Tartarus Sorceror
Posts: 1698
Joined: Saturday, 18th June 2016, 13:57
Charms
The original proposal was that Deflect Missiles should not go out when its effect falls apart, instead being temporarily deactivated with a downtime depending on spellpower. Once the downtime is over, the spell goes back up on its own, without need to cast it again. I think that this is a good proposal, since it limits keypresses, while safeguarding tactical decisions regarding what to do when your protection from missiles goes out.
I think that such a proposal can be expanded to other charms. The obvious ones are ozo's armour and shroud.
So, the idea would be that higher spell power makes 1. the effect stronger 2. the spell break off less easily 3. the downtime shorter.
I don't think that it would make sense for such spells to care about armour encumbrance when calculating failure. We already see this with Deflect Missiles: once you can cast out of battle, you can just take off your armour and put it back on after casting. Spell failure in general would only matter for high-level enough spells to cause miscasts that are serious even outside of combat; the only one I can think of is contamination.
Using this mechanic for other spells depends on the following: is it a spell that you want to be on at all times, and which has some deactivation mechanic already implemented?
The only two charms that I could find that belong to this category are Spectral Weapon and Battlesphere. These are aggressively minded spells, and it can be discussed whether giving them this mechanic would make the game better or worse. It would serve to make them more differentiated from real summons, however. They also would look like the ancestor from Hep.
It's possible that other spells could be modified to adapt to this mechanic. In general, I think that stronger differentiation between magic schools would be good, and this is a way to reach that while improving user experience.