Solutions to Mage's issues with speed

And if deflection is all you are going to do then the argument is over and my point remains standing

 

I believe we were discussing about mages, so I was presenting where can mages shine the most. Here you go injecting dw to your own mage thread. ^_^

 

the discussion was about the issues of mage's motion speed and why they need to be buffed by having their motion speed determined by their cspd instead of their aspd, because logically if they specialize in spell casting, then it would only be logical for their motion speed to be completely fluid and super fast at maximum speeds while casting spells especially since they are supposed to be masters of spellcasting!

 

Just one question, do you think that in this game which bosses are more and more using anti-melee attacks that consist of just not letting melee players Play the game at all and sit there waiting, where they have to resort to other weird alternatives to long range attack instead in this uninteractive and boring downtime, is Nerfing Dual Wield's capability to long range attack "Good" to you?

You just need to answer this one, and I feel the conversation is over, just like debating a flat earther, I can't have a discussion with someone that doesn't "believe" in facts or science, and with boss design I can't have a conversation if you fundamentally believe that increasing bad design and handicapping players to make the game be worse and less fun is "Good". That's just trolling.

Edits: Correcting auto-correct

 

Wtf dw being favorite child ? XD i think u mistaken with archer

 

So, to comment here regarding the main topic, despite the obstacles in this discussion posting cringe- this is what I think of your suggestions, and my own suggestions in comparison:

First off, we need to aknowledge one thing(if you already know this you can skip this context); Physical classes only need to bother with Speed Stat to be efficient. They can focus their Stat Points, Skill Points or Items solely on Speed and get a big gameplay improvement the more they lvlup.
Mages need Both Cast Speed AND Motion Speed investment not to fall behind or to not feel clunky and sluggish, if you focus Just on speed, Your finales and canons and whatevers- will be faster, but then you still have to stand still for a century for •Casting• your magic, and in modern Toram *Every Second is a Luxury,* stand still for a second too long and you die, having 2-3 seconds of Cast time for most skills is a death-wish. So you have to invest in Cast Speed right? Except Cast speed items are extremely Expensive or Rare, best options: Skills, tho only give you a small amount or a Big-ish amount at great costs, ex: wizard passive buff to increase cast speed, It's nice, Decent even, the punishment is that it's inside the *Wizard skill tree*, notorious for sucking or having utterly useless skills. (Its funny how desperatly asobimo wants players to care about those shitty skills they make the cspd buff force you to Max every Cat skill to have higher values)
Support skills, Both have Speed And Cast speed, Both are very good, both disappear If you take damage (doesn't matter too much since taking damage at all is almost guaranteed to One shot you, so might aswell use those), and they D E S T R O Y your AMPR, so much it goes to negative values and your attacks reduce MP instead with them active. And GSW for speed, I don't need to explain what it does, everybody knows.
If you don't want those risky skills, you can rely more on Gear, Two CSPD Potions to complete, and get an *OK* amount.
If your second name is Bezos and you have a billion spinas: you can just fill your SS+ With Xtalls.
*And even if you take the risky Skills, you just get to maybe 6k or 8k cast speed, being very generous*
Cast speed, compared to Speed, is an Insanely and disgustingly hard stat to focus on, and even if you do, you are still dealing with slow-ass animations that let you open-wide to being oneshot by boss.

In short:, Mages are 2X Slower than physical classes, and the best you can do is maybe get to 4-6K Cast speed with a safe-ish build, leaving you... 1.4X Slower than physical classes, f you want speed above all then you can go the risky route and get GSW and support skills for 8K Cast speed, and Speed motion above 30% *And remember, With 2 potions for CSPD*, you will be a paper bag relying on playing perfectly, and STILL you won't reach max CSPD (Unless you are Omega rich to buy the gear and xtalls, which then good for you IG, not a reasonable solution), leaving you, surely, x0.5 times slower than Physical classes, with the condition that you are much more fragile than physicals in comparison.
And, if we are to account for the lack of >Mobility<, Not attack speed, you could argue mages are x3 slower than Physicals, in the sense they take longer to move around, evasion being much more limited and no mobility skills.
[CONTEXT END]

The problem is simple, Cast Speed is unreasonably difficult to get, and you are even slower thanks to animations taking their sweet time doing twirls flips and flops, no natural mobility.

I must say, not a big fan of having Cast Speed functioning both as Cast and Motion speed, That's too much IMO, I think that would be justified if bosses were a 'Bit' more absurd, but they aren't there... yet. that's just too much, it would make the game too easy from the very start and surpass Physical classes by a mile.

