Did anyone use spells?

[Syntropy]

I found them generally useless. That said, I have them all at L9, so everything I say is based on that.

Lightning was worth it in the first... 4 or 4? levels (Note: I mean the first four *battles* not skill points), then it got too expensive because I could do more damage by summoning a new unit. Now that I'm L40 doing endless/last mission, 200hp from an enemy with 92k isn't enough for me to bother with giving myself carpal tunnel.

Frenzy... Useful, though I generally didn't have to use it.

Healing -- I don't think I ever used it, either my healers kept up just fine, or the unit got one-shotted.

Crystal -- Never did enough damage to be worth using. I have pulled off perhaps 5 last-second saves with it, and I have a mostly L40 party with 90 gold stars.

Pushback -- Useful, but the cooldown is so long that, generally I would pushback + frenzy + crystal + lightning as a last ditch effort only, it being more efficient to summon more units instead.

Dragonfire -- I use it all the time for the pretty fire, but it doesn't do any appreciable damage to the revenant I fight, and never did really from the moment I got it.


If the spells scaled both with Azra's level, the level of the enemy, and the level of the skill, they might stay relevant... As is, only Frenzy is ever really worth it. Azra has an attack value even if she doesn't actually attack, this could be part of the scaling factor.

[wads]

the spells are designed to be useful on the first run through of the game, on 1x exp. the lightning, rage, and push back spells were pretty essential on my first play through.

[Syntropy]

I was on 100% xp, first runthrough. Still not useful to me. Basically other than Frenzy and Pushback, it was always better to place or upgrade a unit, and if all units are placed and boosted to 5, the enemies I am having trouble dealing with are so strong that the other spells have no effect.

[AlexxKay]

I largely agree with Syntropy. Frenzy and Pushback are ones I did end up using fairly often. Lightning and Healing almost never. Crystal I used occasionally, but often when I wanted it, here wasn't an available space to use it!

[larsiusprime]

I personally find lightning to be fairly useful if it's upgraded enough - it can be essential for ensuring a "perfect" if you slightly slip up on a mission.

We're going to be adjusting spells slightly in upcoming patches to make the lesser used one more useful - for instance, crystal will be able to be placed anywhere on the map, most likely.

[TomR]

If the spells scaled both with Azra's level, the level of the enemy, and the level of the skill, they might stay relevant... As is, only Frenzy is ever really worth it.

I second this! Scalability is crucial to prolonged relevance.

[Syntropy]

Just for the record: I am talking about all spells at L9.

[Dagny]

One way to make Lightning stay relevant could be to make it deal damage equal to a percentage of the enemy's max HP, with the percentage increasing with each invested skill point.

[coyot]

One way to make Lightning stay relevant could be to make it deal damage equal to a percentage of the enemy's max HP, with the percentage increasing with each invested skill point.

Exactly my thoughts. And dragonfire, too. The damage should be something like A + B*total_hp, so that in easy levels, it would be still usable to 1hit-kill any leaks, but in hard levels it would still make some difference.

[yogsloth]

Lightning - was VERY useful at first, but faded into nothing pretty quick. Level 9 does 400 damage? Not much help with the last layer of a double-split has thousands of hit points.

Frenzy - really the only spell that stays useful as it scales with your characters. I was never actually sure how much of a tangible benefit I got, but I used it on big waves throughout the game.

Healing - useless. Redundant with healers and does so little I never used it.

Crstal - useless. It does so little damage and has so many restrictions on where it can be placed it just wasn't ever worth using.

Pushback - my favorite spell. Useful and you have to be very careful, as the cooldown is long. Perfect as it is.

Dragonfire - Meh, pretty, but not sure it really did enough for me. I rarely used it. The psi is much better spent upgrading.

[Syntropy]

My suggestion would be...

