DoT skill change

[KoboldLord]

I think it's pretty accepted that hexes aren't getting picked up much. They're mostly resistible, which means they're Useless Useful Spells for most of the game unless you started with them and are training them religiously. Almost all of them synergize with the lightly armored stealthy short blade stabber archetype, but are at best marginally useful for almost anything else. They also do roughly the same thing as Evaporate and Mephitic Cloud, both of which are in overwhelmingly superior magic schools that carry the game without anywhere near as much complication.

How about we expand the scope of hexes, then, so they include Damage over Time effects as well as status effects? Sticky Flame is now hex/fire, and Freezing Cloud is hex/ice/air. Most poison spells are now hexes instead of conjurations, with a couple of the best being three-schooled. Poison Arrow can easily handle being hex/conjurations/poison and still be excellent. Conjurations is still the magic skill you use if you want front loaded damage that kicks in RIGHT NOW, while hexes are more subtle effects that debilitate the opponent slowly, so you have to survive a monster's attacks until your DoTs and status effects put it out of commission permanently.

This seems to be good for just about everybody. Hexes become more useful for non-stabbers, but hexes are still useful for stabbers. It would even be possible to make a non-stabber build that revolves around hexes. It's nominally a nerf for conjurations and makes it easier to make a pure caster that doesn't focus on conjurations, but the change doesn't unduly cripple conjurors in the process.

Thoughts?

[MrMisterMonkey]

making the Conjurations school even narrower makes me die inside
I'd love to remove it, but it would probably be a pain to sort out and rebalance everything

[KoboldLord]

I don't know that you can really argue that conjurations is narrow. True, it (almost) only deals damage… But damage is everything. Almost every barrier to progress that the player must overcome is represented as a sack of hit points that the player character must reduce to 0. Conjurations currently dominates the process of reducing enemy hp to 0, at least within the magic skills. Should it have the best single-target damage, the best AoE damage, the best DoT damage, the most cost-efficient damage, all at once?

[MrMisterMonkey]

(damage is not everything, but I'll let you pretend)

yes, Conjurations has a few flavours, but only a few, and it really overdoes most of them.
"single-target" is immensely dull, aside from iood (which is weird in a good way), and has tons of spells
"penetrating beam" would be nice if it only had one spell or so, but of course it has a few variants for Air (the most unique, since they're noisy and bouncy), one for Fire, one for Cold, one for Fire/Earth, and perhaps others I forget.
"aoe" and "dot" spells are mostly nifty/unique, unless I'm misremembering

I don't like tying "damage" to a school at all
aside from having poor flavour, it makes for nonsense like this
If I have it right, you yourself argued that it can't have a variety of effects (mephitic cloud) because conjurations can't be good at both damage and disabling things, and now conjurations can't even be the best at a variety of damage.
(put it out of its misery)

[pratamawirya]

We really should make it clearer what this school does and what that school does.

Conjuration:
1. making something appear out of nothing (so it can create a fire in a very cold place, for example),
2. that something is a physical object and thus has physical properties.

So, anything that:
1. does not appear out of nothing,
2. does not obey the laws of physics,
does not fit into the niche of Conjuration.

Any other characteristics (like causing damage) should not be tied to Conjuration.

[MrMisterMonkey]

"This spell conjures a sticky glob of liquid fire, which will adhere to and burn any creature it strikes."
That says nothing about oil.
In changing it to hexes, the flavour would change too; this is trivial.

[pratamawirya]

Hexes damaging spells should:
1. not get interrupted by physical means (so they cannot be shielded or reflected),
2. pass MR check.

So, in the context of Conjuration vs Hexes, you get to choose between physically interruptible spells or MR hindered ones. Whether or not such choice is truly meaningful is a different problem....

[KoboldLord]

(damage is not everything, but I'll let you pretend)

yes, Conjurations has a few flavours, but only a few, and it really overdoes most of them.
"single-target" is immensely dull, aside from iood (which is weird in a good way), and has tons of spells
"penetrating beam" would be nice if it only had one spell or so, but of course it has a few variants for Air (the most unique, since they're noisy and bouncy), one for Fire, one for Cold, one for Fire/Earth, and perhaps others I forget.
"aoe" and "dot" spells are mostly nifty/unique, unless I'm misremembering

Compare it to the other major source of damage-dealing, which is weapon skill, and I'm sure you'll agree that conjuration is absolutely rippling with flavor. Indeed, its major competitor involves mashing the arrow keys to bump into monsters until they fall over.

I don't like tying "damage" to a school at all
aside from having poor flavour, it makes for nonsense like this
If I have it right, you yourself argued that it can't have a variety of effects (mephitic cloud) because conjurations can't be good at both damage and disabling things, and now conjurations can't even be the best at a variety of damage.
(put it out of its misery)

Removing conjurations entirely is a somewhat more drastic idea than I would support. Being the main source of burst damage is still an excellent and extremely powerful niche.

We really should make it clearer what this school does and what that school does.

Conjuration:
1. making something appear out of nothing (so it can create a fire in a very cold place, for example),
2. that something is a physical object and thus has physical properties.

So, anything that:
1. does not appear out of nothing,
2. does not obey the laws of physics,
does not fit into the niche of Conjuration.

Any other characteristics (like causing damage) should not be tied to Conjuration.

