Breaking off from the complaints thread, where we discovered blackfire is not going to be made available to us in any significant way.

What do you think are some potential avenues for the development of sorcery for WMs?

Aethereal spirits remain a huge ??? for me. We interact with them on a regular basis through familiars, quests, and certain elemental objects. I'm pretty sure they're not related to Necromancy and I certainly don't want to see us become Elemental Necromancers, but there could be valuable work in this area.

Elementals. Life + elemental magic? They exist in our guildhalls. I have the bruised/bloody shins to prove it. It's a big part of our lore.

Unstable magic. Produce stronger effects at (greater) personal risk. Perhaps this could be a manifestation of the middle-road (ie, nerfed) version of blackfire. Rather than unholy fire, you get an out of control storm that hits very hard, for example.

Void. I am unclear as to what this is, but they used it to stop blackfire. That one dude has it in his awesome title. Maybe there's something to it.

All I know is that I don't want to train a skill just so I can cast first or second tier spells from another guild.

Avaya <--Not female.
(But supportive)
Gnome WM of TF
AIM: AvayaTF

If you look at Teleological Sorcery as an example, both of the spells currently present in the spellbook offer Moon Mages a rather unique function, even amongst all the insane crap they currently have. Another important (IMO) aspect of the spells is that they interact heavily with other elements important to the guild: predictions and constellation jewelry.

When designing an analogous sorcery spellbook for Warrior Mages, I would personally ask myself a couple questions:

1) What defines the Warrior Mage guild most?
1A) What guild-related tools, besides standard spells, are important to the guild in both function and lore?
1B) What's unexplored so far?

In respect to 1A, there are familiars, pathways, Barrage, stance points, and a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. Since familiars are supposedly simply constructs of aether, it would be cool if you could cast a WM sorcery spell on them and then turn them into a time bomb. You could send it after someone or prematurely detonate it to hit everything in combat range for hella damage. I imagine very interesting synergy with FoI :P...

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Right now the Moon Mage place on the "combat pet totem pole" is the part that's sunk into the earth to lower the pole's center of gravity.
-Armifer de Dragonrealms

My only request on a guild sorcery is that it be elements related. I liked the thought of blackfire but I always thought of it as just the fire sorcery... I wanted to see water sorcery wind sorcery etc.

Perhaps they can even make the warmage sorcery more of an extension of our current powers such as combining wind elements with fire elements in an unstable way to make an uncontrolled/semi-uncontrolled flame tornado.

Though I admit I wouldnt be against say a gravity manipulation by combining elemental with lunar... anything from crushing forces, negating gravity (ie flight or floating people/objects), pulling meteors from the sky.

Living fire is an everyday feature of the plane of fire, along with gaseous fire, liquid fire, solid fire... it's an entire reality consisting of nothing but fire.

Mixing elements is already possible and done in our existing spellbooks: see Magnetic Ballista. Elementals are just normal elemental magic, too. That none of these suggestions particularly touch on sorcerous notions seem to me more argument that the WM spellbooks are underdeveloped.

If Moon Mage sorcery is any indiciation, WM sorcery will be a largely pointless intellectual exercise. Wait, I mean, WM sorcery will hinge on doing something wrong with elemental magic: Blackfire obliterates matter in a perversion of natural law.

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"Magic has rules and so does posting on these forums." -Annwyl

<<Teleological is a mix of three mana types, I believe.

IIRC from recent discussions in the moon mage folders... Its either Lunar+Holy or Lunar+Elemental. Theoretically I suppose it could be all three, but that's beyond the scope of what players will be able to access.

-Evran

* Prophet Hotoke Fuku-Nyorai snuck out of the shadow he was hiding in.

>>The current idea Zeyurn and I are batting around is Elemental sorcery as unreal amalgamations of elemental features. Such as petrifying winds, ice that literally burns, lightning with arbitrary conductive properties, etc.

Can you clarify what you mean with the lightning one? Just cause it sounds cool. Do you mean something like, lightening that conducts through, wood, instead of metal?

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TG, TG, GL, et al.
Also: Moo.

This was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for. I look forward to seeing all the elements used in some crazy way that they shouldnt.

