Rescale the Magic Crosstraining Penalty

[XuaXua]

Fire vs. Ice and Earth vs. Air is currently a flat -4 penalty against raising the lower skill.
At skill level 0 and at equal skill level, there is no penalty to the opposing elemental skill.

There are no penalties to other skills (elemental Poison, Necromancy, and the core magic schools).

I think a more intuitive / natural scale should be put in place to penalize elemental magic, with the penalty based on the difference between the skill levels of opposing skills.

The penalty should scale based on the size of the difference; the greater the difference, the larger the penalty.

Penalty = - (rounddown(Difference between skills) / 3).

While some might rule this concept creates micromanagement, it definitely creates a slower progression to higher levels of skill if one wants to have both skills, but makes it somewhat easier to gain the opposing spell skill as long as balance is maintained.

[BlackSheep]

It can be argued that having the penalty creates a choice, since you need to choose between the utility of ice magic and the power of fire magic or else pay a significant cost.

[jejorda2]

Why is it penalized at all? Making it bad to train both Fire Magic and Ice Magic reduces variety and reduces choices, those are bad things.

I disagree.

If it's very easy to train both, then nearly every character will train both, and every character will be the similar. There will be less variety.

It it's harder to train both, training one means choosing to not train the other, which means there is more variety.

If it is easy to learn ring of flames after learning ice form, then you don't really have to choose between fire and ice at all.

But we may already have the best situation where it's possible to choose one element or all four, and it's just expensive. But if that's good, why can't we wield two-handed weapons with a shield with high enough skills?

On to the actual question: I'm not sure increasing the cross training penalty when the skill levels are different makes much sense to me. Then players are encouraged to train both early on instead of late.

What does make sense to me is adding a ring-of-ice style fire spell power inhibitor that scales with ice magic skill. Then, training ice makes fire less powerful. Go ahead and set it up so that having equal skills completely eliminates the skill of the other.

From a flavor standpoint, one might ask why being skilled with one thing makes one less skilled with another thing. If we stop thinking of it as skill and start thinking of it as experience and familiarity, you can see how spending time away from something lessens your ability to use it.

[BlackSheep]

Flavor is a shaky basis to use when deciding something mechanical like a bonus/malus. You can justify almost any case as long as you're creative enough to come up with a good story to back it up.

I agree with the original poster's assertion that creating a scaling penalty based on the difference between skill levels will encourage people to fiddle with their skills to step them up one at a time. This seems counter to what the developers want, and the only benefit would be to make it easier to train both. I'm still unconvinced that that is a worthy goal.

[galehar]

At skill level 0 and at equal skill level, there is no penalty to the opposing elemental skill.

That's not true. At equal skill level (including the decimal), the one which got there the latest is penalized. When training both, one is always penalized. The opposite would lead to careful micro-management to avoid the penalty and this is bad.
What you're suggesting would complicate things for no gain. One of critical point of the 0.9 skill reform was to make the cost of training skill the same whatever the order in which you train them. This would go in the opposite direction.

[BlackSheep]

More options doesn't necessarily mean more choices. If there's no penalty to training ice and fire magic, then as long as there are desirable spells available in both schools, it's a good idea to train both. It's analogous to saying there shouldn't be a spellcasting penalty for heavy armor because then you can choose to cast in light armor, not cast in light armor, cast in heavy armor or not cast in heavy armor. Currently you're forced to decide whether you want one or the other, or else pay an XP cost.

From another perspective, removing the elemental cross training penalties makes playing casters easier but does nothing for non-casters. Do we really need to make the game easier for casters?

[TwilightPhoenix]

Casters already train Ice/Air together a lot. You know, those two elemental schools with the most utility? Fire/Ice hardly sounds like making it easier for them when they already can train the easiest combination.

And no, it's nothing like casting in armor types vs. cross-training. If you want to compare to melee, then compare melee cross-training to this, not an entirely different mechanic.

