Issues with spell combinations and balance

[ToXxy]

I'd like to discuss several, in my opinion, issues, with the spell combinations and balance. If you'd like to discuss a certain point, please number or title the point(s) accordingly. Easier for everyone. I will be adding/editing/removing points from my post when I find something I feel needs to be discussed, or an existing point is resolved.

1. Ice and steam not being separate elements

Okay, sure. I've heard the whole "you can just spam icicles and beat the game" a million times. First, if you decide to turn your own game into a one-spell spam, why complain about it afterwards? It's a decision you as the player make. Second, this takes out a lot of other possible combinations. You can no longer cast steam and lightning or ice and lightning at once. There's a lot more spell combinations you could do with that. Rest in pieces, E Q R Q R S A. You will be missed.

2. Earth cancels out lightning

I get it. They're opposites. I can understand life and death canceling each other out, because.. well, what's the benefit of casting them together? Earth and lightning on the other hand... how come that's not a thing? Electrically charged boulders, anyone? Earth grounds lightning, okay, great. But there's literally no reason you wouldn't be able to put them together in a spell and create cool things.

3. Force push is now a magick (Prev. force push only castable through quick bar)

EDIT: The thought that there'd be a magick for this didn't even cross my mind for some reason. My apologies. A question remains though, why not just let us cast it with right-click?

4. Cooldown on magicks regardless of quick bar

If you're going to have a cooldown on the magick regardless of whether it's used through the quick bar or not, what's the point? Yes, it's a smaller cooldown. But it's a cooldown regardless. I'm very quick at spelling, and I played a lot of Magicka, so I could dish out more spells quicker than most of my friends. However, with this little cooldown introduced, whether or not I can spell quickly doesn't matter. I have to wait before I'm able to cast another magick.

5. Shields and frozen targets

What happened to boosting shields? Why is the frontal shield now the exact same as the sword-cast shield? How come you can walk through them? And why does the ice shield no longer harm/tackle people? Does it now function like a frozen enemy, reflecting beams? Speaking of frozen enemies, why do they RESIST lightning?

Thanks to Grey the Monochrome for telling me about the ice shield and frozen target changes.

6. Certain elements overriding the other

I've seen several complaints about lightning overriding death, so it's now a death chain-lightning rather than a death lightning beam as it used to be. Why does death and fire make a fire beam of death, rather than a flame of death? There's a win-win solution to this. Make the first element the overriding one. Queued death and fire? Fire beam. Queued fire and death? Death flame. Obviously there's some combinations that would do the exact same thing either way, so there would be no need to change those, unless you want two different visual effects for the same spell. Fire/lightning, lightning/fire for example. Spray of fire that does electric damage or a chain lightning of the same range that does fire damage.

7. Ward duration (REMOVED)

EDIT: The spells clearly indicate when they're about to expire. Not sure how I didn't notice this at first.

8. Boulders suck (Also nicked this idea from Grey the Monochrome)

Boulders take forever to charge. And back to the topic of ice no longer an element, you can only make spiked ice balls with 2 ice 1 earth, as opposed to 4 ice 1 earth like in the previous game.

9. Apply to target

This has nothing to do with anything in the current game. I just thought it was really cool.
I understand it's obviously too late to add it to the existing game, but I would like to see it in a future game/mod perhaps? We have different ways to cast spells, right? Area, self, front, and weapon. How about an apply to target cast, so you can shield or ward allies from a distance, or apply harmful effects to enemies. Although, I can't think of that many uses for it. I guess you could give a four earth shield to an enemy to slow them to a crawl..? I swear this looks better on paper.

[Daggurat]

1. Separate elements being removed is really lame, your max spell length is now only 5 instead of the 10 you had before, and so many potential combinations are lost because everything just gets overridden now. I really dislike it.

3. You can manually cast force push with Q E space, but base right click now does absolutely nothing.

4. I've got the jester staff from the first chapter that greatly reduces the focus cooldown on spells used via the hot bar and a bunch of them actually take LONGER to cooldown when cast manually. Like, what?

5. On the topic of shields, they also removed the spiked ice armor, it's just blue rock armor now and you can't go around tackling people while hasted.

