AVWW Beta 0.549, "Power Coding Round 3: Continents, New Mana Subsystem," Release

[Hyfrydle]

A bit to go yet then but another goal to aim for I like it.

[x4000]

 

[Moo]

Has anyone else noticed that as long as your feet aren't in acid/lava/whatever, you won't get hurt by it? It's fine if your head is melting away, as long as your feet are OK...

Other than that, gems are definitely coming up very frequently right now. Even staying within the ice age level one region, I have plenty of all six gem colours - I assume that's left over from when it was making dust that was used up?

[KDR_11k]

The harsh difficulty ramp-up certainly isn't nice for lv1 players who want to get some gems. There are no level 0 regions to find level 1 caves in...

[Hyfrydle]

I'm finding the mana regen speed to slow I spend alot of time waiting about or clicking to hear that annoying not enough mana sound.

[danswan]

chiming in as well to say that the mana regen is too slow for me. Having to stand in front of gems because i cannot cast fire touch is annoying. However, i do really like the idea of the mana system.

[Penumbra]

... standing next to a gem vein waiting because you don't have enough mana for fire touch isn't very much fun

I love the new system, it makes it a much more tactical experience. However, I liked the "different mana bar per school" systems from the brainstorming thread exactly for the reason Keith brought up. If you had 3 different resource pools in a fight against a lightning weak boss, you would still have to conserve and be clever, but you would always have something to use.

Stops the down time. Also, since the movement spells are lightning based, it would change the dynamic of those bosses, since they would impact your DPS spells unlike against, say, a fire based one.

[x4000]

Cheers, folks -- we hear ya, and in the next release we'll do what we can on that.  We'll get where everyone is hopefully happy with the actual balancing, but please bear with us in the meantime.  Right now we're right in the middle of a lot of mission coding stuff so we can't push out the next one today, but we should be able to either tomorrow or the day after for sure.

In terms of multiple mana cooldowns, that's definitely not on the table -- there is no time to look at your HUD already when you're in the middle of a fight, so having 3X more stuff to look at is just not something anyone could comfortably manage in rough fights.

[tigersfan]

The more I think about it, I'm not actually sure that the regen time is too long, 30 seconds isn't THAT long, and we need to have some time for the tactical aspects. I think what's happening is that the spells use too much mana. Especially if these are supposed to be the lower power spells in the game, we just can't fire off enough shots on a full load. As I said, this isn't a priority for me, but, when the time comes for balancing, I think dropping the mana cost of the current spells would do more good than speeding up the mana regen. (Though, further playtesting may reveal that I'm wrong or that we need a mix of both.)

[Martyn van Buren]

Does fire touch cost mana now?  I haven't played for a few weeks.  Why, if so?  It made sense to me as a free spell.

[Bluddy]

Not much time to comment, but I just wanted to say that continents are awesome. They reduce the scope of what you have to deal with and focus your attention. Kind of like looking carefully at the island in Settlers of Catan. Everything's shaping up very nicely.

I agree that spell costs need to be brought down. I like the fact that RtL etc cost mana, but they should be quite cheap. Same thing with fire touch -- it's ok (though perhaps not necessary) to limit it with mana, but it should be very very cheap.

[Coppermantis]

Yeah, Fire touch should be one of the cheapest spells out there since it is the first spell you get, and one of the least powerful, but it's still a good way to get granite and gems and quartz.

[eRe4s3r]

To be honest, if we make mining a necessity at least make it FUN.. casting fire touch with mana requirement is not fun imo.

At least make mines die from 1 hit then

Also i feel like Fire touch, sprint and fly spell should have a "heat mechanic" and not depend on mana. That way would feel more natural imo

[zebramatt]

I'm still inclined towards a separate mining/harvest ability which is not related to melee spells; and mine-able items which therefore cannot be destroyed by melee spells. 

That way you can be sure the player always has a tool with which to harvest without worrying about the impact changing melee spells around might have on it.

And hell, if you wanted to keep it magical with upgrade paths and whatnot, introduce a new category of spells, "Harvest Magic", which are purely for that - and balance them separately.

Finally, if it's worries about having to use an action bar slot the simplest would be to simply have a keybinding for "Use best harvest spell" now that we don't have to worry about healing and mana replenishing keys.

[Toll]

This might be something that will change in future versions, but I figured I'd toss it here anyway:

Right now, the sprites in the caves are much trickier than normal bosses, since the mini-sprites take your shots. This means that not only do you have to make sure the mini-sprites don't hit you, you also have to make sure that you don't hit them, since you can no longer just "spray-and-pray". I'm unsure of a good solution, since I really like the general concept of them spawning mini-sprites instead of just boring old shots.

Now that I think about it, I've not fought a dragon yet. I'd guess those have the exact same problem as sprites though, in that their flames absorb the shots.