I am pretty annoyed by recent 0.8 patch

[decasonic]

I've just tried stable version of 0.8 stone soup,
and I can't deny the fact I am kind of annoyed to see the recent changes.

The problem is... Why would you guys had to nerf elementalists so badly?

First to mention is the logic behind two opposite spell schools.
Fire - Ice, and Earth - Air.
Okay, I see the pattern here. BUT is this logic's valid?

Just because you are good with "School of English Literature" doesn't mean you will have hard time learning through the "School of mathmatics".
To note, the relationship between fire magic and ice magic should not be considered as two countering-schools (like, theology and Evolutionary Biology would have two counter-viewpoints, in which case learning one would effect learning another). More over, if you think of nature of fire and ice - as heating and cooling, both of them relates manipulating temperatures: If they were to exist in real life, learning one would actually ease learning of another; not get them harder.

Also, even if these logic is valid, it is worth noted that, if you apply those same logic to other skills as well, following skills should have penelty:
Armor - Dodge, Blades - blunts, Crossbows - bows and so on.
(Its true armors do get EV penelty as they get heavier, but conjugating fire spells with ice spells do have penelty as well - You wouldn't mix fire spells with ice clouds for example)

But this isn't it - we got more. We don't of selective amnesia anymore, which further limits the versatile spellcasting, even in the what limited schools we have. Also, enchantment has been divided into two skills, further limiting the usage of magic.

This whole changes raise another question. Were mages that overpowered?
A quote here:
"Top three gods of winning characters: Trog (53), Makhleb (26), Okawaru (24)" from 2011 May tournament.
Shouldn't berserkers be the ones subject for some serious nerf?

[Kautzman]

I like Minmay's explanation better.

[decasonic]

I like Minmay's explanation better.

I read it already and was about to comment I now understand =/
I see the point now

[galehar]

It's not even completely new in 0.8, it was already present in previous versions but a bit different. In 0.7 (and before), knowing an elemental school slowed down the training of other elemental schools, especially the opposite one. It simply reduced the chance of exercising the skill, so you could still train them but you had to victory dance more. There was also a similar system (even more obscure) to slow down the train of normal magic schools when you knew many of them. I removed all this and replaced it by the aptitude penalty for opposite elemental schools. And there's no penalty at all for training non-opposite schools (fire and earth or air for example) or many magic schools.

[dpeg]

Spellcasters are, by definition, very versatile. This has to come at a price: they rely on MP, they need to spend xp on many more skills, they are restricted/hampered in weapons and armour. But none of these drawbacks affects that, in principle, all casters could look alike in the endgame. (Early on this is not a problem, because you have to make do with what you find. But later on this is an actual design flaw, as some threads already discuss.) The Air-Earth, Fire-Ice is one (very old!) attempt to help here. It is definitely good to have and we will keep it (in fact, Galehar actually made it meaningful for 0.8). This cannot be all, as shown by the overpresence of the eversame convenience spells in mid/late game caster spell sets. My favourite means of breaking this up is by making spell diversity more expensive, I would use spell slots as currency.

Re Sticky Flame: not strictly a nerf, it now always hits. (Still mostly a nerf, I'd agree.)

Re Selective Amnesia: was trivial before (free choice once you have it; very conservative approach before). Now there should be more choices. We're free to reduce ?SA generation rate any time.

[Shade]

Re Sticky Flame: not strictly a nerf, it now always hits. (Still mostly a nerf, I'd agree.)

As a player, range 1 isn't that much of a nerf. One reason why I love the Ice Elementalist is their Lv. 1 spell. It's range 1, but it pretty much never (or never) misses. FEs and AEs have what seems like a far less certain chance of hitting with their level 1 spells. (I play far fewer EEs so I'll skip them.) Uncertainty is both a physiological killer and a real one. Physiological because a player assumes they'll miss 4 times when it matters because Xom hates them, and a real killer because eventually the aforementioned scenario will happen. To a low level character than means that a hobgoblin has just bludgeoned you to death with a club.

So when it comes to trading range for certainty, certainty makes me far happier.

[mageykun]

I am pretty annoyed by recent 0.8 patch

There's absolutely nothing stopping you from playing an older version of the game if you want to.

[asdu]

FEs and AEs have what seems like a far less certain chance of hitting with their level 1 spells.

Comparing FEs and AEs in this respect is almost unfair. Flame tongue is the worst conjuration spell in the game by far

[Jeremiah]

This cannot be all, as shown by the overpresence of the eversame convenience spells in mid/late game caster spell sets. My favourite means of breaking this up is by making spell diversity more expensive, I would use spell slots as currency.

I think the problem with this is that it hits pure spellcasters hard, as they need to use a lot of spell slots for their high level conjurations/summons, but will have hardly any effect on crusader-type hybrids, who are arguably the most powerful and versatile characters.

These characters rarely even need to use all their spell slots because they rely mostly on combat for killing things so have plenty of slots left for all the utility/buff spells they need.

[dpeg]

What you (minmay and Jeremiah) say is clearly true. Short of removing the many low buffs,it will be very hard to make spell choice more interesting for both pure and hybrid casters. If we think that the situation is not ideal (I do), we just have to think harder about the problem.

[KoboldLord]

What you (minmay and Jeremiah) say is clearly true. Short of removing the many low buffs,it will be very hard to make spell choice more interesting for both pure and hybrid casters. If we think that the situation is not ideal (I do), we just have to think harder about the problem.

I think a lot of these problems will solve themselves once spell power starts playing a part in the effects of these low-level spells, a lot of these problems will simply go away. Repel Missiles, for instance, basically doubles EV *and* SH against the relevant attacks, even if it's barely castable, by reducing the monster hit roll that these are compared against. There's simply not much that can be done if we don't want everyone to pick it up; casters are going to drop everything else first because the effect is so good. If it had a more modest bonus that scaled additively rather than multiplicatively with existing defenses, such as a 1d(air+charms) effective bonus to AC that applied to ranged attacks, there'd be fewer players bothering to pick it up if they weren't already planning to focus there.

There's a few, such as Blink, that will need other steps, but once the low-hanging fruit are dealt with by means of the spell power correction, it'll be easier to handle the few that are left. In Blink's case, this probably means teleport control needs to be dealt with, since uncontrolled blinking already has meaningful tactical drawbacks that the player must mitigate.

[Jeremiah]

I think a lot of these problems will solve themselves once spell power starts playing a part in the effects of these low-level spells, a lot of these problems will simply go away.

This is probably true, and if it is, will be even more so if Spellcasting no longer affects spell power calculations (and possibly also spell success ...?) which I hear is planned.

This combined with the often-used tactic of increasing the level of some spells could go a long way towards reducing this problem, if not solving it completely.

[dpeg]

Yes, I agree with all of that. Coming up with a specific proposal (formulas/numbers) for the low-hanging fruit would be very useful. Hinthint