Spell balance!

[madcow]

I'm not sure it's a bad thing that some Mage classes excell in certain areas and are weak in others. You can typically know what sort of situation you're getting into before hand, and pick a class accordingly. Which is one of the game's big selling points.

I haven't been able to play lately, so I say this without being able to comment on how balanced he class is. Last I played snake spells were great in tight places, you just had to be careful and not to into the line of fire.

[danterules]

lol i hadn't played the game since a few betas back and decided to give it a try after the 1.0 release , its all good now but was shocked that i died by my own spell twice :O when did our spells started to attack us ? not happy with this , that rocket spell was the only thing i liked in the current list of spells and its killing me please turn off the friendly fire on it.

 

[Winge]

I'm not sure that making rocket spells High caliber would be a good idea, as they would block almost everything.  However, they definitely should not be Low, as that means even basic enemies will pop them (on that note, why on earth is the Mosquito's spell Normal caliber???).  Normal caliber seems like an OK balance point for rocket spells.  Another option would be to decrease or even remove the friendly fire damage from the spell (the caliber change took care of rocket cheesiness).  One last idea is to make the rocket projectile high caliber, but make the explosion low caliber...but I don't know if that is possible in the code.

The Illuminologist class is definitely one of the most difficult starting classes (although not the weakest...I was thoroughly unimpressed with the damage numbers on the Technozoologist).  Rocket is extremely risky in its current form.  Snakes are situational (but oh-so fun and excellent when their time comes).  Flares are OK for sniping, but fire waaayyy too slowly for close-quarters use.  Light Flare is actually my biggest gripe with the class.  The Ammo spell is very weak, however it does synergize well with the rest of the class, and has a very low ammo cost.

[Psyren]

I'm not sure it's a bad thing that some Mage classes excell in certain areas and are weak in others. You can typically know what sort of situation you're getting into before hand, and pick a class accordingly. Which is one of the game's big selling points.

True.

On the higher difficulties optimizing your loadout is essential for survival, I get that.

But the average player is most likely not going to bother with doing this (on the average/lower difficulties I mean), and they will most likely expect each class to be relatively balanced for most situations. That said, if classes are going to have specialized/hard spell kits then I think each class should at get a basic playstyle description point out key strengths & weaknesses along with a difficulty meter (rating out of 5 stars maybe?) relative to its overall usefulness/skill requirements, and there should be a stronger emphasis on pointing out to players that they should adjust their loadout to better adapt to situations.
/Off-Topic


On topic: I considered the idea of buffing the Flare spell, but if anything else other than damage gets buffed it may as well become the class Primary.

Another suggestion rather than buffing Rockets straight to High Caliber:

+ Lower/Remove player damage
+ Buff Caliber to Normal
- Increase cooldown time
- Slightly smaller AoE explosion (?)

Slightly nerfs its ability to ping distant enemies, and nerf overall DPS in exchange for bulleteating/defensive options