Spell gem tiers aren't fun

[KDR_11k]

I know it's a necessity with the current design goals of the game but the way spell gem tiers work just isn't fun. Instead of feeling like you're going for a tough fight that will reward you with great strength if you succeed it feels more like a shopping trip where you're just replacing the gear that's getting obsolete again. You fight a (fairly easy) boss and take a gem that just lets you use the spells you already have for another 10 levels before they degrade. It doesn't feel like an upgrade, more like a necessity. When you emerge and use your new spell it performs exactly like the old one.

I don't know what could be done but I know it can't stay the way it is.

[zebramatt]

I'm relatively certain this is just endemic of it being VERY EARLY BETA and there only being the one underground boss type.

[Terraziel]

I know it's a necessity with the current design goals of the game but the way spell gem tiers work just isn't fun. Instead of feeling like you're going for a tough fight that will reward you with great strength if you succeed it feels more like a shopping trip where you're just replacing the gear that's getting obsolete again. You fight a (fairly easy) boss and take a gem that just lets you use the spells you already have for another 10 levels before they degrade. It doesn't feel like an upgrade, more like a necessity. When you emerge and use your new spell it performs exactly like the old one.

I don't know what could be done but I know it can't stay the way it is.

I would argue that you are expecting more from the tiers than you should be, they aren't supposed to be a tough fight with a big reward at the end. They are a way of treading water, It is a necessity not an upgrade. they are the functional equivalent of basic quest rewards in MMO's, a slow drip feed of superficial rewards designed to keep you in the game, not ahead of it.

Similarly, If this were say, Diablo, then you would experiencing the same thing, you would be fighting through groups of enemies with slowly increasing stats, making your weapons relatively worse, until *clang* something drops a weapon with higher stats and you are back to parity.

The only real difference here is that this is honest about the lack of actual increase.

Spell gem tiers could be completely removed but that would mean that once you crafted a spell you never need the crafting cost again, which would minimize both the usefulness of gems and the raw materials and the interest factor, past a certain point, which you would reach fairly quickly, materials would be pointless, you would already have sufficient to craft every spell in the game.

As it stands I NEED to go get gems regularly, if i wish to upgrade my meteor spell, I NEED to go into another commodity tower, without the tiers creating demand then caves and towers are as dead to me as buildings are.

keeping in mind that tiers are supposed to be meaningless the other options sort of boil down to:-

visual changes, which wouldn't work, because you'd either have to hand-design the increases (impossible to do for infinite tiers), just add particles as tiers increase (a bad idea for infinite tiers), and it would generally interfere with spell recognition.

Scale the numbers, this is what most games do, so that you feel like you are accomplishing something when you aren't. So for an over simplified example fireball level 2 does 110 instead of 100 damage but everything has 110 health now anyway.  but this is more complex to balance than the current system

And I'm done ranting, If you can't tell i quite like the spell tiers.

[CoyoteTheClever]

I understand what the op is saying here and I think its a hard problem to fix. I think the thing here is that simple changes in numbers aren't really that exciting. I can get deathtouch 3, but the real difference between that and 1 is a change in numbers. I never really -feel- like deathtouch 3 is any different than 1 because everything scales with me anyways.

When I think of infinite leveling, I think of Disgaea, and ultimately, spells in that game are more fun for a couple of reasons. The first is that as I level up my spells, there is a change in them, which is namely that I can cast them against more area on the map than before, so even if it is just the lowest tier fire spell, it can cover the entire map. It isn't just a change in numbers, there is a visual difference the player can see. The second is that as I level up, new spells and abilities become available.

In AVWW, everything I can get is available right off the bat, I just need the commodities. That isn't necessarily bad, I think there just needs to be more variety in the commodities and spells. Not a problem, as this is just the beta. The second problem is more serious though, and that is the fact that there is no visual difference between death touch 1 and death touch 3, and that the spells feel exactly the same, you don't feel like your spell is really leveling up so much as the number is changing and that's noticible if you are trying to attack something a higher tier than what is ideal. I think there can be a nice solution for this though, and that would be to separate tiers off into different groupings. For example, you'd have minor death touch 1-5, then just death touch 1-5, then maybe major death touch 1-5, and each of these groupings would have their own associated spell effects. Maybe even secondary effects can be strengthened too for each grouping (Once status effects come in), or with shields, the higher categories would last longer. I think that would do a good job of making the player feel like the spell is getting stronger.

