MedievaLands Forums

Again, to get a little more in-depth on my idea from another thread on how to make Yserbius more engaging:

Currently, the spells in the MedievaLands games have a controlled damage pattern. Each spell (much like skills) can be leveled up to a maximum rank of 12. The power never changes outside of the preset damage setting per level of the spell. The problem with this is that spells will quickly fall behind weapon fighting in terms of raw damage output.

To fix this and make spellskingers more interesting/fun to play, I think spells should receive scaling based on an additional two factors: a new statistic to increase - Intelligence - and the player's character level.

Let's do some math. First let's say that Intelligence levels up just like Strength, Defense, Initiative and Agility does, with its own cap based on class/race choice.

Intelligence: 5 percent spell damage increase per point

Character level: 3 percent spell damage increase per point

We have a level 9 Wizard with 22 Intelligence

We have a level 12 Barbarian with 5 Intelligence

Both of these will cast Lightning at level 12, which would regularly (if I remember right) deal 200 damage. But if we intelligence and character level scaling into account...

The Wizard would deal 200 x (1.27 + 2.1) = 674 damage

The Barbarian would deal 200 x (1.36 + 0.25) = 322 damage

So despite being lower level, the Wizard would use Lightning at more than twice the efficiency of a Barbarian. The actual numbers behind the calculations can be changed of course, but this seems to be a reasonable simple formula to use.

Furthermore, this would mean that new staff type weapons could be introduced that increase the Intelligence stat, or perhaps the staff fighting skill.

Thoughts?

Pardon the grammar and spelling errors, oops.

I talked it over with a friend of mine and realized that a possibly more simple solution (now that I know how combat works from reading Zane's post on it) would be to create a stat similar to Dexterity but use it to increase the power of spells instead. A similar formula could be used to the one above.

I like your second, simpler idea in regards to having a stat similar to Dexterity; from what I can tell with most damage spells, they're based on a set amount of damage as it stands, and don't have any additional features aside from measuring Agility and Magic Armor. (Example: Deflect Magic skill)

This would give Wizards a true opportunity to shine; like how the Barbarian excels in Dexterity, the Wizard would excel in Intelligence.

- Regi

How would Intelligence affect the spells that don't do damage as such, but have a percentage chance to fail/succeed? Would it be calculated in the same way as hit/miss/crit is for physical damage, taking into account Intelligence versus magic resistance/Agility?

An interesting point you raised there, Silver. Maybe spells like Curse and Petrify should work similarly to how Defense works against Strength, so we'll pit Intelligence against Agility. If their Agility is vastly superior, they will resist it more often than not, but if your Intelligence is vastly superior, it will most likely never fail.

Alternatively, after a corresponding stat check (again, Int vs Agi) the duration of said spell could be altered. Maybe 0-4 combat rounds based on how well they resist spells?

Maybe a combination of effectiveness, accuracy and duration?

I thought about it some more and I definitely think the simpler it is, the better - maybe "just" copy the code from how it calculates crits for melee (Defense vs Strength) and turn that into a check for spell resistance using Agility vs Intelligence instead?