[crossfire] Project: Slow down combat (vs magic)

[Mark Wedel]

Kevin R. Bulgrien wrote:

> In short, magic use is terrible.  If you choose to play a magic-use only player,
> you are totally and completely disadvantaged.  A magic-only user will die very,
> very easily, and will level very, very slowly compared to a physical combat
> character.

  I think most everyone knows magic is messed up in many ways - many of the top 
vote getters were related to magic.  And certainly once melee combat is done, 
the spell system gets redone

  I also do agree that larger pictures need to be kept in mind.  I personally 
don't think a total system perspective/design can be done.  Things like that 
just don't generally work on a distributed system - the amount of work needed is 
quite large, such that one person can't do it in a timely fashion, and trying to 
coordinate that amongst a bunch of people, especially given the time 
differences, is very difficult.

  I'd also say that is only really required if the current system (code) was 
deemed completely unsuitable and thus needed to be redone from scratch. 
Obviously, in that case, you'd need want to try and design most of the system 
before writing code.

  I don't think crossfire is in that state.  Combat needs to adjustments, as do 
spells.  Some of those adjustments may be pretty big.  But I also think that 
archetype changes will be a much bigger piece than code changes.

  My perspective is that since the code is largely sound, one can do things in 
smaller pieces.

  In this particular case, it sort of falls into a 'redo melee combat, and then 
balance the spells so they are comparable to melee' or 'redo spells, and then 
rebalance melee so it is in balance with the spells'.  I don't think 'redo both 
spells & melee simultaneously and balance the two together at the same time' is 
especially doable, given resources available.

  Now in terms of rebalancing spells first and then combat, or combat first then 
spells, I'd sort of call that a tossup.  I personally think it will be easier to 
do combat first and then balance spells to that, but may be wrong.

  I'm more than happy to take part in discussion on what the spell system should 
look like, ways to balance it, etc.  I'm not particularly interested in getting 
into discussions about how things should be designed/discussed, etc, as most 
likely that is a large time sync that won't show much in the way of results.