Choke-Can't comment much on this, haven't had it happen much. Will update when I get more research on it done.
      Bound-Add a minimum timer for bound against NPCs, at least 5-6 seconds so they can't immediately stance dance you when you succeed( I keep saying against NPCs as I feel they have an innert advantage over players in that players need to manual type inputs like stand/struggle.) Add a slightly larger roundtime to struggling. Not enough to give negative rerolls, but enough to take away positive ones. This will also super reduce the spam. I would also like to see the ability for enemies to perform things like feints removed, and things like dirt kick slightly impeded. When bound, you should not be able to feint, or do any offensive ability involving hands.
Overall just not a fan of being penalized for a successful cast, which binding tendril does seem to do. This is very opinionated, I love the ability itself, but don't really find myself using it, as it often leads to be taking a hit while in roundtime because an enemy immediately broke my binding, or stood back up. Also, enemies can still use special attacks like feint and (I think) dirtkick while bound, meaning even when they're bound, they can stun you, throw you off balance, and put you into heaps of roundtime.

Opinion that is not really relavent:I prefered the ability pre offensive rerolls when there was no cooldown. It let you sometimes refresh bound, which was a bit more useful.
  • Essence Leech-An ability that has a 3x offensive reroll, and can do a moderate amount of damage.
    • Pros:
      This ability can be a very good one when you're still using one channel. It will regain at a maximum of 50 energy against a target, and can do a fair 25 points of damage on a good roll.
      High reroll means it's a good chance of hitting.
      Doesn't take energy to cast.
    • Cons:
      Less useful if you're using more than one channel as your fatigue will quickly outpace all but the 50+ energy casts, and even then it's only minorly useful.
      Can sometimes put you into roundtime for a negliable amount of energy( I feel this is pretty balanced as is. The ability is really good a lot of the time)
    • Ideas:
      I've really only got one suggestion for this ability, and that's for every channel of sorcery you've got, add a higher maximum gain. If you use more than one channel this ability will not sustain you enough to be worth the roundtime per cast. OR make the cooldown and roundtime per cast shorter for each open channel of sorcery.
Opinion:I actually really like this ability as is. The roundtime could be a little lower, or it could have higher gains for more channels, but other than that it feels balanced, it does a decent amount of damage for a utility ability. Whilest I do not like the cooldown on this ability. I don't really like the cooldown on any ability, so I don't really think that matters here, and I think this abilities cooldown is quite necessary. Well balanced for low single channel casting.
  • Echoing Whisper-An ability that allows you to take a blood sample, to communicate with someone from a long range.
    • Pros:
      Allows for organized private long ranged 2 way communication.
      Assuming you can label vials, you could in theory have several of each named vials, which would make it very convenient. Sorcerer's speedial list anyone?
      Cheap to use/cast, only requiring a vial and needle.
      Vials are reusable, but you don't clean them, you unsanitary freak.
      Blood never coagulates. Because magics
    • Cons:
      Each vial only gives you a couple of casts, and the duration is quite short. Better drain your friend completely if you want to have a long far away conversation!
      People will think you're creepy wanting to prick them with needles, and really, can you blame them?
      Friends not included.
      Don't mix up your blood vials. You'll never be able to resort them.
    • Ideas:
      Let us empty the blood from vials.
      Let blood spoil, we shouldn't be able to keep it forever. Perhaps a week at max?
      Let us use these blood vials for occult rituals later!
Opinion-Seems like a fairly nifty ability. I like it, doesn't completely invalidate ESP nor do it ESP make this useless.
  • Shadow Cloak-An ability that has got a few nifty uses, it shrouds your identiy. Makes you look really spooky. Decreases roundtime for hiding in dark rooms, and supposedly increases your stealth roll in dark areas(I can't confirm or deny this having no ability to see my stealth roll).
    • Pros:
      Great Synergy with Shadow orb, and the Muffle and blur glyphs.
      Disguises you.
      You can finally dress like a phantom for octum.
      Can easily obtain a reasonable duration.
      Able to be dismiss early.
    • Cons:
      They will not let you into town with it active.
      Octum Charmseeking bag not included.
      Also Nether claws and Katars not included.
    • Ideas:
      Let us use this in town only during the month of Octum as a replacement for a charm seeking outfit.
Opinion:I've really got nothing bad to say about this ability. Now that the dismiss scloak command exists, this ability feels fine to me. Easy to use, and I enjoy it.
  • Shadow Orb-Basically a reverse Disco Ball. Darkens the room and looks creepy as hell.
    • Pros:
      Can be used to increase stealth capabilities.
      Boosts usefulness of shadow cloak and stealthy glyphs.
    • Cons:
      Disco has not been invented yet.
      Cannot be dismissed early(Nor should it be)
      If used in a dark room, you will not be able to see anything.
    • Ideas:
      This ability really seems fine as is to me.
Opinion: Do not ever allow Sorcerers to have a night vision ability if this ability stays the way it is. You will become damn near unstoppable in dark areas. Many memories of shadow orb to cheese drakes on Clok.

