Spell Balance

[KDR_11k]

The Schlock response would be "A meta for WHAT???"

Plasma bolt is far from free, or even "free". It's one of the more expensive spells. Yes, it costs 35 mana, but it has a default refire time of .5 seconds. That's 70 MPS vs 37 mana regen per second.

(The whole reason I've been arguing that spells need an MPS measurement clearly defined on the spell, to avoid this confusion.)

I know it isn't free, I was arguing for it to be made free. It's seriously overpriced right now and would be a good candidate for a free spell.

[BobTheJanitor]

Sorry I wasn't yelling at you, I was being pedantic at Terraziel. I agree it should be cheaper to make it more useful.

[Terraziel]

The question is will decreasing the cost Actually make it more useful to you?

If the mana cost was cut to 18 (so even accounting for 2 shots a second you still end up with a net mana gain per second), the DPM would close to double, but would still only be 19 compared to fireballs 15, and the damage and DPS would remain naff, and I'd argue that the latter two are far more important in most situations in the game, there just isn't great situational demand for a low damage, high ROF spell, the usual one would be swarms of enemies but with piercing spells quite so prevalent even that would not really count in its favour.

In the choice between the adjusted plasma bolt and fireball which would you choose? Fireball still does better DPS, damage per shot, and can be spammed pretty easily. The only situation where Plasma bolt would beat fireball marginally is against the overlords, but then I wouldn't use either then anyway.

Just so that we are clear on the situation, I'm not defending Plasma bolt as it is, it clearly needs changing,  I just think lowering the Mana cost is the wrong way to go about it.

[BobTheJanitor]

I used to use plasma bolt as my go-to ranged spell, until the mana rebalance made it a lot less useful. The only plus to plasma bolt that I can think of now is that light resistance doesn't seem to be a normal state on any mobs that we have currently. There are things that are always fire/water/air resistant (espers, some bats) and something that's always earth resistant although I can't think of it right now (and who ever uses forest rage anyway?). But I know of nothing that is by default light resistant. Can't think of anything that's always entropy resistant either, but that doesn't have any good spammy ranged spells, although I do use miasma whip as my go-to melee spell. Anyway, yeah, it's good on the resistance front. At least until Chris introduces light and dark espers that attack by blinding you. 

[Terraziel]

Normal bats are light resistant, but that is about it I think.

[BobTheJanitor]

Normal bats are light resistant, but that is about it I think.

Ooh, that's right. I'd forgotten about them. I always end up using close range spells on those anyway, since they end up in my face before I notice them (camouflaged little jerks!). You'd think bats would be resistant to dark, and weak to light. Since they're, you know, bats.

[KDR_11k]

Eagles are light resistant too.

Probably the shortest end of the stick in terms of immunities goes to water. All ocean enemies, ice bats and leapers, water espers, blue amoebas, ... Air is the most favorable because of the large number of enemies with a weakness against it and I think the enemies that are resistant to it don't tend to have very high resistances either (except for the lightning esper).

[Coppermantis]

I rarely switch from Forest Rage+Ball Lightning as my two active (bound to mouse1 and mouse2) spells since they're the highest-damage practical-to-use spells (Creeping Death, that ice touchy spell  and that kind of thing are too expensive) and since they're opposite elements, it's very rare that something has resistance to both. I do occasionally use the light boomerang, whatever it's called, which has a higher damage than ball lightning.

Purely increasing damage of the other spells wouldn't make it balanced either. You'll still always have a clear winner for every situation except when the enemy has resistance. It's like the bonus ships in AI War, each one has a different use to make it stand out. Bombards rain long-range hell, paralyzers paralyze, parasites reclaim, etc. The spells in AVWW should, in my opinion, work like this too in some way, at least several of them. Fireball could do little base damage but ignite 'biological' enemies such as bats or espers, creeping death could 'reclaim' the target so it will self-attrition but fight on your side for the remaining time, things like that.