[crossfire] Polymorph etc

[Alex Schultz]

Mark Wedel wrote:

> Brendan Lally wrote:
>
>> On 1/19/06, Anton Oussik <antonoussik at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I did not necessarily mean more powerful spells. Some existing spells
>>> can get moved up the chain, and intermediate "interesting" spells can
>>> be added to fill the gaps, so a player always has a new spell "just
>>> within reach".  Either that, or spell could be made to not get more
>>> powerful with level, and then players could learn more powerful
>>> versions of a spell they already know, which would exist every 5-10
>>> levels.
>>
>>
>> The problem with that is that skills already scale with level,
>> icestorm is one of the best cold spells at any level, because of how
>> well its damage and range scale, so unless you want to nerf the
>> scaling of all the low level spells, they are going to remain the best
>> option, especially if the base level of the supposedly 'better' spells
>> is increased, because then they will have fewer levels to scale over.
>
>
>  Well, perhaps the scaling is too powerful then.  I'd make the case 
> that icestorm (a pretty low level spell) shouldn't be the best spell 
> in the game.
>
>  Other possiblity is to put caps on scaling, ala dungeons & dragons - 
> ice storm goes up in damage until skill level 20 or something, and 
> then stops, where as large ice storm scales up to level 50, etc.
>
>  I really should do a dump so all this can be reasonably compared.

Hmm... I'm not sure icestorm is so powerful. In my experience, it is 
virtually useless against monsters (can barely be used to kill a red 
dragon), but is very very effective against players. Also, when was the 
last time that burning hands was useful at high levels? And such things. 
Personally, I find that at the high levels, magic is increasingly 
useless if you are fighting monsters similar to your level (for this, I 
think the fact that magic doesn't get Wc bonuses for levels is at fault)

Alex Schultz