[x4000]

A few notes:

1. Yes, these are just for treading water.  That's really ALL they are, and that's never really to change.  Death Touch 10 would never look different from Death Touch 1.  If you want a world where you can play an infinite amount of time, spell gem tiers of this sort are required.  No way to mince words about it.  It's a way for you to play the same thing again, every 10 levels, but with all the details different based on the monsters, the terrain, and whatever other factors.

It's kind of like playing multiple campaigns of AI War in a single campaign rather than starting over each time.  It's a core design tenet of this game and not something that I ever plan to change for a lot of really detailed reasons I've gone into elsewhere.

2. THAT said, these aren't the main way of progressing in the game in terms of exciting rewards.  Want a better death touch after an epic fight?  Well, that would be a new spell.  If you think of this as a graph, then the spell tiers are the Y axis, and they go up infinitely.  The X axis would be the actual TYPES of spells you can craft, and those go up over a long period of levels in the game, but still in a finite fashion.  The X axis is where the fun, traditional gameplay progression comes from.  The Y axis is where the infinity bit comes from.

3. Regarding the impression that all spells are available from the start: that couldn't be further from the truth, even now.  Sure, "all you have to do is get the commodity," but a lot of the commodities are only available in higher-level areas.  The commodities, at present, are the gating.  So while you can see everything at the start, not remotely everything is available to you to craft even now until you hit level 14 or so.  In terms of the overall progression for the game, of course that isn't nearly sufficient, but that's a factor of it being early beta, not design intent.

[KDR_11k]

One issue is that there's no immediate gain from upgrading your spell if it hasn't degraded yet. You're future-proofing your gear but you won't notice a difference until several levels later. Even with the old tier system there was an immediate difference when you brought home a new gem tier and got a new, bright blue spell. For the Diablo analogy, if you average it out over a long time then yes you're just scaling to the threat but in the short term you're getting (actually not that common) upgrades that provide an immediate tangible upgrade and you see the difference by killing enemies that you used to kill before much quicker or others that used to be a big problem turned harmless. Sure, new enemies get introduced but these two things happen at discrete steps.

Anyway, maybe those spell types would be more interesting if we could actually get any more powerful spells already. We can already get crappy rare ones like meteor but that's it.

[x4000]

In terms of the higher-tier spells, you get more of a benefit even if the other ones haven't yet degraded... I think.  It depends on when you get them.  There might be some dead areas where both are identical... and if that's the case, that does in fact need to be addressed.

In terms of the Diablo example, that's more or less exactly what we have planned with the X axis of the graph I was referring to.  But the X axis is just at this miniscule amount of progression compared to where it ultimately needs to be for that to feel remotely satisfying.  I really hate leaning on the "it's early beta" crutch with things like that, but please bear with me.

[zebramatt]

There might be some dead areas where both are identical... and if that's the case, that does in fact need to be addressed.

Is this easy to diagnose?

[x4000]

Yeah, I need to look at the numbers.

[KDR_11k]

I think on the exact tier levels your old spells haven't started to degrade while your new spell has fallen to 100% power.

[x4000]

I think on the exact tier levels your old spells haven't started to degrade while your new spell has fallen to 100% power.

I think you're right.  What I really need to do is shift it around a bit so that there's a degradation buffer ABOVE your tier, too.

[KDR_11k]

I don't know what you mean with degradation buffer above...

Considering that we have those buffers now couldn't we go back to a tier per 5 levels so we have more freedom to choose when to replace our gems? And/or maybe have different quality levels of gems within a tier that require fighting bosses of different difficulties so you can go for a tougher boss to get a better gem with some benefit (dunno what, maybe +5 to the degration delay per boss class?)?

[x4000]

5 tiers per gem is definitely far too fast, for all the very many reasons we stopped using them -- and it would only compound this problem.  What I mean is that spellgems that are higher-tier than your ones that are degrading need to stay more powerful (and more expensive) longer.

[Terraziel]

I believe what he is trying to say is that he is considering making it so for example

A gem tier is still 10 levels, so level 10 through level 20, but making it so that the damage doesn't decrease until say level 22, so that if I get to level 20 and decide to get a new gem from a level 20 chunk it will actually be stronger for a couple of levels before returning to "normal" damage

[x4000]

Yep, pretty much.