Spells

How about we work out some functionality and identities for current trees before introducing new ones?

Right now the trees have identity but don't *always* work. Let me go over things a little -

Fire - A tree designed to opperate relatively indipendantly of INT. This tree isn't afflicted by damage caps but but has a high MP cost and high base damage. From that we devine that the fire tree is meant to be used by defensive mages who have fewer points in int, favouring defense and possibly dex instead. The downside to this is the MP cost - any mage not built for int will have a horrible slow time meditating and using the fire tree as his only functional tree will drain his mana pretty quickly, leaving this to be an extremely slow and godawful boring build. The conclusion is that the tree has Identity and purpose, but not functionality. I would recoment tweaking the mana costs to be moer supportive of the type of character that would be using these spells.

Lightning - This is a fairly well balanced tree. Damage scalling isn't great and the low caps make it prohibitive, but the ability to completely bypass armour and defense make it a nice tree, if somewhat situational. The low mana cost is nice, and since you're doing lower overall damage with it the low mana cost is required. If you randomly meet a mob with stacked defense who can only hit you for 1, using lightning is your best bet to hack away at him without killing your MP completely. Conclusion: This tree is well designed and well balanced. Personally, i'd have the damage caps at 75% of water/earth rather than 50% that it appears to be (my testing is admitedly somewhat limited for obvious reasons).

Earth/Water - I'd say these are the template INT mage trees. The high INT scalling coupled with forgiving caps makes them the weapon of choice for an INT mage. Obviously, the 2 trees are yet to find anything that clearly seperates them from one another (and I presume someone in DEVneyland has ideas about where they want to take them - i'll leave that from this post).

Shadow - I admit my experience with shadow is limited, as is my testing. The caps follow rank for rank with earth/water so the tree's potential is on par with them, but it also gains a healing factor. I would assume then that this tree is for a low DEF mage that would actually want the regular healing. MP costs are a bit higher and I can't speak for the INT/DAMAGE ratio but I would presume its lower to compensate the healing. The tree has its place and its uniquity so I would call it balanced untill I have a chance to examine it closer.

Holy - I don't know whats going on with this. Its the only real healing tree and its claim is for 'efficient healing' - but as we have seen the healing is prohibitavely int-dependant and the benefits on new ranks don't scale as quickly as the mana costs, making rank 1 heal the best choice regardless of level (Honestly though, I need to test higher ranks to see if any base amount is gainsed on better tiers). Conclusion - this tree needs looking at, especially mana/heal ratios accross ranks. Theres a number of approaches available to help it, which i'll go into if/when I decide to make a thread dedicated to sorting out magic.

Magic Overall - Doesn't scale nearly as fast as melee, with the added drawback of meditating, which itself takes a very long time at higher levels, even on an INT build. Things may change once you out-level your own gear substantially but that is not fair scalling for lower players (unless the intention is to punish low level players for using high level mage weapons by giving them a mana pool they couldn't possibly fill up in under 20seconds).

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