Destroyer was introduced due to Avs inability to balance melee/archery and magic. It was a cheap way out to satisfy as many people as possible but was never a real fix.

Said it before and said it again - the only reason magic is so powerful (no just damage wise, but utility wise), is because the original game was intended to have skill decay, so that no one would ever have everything maxed out.

You wouldn't find, for example, a mage with 100 greatsword mastery, 100 sharpshooter, but also with eye-rot, Volcano, Wall of Force, pungent mist, impale, stormblast, dragonsbreath, slow, delayed shot, sluggish, tongue-rot, fireball, inferno, exploding charge, thunderstorm, vampiric touch, stamina drain, witches brew, cursed bolt, confusion and so on AND 100 quickness and 100 strength and 100 int.

This simply wasn't possible in the original concept.

Now they need to balance the game in other ways. The problem with store bought specialisations is that I can't just switch specialisations by switching my gear. I need to spend money to do it. I get locked into A until I'm willing to spend money to get locked into B or drop A entirely.

People in full plate suits shouldn't need magical nonsensical damage bonuses to compete with mages.

 

Yes but this is a minor limitation that can definitely be solved. People were suggesting since beta to make skills such as Destroyer a one-time purchase, that you could then activate via Journal.

Otherwise, what you bring up regarding history might be valid, but it's way past the time to discuss these things imo.

 

I liked the basic concept of an idea of opening more spells to people, but I believe it fails to address the over arching failing of Darkfall, which is that you NEED everything to compete, because if you don't, you'll be killed by someone who does. I think a skill cap in Darkfall would be brilliant, but that ship is sailed, it is far too late to implement something like this, people have leveled up and the game is rolling. A massive change like this could not be implemented smoothly.

What I do think should be done, is that schools should be diversified. Why does every school have a bolt, an r50, an r90, and a field AoE? This results in people just running damage tests and going "Okay thunderstorm is just the best of these, don't use any others, just use Thunderstorm", and the other FIVE versions of what is essentially the same spell, never get used.

Balance is always hard to establish, and I'm not going to pretend I'm a master of this, but I would like to see some major changes to the magic system, which we as a community and dev team and work to establish a balance. Things I'd like to see changed: Greater magic removed, take the essential spells from it, build them into lesser magic, and trim the fat on both schools. From here, the schools need to become more specialized, I would like to see spell chanting reworked into a Bard type / Buffing school, fire magic can remain a Primary DPS school, allow water magic to be a support school with heals and support abilities like shields and area denial, Earth magic could be a "melee mage" school, keep stone shield, maybe give it a melee damage buff, make impale do piercing damage, remove most of the nukes, etc etc

These are just a few ideas, but if we want to see build diversity, each school can't just be the same as the other ones with a very minor difference.

 

This is what I was getting at when I said it would be more fun to grind if we could level what we want earlier. Rend, Needles, Mana Blast... literally never used them once I got the school level I needed. What fucked up game design is that?

A drastic change such as removing most spell level requirements would help new player retention, reduce the gap between new players and developed characters and make the game more FUN to play from the very start. We could even allow them to TEST DRIVE new spells if they are overwhelmed by choice. They'd still have to get their intensifies, archemage, stats etc etc but they'd at least not be useless in a fight or in PvE runs.

School levels are just a gated time sink that should seriously be looked at.

 

What do you think about increasing the leveling speed for magic schools and base melee skills though?

 

Do you see any merit to a change in the system that gives players the freedom to evolve the metagame or is combat the least likely thing to change? I understand it's easy to break things and that potentially it's a gigantic task for a small team, but theory crafting and the evolution of builds/strategies is content in itself. And one of people's main gripes is lack of content. Don't get me wrong, the combat is really good, but it's not perfect and, in my opinion, everyone having access to everything at all times with very little diversity outside of the decision of how much encumberance to take is unhealthy for an MMO. People are investing in a world that doesn't change in one of the most important ways of keeping people interested.