For starters, please SV, @Henrik, do not simply port over the old system into the new game, there are a lot of ways the system should be improved so we have a really good base to start from when the game goes persistent. Iterations and changes should be considered and made now, and tested in the alpha, just like you’re doing with melee combat now, so it can be tweaked over time so that when we go live we have a system that is:
Fun, Useful, Effective, and Functional from the very beginning for new players
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to hate on everything we got concerning Magic in MO1, and I don’t want to crap all over all the work SV has done over the years to build these worlds, I’ve been here since the beginning, and MO2 is really the only game I want to play now and in the future. So I want it to be good, and I want it to be so good that the world is full with other players who enjoy playing the game as well, because the enjoyment we can get from this one world server game exponentially grows with a healthy population.
Magic should be fun. In MO2 we’re only getting 1 character to play with, with that character we spend our skill points into separate pools for combat oriented skills and crafting related skills. While this gives our 1 character more capabilities overall than a singular character in MO1, we will now be making a more singular choice in combat playstyles, whereas before we might have a melee fighter character, a mage, an MC and a MA, now we can only choose one of these, and outside of reskilling, and adjusting attribute points, we have no real option of switching things up. So that choice we make in playstyle is now more meaningful.
If I’m new to the game, I probably come in with some kind of idea of what kind of character I want to play, with no outside influence or knowledge I choose something that I think will be fun to play. My choice at the very beginning should be about how I want to enjoy the game, with no experience or knowledge my choice is simply based on preference, and that’s a good thing. If time is being spent on designing and implementing this core piece of the game in regards to what we will spend on combat skills, in this case magery, one of the first things the system should nail down is the fun factor.
Melee combat in both versions of MO can be enjoyable. There is depth to it, you get to run around and swing whatever kind of weapons fancies you, you can attack from 4 directions, block in 4 directions, parry and counter attacks etc, it’s dynamic, yet simple and complex at the same time. It’s a system SV has obviously thought about a lot and taken great care in developing so that it’s a well flushed out system from the get go, and it’s fun. Magery unfortunately has never really been that way, yet it’s a token “class” of nearly every RPG, and it’s a choice many players, new and old alike, would like to choose for their only character. Many tried it in the original, and then dropped it for something else because it wasn’t fun or functional, or dropped the game entirely because they couldn’t do basic fun things with a mage in the game.
Having choices and options is fun. With a melee fighter I can try out axes, swords, maces, spears, polearms, and daggers, they all play a bit differently and I can choose which one I like playing best. And trying them all out doesn’t take any kind of big investment to do so. But with Magery we get one school, ecumenical, and while it’s a swiss army knife of a school, you could throw away half the spells because they weren’t worth spending the mana to cast. So we got a couple heals, a curse, a purify, a spell reflect, and then a handful of nukes which have different damage values and spell effects, and varying cast times, but essentially all work the same way.
They have plans for a ton of schools, that’s awesome, but after 10 years of MO1 we only had 4, and only Ecumenical was available to a new player, where’s the choice? If MO2 released with only swords would that be considered good? Sure, we’re implementing many weapons..down the road, but here, use this sword for 2 years while you wait. 2 years later...You want to use an axe? Go on this wild goose chase across 2 continents or spend a ton of gold just to try it and see if you like it. Not fun.
I don’t think hitscan is as fun as projectiles, nor as skillful, and ecumenical is all hitscan. SV has said many times, each school has a different kind of casting, and ecumenical is hitscan. It makes sense that casting staff magic is different than elementalism or whatever, or the one where they plan to have you like idk scribe some rune shape to cast, ok, that’s cool, but please ditch the idea that “all hitscan” as a casting type for a whole school is on the same level as those other differences in school casting styles. It just isn’t. It’s not as fun.
We’re going to be stuck with only ecumenical for a long while, it’s the only option for a new player, it’ll be the only option for all players who want to build a mage at first, so make that one school we’re going to have diverse and dynamic like melee playstyles are. Mixing projectiles for longer range nukes, and using hitscan for like short range rays would be perfect and open up the playstyle and make it more fun. All those unused nukes are just begging to be redesigned and made into fun spells. Now is the time to try it out, please!
Magic should be Useful and Effective for the most basic gameplay loops. The most common thing most players do in the game when starting out and developing your character and your personal resources is to go out hunting, doing basic PvE stuff. If you’re not gathering ore or wood or PvPing, you’re most likely out hunting. But a basic mage can’t even do this most basic aspect of the game without working around it by going hybrid or using a pet. Why? This issue from the MO1 system will be greatly magnified because you won’t have some other character to log onto if you need to go do some PvE. And even if you’re stubborn about it, max out your skills, then kite around mobs forever until you can kill them with your spells, you’ve spent more in reagent costs than the value of the carcass or loot. So now you’ve wasted time and money just trying to do the most basic thing in the game. Not fun, not useful, and not effective!
