spell powers-- too powerful? too early?

I am running up a resque party. And one thing I note is that the spellers seem to have an even larger edge over the fighter types than they did before.

Wizard level 115 (ish) can cast power and just obliterate stuff all the way down to level 6. I have seen him wipe out a bunch of fairly high hit point mobs at a relatively low level. This seemed to kick in about level 100 or so. Or perhaps you made some change about then...

Mage spells also seem much more powerful than I recall.

At level 70 ish my sorc is just mopping up with poison.

I guess if this is the way you want it with the new spell progressions, okay. But it would seem to me that the fighter types were already WAAAY behind the power curve compared to the spell chuckers. Why make this even more extreme?

PS

I just walked my party all the way to level 9 clearing everything in their path....

ninja 89
thief 132
mage 108
wizard 119
sorc  73

and a level 725 nomad as a cover (clean up)

they did amazingly well.  Admittedly, the sample size is small and I have a lot of experience with the dungeon-- AND without the big stick nomad, cleaning up the remains of a few of the encounters would have been hard...

but no one died.  or got drained.  and my spell chuckers kicked serious aZZ down there.  I don't think this is what you want/intend this game to be.  do you?

I made a change to the spell progression code two weeks ago. Yours is the first feedback I have heard--thanks!

The new code is a lot more accurate to how the original game did things--but we need to tweak in the parameters. It sounds to me like you would like to see power, poison and perhaps some other mid level spells 'peak' at a higher guild level. That should be an easy adjustment with the new system.

The change was necessary to keep Villains and Paladins from getting screwed over on their healing spells. I'm not surprised that a mid level tweak is in order. If you have any more specific recommendations on levels you think individual spells should peak at, I'm all ears. This is one of those parts of Javatar where we have to fill in the blanks so to speak.

it is hard for me to know if the change caused what I am seeing or if I crossed some sort of skill level with the spells. for what it is worth -- sorc spells seem to be pretty true to what I recall, except for poison. which was probably too wimpy before.

power is just totally over powered. as it currently sits it is good to kill 5 monster in each group all the way down to 9. I haven't tested it lower -- but I am guessing it is hitting for 600 hitpoints (or more) per slot... which seems like an awful lot for a level 120 wizard.

summon shade is also very powerful.

I am unsure what you mean by the original game... it certainly does not appear to be true to my experiences on either cyber1 or novanet, but those weren't 'original.'

Your progressions seem to remind me of what I experienced when I played 2avatar on cyber 1. Which isn't really a good thing, IMHO. There the spells were pretty lame, and then all of a sudden over the course of a few levels, they became god like. this is why I stopped playing that game, because it seemed broken.

what you have here now, makes me not want to build my casters-- because it seems like I am cheating.

My recollections are as follows:

Power: got strong later than other spells (all the damage spells seemed to power up later than other casters), but the progression to the "plateau" where it became usable was pretty linear.  Then at just short of level 200 it progressed rapidly till it hit about 2/3rd of its full power.  Then it progressed pretty linear from there and somewhere in the 300s it maxed out and basically took 6 from 3 groups of things that it hit.
Harm/Touch: similar to power but of course hits larger groups for more hit points, but progressed at a similar number.  Probably 250 ish for the "plateau" gains like power.
WoD: similar again, but did not top out till near spell level max at 509.  Plateau level around level 300.

Mage spells always hit the hardest the earliest of any guild.  Makes the mage a necessity in your starter party imo (along with dazzle only monsters).  In non javatar vers i got in the habit of pushing mage early so that the mage could offer cover for other chars while they were building.  Plus would give you a change to kill tougher monster quests early.  I always assumed that was because the mage spells were at a lower spell level.  4 for summon shade vs 5 for power for example.  As the progression of mage spells seemed at least 20% ahead of wizard/healer spells (160ish vs 200ish).

The same was true on sork spells.  sork spells powered up faster than wizard spells and I believed it to be because of the lower spell level of the spells for the sork (the ones I used for building at least).  

All this said, the algorithm seemed to be spell level based.  In vavatar where the spell levels were raised over zavatar, the levels at which spells hit their stride and maxed out went up as well.  

The same held true for lower spells like nerve blank, cause wounds, cause heavy wounds (same for sork spells).  You would end up using each of these to build a char as they hit their stride at different levels and what the spell was that gave you the most "bank for your buck" changed as you leveled up.

