casmith789 wrote:I see you need clarification.
Yes, you should have probably done that first.
casmith789 wrote:No investment to speak of" = level 3, three schools. This means meph will be miscastable (not excellent) even when you reach lair, assuming you train one of the skills and then deliberately train the others (not the case - because you need to learn more than those 4 skills (poison magic, air magic, conjurations, spellcasting))
Every instance of Mephitic Cloud in a starting spellbook is on a conjurations-focused background. Therefore, if you start with Mephitic Cloud you will be training conjurations. Conjurations is not a cost for these backgrounds, it's what they do. Neither is spellcasting skill a meaningful cost for any primary or hybrid caster. Conjurations from your primary kill spell is more than sufficient to get Mephitic Cloud to excellent, and my hope is that undoing this exploit and forcing players to actually train for Mephitic Cloud if they want it will be enough of a nerf to get it under control.
The fact that your necromancer didn't want to train it from scratch isn't especially relevant. We didn't see too many troll berserkers of Trog training to cast Haste, even pre-nerf, and even you admit that pre-nerf Haste was overpowered.
casmith789 wrote:Assuming your targets for meph are... well the early game threats minus the ones not affected by meph. So uniques, ogres? Not going as far as poison resistant monsters, of course.
How about orcs with big weapons? Orc warriors. Orc wizards. Orc priests. Gnoll packs. Yak packs. Centaurs. Kobold vaults with multiple blowguns. Killer bees. Yellow wasps. Scorpions. Crocodiles. Komodo dragons. Giant frogs. Manticores. Minotaurs. Getting ridiculous yet? Mephitic Cloud shuts down every early caster, every early archer, and most early melee bruisers.
Walking into a room and having an orc shout to wake up Dowan and Duvessa as well as the two orc priests in the room is normally an extremely dangerous situation for a low-level character, wouldn't you agree? If you have Mephitic Cloud at excellent, you just kill them all. A couple casts lock down the three casters, and the couple normal orcs that escape are easy to deal with. Once you've got the casters locked down they will never recover. Zero risk.
If you've got Mephitic Cloud at excellent, the only early game enemies that are meaningful
at all are the ones that are immune, because they're the only ones you actually have to pay attention to. Non-immune enemies will only get a non-confused turn if your attention is diverted to weightier matters, such as the ice beast that wandered in. Mephitic Cloud casters basically get an entirely different list of early threats than everybody else, and the only quality that matters for this list is immunity to Mephitic Cloud.
casmith789 wrote:Evaporate - level 2. Two schools <-- meph is clearly worse
Evaporate is another good target for a nerf, but at least it isn't as disgustingly ubiquitous. Transmutations should probably also not get a hex that's better than actual hexes.
casmith789 wrote:Confuse - level 3. One school <-- noiseless and when used to isolate a threat probably stronger than meph, as it's unusual to get a pack of strong monsters early. If this does happen, leading them into a corridor and confusing while you run away has a similar effect.
One target, so clearly inferior. I don't know what game you're playing where orc casters don't come with a pack of meat shields.
casmith789 wrote:Ensorcelled Hibernation - level 2. Two schools <-- incapacitating a monster completely
One target, so again clearly inferior. Short duration, and breaks on damage. Has a niche role for trained stabbers, but getting into melee like that is inherently more dangerous than standing back and shooting.
casmith789 wrote:Swiftness - level 2. Two schools <-- allowing the same running away effect as mephitic cloud, ability to heal
Does nothing against casters and archers. Also rare.
casmith789 wrote:Long range attacking spells of course also follow this pattern, they "incapacitate" your opponent by killing them. Great examples of this include Sandblast with stones (L1), summon small mammals (L1), freeze (L1), pain (L1), sting (L1), stone arrow (L3), IMB (L4, but only one school).
Making conjurations the best magic skill at dealing direct damage should not be paired with being the best magic skill at setting debilitating status effects. Hexes are, by definition, the baseline at which debilitating status effects should be set. Anything that sticks above that point should be cut down.
casmith789 wrote:Of course none of these spells (apart from evaporate) are *always* better than mephitic cloud but the same situations can be avoided with lower-cost spells quite easily.
Skilled play of that kind is unnecessary if you have an AoE confuse that always works on almost all of the most dangerous enemies, and that's bad.
casmith789 wrote:Is meph ever useful? Yes. Why isn't it always useful? Because it *doesn't* work against *every* earlygame monster, it draws *attention* to you so that out of mp [presumably being early game you're unlikely to be a hybrid, so you still have to kill those monsters] you die [more likely run away].
If the noise draws some more monsters in, just Meph those too. Mp is easy to regain if you've locked down everything nearby. It really is a one-tool solution to nearly every problem, and that's bad.