Remove Bolt of Magma
Posted: Sunday, 7th May 2017, 13:05
Because it's meaningless and barely used
KoboldLord wrote:There probably are too many bolt spells that have no meaningful differences other than the spell skills that you train to be able to use them. Magma has shorter range and requires more new xp investment compared to most of the others, but it's open to question whether this means that magma should be removed or a bunch of the others should be removed.
With respect to in-game use, the current use case for bolt of magma is basically that you're running a compatible build and it happens to be the first appropriate-element bolt spell that spawned for you. It's basically just a palette swap, and it doesn't matter all that much what color you pick.
Trying to differentiate spell schools based on attack type is going to lead you to the conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage, but trying to consolidate down spell attacks to only a few fundamentally different spells results in throwing out most of the spell schools and with it all the secondary advantages that differentiate them.
watertreatmentRL wrote:I think you're onto something in your second paragraph there. "Would bolt of magma be more interesting with a fireball-like attack pattern?" No, but is fireball interesting as a spell with a fireball-like attack pattern? Also a no, in my opinion. It is about the most cliched possible spell that could be in crawl.
Similarly, good paragraph:Trying to differentiate spell schools based on attack type is going to lead you to the conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage, but trying to consolidate down spell attacks to only a few fundamentally different spells results in throwing out most of the spell schools and with it all the secondary advantages that differentiate them.
Indeed, consolidating spell attacks has a lot of potential!
In a game where you generally don't have all possible spells available anyway, it is neither necessary nor useful to have ten different magic skills, much the way it is not necessary or useful to have ten kinds of weapon skills. You have all these weapon skills that are all about doing damage either in melee or at range and then you have six kinds of magic that are mostly about doing damage in melee or at range! "The conclusion that there's only so many different ways you can cause damage" is where you have to start, not a realization you try to avoid through six kinds of bolt spells.