And sadly, this sort of pure-flavor definition is absolutely useless in every sense, because every spell idea can be trivially re-flavored to make something appear out of nothing. (also works for transmutation)

Want haste? Conjure up some adrenaline in your blood, to make you go twice as fast. Want deflect missiles? A bunch of tiny shields poof into existence whenever a bolt comes your way to block it. Want teleportation? Conjure an exact duplicate of yourself with all your memories at your destination, and then have your old body explode.

Hexes damaging spells should:
1. not get interrupted by physical means (so they cannot be shielded or reflected),
2. pass MR check.

See this? This is actually what I proposed to change. My proposal here is actually an expansion of the definition of hexes to include other effects, so they aren't universally and without question neutered by MR.

Why don't we change the bad definition that ensures that hexes cannot be fixed?

[MrMisterMonkey]

Compare it to the other major source of damage-dealing, which is weapon skill, and I'm sure you'll agree that conjuration is absolutely rippling with flavor. Indeed, its major competitor involves mashing the arrow keys to bump into monsters until they fall over.

mashing fight vs. mashing spells
jjjjjjjjj or autofight vs. zafzafzafzazfzaf or zaf````````` or macros
(I'm not sure about choice of keys to mash having anything to do with flavour at all)

And besides, weapons aren't really as magical as magic, anyway; I think a comparison with necromancy would be just as fair (necromancy is less restrictive but has all the magic).
(necromancy is very cool thematically and has a nice variety of effects with mostly clear downsides (benefits come with drawbacks, damage is best or only applicable against MH_NATURAL monsters) -- if it's not clear enough, in my opinion it should change to be such)

Conjurations, given a good flavour and some spells that play differently from hit things until they die, would be pretty nifty.
Of course it would need some good restrictions such as not to do everything, and it would be best if they were consistent/thematic, but I imagine that would be a bit hard to do with such a school.
A school designed to be a lot of the same, however, is pretty boring. Bunches of different effects and removal of some overlapping ones would help, here. (this is why I'd prefer keeping DoT in Conjurations and finding some other way to make hexes better)

Further on Conjurations removal, each spell/school would of course need differentiation, such as not to make them feel samey (right now they outsource that to Conjurations).


And now, for the other perspective
Mostly I've been yammering about what it would do to Conjurations, but what would it do to Hexes?

Adopting the "the school would be able to do everything" argument, suddenly, trained hexers would have access to damaging spells. Expanding Hexes' scope isn't necessarily bad, but I'm not so sure about giving it so much non-stabby damage potential. (SpEn sticky flaming and freezing clouding everything and such)

[pratamawirya]

And sadly, this sort of pure-flavor definition is absolutely useless in every sense, because every spell idea can be trivially re-flavored to make something appear out of nothing. (also works for transmutation)

Want haste? Conjure up some adrenaline in your blood, to make you go twice as fast. Want deflect missiles? A bunch of tiny shields poof into existence whenever a bolt comes your way to block it. Want teleportation? Conjure an exact duplicate of yourself with all your memories at your destination, and then have your old body explode.

The bolded part is equal to:
1. every weapon can be trivially re-flavored so that it is one handed or two handed (so imagine a one handed GSC that a Spriggan can wield and has only 10 attack points),
2. every enemy can be trivially re-flavored so that it is flying or swimming or whatever (so imagine a flying Orc or a swimming Orb of Fire),
3. every dungeon branch can be trivially re-flavored so that it contains whatever kind of enemy (so imagine the Crypt get populated by Orcs instead of undeads),
4. etc.

Now, I surely don't want to see a swimming Orb of Fire for whatever reason, because that's just odd.

[MrMisterMonkey]

what?

that's nonsense; it's not equivalent to those at all.

[pratamawirya]

I'm not talking about game balance, MrMisterMonkey. I'm talking about trivially re-flavoring things.

Of course naturally-flying Orcs and swimming Orbs of Fire need some adjustments before they are implemented (if for whatever reason the devs want to implement them, that is).

Hence, a Conjuration-based Haste spell might work, but of course it needs to be balanced.

But balanced or not, such spell will look a bit weird flavor-wise. The same with a naturally-flying Orc. And people don't make weird stuff for no reason....

[MrMisterMonkey]

I was speaking from a flavour perspective, as well.

Flavour needs sensibility, and your examples seem to lack that; the trick in reflavouring things is in getting them to make sense.
Setting things ablaze with hexes can make sense; a puny spriggan-wieldable weapon called "giant spiked club" does not, and the name doesn't have anything to do with balance anyway, so long as you're adjusting its other stats too, so I don't understand the point of this example.
Similarly, on reflavouring enemies to fly or swim, you'd actually have to edit their flavour, not just tweak the gameplay and leave them hanging. I can imagine a flying orc because it would have wings or an orc-jetpack. This is sensibility.
Your Crypt example is baffling, too; you would want to change it from "crypt" to "orcville" or something, if you really want the gameplay of an orchouse in Crypt's place.

[pratamawirya]

Well then we can make a story about the Orcs having to move to the Crypt because some greater race has invaded their mines (greater to the Orcs, not the player). Why not rename it to Orcville? Because, uh... the Orcs have just recently moved there, so they haven't considered to change the name. Yeah.

We can also invent a new GSC type that is somewhat "magical" (like Quick Blade or Double Sword), so that it is quite light but doesn't deal as much damage as the normal type.

You think such stuff are absurd? Well, I don't (at least compared to Conjuration-based Haste).

So what I'm saying is: you are being somewhat subjective here.

Once you put "flavor" and "trivial" in the same equation, you'll get to see weird stuff sooner or later, whether you like it or not.