Sorcery as generic spells

[Reven]

Proposal
I am proposing allowing all other wizard-casting skills access to sorcery spells. Sorcery then would essentially cease to exist as a seperate skill. The following is the reasoning and a little bit on how to implement.

Background & Reasoning
Sorcery is one casting area where it's very hard to level up. Spark storm, steambolt, poison cloud, and the venerable magic missile/bullet. Not exactly the recipe for high-level success. Lots of other very useful spells, but hardly any of them actually give experience.

Most of my actual Crossfire playing comes from back before there were separate skills for pyromancy, evocation, etc. Back then an evoker was a class that was simply attuned to evocation and repelled/denied something else. Personally, I think that system made a lot more sense than the current one, but I strongly suspect I am in the minority here and that suggesting we revert would cause a flame fest a level 50 pyromancer would be in awe of. I suspect that the reasons for the split were that the generalist classes were far more useful than the specialties, and that the specialties (attuned or not) were probably largely ignored.

Sorcery is the swiss-army-knife of casting. It probably is crippled simply to keep the diversity up. If sorcery is as easy to level up as, say, pyromancy or evocation, and it also has lovely little spells like all the stat buff spells and town portal etc, then no one will want the other classes and we're back to the defacto system we had before - no diversity.

Implementation
What would happen is that sorcery spells would be learnable by all other wizard classes. They would belong to all wizard skills. Pyromancy, evocation, and summoning all have the ability to cast sorcery spells.

There are only a handful of sorcery spells that give XP. I would suggest these be divided out and moved to other skills. Steambolt would be given to pyromancy, poison cloud to summoning, spark storm & the magic bullet/missiles to evocation perhaps. At that point, there are no more sorcery spells that generate XP. That way, you don't have to worry about what wizard skill gets XP for casting a sorcery spell - there simply isn't any XP to give out.

Then, the rest of the sorcery spells become the common magic that all wizards can use. The generic toolkit spells. They would be cast at a level equal to the highest level the caster has in any other skill. A character that is level 10 in evocation and 6 in pyromancy would cast sorcery spells at level 10.

I would suggest keeping the current sorcery spell book face so that all casters recognize those spells as ones they can learn.

Summary
There are details of implementation I haven't brought up. The biggest (but not only) one is how to roll it out and maintain existing characters. RaphaelQ on the IRC channel pointed out the devil is in the details, and so it is. Before we get detailed to death, though, I'd love comments on the idea itself.

[Rednaxela]

This proposal seems good to me. To me it seems like it would be good to make this change, along with the rebalancing of spell paths (i.e. change required levels for given spells), as a part of it. Anyways, indeed, the devil is in the details, though the concept and reasoning seems sound to me.

[bencha]

I find it a good idea as leveling sorcery is really painfull, and i don't imagine how a wraith/devourers follower (denied fire) can level it up to town portal, since shared party xp is broken.

And i think it would reduce raffle1 squatting

[Rednaxela]

And i think it would reduce raffle1 squatting

Oh yes, I do recall raffle1 squatting being perticularly popular for getting those painful sorcery levels, which were somewhat time consuming even with the raffle1 squatting.

[kshinji]

Wasn't it meant to be that way? I mean, sorcery requires more hard work to be possesed, but have this tricky spells, lieks steambolt, invisibility etc?

[bort]

No. Sorcery was meant at most to be the more difficult of skills to level, but it is not meant to be nigh impossible.

Think of it this way, most of the great monsters have see_invisible or some item/spell that gives them see_invisibility.

Invisibility is great for PvP (arena anyone?) but has it's drawbacks. And since Town Portal can no logner be used to map squat, it makes sorcery not as interesting to use.