A suggestion I made before and still stand by, is to increase stats scaling Per Level, the values of CSPD you get today are crumbs, sub-atomic, they should be higher for a bloody *Mage,* say, from 50-100 the stats stay more or less the same scaling wise, at 150 you start getting a bigger growth of Cast speed per point on DEX, and Level up general stat increases increase overall cast speed and a bit of speed (your stats get bigger when leveling btw, I forget it at times since they are so demn low), at 200 you would be getting much more Cast speed per Dex point and Level growth, its at that level that bosses start to become cancerous, so should you become faster to deal with them, and so on.
Right now I believe a Dex mage with JUST Dex can get about 1700 cast speed flat from stats (?) I don't remember exact numbers, but at late game it should be about 3k cast speed flat, so you get smoother gameplay right away, and if you invest in items and skills you can get more cast speed based on your flat 3k to be even higher, and if you wanna be Real tryhard you can go for the risky stuff, at the cost of becoming toilet paper.
Reason why I prefer scaling on levels, instead of just making cast speed be motion speed aswell: it would make the Earlier bosses, made with a much more sluggish toram in mind, too easy, and at worse innofensive, the Real problem is the late game were bosses get way faster than you; There, your stats should SPEED up to match them.

I'm not too sure about motion speed, maybe give mages more speed stats so they don't take forever on animations, but not so much to the point they become better than Physical classes. Thats another worrying issuse.
In general, Mages should be Fast Casters, Physicals should be fast attackers, and only exceeding in both Speed types at a cost (risky skills, fat moneys, etc...)

That's only concerning the speed of your Offense, mind you, Mages have no fkin mobility outside the common Back step or whatever, my suggestion: have mages be able to set up a Mark on ground, animation of a half second or something, if they walk away from it, it acts as a recall and activating again returns you there, 200MP for use, and if you stand on the mark, you can hold down the skill to use extra MP and Blink forward immediately, as the "Oh shit I'm gonna die" panic mobility skills, for bosses that like to use One shot Map-wide aoes with short warning times, a skill like that would be a life saver, literally, it would even aliviate the long animations by having mage be safer to get out. At the cost of you needing to use it intelligently.


I don't want mages to Be on cocaine like Dual wield or knuckled, just be good at being mages, with a more methodical playstyle of having to think about what boss will do and making preparations, Magic is traditionally something that is very powerful but takes time because of singing encantations, using magical words or wands, whatever it is, they shouldn't be Fast like melee (unless they are some kind of God-Arch Wizard Grand Master of Magic) just faster casters.

The MP and Stat scaling values can be decided by asobimo or discussed here by us, Idk, I'm not good at math and I won't pretend to be xD. Maybe some of the values I suggest are a bit much or too little.

That's it.

 

Bow is the Throphy Wife they brag about, DW is the secret lover asobimo cheats with but never assumes-

Knux is the neglected step-child eating cat food to survive
Magic.d is the one that died-

 

I agree with your points of having mage's cspd to scale with their levels as to not make early bosses too easy, but maybe the bonus to the cocaine God-arch Wizard Grand master of magic thing, is that it should be accessible if they not only achieved 5,000 cspd and are high enough level but they must also master every magical based tree to access maximum motion speed, so basically the mage who wants to ascend and become an ultra fast and powerful "God-arch Wizard Grand master of magic" would need to invest into not only cspd up to 5,000 but also skill points into every magical based skill trees and level 10 on each skills in addition to being at least level 200 and beyond. The idea is not to completely barr mages from attaining maximum motion speed(quick physical level motion speed but on mages) but to make it accessible with reasonably high difficulty to attain with special rituals to achieve it, and i am sure alot of mages besides myself who don't like Godspeed Wield would gladly take the super difficult to attain "God-arch Wizard Grand master of magic" route rather than the easy but much riskier route called Godspeed Wield!, what do you think?


