Mines Malingerer
Posts: 50
Joined: Monday, 31st January 2011, 03:23
Cross-school spellcasting is too easy
A more severe example of this relates to conflicting spell schools. An earth elementalist can fairly easily pick up flight and deflect missiles, while an air elementalist specializing in conjuration could fairly easily pick up iron shot, or even LCS with a little training (although it won't be terribly powerful). I think these sort of things should be nearly impossible. They make end-game elementalists less distinct and less dependent on the unique strengths and weaknesses of their school. As a recent example of this, I had a DEEE with 20 spells, and only three of those spells had an earth aspect at all (iron shot, LCS, and shatter). I had more air spells than anything else.
There are a few ways to approach this problem. One of them might be to nerf the spells that tend to crop up in every caster's arsenal, so they're no longer worth the unconditional experience investment. This was applied to haste, and I remember reading there were plans to nerf abjuration. However, characters with high spellcasting will still be able to cast these spells with little or no investment, provided they have the spare slots, so they might take them regardless.
I think a better solution might be to limit the spellcasting skill's effect on success rates. Currently, high spellcasting gives a character merit to cast level 4 and under spells at a decent success rate. I think there are already enough reasons to train spellcasting without this boost. The downside of this is that branching out does become harder, and more dependent on finding low level "training" spells to victory dance with. It also worsens a somewhat annoying dynamic that armored casters have, where they'll want to remove their armor to train low success rate spells. This might be fixed by capping the accuracy effect that spellcasting has on spells (so that they may only be brought to "fair" or so, without additional school specific investment).
Another idea which I've seen thrown around before is computing success rate with the minimum relevant spell school, instead of the average across spell schools, or at least changing the weighting so that especially low skills drag down the success rate. I guess another solution would also be to make spell power level matter more.
There's already a system in place to prevent the training of conflicting skills, which I think does a pretty good job. It'd probably be bad design to have a separate system that additionally gimps the spellcasting of conflicting spells, but I dunno. I can't think of anything right now that wouldn't encourage odd meta-gaming of skills to minimize penalties. But I think that somehow it should be nearly impossible for a dedicated earth elementalist to be able to cast deflect missiles.