0009168: Double-casting is too strong - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0009168	Valley 1	Suggestion - Balancing Issues		Aug 9, 2012 12:47 am	Aug 9, 2012 10:33 am

Reporter	lavacamorada	Assigned To
Status	considering	Resolution	open
Product Version	1.205

Summary	0009168: Double-casting is too strong
Description	Right now, I'm still feeling like the game pulls me toward using more or less the same spells every level, despite the efforts on the part of developers to do the opposite. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the incentives for using spells that you don't normally use are relatively weak. This is something that I already discussed in 0008752, so I won't discuss it further here. The second is that the spells that I usually use are very powerful. The two spells that I use the most are Energy Orb and Ball Lightning, and it is not either of these spells individually that is particularly powerful, but the combination of both. Both of these spells have "category" cooldowns that are roughly half of their "element" cooldowns. In addition, their cooldowns line up fairly closely, so that, as long as I have the mana, I can cast both of these spells continuously, and cast about as many of each spell as I would if I was casting it on its own (meaning that the total number of spells I cast is roughly twice what it would be if I was casting either of these spells on its own). What really pushes these two over the top is the similarity of their effects. If I'm in a good position to cast Ball Lightning, then I'm also in a good position to cast Energy Orb. Launch Rock's cooldown also lines up with Energy Orb or Ball Lightning, and I also use it in my build, but it's much harder to hit a target with both Energy Orb and Launch Rock aimed at the same angle. I don't want to see double-casting removed entirely, but I do think that it should be reworked to keep combinations like this from being too powerful. I can think of three possible solutions: 1. Make sure that no two spells line up too closely. If one spell has a cooldown of 1.0/0.5 seconds and the other has a cooldown of 0.8/0.4 seconds, they can still be useful when cast together, but it isn't quite as powerful. There could be a bunch of double-castable spells with different cooldowns (for example, one at 1.0/0.5, one at 0.8/0.4, one at 0.6/0.3, and so on), so that if you have one double-castable spell you might want others with similar cooldowns, but none of them line up perfectly. There could also be multiple spells in each cooldown slot, chosen so that any two are either difficult to use together (such as Fireball and Tidal Pulse) or of the same element (such as Energy Orb and Energy Slice, since you can't double-cast two spells of the same element). This has the advantage of making builds more open-ended, but it would be more difficult to scale with large numbers of spells. 2. Make double-castable spells weaker, but intentionally line them up with each other. There could be several families of spells, each with the same set of cooldowns. If you had a couple of 0.8/0.4 spells, this might push you to acquire more. This method would make it easier to add more spells that could be double-cast, but it would also make the spells in question weak outside of builds that use several spells of the same set of cooldowns. There could still be a lot of flexibility if enough spells are added, but builds would be a lot more linear than they are now; a spell with one set of cooldowns might be very weak if your build used a lot of spells with a different set of cooldowns. 3. Change the ratios between the cooldowns, so that, for example, a spell with an elemental cooldown of 1.0 seconds might have a category cooldown of 0.75 seconds (the exact numbers could be adjusted). This way, you could still double-cast any spells that can be double-cast right now, but you would always lose some damage potential on at least one of the spells compared to casting it on its own (although your total damage output would almost always be higher). This method would be the least restrictive on the design of spells, although it might still be difficult to balance.
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Internal Weight	Feature Suggestion

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Aug 9, 2012 12:47 am	lavacamorada	New Issue
Aug 9, 2012 10:33 am	tigersfan	Internal Weight	=> Feature Suggestion
Aug 9, 2012 10:33 am	tigersfan	Status	new => considering