Sork was always pretty tough till poison hit its stride.  Same for wiz till poison was usable.  Healer was tougher with no poison, had to limp all the way on with burnables till power hit its stride and use cause heavy wounds.  Spheres were the savior for power building (and cubes) along with wands initially.

Finally, my rough idea for when a spell powered up was sometime after it hit minimum cost to cast.  Power/damage spells being the exception.  Those usually started to power up sometime after the one above it hit min to cast, in this case when harm/touch hit minimum, sometime in there, power hit its stride.  It was never precise when after it hit min cost it would power up, but shortly after that is when I would start testing it.  The spell became worthwhile to use at least a few and sometimes more than few levels after it hit min cost.

One more additional bit. Spells as they approached their "plateau" gave off signals as they would wildly fluctuate in their effectiveness. One time they would seem quite strong, next time you cast them quite weak. Made it sorta a crap shoot if you wanted to try to use them before they hit their stride. Sometimes it might work out well, other times it would fizzle.

One more thought to share. I believe that burnables had some sort of algorithm based on the level of the char casting from the burnable. At its max, the burnable would cast at the "plateau" strength and never go up once that was reached. I postulated that math was done between the plateau level and the level your character had reached that was using it.

So if you character was level 89 and you were using a sphere of harm, some math like current level/plateau level or 89/200 % of max strength was cast from the sphere. Same for wands and cubes. Once you hit the plateau level, the item was similar to your characters spell. After that your characters spell would continue to increase, but burnable spell strength would never increase.

thanks for these reports.

Jake -- build your chars. it is not cheating.

Glenn -- your memories and mine are in similar veins... except when it comes to wands. I clearly recall them being initially much better than your native spell, and then as your spell level rose, the wand stayed the same, until your spells eclipsed the wand. Same with spheres and cubes. I don't recall a wand of fire getting better from level 33 to level 66. Am I wrong? It's been a few years and I have killed a few brain cells since then!

When Jude and I talked about spell thresholds ( where the spell starts to "kick in" ) we targeted "where the next spell reaches minimum cost" We may not have gotten it totally correct-- but that was our goal. Jude has some new info and new spell progression guidelines. This may require some tweaking, and incremental changes to walk it into the sweet spot -- like almost everything we do.

Further feedback will be needed.

JPA

JPA - I would defend my recollections on all but wands, not quite so certain on those.  I believe strongly that sphere of harm improved as the character made level till some max point was hit.  I have done a lot of power building in my time in other vers and when droning up new chars through those levels tracking little stuff like this is what my relic brain likes to do .

Wands in level 35 char hands are far far better than native spells.  wand of power is strong in level 35 chars hands, power cast from level 35 char is next to nothing.  Wands must have a different progression than spheres/cubes favoring more strength earlier.
Wands don't ever reach the strength of spheres regardless of the level of the character using.  Wands don't ever reach the 'sweet spot' of native spells. It is like the max power spell from a wand does good damage, but perhaps only some percentage of the damage a caster can do at the "sweet spot" level.

Spheres much greater than wands, cubes incrementally better than spheres (just casts bigger spells basically).

2 cents.

I just made a few adjustments.  Power now peaks at a later level.  

The mage spell data had some weirdness going on.  Summon shade in particular had way too many damage dice--likely the result of a typo.  I've dialed that spell's damage dice back to the realm of reason, and slowed its progression a bit. Flickering Doom and Precognitive Death were peaking waaay too early too. They've been pushed back a bit.

I don't think these adjustments are going to be the last ones.  (I may need to retool our spell algorithm yet again..)  This adjustment is now live.  

Thanks for the feedback all!

Glenn,

At this point, wands/spheres and cubes probably are not up for changes-- at least not in this round of balancing. Perhaps when the rest of the balls come to rest, we can start juggling those.

No worries, just doing a brain dump, that makes a mess you know. :-)

Yes. Second level sorcerer elemental type spells need to be looked at for casting times.

Oops--thought I was quoting Glenn's note, and deleted it by mistake. Anyway, here is my response to his note about Sphere of Fire not breaking peace:

Whoops--I'll fix sphere of fire as soon as I get the chance..

Sphere of fire should be back to normal now.

I just sketched out a system for spell progression/adjustment that will give us a bit more flexibility. I haven't coded it yet--maybe this weekend. Stay tuned.