[crossfire] Spell path balance - Summoning

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Sun, 20 Aug 2006 14:05:55 -0500, "Kevin R. Bulgrien" <kbulgrien at att.net> wrote:
> One is that I wonder if I do not know "how" to play a summoner,

Probably not.  :-)

> and the other is whether summoning is completely out-of-balance.

Yes, but probably not in the way you think.

> It seems
> like it is extremely difficult to level a summoner.  What sort of
> game playing style is needed to make a summoner level the same way
> that the other path players can.  If killing monsters with summoned
> creatures is the primary way of getting experience, then the path is
> completely unbalanced as it takes eons of mind-bendingly boring
> snooze, summon, attack, snooze until summoned character is dead
> cycles.  Am I just missing the point of this path, or is it really
> not very well balanced?

It is not well balanced.  Gaining the first few levels is difficult
but after that, gaining levels in summoning is far too easy.  In
fact, I usually try to create balanced characters and level up several
skills at the same time instead of focusing on a single one.  And I
find it difficult to _avoid_ gaining exp in the summoning skill.

If you want to know how to use the summoning skill, here is a little
*SPOILER*:

- Gaining the first 2-3 levels in summoning is rather boring because
  you have to rely on your golem or lesser golem.  Gaining exp with
  these takes time.  In (very) old versions of the game, summoning pet
  monsters was also useful because you could summon some monsters that
  were able to kill other monsters faster than you, but this is not
  the case anymore so you will have to rely on golems and be patient.
  Make sure that you use your golems in narrow corridors so that they
  only fight one monster at a time.
- Once you reach levels 4, 5 and above, you can start summoning
  elementals.  Here again, the cost in mana compared the speed at
  which you gain experience is not really good but you have to be
  patient and keep on killing lots of low-level monsters with your
  elementals until you can gain more levels.
- After a while, you will have learned the spell "charm monsters".
  This is what changes the game completely: at first you will only be
  able to charm a few low-level monsters so you will not much exp
  with that.  You may have to continue practicing killing monsters
  with a fire elemental.  But after reaching level 10 or more, you
  will be able to charm more and more monsters and gain a lot of exp.
- Gaining exp by charming monsters is so convenient that I have bound
  a key to "invoke charm monsters; killpets".  I have also done the
  same for "invoke command undead; killpets" for the praying skill.

You will probably find that it takes you as much time to go from level
15 to level 107 in the summoning skill than it took you to go from
level 1 to level 15.  This shows that the skill is not well balanced:
it is too hard at the low levels (the mana cost vs. exp gain per time
unit is too high) but it is too easy at the high levels (the the exp
gain is several orders of magniture faster for roughly the same mana
cost).  When you reach level 100+ in that skill, you can kill a dozen
dragons or big wizards instantly by casting "charm monsters" once and
spending less than 100 mana points.

Something needs to be done to re-balance this skill (and also some
other skills).  However, some of the solutions that have been proposed
so far would only make "charm monsters" useless or dangerous to use,
which would not solve the other part of the problem: this skill is too
difficult to use at low levels.

-Raphaël