09-11-2016, 07:15 AM
As per tradition, mages have once again shifted from useless to strong. Hopefully we don't see that cycle continue any time soon, but I'd like to revisit a change I suggested right around the time Martial Artist was updated.
Invocations cast with High Speed Divine Words suffer from repeat action penalty.
To clarify, this means it would take 7 momentum total to cast an invocation in one turn. Starting the invoke would take 3, then finishing it would take 3+1 from repeat action penalty. Specifically, this would tone down the power of Screaming Tome and Burn Up + Winged Serpent. As of right now, any mage who has Charge Mind and High Speed Divine Words active is (almost) entirely unapproachable because of Screamer. Going into a damage race against someone who is threatening your entire health bar and Lazarus Wind that can't be stopped by Silence -- or Knockdown, in the common situation that they run Martial Artist in tandem -- is entirely unfeasible. Stacking resists can only take someone so far, and mages in this game do not often follow the glass cannon stereotype. Indeed, we are more often than not seeing bulky mage-tanks throwing Sear or Isenshi at people. Additionally, the distance players usually spawn away from one another often gives someone enough time to put these buffs up before their opponent is even capable of reaching them to punish it.
By making this change, keeping a mage silenced will at least force them to loose non-invocation spells. Triggering a resist on the first spell cast would then become meaningful, since it would then bring them to 2 momentum. This works out well, since the tome already skews the action economy in the mage's favor. Inflicting silence is almost always a 3 momentum venture, and outside of a few setups -- Void Assassins with cutthroat, nightflower weapons, water damage stacking Summoners with Drown -- using that three momentum for silence is often doing far less damage than your other options, not to mention less reliable if a status infliction check is present. And while Screaming Tome does have relatively poor scaling compared to the rest of its weapon types, most people simply run their real casting weapon in the off-hand since the game chooses the best one automatically.
On the other side of the coin, Burn up + Winged Serpent (Which I will now call BUWS to make life easier) does the opposite. Instead of making a mage impossible to shut down or approach, it makes their range of approach far greater. BUWS accomplishes the same thing as Blink without siphoning an action from the person using it. The only time blink becomes more worthwhile as far as invocations are concerned is when one is already in the process of being cast. In this scenario, you are no longer safe from invocations even at ludicrous range. Unless someone is able to reliably attack from 15 range or greater, AND create that distance every single round, it is impossible to avoid being Overloaded/Isenshi'd into the dirt within one or two rounds. Because of this, requiring 7 momentum for one-turn invocations would drastically lower the amount of damage being threatened at those incredible ranges.
Hopefully I made it clear enough as to why this change would be helpful. This was not originally necessary because, in their first iteration post Great Reckoning, mage invocations didn't do enough damage to be a meaningful threat. That has since changed, and rightfully so. If these disproportionately powerful combinations can be tweaked as a result, that'd be even better. If at all possible, discussion about silence as a whole should go elsewhere; any thread that mentions Screaming Tome has a habit of quickly devolving into outcry over how polarized the status effect is.
Invocations cast with High Speed Divine Words suffer from repeat action penalty.
To clarify, this means it would take 7 momentum total to cast an invocation in one turn. Starting the invoke would take 3, then finishing it would take 3+1 from repeat action penalty. Specifically, this would tone down the power of Screaming Tome and Burn Up + Winged Serpent. As of right now, any mage who has Charge Mind and High Speed Divine Words active is (almost) entirely unapproachable because of Screamer. Going into a damage race against someone who is threatening your entire health bar and Lazarus Wind that can't be stopped by Silence -- or Knockdown, in the common situation that they run Martial Artist in tandem -- is entirely unfeasible. Stacking resists can only take someone so far, and mages in this game do not often follow the glass cannon stereotype. Indeed, we are more often than not seeing bulky mage-tanks throwing Sear or Isenshi at people. Additionally, the distance players usually spawn away from one another often gives someone enough time to put these buffs up before their opponent is even capable of reaching them to punish it.
By making this change, keeping a mage silenced will at least force them to loose non-invocation spells. Triggering a resist on the first spell cast would then become meaningful, since it would then bring them to 2 momentum. This works out well, since the tome already skews the action economy in the mage's favor. Inflicting silence is almost always a 3 momentum venture, and outside of a few setups -- Void Assassins with cutthroat, nightflower weapons, water damage stacking Summoners with Drown -- using that three momentum for silence is often doing far less damage than your other options, not to mention less reliable if a status infliction check is present. And while Screaming Tome does have relatively poor scaling compared to the rest of its weapon types, most people simply run their real casting weapon in the off-hand since the game chooses the best one automatically.
On the other side of the coin, Burn up + Winged Serpent (Which I will now call BUWS to make life easier) does the opposite. Instead of making a mage impossible to shut down or approach, it makes their range of approach far greater. BUWS accomplishes the same thing as Blink without siphoning an action from the person using it. The only time blink becomes more worthwhile as far as invocations are concerned is when one is already in the process of being cast. In this scenario, you are no longer safe from invocations even at ludicrous range. Unless someone is able to reliably attack from 15 range or greater, AND create that distance every single round, it is impossible to avoid being Overloaded/Isenshi'd into the dirt within one or two rounds. Because of this, requiring 7 momentum for one-turn invocations would drastically lower the amount of damage being threatened at those incredible ranges.
Hopefully I made it clear enough as to why this change would be helpful. This was not originally necessary because, in their first iteration post Great Reckoning, mage invocations didn't do enough damage to be a meaningful threat. That has since changed, and rightfully so. If these disproportionately powerful combinations can be tweaked as a result, that'd be even better. If at all possible, discussion about silence as a whole should go elsewhere; any thread that mentions Screaming Tome has a habit of quickly devolving into outcry over how polarized the status effect is.
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