And this is with the premise of cspd acting as both cast speed and motion speed at the same time but with requirements being half of 10,000 which is 5,000 cspd to achieve maximum motion speed, with the additional requirements being that they must be at least level 200 and have all magic based skill trees mastered with all the skills within each of them at level 10, otherwise if they don't meet the additional requirements, they would cap at 30% motion speed instead of the full 50% motion speed((which is maximum motion speed)) that they would have gotten if they had completed the additional requirements

 

And to balance things out, the developers could add a passive skill that only physical weapons could use called "limited magic negation" which negates magic spells against them for up to a maximum of 25% of the time and cannot be stacked, so magical spells would technically have a 25% chance of "missing" against physical weapons that have the passive skill "limited magic negation"

 

I have two things to say, Will ***Try** to keep it short (No promises úwù)

One: I don't dislike the idea of having a Mage with **Every** Magical skill maxed be able to achieve both motion speeds, with the level requirement, etc etc... Thing is... This really sounds like it's Tier 6 talk (and now some might be calling irony as I did say it *Feels* like bosses time traveled from the future were t6 is a thing that exists)- but what I'm asking really is just the bare minimum, quality of life for mages, as they really don't even have that. Having max motion on Both CSPD and ASPD sounds wonderful, trully, as a Tier 6 "perk".
as much as I hate the artificial difficulty and lazy boss design right now, there's no world in this present time, that having Max-Max motion speed, Even with High Diff requirements, would 'Not' completely break the game and make mages cosmically broken once they did achieve the requirements, I may think the bosses are bonkers, they aren't *Cosmically* bonkers just **YET** (and heed my words for bosses are trending to get more and more fast and stupid, we Will have this max-max speed discussion again in a few years)
Again, not opposed to the idea itself, I just think that despite it being interesting, its Just too early.
And a bit of a petty point of mine: I really don't want to be forced into maxing the freakin Cat/Wizard skills... Please don't do this to me ;w; have mercy on my humble soul my good 'person of undefined gender on the internet' ;w;

Two: is there any significant difference between having the Cast speed merge with Speed at X requirements, Versus, on the very same requirements, have the Cast speed and Speed stat go to 10.000 separately?

Bonus question: I suppose the last response you mean to address PvP yes? I guess that works, frankly I don't understand why Asobimo is funelling so much resource into PvP, nor I care about it, it's good that it be balanced don't get me wrong, but I rather have them focus on the actual game rather than an optional irrelevant mini-game thing, its asking for more resource management problems at Toram HQ...

BTWx2: what you think of my teleport idea? Is it good/bad/something missing? I notice most people never address this suggestion :/

 

this topic has appeared many times over the last year, and every time the predetermined solution was to set everything at max motion speed by default.
this is just an ugly hack, not a long term solution. not to mention how it would break older game content.

one improvement would be to include all the poses and dance moves within the cast time rather than adding them before and after. this way they would also be affected by cspd similar to how every other skill benefits of motion speed.

and ultimately motion speed needs the critical damage treatment. making it scale on aspd and cspd like critical damage scales with str and agi to be more accessible by all.

 

I'm having difficulty imagining how the Casting animations would look like if all of the movements were included as "Casting", if one were to have 100% cast speed, would you just press the skill and it goes off instantly and you walk away? Like, no movement, you shoot magic cannon, the magic effects appear but character stay still and walks off? This is very confusing to try and imagine
Please explain this in further detail, it's interesting.

And, question, when, If Ever really, would Max every speed be justified, in your opinion? Now it's a Big no, but in 2, 3,4 years from now? Realistically we ain't getting tier 6 for at least three years, or more, or is it a Tier 7 thing? (Its hard to know what kind of cosmic horror boss would require this absurd growth in stats anyway)
Any thoughts on the Level scaling suggestion? 3k flat CSPD gain is what I settle as decent flat CSPD for a DEX mage, at least %CSPD would become a proper useful stat preferred over more additional CSPD

As long as mage suck this discussion will keep resurrecting I'm afraid, the devs can fill mage with all the cheap-trick, damage Band-Aids until mages become a damage Nuclear bomb, it won't fix anything, just make them broken And handicapped.

 

From a knux main perspective, bosses doing antimelee tactics are just prolonging their inevitable death. I got the option to attack on range or charge the spikes head-on.

Nerfing dw is not good or bad for me, since I don't use the class. ^_^

 

Awsome glad you like the idea and also to address each point starting from 1,

1.yes i agree that mages need a minimum quality of life that is fair for mages which they currently lack, and judging from how they are getting to the point of making bosses "cosmically bonkers" i think its safe to assume it may even be sooner than we think that it would completely justify us players needing to become "cosmically bonkers" as well to even contend with such ridiculous bosses that may potentially soon come into being!

