Swamp Slogger
Posts: 163
Joined: Wednesday, 29th December 2010, 22:32
Re: alternatives to permabuff
njvack wrote:Sjohara wrote:The simplest, most straightforward way of implementing permanent buffs would be to have them reduce your maximum mana by their level while active.
Unless you're using conjurations, as long as you have enough MP to cast your buffs (maybe with some reserve if you're a transmuter or want to blink), you don't care about reserve maxMP very much.
42 (I think) MP would let you simultaneously cast (I'm ignoring conflicts here):
[a lot of spells]
... so having a cBlink or two in the clutch is totally reasonable for most endgame characters, even with every buff you could possibly have running at once.
Yes, getting all of those castable would be a chore, but you don't really want all of them, anyhow.
Well, for what it's worth, a heavy armor character learning a wide variety of buffs is probably spending a pretty serious amount of skill points in the process, and a light armor character who avoids useful combat magic in order to pay for buffs is still making a strategic choice. That said, if the benefit you get per point of mana spent can wind up way out of proportion in edge cases, there are lots of ways of keeping things grounded. For example:
-Hard-cap the number of buff slots (probably at 2 or 3), forcing you to waste a turn dispelling one effect to get a new one.
-Soft-cap the number of buff slots by causing you to quickly accumulate glow if you have more than X active at once.
-Give each buff an additional cost that increases the more buffs you already have active. For example, the first buff costs 1 more mana than its level to maintain, the second costs +2 on top of everything else, the third costs +3, and so on. Or you could do it exponentially instead of additively: +1, +2, +4, +8, etc.
Yet Another Stupid Noob wrote:The problem with any any penalty to permabuffing is that it makes using it sub-optimal. Then means the current default (manual recasting) remains the boring, but optimal play.
Yeah, permabuffing would probably need to completely replace the current casting method for any spell it's implemented for for exactly this reason.