Water and Air Attacks

[dragon]

Most other forces of nature (electricity, fire, ice, etc) have been fully explored but air and water spells seem to have been neglected. Has anyone ever considered adding tornadoes, floods, or storms?

[Leaf]

Most other forces of nature (electricity, fire, ice, etc) have been fully explored but air and water spells seem to have been neglected. Has anyone ever considered adding tornadoes, floods, or storms?

How do you envision such spells to be implemented in the game?

How would they damage monsters?

What attacktype would they use?

What kind of visual effect would be used to represent these attacks?

[mwedel]

While not precise, water/ice and cold and fairly close to being equivalent. Most cold attacks suggest some form of water (ice storm, snowball, etc).

From a protection standpoint, water and cold are fairly close - if you're a fire creature, water would be pretty devastating whether or not it was cold or not.

Air and electricity are also fairly closely tied - not a huge reason for it, but likely because most electricity attacks would come through the air (lightning strikes, etc).

Things like tornadoes, gust of wind, etc, most likely should hit with a physical attacktype - the damage they do is really based on all the bits of wood, rock, etc, flying about with them - being heavily armored should protect against them, being protected for electricity shouldn't.

[dragon]

Most other forces of nature (electricity, fire, ice, etc) have been fully explored but air and water spells seem to have been neglected. Has anyone ever considered adding tornadoes, floods, or storms?

How do you envision such spells to be implemented in the game?

How would they damage monsters?

What attacktype would they use?

What kind of visual effect would be used to represent these attacks?

I've put a great deal of thought into this, constructive criticism is appreciated.

Tornadoes:
By far the flashiest of the spells I'm proposing, it should probably behave like the ball lightning spell, but do physical damage. Items in the spell's path should probably be pushed out of the way, causing further damage.

As the spell caster gains levels I though he/she should be able to choose between the spell doing more damage and the size of the spell by using a variable i.e.: each space of a 2x2 tornado will do 1/4 the damage of a 1x1 tornado, so the damage is same just distributed.

I think this spell should be lowish level sorcery perhaps around level 12, this area seems to be the hardest to get through with just steam bolts.

Flood:
I think this should fire a 1x1 bolt of water. This bolt should actually be a heavy object and as such should do a large amount of physical damage. Once the object hits something and comes to rest it should deposit a 1x1 volume of water.

The deposition of water is what makes the spell different from anything else. This should appear as an item, but be unable to be picked up unless it is frozen. If hit by fire, instead of burning it should burst into a large amount of fog. The water should also slow down any monster moving through it. More than one unit of water should not be allowed in a space. This means the water must move elsewhere (a random direction). If the space the water moves to also has water, on of the waters just moves again. The move should also do damage if a monster happens to be on the space it moves to.
The moving behaviour should result in a few new strategies.

This spell should be a lowish level summoning spell (perhaps around 15?). I suggest the visual for both water and bolt should be the old pupland terminal "sky" background that actually looked like water.

Rainstorms:
Although most people don't consider rain deadly, the floods they produce are. This spell should be controlled like a gollum but pass over a target and leave water (same water created by floods) behind. The spell passing over a monster shouldn't damage it, but if the storm drops water when passing the water does damage.

Instead of a using large quantity of mana a one time, this spell should use mana whenever it drops water (probably the amount of mana the flood spell uses) Use of this spell will probably use similar techniques as the use of the flood spell.

This spell should be mid to high level summoning. I suggest the the storm itself to be a black or dark grey colored fog (shouldn't be too hard to change the fog color), Water should be the same as mentioned before.

Thanks for reading.
Joe B

[mwedel]

Those are good suggestions. Some are easier to do than others.

The biggest problem of variable spell effects (do you want a big spell with moderate damage or a small spell with high damage) is how to control that affect on the fly. If I'm in combat, I really don't have time to do something like 'cast tornado of 2x2 size' type of thing.

This can be solved by keybinding, but even there, I'd like some better way to communicate to the player what the options are (so in a sense, the player can click/spin a few dials and get the spell they want)

[Tzevael]

but even there, I'd like some better way to communicate to the player what the options are (so in a sense, the player can click/spin a few dials and get the spell they want)

Use the counter for drop/pickup, the same way you control how far you jump with Dimension Door.

[mwedel]

I'm more tempted for the entire counter thing to go away. An ability to communicate count is still needed, but as it is now, it is all a bit of a hack.

The client sounds the count to the server whenever it changes, but client or player doesn't necessarily know when it gets used/cleared. And the entire dimension door thing ended up being a bit of a hack after the fact.

It is a cleaner design in many ways that the count get sent with actual command. So you'd do something like 'cast dimension door of 5 spaces' or 'drop 180 gold'

Note that the client interface could abstract a bit of this - I'm not expecting players to type in 'drop 180 gold', but client provide a better interface when player actually drops items.

The other reason for this change is that now adds 10 keys to be available for other purposes. Weapon/armor sets? Quick applies? Whatever. Point being that for how often the count is typically used, tying up those keys really isn't needed.