In my opinion, they can make Magery more useful and effective mostly thru balancing spell damage, mana cost, mana regen. This aspect is mostly a simple numbers game. Then balance it so it’s not OP in PvP with either lower damage on players, or better yet give materials another value in the database which relates to a spell defense stat...bam..crafting gets even deeper. Break up spell defense into categories for different types of spell damage, elemental or otherwise. See a guy wearing an armor material that is weak to fire, light him up, weak to fire, choose something else...iterations such as these can greatly enhance the game on a large scale if done right in my opinion. Now you deepen crafting, you raise the skill ceiling on mages where they react to different scenarios, and you make Magery more fun, useful, and effective!
Mechanically, what I would like to see is being able to charge spells on the run. Besides what I mentioned before about efficiency issues, the fact that mages wear little armor and have no way of blocking damage from a mob, added to the general clunkiness of sprinting in combat mode to kite/create distance, charging your spell and casting, and doing that over and over again, it’s way more clunky and ineffective than using literally any other method of killing a mob. It doesn’t even need to be all spells, just give us some choice in the matter and let us be profitable members of society man.
Magic should be functional from the beginning for a new player. The original Magic system and related skills from MO1 heavily discourages new players from the very beginning, and seems to encourage you to just forget the whole thing and pickup a sword or literally any other weapon instead. You start out, maybe get some free skillups from a trainer, or read a couple skill books, pickup some reagents and go out and try to kill a pig with a fireball. To your surprise, this pig that takes like 3 hits to kill with a worn short sword, low strength and no skill, doesn’t wanna die. You look at the combat log and see you were only doing a few damage, and after only a few casts you’re out of mana, so you pull out your worn short sword and finish it off instead. Silly me, I should have known I needed to set up a spurt macro and spurt myself overnight just to be able to do any damage and cast more than 4 spells on my mana bar.
This makes no sense to a new player, and doesn’t even make sense for an old player, we just accept it and do it every time we build a new mage. That was a pretty garbage design, based on a very old game. I get it, respect your mentors, respect your elders...but MO is over 10 years old, it’s its own game and has a legacy of its own, and should design its systems accordingly. And furthermore, learn from the mistakes of the past and don’t repeat them! Don’t just copy paste that old stuff into this new game.
SV can do so much better with the experience and skills and knowledge they have now. If we want to keep the new players who are going to be drawn to this game, the game itself needs to stop discouraging them from playing it! Make magery comparatively easy and intuitive and fluid to pick up as every other combat skill in the game. We’re so accustomed to working around the bad systems that we forget just how jarring this game is for new players. But it doesn’t have to be this way, being willing to adapt and iterate on the system now in the alpha will pay huge dividends in the future.
Tl;DR - SV, @Henrik, please make Magery more fun, useful, effective, and functional for everyone dying to play your game.
Fun, Useful, Effective, and Functional from the very beginning for new players
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to hate on everything we got concerning Magic in MO1, and I don’t want to crap all over all the work SV has done over the years to build these worlds, I’ve been here since the beginning, and MO2 is really the only game I want to play now and in the future. So I want it to be good, and I want it to be so good that the world is full with other players who enjoy playing the game as well, because the enjoyment we can get from this one world server game exponentially grows with a healthy population.
Magic should be fun. In MO2 we’re only getting 1 character to play with, with that character we spend our skill points into separate pools for combat oriented skills and crafting related skills. While this gives our 1 character more capabilities overall than a singular character in MO1, we will now be making a more singular choice in combat playstyles, whereas before we might have a melee fighter character, a mage, an MC and a MA, now we can only choose one of these, and outside of reskilling, and adjusting attribute points, we have no real option of switching things up. So that choice we make in playstyle is now more meaningful.
If I’m new to the game, I probably come in with some kind of idea of what kind of character I want to play, with no outside influence or knowledge I choose something that I think will be fun to play. My choice at the very beginning should be about how I want to enjoy the game, with no experience or knowledge my choice is simply based on preference, and that’s a good thing. If time is being spent on designing and implementing this core piece of the game in regards to what we will spend on combat skills, in this case magery, one of the first things the system should nail down is the fun factor.
Melee combat in both versions of MO can be enjoyable. There is depth to it, you get to run around and swing whatever kind of weapons fancies you, you can attack from 4 directions, block in 4 directions, parry and counter attacks etc, it’s dynamic, yet simple and complex at the same time. It’s a system SV has obviously thought about a lot and taken great care in developing so that it’s a well flushed out system from the get go, and it’s fun. Magery unfortunately has never really been that way, yet it’s a token “class” of nearly every RPG, and it’s a choice many players, new and old alike, would like to choose for their only character. Many tried it in the original, and then dropped it for something else because it wasn’t fun or functional, or dropped the game entirely because they couldn’t do basic fun things with a mage in the game.
Having choices and options is fun. With a melee fighter I can try out axes, swords, maces, spears, polearms, and daggers, they all play a bit differently and I can choose which one I like playing best. And trying them all out doesn’t take any kind of big investment to do so. But with Magery we get one school, ecumenical, and while it’s a swiss army knife of a school, you could throw away half the spells because they weren’t worth spending the mana to cast. So we got a couple heals, a curse, a purify, a spell reflect, and then a handful of nukes which have different damage values and spell effects, and varying cast times, but essentially all work the same way.