Lightning -- (Skill*Azra's Attack Value*[.5*Boost Value])+ (3%+[.77%*Skill]+[1%*Boost Value]) Total: 1845 + 10% of mob's max HP per hit at L40 max skill level, scaling up to 4612 + 15% with Azra at boost 5. (Since the mechanic already exists, no reason not to make use of it!)

Healing -- Should heal for say, ([25*Skill+].5*Azra's Attack Value*Skill) and give some form of damage reduction/armor boost. Possibly +armor equal to Azra's Attack Value decaying at a rate which is lowered by skill points, or percentage based damage reduction based on skill and decreasing with each incoming hit. Would cause endless to be more doable, largely by changing it so you don't have to put out units every 10 seconds.

Crystal -- Say, (50*Skill) + (AAV*Skill) + (2% of the mob's health * Skill) with a 10% bonus (to all effects) per second you let it count down. So a full 5 second countdown would be 3443 damage + 27% of the revenant's max HP.

Dragonfire -- something like (200 + AAV * Skill) + (1% total HP * Skill) initial damage, plus 1%+(.1*Skill) of that value for the listed value in seconds.

Thoughts? Disclaimer: Roughed out "to give an idea" numbers, I have not gone through at different levels to test.

[klattmose]

Lightning -- (Skill*Azra's Attack Value*[.5*Boost Value])+ (3%+[.77%*Skill]+[1%*Boost Value]) Total: 1845 + 10% of mob's max HP per hit at L40 max skill level, scaling up to 4612 + 15% with Azra at boost 5. (Since the mechanic already exists, no reason not to make use of it!)

At full boost, this would be enough to kill anything in 7 hits at the most. At 10 psi per hit as fast as you can click, nothing stands a chance. Killing Eztli shouldn't be as simple as 70 psi.

[Syntropy]

Ahem. Disclaimer: Roughed out "to give an idea" numbers, I have not gone through at different levels to test.

That said:
1. Increase the cooldown?
2. Make bosses immune?
3. Change the %?

Be constructive.

[klattmose]

Sorry, sometimes I skip things when I read.

To be constructive, I would suggest a sliding scale that the player can adjust. For example, Lightning lvl 1 would default to 10 psi and 10 damage, but the player can change that to 15 psi for 15 damage. Spending skill points would make the dmg/psi ratio more favorable, up to the current max of 20 dmg/psi at lvl 9. At the very least, it should save someone carpal tunnel.

Or maybe something along the lines of, the more you use it the better you get at it. Have the effect increase by a small amount each time you use it, like 1 dmg/skill point for Lightning, or decrease the cooldown for the longer wait ones like Dragonfire. Within a limit of course, or it could quickly become unreasonable. What I like about this is that it rewards players for using spells.

[coyot]

Lightning -- (Skill*Azra's Attack Value*[.5*Boost Value])+ (3%+[.77%*Skill]+[1%*Boost Value]) Total: 1845 + 10% of mob's max HP per hit at L40 max skill level, scaling up to 4612 + 15% with Azra at boost 5. (Since the mechanic already exists, no reason not to make use of it!)

At full boost, this would be enough to kill anything in 7 hits at the most. At 10 psi per hit as fast as you can click, nothing stands a chance. Killing Eztli shouldn't be as simple as 70 psi.

Simple solution, make bosses immune to the percentage effect.

[Syntropy]

In addition to bosses being immune to the % effect, each hit after the last can do less damage. Say Dmg = (X / [1+n]/2) where X is total damage and n is the number of times that target has been hit by lightning. Obviously the first hit is calculated with a 1 for #hit variable so it does 100% damage, then falls off from there.

Code: Select all

                    Damage + % damage, rounded down.
1 / [(1+1)/2] 100%  1845 + 10%
1 / [(1+2)/2] 66%   1230 + 6%
1 / [(1+3)/2] 50%   923 + 5%
1 / [(1+4)/2] 40%   738 + 4%
1 / [(1+5)/2] 33%   614 + 3%
1 / [(1+6)/2] 28%   516 + 2%
1 / [(1+8)/2] 25%   461 + 2%


...etc.

