[crossfire] cone damage oddity

[Mark Wedel]

Rick Tanner wrote:
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       I guess the first question is whether this is considered a significant flaw or 
     
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     not.  It has long been held that center of cone does more than edges, but in 
     
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     this case, center has a very broad meaning.  And the fact that being next to the 
     
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     caster does less seems quite odd.
     
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      Might be a different subject matter - but how does damage propegate 
     
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      outwards from a ball spell exploding?
     
     
  Don't have any real examples.  The code appears proper in that the explosion 
has proper tracking for uniqueness.  Thus, the main reason fireballs do more 
damage is that the inside of the fireball lasts longer than the edges.

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      Should this damage (from ball spells) work the same as cone spells?
     
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      Or work the same as updated (from this email thread) cone spells?
     
     
  Maybe.  OTOH, its somewhat obvious how the ball spells work - the fact the 
fire lasts longer would be pretty clear indication that standing there will do 
more damage.  I actually like the fireballs - how it explodes and then collapses 
back on itself - I think it would actually be odder if it expanded, and at some 
point, there was no fire left at the center while it continued to expand outwards.

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       Now it is a very simple fix to make it so that the entire cone does the same 
     
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     amount of damage.  A side benefit of such a change is that it would also reduce 
     
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     server load - basically, reduce the number of objects used in the spell casting 
     
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     by a factor of 3.
     
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       This would obviously weaken spells, so all cone spells would need to be upped 
     
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     in the damage they currently do.
     
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      Going back to your original table which showed 1's on the edges, then 2's, 
     
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      followed by 3's in the middle - would it be easier and less spell damage 
     
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      tweaking to use the "3" for all areas of the spell isntead of the 1's or 
     
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      2's?
     
     
  The reason that diagram exists is pretty basic - think of 3 cone spells 
emanating from those initial 3 spaces.  Where they don't overlap, it is a 1. 
Where it overlaps with 1 other cone, it does 2x damage (2 spell cones active). 
Where it overlaps with 2 other cones, it does 3x.

  the basic change I have in mind would make that area act as one logical cone 
spell, so the entier cone would do the same damage.  It makes things more 
efficient because now there would only be 1 fire object on those spaces instead 
of 3.

  As I've said before, I generally don't like the code to make adjustments that 
aren't obvious to the player.  So if I did the above change, the cone spells 
would effectively do less damage because there is no overlap.  The archetypes 
would be adjusted upward to take account for this (although perhaps not as much 
as 3x).  Thus when an archetype says 'dam 40', you know it will do 40 damage, 
not 120, not 13, etc.