They have plans for a ton of schools, that’s awesome, but after 10 years of MO1 we only had 4, and only Ecumenical was available to a new player, where’s the choice? If MO2 released with only swords would that be considered good? Sure, we’re implementing many weapons..down the road, but here, use this sword for 2 years while you wait. 2 years later...You want to use an axe? Go on this wild goose chase across 2 continents or spend a ton of gold just to try it and see if you like it. Not fun.
I don’t think hitscan is as fun as projectiles, nor as skillful, and ecumenical is all hitscan. SV has said many times, each school has a different kind of casting, and ecumenical is hitscan. It makes sense that casting staff magic is different than elementalism or whatever, or the one where they plan to have you like idk scribe some rune shape to cast, ok, that’s cool, but please ditch the idea that “all hitscan” as a casting type for a whole school is on the same level as those other differences in school casting styles. It just isn’t. It’s not as fun.
We’re going to be stuck with only ecumenical for a long while, it’s the only option for a new player, it’ll be the only option for all players who want to build a mage at first, so make that one school we’re going to have diverse and dynamic like melee playstyles are. Mixing projectiles for longer range nukes, and using hitscan for like short range rays would be perfect and open up the playstyle and make it more fun. All those unused nukes are just begging to be redesigned and made into fun spells. Now is the time to try it out, please!
Magic should be Useful and Effective for the most basic gameplay loops. The most common thing most players do in the game when starting out and developing your character and your personal resources is to go out hunting, doing basic PvE stuff. If you’re not gathering ore or wood or PvPing, you’re most likely out hunting. But a basic mage can’t even do this most basic aspect of the game without working around it by going hybrid or using a pet. Why? This issue from the MO1 system will be greatly magnified because you won’t have some other character to log onto if you need to go do some PvE. And even if you’re stubborn about it, max out your skills, then kite around mobs forever until you can kill them with your spells, you’ve spent more in reagent costs than the value of the carcass or loot. So now you’ve wasted time and money just trying to do the most basic thing in the game. Not fun, not useful, and not effective!
In my opinion, they can make Magery more useful and effective mostly thru balancing spell damage, mana cost, mana regen. This aspect is mostly a simple numbers game. Then balance it so it’s not OP in PvP with either lower damage on players, or better yet give materials another value in the database which relates to a spell defense stat...bam..crafting gets even deeper. Break up spell defense into categories for different types of spell damage, elemental or otherwise. See a guy wearing an armor material that is weak to fire, light him up, weak to fire, choose something else...iterations such as these can greatly enhance the game on a large scale if done right in my opinion. Now you deepen crafting, you raise the skill ceiling on mages where they react to different scenarios, and you make Magery more fun, useful, and effective!
Mechanically, what I would like to see is being able to charge spells on the run. Besides what I mentioned before about efficiency issues, the fact that mages wear little armor and have no way of blocking damage from a mob, added to the general clunkiness of sprinting in combat mode to kite/create distance, charging your spell and casting, and doing that over and over again, it’s way more clunky and ineffective than using literally any other method of killing a mob. It doesn’t even need to be all spells, just give us some choice in the matter and let us be profitable members of society man.
Magic should be functional from the beginning for a new player. The original Magic system and related skills from MO1 heavily discourages new players from the very beginning, and seems to encourage you to just forget the whole thing and pickup a sword or literally any other weapon instead. You start out, maybe get some free skillups from a trainer, or read a couple skill books, pickup some reagents and go out and try to kill a pig with a fireball. To your surprise, this pig that takes like 3 hits to kill with a worn short sword, low strength and no skill, doesn’t wanna die. You look at the combat log and see you were only doing a few damage, and after only a few casts you’re out of mana, so you pull out your worn short sword and finish it off instead. Silly me, I should have known I needed to set up a spurt macro and spurt myself overnight just to be able to do any damage and cast more than 4 spells on my mana bar.
This makes no sense to a new player, and doesn’t even make sense for an old player, we just accept it and do it every time we build a new mage. That was a pretty garbage design, based on a very old game. I get it, respect your mentors, respect your elders...but MO is over 10 years old, it’s its own game and has a legacy of its own, and should design its systems accordingly. And furthermore, learn from the mistakes of the past and don’t repeat them! Don’t just copy paste that old stuff into this new game.
SV can do so much better with the experience and skills and knowledge they have now. If we want to keep the new players who are going to be drawn to this game, the game itself needs to stop discouraging them from playing it! Make magery comparatively easy and intuitive and fluid to pick up as every other combat skill in the game. We’re so accustomed to working around the bad systems that we forget just how jarring this game is for new players. But it doesn’t have to be this way, being willing to adapt and iterate on the system now in the alpha will pay huge dividends in the future.
Tl;DR - SV, @Henrik, please make Magery more fun, useful, effective, and functional for everyone dying to play your game.