So 80 PSI worth of Lightning will inflict 6327 damage, plus 32% of the revenant's maximum life in damage. Me personally I'd say let the percentage get scaled down, but keep the flat damage the same. Even if you did let it affect bosses, you could only really nuke away about one of Eztli's health bars before you made the DR so high it wasn't worth it, and that's assuming you had 9 points in it to begin with. That said, scaling for bosses would be easy, you have the options of immunity, (bosses have an arbitrarily high scaling variable by default, so you're only doing .00001% of their life in additional damage per hit,) or resistance (bosses start with a relatively low n value, but since it scales down fairly rapidly, they would be highly resistant to lightning by default. If you really felt like it, you could have that value slowly iterate downward over time, making them less resistant.

That way lightning is effective at eliminating leakers, but it is counterproductive to spam it on a single target. This also brings up an idea for special weapons or perhaps some other skill property or book affect or something--when under the effects of <X> effect, spell damage is increased by <balanced scaling factor>.

I also support the idea of making spells more effective the more you use them. Letting them gain experience and improve, even if it rapidly became achingly grindy would still give me something more to do.

Final sidenote: you could always add in secondary effects to heal and lightning that iterated the cooldowns of higher spells slightly when they were cast, giving you a reason to keep up a steady lightning barrage if you have the psi and a reason to want the higher spells ready again.

[klattmose]

Final sidenote: you could always add in secondary effects to heal and lightning that iterated the cooldowns of higher spells slightly when they were cast, giving you a reason to keep up a steady lightning barrage if you have the psi and a reason to want the higher spells ready again.

By "iterating the cooldowns" do you mean shorten the wait time? Because it'd be pretty cool to have an option to spend more psi instead of waiting, kind of like "forcing" the spell if you will. Maybe have 0 cooldown, but each successive use increases the cost, but over time the cost recedes to its original value. In this manner, Dragonfire would start at 100 psi, but the second use would be 200, and the third either 300 or 400 depending on if you want to scale linearly or exponentially, either would make sense, with the cost going down 50 psi/min to reset to normal after the current cooldown time.

On a completely unrelated note: proximity crystals would be amusing, and useful for any worms that slip through.

[Syntropy]

Yes, that's what I meant, but I was concerned that saying "decrease the cooldown" would be met by someone thinking I meant decreasing the refresh time per use, so if you spammed lightning enough you could get the cooldown down to practically zero.

+1 for Proxi crystals.

It would be cool if the spells allowed a bit more strategy in their use via options like charging up, spending psi to lower the currently active refresh timer's value, etc. Anything much more complicated than that is for DQ2.

[Marak]

I only use the non-damage ones, typically: Pushback and Frenzy.

The problem is, and has been discussed, that static damage fails completely when you consider the following:

Monster health ranges from 8 (tutorial Zombies) to 35,000 (final level, Extreme difficulty Cultists).

Any spell that can deal significant damage to that aforementioned end-game Cultist? Brokenly overpowered on earlier maps/difficulties.

Any spell that deals significant damage to monsters in Acts I-III? Brokenly underpowered on later maps/difficulties (this is where we currently stand).

So, I save my Psi for the occasional Frenzy and "oh crap" Pushback, and use the rest for the gift that keeps on giving (more damage): units. If I'm farming a map for XP, and I know I have things well in hand, I'll cast Dragon Fire just because it looks cool and can be moderately useful when you have 3 waves of Snails in 6 lanes and want to soften them all up just a wee bit before they hit your Boost 4 Frost Magi and Boost 5 Berserkers.

[klattmose]

You have to admit, it is fun to replay earlier levels and see how many you can do without summoning any defenders .

However, isn't this a tower defense game? The point being the rest of the party defends Azra? If she could wreck house all by herself, the game wouldn't be very interesting. It's probably for the best that the most she can do is support the team. And, you know, get them on the field in the first place.