crate wrote:well a large number of charms spells are problematic, in that you just want to have them active all the time (no drawbacks or drawbacks that are not really meaningful) and you can often more-or-less manage this by just recasting them out-of-combat.
Perhaps we could have these charms spells run a tension check on cast. If tension is below a certain threshold (less than one enemy), the time on the buff will run out five times faster. That would discourage players from casting the buffs outside of combat, since they would have to constantly keep using them and if they actually stumbled into combat while doing that all of their buffs would run out extremely fast.
crate wrote:The low-level weapon brands are problematic like this, are rarely used, are only usable on unbranded weapons (this promotes weapon-switching tedium for no real gain).... What's the actual loss from removing them? I don't see a way to rework them that makes them worth having. Maybe you have better ideas.
Well if all you're judging that from is your own personal experience then I wouldn't say they are "rarely" used. If I'm a melee guy and I'm capable of casting level 1 - 2 spells, and I happen upon a book with weapon branding spells, I almost always learn them because a weapon that can go from burning to freezing your enemies on-the-fly is a very nice thing to have. Yes it's true, it's pretty lame how you can only cast the brand spells on unbranded weapons, but you have already given your own suggestion on how to fix that and I agree with you 100%: allow branding spells to temporarily overwrite any brands that are already on the weapon.
I don't think you need to ask me what we'll lose if these spells or gone, because those spells
are what we'll lose. I appreciate that the people behind this game aren't afraid to remove content to fix problems, but I don't believe that removing content is always a good solution. I think it's rather silly to include "rarely used" in your list of reasons why you think it should be removed. If you don't use it and most other people don't use it, then what would we actually
gain by removing it? Nothing, you'll only be upsetting the few who actually do use it. For example, few people use the Wanderer background, and yet it still remains in the game. Even if most don't use it, removing it would only achieve removing some fun from the game for those few people who like to play Wanderers.
It's important to remove content when it becomes a problem. For example, Projected Noise. It was removed because it was very overpowered in certain areas of the game. I do not, however, believe that weapon branding spells are causing some sort of problem that would warrant their removal.