  • Sorcerous Channeling-The primary ability that allows you to learn sorcery and channel. I don't really feel a pro/con list applies here. So I will instead skip straight to the ideas.
    • Ideas:
      Increase the minimum damage when using several channels. I don't mind there being an overlap, but unlike clok, there is no channeling skill, meaning more than one channel is super draining.
      Allow the number of channels to affect offensive spell abilites, eg making essence leech/transfer more potent, and making binding tendril last longer.
      When in really high levels of sorcery, allow basic channeling and raw casting without a focus, but only 1 channel.
      Let sorcery factor into the offensive formula for raw casts/spells?(this could affect the balance in a bad way towards the higher end. I understand and acknowledge that. Sorcerers are not a combat class, even if they are the most offensive of the scholar branches. But it would be nice for the more scholarly among us who don't level up ranged combat to still have a fighting chance against your average infested.)
  • Soul Detection-Kind of sort of like the mummer ability to sense stealthed folk. It could be useful. Don't really know much about it, as I haven't been able to test it much. Will edit this at a later date with the pros and cons.
  • Essence transfer-Ditto^
Edit:I should add that a lot of the negatives could simply be me having really bad luck with rolls and a lot of the positives could be the opposite, take everything here with a grain of salt! Also removed the idea about binding tendrils cooldown, it's really not super bad, I think it's just my bias against cooldowns hehe.
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Rias
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Re: Review of Sorcererous abilites!

Post by Rias »

Excellent feedback post. Here's some of the stuff I've done to address the concerns (for those who don't watch the #OOC or #announcements channels).

- Binding Tendril's knockdown effect now causes stagger.
- The Bound effect now prevents many more actions (including feint).
- Essence Leech energy returns now get an inherent +5 per active sorcery channel.

The inconsistency issues can at least be predicted by paying attention to the end percent of the cast roll. The higher that percentage, the more effective the spell will be. So a binding hit with a low percentage won't last long, but a binding hit with a high percentage will last a decent amount of time.

So in this example ...
An inky black tendril lashes at an attack dummy! Ranged(d300(2x)):213 vs Dodge(d103(3x)):72 = 141 (47%)
I'm talking about the (47%) at the end. That'll give you a rough guess as to how effective the result is going to be. If you get something low like a 5%, maybe don't let your guard down since the bind isn't going to last long.

Regarding blood samples: Yeah, keeping them organized isn't the easiest. I'm pondering ways to improve that. I also have an update in mind for Echoing Whispers that'll give it slightly more utility.

Raw sorcery casts already do more damage with more channels, but it's not necessarily meant to be a devastating means of attack even at three channels.

I've intentionally kept the ranged attack accuracy based on the Ranged Combat skill and not Sorcery. Being good at sorcery doesn't equate to aim in combat situations, and those wishing to use their sorcery for ranged attacks will need to invest in the Ranged Combat skill. This is part of my whole thing I have against the tendency in games for magic users to be able to do a multitude of different things effectively, solely by virtue of being able to use magic. I've always felt that kind of thing to be a slight to people who invest in dedicated skills/means of accomplishing the same things, having invested in a particular skill to do a particular thing instead of just depending on a single skill (like magic) to cover multiple radically different activities and situations. I want to ensure magic users need to invest in skills appropriate to what they want to be able accomplish, just like everyone else.
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TheCacklackian
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Re: Review of Sorcererous abilites!

Post by TheCacklackian »

You made a lot of good points, and addressed the bigger concerns I had particularly with binding tendril. if you want to make blood vials easily organized? Let us lable them if we can't already, and then grab them based on the label name! Eg, you have a blood vial labeled MEL, get mel would grab that vial. Afterwords you can remove the label if you like, or maybe have them be magical labels that can be rewritten? Dunno could be something like occult glyphs that change depending on who's blood it is! Just an idea really.
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Rias
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Re: Review of Sorcererous abilites!

Post by Rias »

You can put labels on vials and target them based on the label text. I think this was actually the thing that pushed me to implement labels in the first place.
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