Stealth Assassinations

[BobTheJanitor]

Mostly it's a muscle memory thing. If the menu to get to light, light snake is always one left and one up, for example, I can know exactly how to cast it with a gesture and it takes me half a second to do it, even while on the run. In fact, being able to assign spells to mouse gestures would be awesome all by itself. I can't live without the mouse gestures addon for firefox, though, so maybe that's just me.

If I'm dodging shadow bats and I have to move my hands off the movement keys to get to inventory, find the spell in the 4 or 5 line high stack, move my aiming reticule off the bat to get to the spell, cast it, then again hit inventory to close it, it's a bit of trouble. I know, I'm overstating my case a little bit here. But it is still a little inconvenient, especially when you're trying to focus on dodging in circles around a cave.

[x4000]

Gotcha.  Well, it's something to consider post-1.0 -- it definitely doesn't fit before that time, unfortunately.

[Terraziel]

Personally I don't have any issues accessing spells\items at all, I mean how many things are people actually using?

I use 2 offensive spells and a shield, which takes up slots 1,3 and 2 respectively,  platforms in 4, light snake in 5 (which i rebound to T), splash back in 6 or G. What else do you need in your active ability bar??? teleport possibly which would go in 7/B.

That's seven slots without needing to take your hands off WSAD or stop targeting with the mouse, add in R and F to change slots up and down and that's 21 slots within seconds of access.


EDIT: Going back to the light discussion, I literally just installed AVWW on my main computer which means I'm playing on my TV, and the settings don't match up well, meaning that darkness is really black to the degree that there is no gradient it's either bright or pitch black.

And I quite liked it.... it made caves seem much more imposing, but something didn't add up and it took me a few minutes to figure out what.

The majority of the difference was actually down to the change in resolution between by laptop and main pc, on my laptop at 1280x800 a ball of light or enchant will light the entire screen,  but at 1920x1080 it leaves a significant amount of darkness on screen.

The difference it makes to the atmosphere of the game is astonishing. Unfortunately aside from scaling light sources with resolution (which seems a poor if not an infeasible plan) there doesn't strike me as any way round it.

[BobTheJanitor]

Looking at my spell inventory right now, I count 9 long range spells, 4 AoE spells, 5 touch range spells, 3 light emitting spells, and 9 utility/movement spells. (counting all 3 platform types as one, and ignoring storm dash and ride the lightning since they are accessible outside of inventory binds) And I know I'm missing some spells. In theory, all these spells will be useful at one time or another, whether to deal with enemy immunities or something else. And the majority of them will be useful at a time when you won't necessarily want to open a menu and hunt them down to cast them. You may not often need to cast sieze, or a decoy firework, or drop a pile of crates. But when you do, you'll need to do it now, and not ask the enemy to hold on a second while you shuffle menus.

Now of course you can pause, and adjust spells, and start playing again, but that takes you out of the action for a while and it feels like a non-optimal solution.

Anyway, I'm only mentioning this because of the question about how many spells people are using. The right answer should be all of them, otherwise why have them? I don't want to give the impression that I think this is more important than getting as much new content crammed in as possible before 1.0. I'm very much looking forward to having more of that. 

[x4000]

In terms of how many spells you're using, the idea (from my perspective) is as follows:

1. Specialize in two colors, so that you can definitely deal with any threat regardless of what it is immune to.
2. Orient your offensive spell unlocks and your enchants (using element-seeking stuff) around those two colors.
3. Augment that with other logistical and defensive/whatever spells from any other color.
4. Carry a few different kinds of spells for different contexts, in or outside of your color, and swap those out as needed based on the general situation you run into.

The amount of spell content at the moment is a bit limited so that you can't fully do some of that, but this is my goal.  Saying "play with all of them" is a bit backwards to me, because that's like playing with every class in an MMO at once.  That's waaaay too many spells at once.  Like AI War ditched civilizations in favor of "build your own civ," the idea here is to ditch classes in favor of "build your own class."  So the fact that you don't play with all the spells isn't a failure of the game or a lack of imagination on your part, it's a tactical choice of how you decided to evolve your characters on that continent.  And on the next continent you can make different choices if you want.

That's what we're going for, anyhow, and that's why the prospect of a hundred or more spells shouldn't be intimidating to anyone; it's all about specialization and allowing player personalities to really come through.  If we all choose the same loadouts that's lame, but if there's multiplayer servers where each player seems visibly unique in how they are fighting and what their spells are, that's really kind of the ideal end state for me.

[BobTheJanitor]

Fair point. I think I'm still confusing myself by playing with an old world where I had a ton of things unlocked. And then further confused by getting hit with the tier orb changeover, so I'm now especially limited into only having, I think, two spells of the appropriate tier that I can still continue to level up. So I have no idea what a normal, balanced character looks like.

[x4000]

Yeah, you've got one of those Frankenstein worlds, for sure.  Your next continent will make more sense, at least!

[Penumbra]

The number of spells I have upgraded and made useful for Tier 3-5 play on a specific continent is the limiting factor. I can only get so many.

Making it an interface limitation, where I might just feel more comfortable accessing my spells in a different way seems unfair.

If you let us bind the first 10 bars to a key, leaving all but the first row defaulted to "blank" wouldn't change the balance. It would just make some players, like me, really happy.

[x4000]

I wasn't suggesting that we wouldn't add key ones for that eventually. My complaint was about radial menus by category.

[Moo]

I'm lucky enough to have a five button mouse, so right now I run with the following:
Left mouse - Ball Lightning
Right mouse - Fireball
Middle mouse - Miasma Whip
Mouse 4 - Platforms
Mouse 5 - utility, which varies between crates, healing, shield, or specific spells for weaknesses if I feel it necessary.