[BlackSheep]

I wasn't comparing to melee, I was comparing the choices you're forced to make under the current system. You can have this, or you can have that, or you can have both, but together they cost more. Removing penalties means you can have both without extra investment. Some people view that as more choice, but I think that waters down choices.

From the very start this game forces you to make choices that either close off paths or make certain paths more expensive. I think the elemental magic cross training penalties are totally within that concept. I'd even be interested in an expansion of the interaction of the various schools, but that's a pretty complex topic on its own.

[KoboldLord]

The opportunity cost for paying DOUBLE xp to get two elemental skills is more than crippling enough to mean you basically never do it, particularly when you really don't get anything from the second one but another flavor of direct damage to go with the excellent direct damage you already have.

There is exactly one good build that uses high levels of two elemental skills, and that's the one that heavily abuses Freezing Cloud. Other builds may dabble in air magic to get Mephitic Cloud, Poisonous Cloud, or Deflect Missiles working as cheaply as possible, but they never bother getting high levels in it if they already have high levels in one of the other three skills.

There are no spells or combos that significantly benefit from having high levels in fire and air simultaneously, or fire and ice, or fire and earth, or ice and earth, or air and earth. You could give a +4 bonus for elemental aptitudes that are on skills lower than your highest elemental skill, and it still probably wouldn't be worth training them to high levels.

Elemental cross-training is there for flavor. End of list. It doesn't have a gameplay-related meaning, and it won't until there's a Freezing Cloud-equivalent for other combinations.

[roctavian]

I think it could be more interesting to have the actual casting of opposed elements be penalized -- if you were to cast a fire spell one turn, then an ice spell the next, you'd suffer a little bit of glow or increased miscast chance. The option of casting opposed spells is there, but you're given good reason not to do it in every situation (the Freezing Cloud/Conjure Flame duo should still be possible, even desirable, but more risky than it currently is)

[snow]

When I train earth magic I usually get a bit of air too for utility. 15 earth magic and 5 air magic for example isn't hard to do. And, as already stated, there's no point in getting them both to for example 15... it's just redundant.

If the penalties were removed I don't think anything would change. There would still be no point in getting them both to 15 and the extra experience for leveling a penalized skill to 5 isn't really noticeable.

The problem, if any, is with the way an experience curve works on a fundamental level. There's been some attempt to fix this with experience points and skill points being separate but really all that does is virtually flatten the curve a bit. The only way getting a penalized skill to 5 would be different than getting an unpenalized skill to 5 would be if getting a skill from 0 to 5 wasn't much different from getting it from 15 to 20. That way the penalty would actually matter.

I mean really when your penalty only causes you to kill a few more death yaks....

[jejorda2]

If it's very easy to train both, then nearly every character will train both, and every character will be the similar. There will be less variety.

Does nearly every character train both Earth and Ice? (Hint: they don't.)

Personally, if I'm playing a FE and I find Icicle before mystic blast, I'll train enough ice to get it castable so I have something for fire resistant enemies. Or I'll train up Air to get Airstrike. Similarly, I always train enough fire to get conjure flame if I can find it. This means that all my casters end up more similar than they would if these spells were difficult to get when using opposing schools.

I never turn down swiftness, blink, conjure flame, Butterflies, or passwall, no matter which schools I'm focusing on. I see that as a small problem, and penalizing diverse schools would help solve it, but I'm not sure it would be enough.

[XuaXua]

removing the elemental cross training penalties makes playing casters easier but does nothing for non-casters.

OT: my wins of this game were through crushing the enemies with melee. Mostly. My small-rune win was a stabbing enchanter who abused a rod.

[XuaXua]

There are no spells or combos that significantly benefit from having high levels in fire and air simultaneously, or fire and ice, or fire and earth, or ice and earth, or air and earth. You could give a +4 bonus for elemental aptitudes that are on skills lower than your highest elemental skill, and it still probably wouldn't be worth training them to high levels.

Elemental cross-training is there for flavor. End of list. It doesn't have a gameplay-related meaning, and it won't until there's a Freezing Cloud-equivalent for other combinations.

