[CF-Devel] town portal (RE: CVS commit: maps/city/misc)

[Mark Wedel]

 As said, town portal is the worst abuse because it allows you to return to just
where you were.

 Word of recall isn't quite so bad - there is some delay factor before you get
out (so you can't reliably use it if your about to die).  Plus, it puts you back
at your savebed (I should note this used to be the city map - now that it is the
savebed, it becomes a little more of an abuse (Because you can arrange that
savebed closer to where your actually adventuring).

 Actually doing backfiring depends on the chances of it happening and the
effects.  If the failure just happens to be that it uses the standard amount of
mana and doesn't do anything, that doesn't do anything.  If it does something
that may kill the character, then I agree with garbled that that won't be
something very popular (would you use something that has a 1% chance to kill
you?  Probably only in an emergency).

 One of the problems with the spell failure as currently done just isn't that
good - I seem to recall that it basically takes spell level vs caster level -
thus, low level characters fail much more often, high level characters can cast
the lower level spells quite easily.

 I think the approach of balancing the spells that are overpowering is the way
to go.  For town portal, that may become something like the void theory (there
isn't that many alternative).  For spells that due damage, it may be tuning the
damage or upping the mana cost.

 Its unclear to me if some spells are greatly suprerior, or it is more that some
spells just work really well against some monsters due to those monsters
resistances.  If thats the case, I'm not really sure if thats much a bug - it
sounds more like people have just identified the right spells for the job.

 It should be noted that some spells will always be better than other, so fixing
the most powerful spell all the time probably isn't the right approach.  What is
a problem is if there are spells that are universally the best to use (eg, learn
this spell and you don't need anything else).  The right thing is that 'use this
spell against zyx, this spell against abc, etc'.