There's a couple of fairly significant changes coming to the magic system and we're at a point now where I'm ready to start talking about some of them.

Before we get into the nitty gritty I want to address the motivation behind these changes, and that's a story that starts with a spell: Mental Blast.

A major change with 3.0 was the introduction of slot costs. No longer would all spells cost just one slot (The equivalent of two slots under the new system) but would have variable costs based on what they did. And Mental Blast is the Grand Poobah of this at a massive five slots. Another major change was a great deal of standardization in mana costs - for the most part spells range from a variable minimum value to 100.

The idea behind variable slot costs was to largely balance the value of spells against one another. That's why Clear Vision costs one slot and Aura Sight costs two slots. Aura Sight bonuses two skills and Clear Vision bonuses one. This makes sense and works out rather well in practice.

The problem is when you consider these design choices in the lens of Debilitation spells (and to a lesser degree TM spells). Take Sleep (two slots) vs Mental Blast (five slots). Mental Blast does a lot more, so it costs a lot more slots. The problem is, unlike our Augmentation example above which have unique effects, once you've spent the slots on Mental Blast and Sleep - you no longer need Sleep. Mental Blast does everything Sleep does at the same mana cost (albeit you might need more skill, but in the long run Mental Blast is going to win).

So the system designed to prevent Mental Blast from being strictly better than Sleep doesn't work - it doesn't create a niche where if you know both spells sometimes you might want Sleep and sometimes you might want Mental Blast.

You can also make this entire argument based on AoE spells such as Thunderclap vs Arc Light. And you'll see in a few moments, we have.

A parallel problem to this is Debilitation in general (Particularly in PvE). If the effort to cast Heighten Pain is roughly equal to casting another Acid Splash, why not just splash it one more time?

The answer lies in mana costs. By standardizing mana costs with 3.0 across all non-cyclic non-ritual spells we lost a major balance tool. So let's talk about the changes that are coming.

1) Mana will now recover at a linear rate. I fully expect this to take some time to dial in, but the general change to linear recovery is currently on Test.
This accomplishes two primary things. Firstly, it removes the need to keep your mana bar as low as possible to maximize your recovery which should open up greater tactical options. Secondly, it makes it far more practical to keep a reserve of mana for when you need it. It also has the happy side effect of making it easier to use mana costs as a balance tool.

2) The percentage of mana you recovered with each pulse is no longer dependent on skill set placement and Attunement skill. Attunement continues to drive the size of your mana pool, so it will still result in more absolute mana recovered per pulse but it will no decrease the time to recover your entire pool. This was just using the same skill twice to do the same thing and needlessly hindered Secondary and Tertiary casters (Who already have smaller mana pools due to their skill set placement and thus already recovery mana slower). This is also currently on Test.

3) Single target debilitation spells will, generally, have their mana costs greatly reduced. Right not we're aiming for about a 66% reduction. Some spells will not be reduced this far, if at all (See: Mental Blast).

4) Single target TM spells will, generally, have their mana costs reduced. Right now we're aiming for a 50% reduction.

5) AoE Debilitation spells will remain about the same in cost.

6) AoE TM spells will, generally, increase in cost. This will hopefully balance them enough that we can give their damage templates some more oomph.

7) In general, Utility, Augmentation and Warding spells will not see costs change.

8) Spells that have increased mana costs (Such as AoE spells or complex debilitation spells like Mental Blast) will see a reduction in slot cost.

There are a few more tangential changes in the works that I'll be discussing after the core of the project stabilizes more (Such as adjusting sorcery danger to be more of a curve than trivial, trivial, still trivial, DEATH).

My intention is to make the first round of cost adjustments to Warrior Mage spells and move them to the Test server in the near future. (Why are Warrior Mages first you ask? Because I already need to make an edit to every one of their spells for the Elemental modifiers project that is currently in test.)

Even more than usual I feel the need to remind people to keep the discussion civil and polite. I want feedback but if it's wrapped in hyperbole and baseless speculation it's not going to be very effective feedback.

-Raesh

"It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to BE itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true." ― The Slow Regard of Silent Things