Fire/Earth - Magma Bolt, or is that not enough for you?

SUGGESTIONS:

Backdraft (Fire/Air) - causes existing flames in view (conjured, inner flame'd) to spread outward (potentially out of view)
Freezerburn (Ice/Fire) - the surrounding vicinity causes all monsters in view to be damaged simultaneously by an ice/fire brand as their skin is blistered. They are penalized/crippled in their ability to perform actions.
Dust Storm (Earth/Air) - creates vortices of blistering sand
Lava Floor (Earth/Fire) - floor is transformed to permanent lava.
Glacier (Earth/Ice) - moisture and dirt from the surrounding area is pulled upward to create a temporary wall of ice and stone. Damages opponent on target area.

[XuaXua]

Fire/Earth - Magma Bolt, or is that not enough for you?

another flavor of direct damage to go with the excellent direct damage you already have.

What about the suggested spells of Glacier (defense, minor offense), Lava (defense, minor offense), and Freezerburn (cripple monsters; just added effect)?

Elemental schools are primarily offense/defense related. Want something different, try a Trans* school.

[nicolae]

There are no spells or combos that significantly benefit from having high levels in fire and air simultaneously, or fire and ice, or fire and earth, or ice and earth, or air and earth. You could give a +4 bonus for elemental aptitudes that are on skills lower than your highest elemental skill, and it still probably wouldn't be worth training them to high levels.

Elemental cross-training is there for flavor. End of list. It doesn't have a gameplay-related meaning, and it won't until there's a Freezing Cloud-equivalent for other combinations.

Fire/Earth - Magma Bolt, or is that not enough for you?

SUGGESTIONS:

Backdraft (Fire/Air) - causes existing flames in view (conjured, inner flame'd) to spread outward (potentially out of view)
Freezerburn (Ice/Fire) - the surrounding vicinity causes all monsters in view to be damaged simultaneously by an ice/fire brand as their skin is blistered. They are penalized/crippled in their ability to perform actions.
Dust Storm (Earth/Air) - creates vortices of blistering sand
Lava Floor (Earth/Fire) - floor is transformed to permanent lava.
Glacier (Earth/Ice) - moisture and dirt from the surrounding area is pulled upward to create a temporary wall of ice and stone. Damages opponent on target area.

I would like to see more elemental combination spells, personally. But then again, I want to see spells of every two-school combination someday...

[XuaXua]

I want to see spells of every two-school combination someday...

Clip (Transmutation/Translocation) : Splits a target in twain, allowing it to effectively attack via melee at range.

[Igxfl]

Having to choose between opposing elements would work better if the choices were more interesting.

Fire is basically an all-in for Firestorm and Ring of Flame. Conjure Flame is good but requires virtually no Fire training if you have Conjurations, which most casters do.
On the other hand, Ice has a bunch of awesome utility, and Ice Storm is almost as good as Firestorm.

Air has invaluable spells like Repel/Deflect Missiles, Flight, Swiftness, and a share of every one of those wonderful cloud spells.
Earth has some interesting stuff, like LRD and Liquefaction, but other than Statue Form it doesn't really measure up to Air.

If every elemental school offered casters must-have utility, like Air's Repel Missles, Swiftness, Mephitic, Flight, etc. with little overlap between them, (maybe air could be toned down a little too) the choice of element would be a serious game-altering decision. Currently it's irrelevant for most specialized casters and an Ice/Air no-brainer for generalists.

[Pteriforever]

So, character overgeneralisation's the problem?

The first two magic schools should be normal, then the third should crosstrain at -2, the fourth at -4, and so on.

[Igxfl]

After some experimentation, I think I'm wrong in my above post. The real problem might have more to do with the lack of good available Fire/Earth spells in starting books.

[banei]

The real problem might have more to do with the lack of good available Fire/Earth spells in starting books.

I disagree with this. Throw flame is the only bad spell in those books.

Also with high spellcasting and, if releveant to the spell, a high third skill (ie. conjurations), any spell can be reasonably cast with low elemental skill.