2. Yes there is a significant difference between those two, the former which is the "God-arch Wizard Grand master of magic" route mechanism in which cspd functions as both casting speed and motion speed with the number value needed to reach maximum casting speed and motion speed being reduced from 10,000 to that of 5,000 is much more practical because of the fact that you would only need to max out all magical skills and be at least level 200 in addition to needing 5,000 cspd to attain maximum motion speed, the latter mechanism which is keeping the default mechanism of aspd and cspd seperate and somehow still reach maximum motion speed and casting speed via 10,000 aspd and 10,000 cspd without Godspeed wield is literally an impossibility or at least so goddamn impractical because it needs so many buffs to setup that you might as well just be a sitting duck!,
To address your concern of being forced to max out all the cat/wizard skills to achieve maximum motion speed via the "God-arch Wizard Grand master of magic" route, maybe the wizard Skills tree can be optional, or at least reduced to needing to only max out the non-cat wizard skills!

3. Yes the "limited magic negation" skill which makes magic spells technically "miss" 25% of the time exclusive for ranged/melee weapons is for pvp balance in response to mages being able to reach maximum motion speed without Godspeed wield via the "God-arch Wizard Grand master of magic" route!

And i think your teleport idea is unique and would be practical and offers more mobility usages for mages that is even more useful than backstep!

I hope those addresses each of your points!

 

ah... i forgot motion speed is capped at +50%.
then maybe keep the attack movement but synchronise it with the skill.
currently most skills do movement before the cast time even starts and then move again after casting and then finally activate the magic. while you are technically save from being flinched after the cast time has finished you can still have your attack cancelled by status effects even after successfully completing all the preceding charge move requirements.
(specifically Finale suffers from this, it takes almost 6 seconds to go off)
meanwhile physical skills hit immediately on contact and getting hit during the recovery/cooldown motion won't negate your attack.

 

So, visualizing it: I use magic: storm, I have no CSPD, 0, immediately, Do I have a Cast time bar as the character Begins to position his staff? As opposed to Cast time bar appearing only after the initial staff positioning?
If that's what you mean, then the entire skill animation would be under Cast speed, meaning having max cast speed would exactly be like having 10.000 attack speed/50% Motion speed, as an animation that takes 4 seconds to animate, now without any cast time in between Readying and finish Animations, take 2 seconds, as if you were using Swift combo.
Thats basically what takata is suggesting, but your versions is kinda more broken :v I think this is Tier 6 stuff.

Again, I might be misunderstanding, can you give a detailed explanation of how the scene would play out?

 

currently:
your character raises the staff to go into chanting position. cast time starts during chanting. your character swings the staff around to cast storm.
with the hypothetical 10k cspd you would still raise your staff first, skip the chanting, and then swing it around to cast storm. (this is what they did to Javelin)

my version:
cast time starts immediately, raising the staff is part of the chanting animation. then your character swings the staff around to cast storm.
with the hypothetical 10k cspd your character would swing the staff to cast storm, similar to how physical skills are executed. (for reference consider how Impact changes as it's cast time shortens)

the problem is that magic is not only slower because of cast time but also because they perform twice as much motion compared to physical attacks.
on top of that, cspd is more expensive but only affects half of the motion time.

 

If I understand this right, With 10.000 CSPD, similar to impact, one could skip the wole "Position staff forwards to chant" animation and skip to the "release spell" animation?
Also, if I understand this right×2: motion Speed itself would stay normal, the cast speed would just halve the Base animation itself (or... FLAt anIMAtioN :V) but it would play out in normal speed (or whatever speed you currently have)
Did I get it right?

 

pretty much
or perhaps the animations need some adjustments, idk.
Javelin, for example, used to have a 1s cast time originally. with the first ever skill adjustment they changed it to instant cast by setting the cast time to 0, but the animation remains unchanged. so despite supposedly being a fast magic it is still a sluggishly slow skill. newer additions such as Staff Thrust and Magic Knifes don't follow this pattern.

 

Well, this sounds pretty good.
Still, even with that change in mind, CSPD is hard as hell to get, what you think of the level scaling suggestion? I am aware of how old content is just Not made to be fought by fast players, so the speed should only ramp up mid-late game (150-200-250[God knows how long this game will last for whatever max level to be inserted here])
I don't think motion speed + that Cast time rework you have in mind- would be a problem, the few ways a mage gets speedy is potion and quick aura anyways, if they want to use GSW despite the rework, they would be more or less on par with Physical classes, but with the now reasonable "don't ever get touched" gameplay. A little motion speed is nice for auto attacks to go instantly and faster.