Ive always liked just focusing on one or two books as far as the spells I use so I was hoping that Id get a chance to cast a sorcery spell in my theme rather than suddenly popping out a fire spell when I almost exclusively use water and wind.

BTW has anyone heard how far along that wind attack spell is? Im dying for an actual single target wind attack.

I'm still highly opposed to this line of inquiry.

But...

We make the elements look weird and do weird things all the time - Fire Shard calls up sharp pieces of fire, Chain Lightning discharge lurid-green energy, Paeldrynth's Wrath impossibly bludgeons victims to death with air - we did the math on that one, once.

I think any WM sorcery should be more blatant than turning people to stone. Sorcery isn't generally subtle, and WM sorcery should define "blatant" as much as blackfire does.

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"Magic has rules and so does posting on these forums." -Annwyl

>>I'm still highly opposed to this line of inquiry.

I'm comfortable removing the topic from public discussion, if that is what is necessary to please the most posters. Bringing it up at all will likely turn out to be a counter-productive lark on my part.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

>I think turning people into stone, especially if it were a fatal type of thing rather than a cutsey temporary effect, would be kind of awesome. TM contest to see if it hits.

...this is pre-nerf Blackfire. With different messaging. This brings us to:

>RobertDH, I'm curious as to why you think any sorcery should exceed the limits on efficacy put into place several years ago?

Not sure what I wrote if you got this. The 'weird science' angle of sorcery doesn't translate well into game mechanics, so the result is 'Magic, but...' and making room for that 'but..' leaves you with a very niche and less effective spell. Sorcery was never going to be mechanically awesome - Blackfire would have been paid for with obscene costs, MM Sorcery is very very niche. Sorcery is just another spell, but not as useful.

The flavor of MM sorcery is the awesome, but it's s subtle kind of sorcery that you might not even recognize something sorcerous is going on. WM sorcery should be blatantly visible and awe-inspiring, even though it's just another spell.

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"Magic has rules and so does posting on these forums." -Annwyl

>If old Blackfire is your standard of measurement I would expect to be disappointed.

I though it was pretty clear that I'm expecting complete disappointment. It opens the door for being pleasantly surprised?

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"Magic has rules and so does posting on these forums." -Annwyl

I got to brainstorming with a friend earlier. Sorcery... Elemental... Well, a few different things started to flow (mainly from them). Our TM spells and our buffs are really nice. What we don't have are curses and anything else that is limited by our focus.

So one idea was from a combination of lunar magic with elemental. He named it Shadow Flame. Pulses for a damage over time. Also comes with a minor debuff against fatigue.

Life mana with elemental. Combine venom with tm. Yet another damage over time/ debuff.

Holy mana with elemental. If hits; moderate damage; one second stun. If cast at undead no stun and half damage.

We have unfunctional spells that sort of do what he's proposing.

Meta-familiar spells are interesting, I guess... but isn't that last one just the cliche necromancer 'detonate corpse'?

I think trying to differentiate sorcery mechanically is missing the point.

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"Magic has rules and so does posting on these forums." -Annwyl

>>Really, fleshed out elemental control is what I want. Greater ability to shape the earth into fields of spikes (like a working Ring of Spears). Making boats of ice. Using the wind to fly. Manipulating the heart of a flame to make some really even toast. You know, the reality defying stuff (i.e. magic) that interferes in other guilds paradigms.

Unfortunately nothing about those examples say sorcerous(Except maybe the toast) you have to remember that sorcerous is a perversion of the actual element.

A suit of stone armor which makes you lighter and more vulnerable to damage, for example

Or extreme exaggeration.

A suit of stone armor that makes the target near invulnerable to damage while crushing the target under its own weight.
_______________________

I know all about Paladins, trust me. All they do is boss you around and tell you what to do.
"Don't walk on the grass, don't litter, don't rape the cycle of life with your unclean Power" blah blah blah.
-Tsukiko OOTS

>>Unfortunately nothing about those examples say sorcerous(Except maybe the toast) you have to remember that sorcerous is a perversion of the actual element.

I was unclear. I meant to say I have everything I could possibly want, if I truly had control over the elements. Compared to that dream, sorcery seems unlikely to excite.