All in all, I'm not enjoying Magicka 2. Haste now barely lasts long enough to get away from the hordes of enemies just charging right at you, healing takes FOREVER and slows you down to the point where stuff is hitting you and killing you faster than you heal, charging up any boulder spell also takes FOREVER but if you don't charge, the thing will just plop out of your staff and drop in front of you, and freezing enemies is hardly beneficial anymore because they turn pretty much completely invincible with beams and weapons just bouncing off until they break out themselves with you unable to charge up a boulder long enough to hit them.

I played past chapter 4 and just had to stop. Single player is horribly unbalanced and the opposite of fun to play. They just decided to completely remove anything remotely powerful from the first Magicka and it feels like 75% of the game is missing. It's like this game was the original Magicka and Magicka 1 was the sequel with all the new stuff.

[BlueX]

ad 1. I miss those too.
ad 2. Think about grounding of lightning rod.
ad 3. What about Q+E+Space? But I also wonder what was wrong with push as default (without elements) action.
ad 4. This probably exists precisely to prevent spamming. If you are fast spam spells rather than magicks.
ad 5. Do you really boosted shields that often? They are different, take a closer look, frontal shield have rounded edge surface. You may ask why it's no longer sphere slice.
ad 6. Yeah, it's quite strange. I prefer death lightning beam, but citing official Magicka 2 slogan "Learn to spell again". Although I'm not entirely convinced by some of those spell changes, there are some awesome new changes too, like increasing elemental damage reduction up to elemental healing shield rather than increasing shield AoE.
ad 7. Maybe beacause it would look ugly? Mines animation changes over time so it's quite clear when they are about to explode. IMHO it's fine now.

@Grey the Monochrome: I had similar feelings after sneak peak, but after playing again today I changed my mid. You just have to change your approach.
First of all - elemental healing shield - it's blessing, use fire shield and some E+F AoE for nice healing.
Elemental mines - they are super powerful.
Try to find which element works best against different types of enemies - it makes killing much easier. Use shield against element used by your enemy.
But I do agree that charging spells takes more time than it should.

[CaptThad]

1. Balance is always about fundamental game design on the dev's part, not about hoping the player doesn't choose to play in an unintended way. Combined elements let you break the 5 element spell rule, which broke the intended design. Plus, the way they did steam, you'd think that'd cancel lightning using the same rules as their water element cancelling lightning.

2. Earth grounds[en.wikipedia.org] lightning.

3. It's a spell now, all the hotkeys are actual spells that can be done manually. Kinda undecided on that particular one myself.

[Godzilla.exe]

This. Is. from. Wizard. Wars.

The whole system is the JUNK from WW. That's why the game is at 50% of the speed, why there is a quickbar.

Ugh. This game....ugh.

[ɃƵ Crazy Cat Lady]

2. Earth cancels out lightning

I get it. They're opposites. (Seriously, who thought of this?) I can understand life and death canceling each other out, because.. well, what's the benefit of casting them together? Earth and lightning on the other hand... how come that's not a thing? Electrically charged boulders, anyone?"

Totally agree, like I said in another post.
You can have lightning + earth to make a kind of double projectile with a lightning bolt between it, or sparks, or a lightning ball. or lightning + earth + shield to make a kind of tesla tower XD. and lightning water could make a storm.

Originally posted by CaptThad:

2. Earth grounds[en.wikipedia.org] lightning.

and the whole earth grounds lightning nerd-tard argument? there is metal in earth, so put a sock it in and think progressively and stop squelching peoples creative ideas to make a game better you useless ghet.

[Minimo]

Originally posted by Christian22:

2. Earth cancels out lightning

I get it. They're opposites. (Seriously, who thought of this?) I can understand life and death canceling each other out, because.. well, what's the benefit of casting them together? Earth and lightning on the other hand... how come that's not a thing? Electrically charged boulders, anyone?"

Totally agree, like I said in another post.
You can have lightning + earth to make a kind of double projectile with a lightning bolt between it, or sparks, or a lightning ball. or lightning + earth + shield to make a kind of tesla tower XD. and lightning water could make a storm.

Originally posted by CaptThad:

2. Earth grounds[en.wikipedia.org] lightning.

and the whole earth grounds lightning nerd-tard argument? there is metal in earth, so put a sock it in and think progressively and stop squelching peoples creative ideas to make a game better you useless ghet.

The "Tesla Tower" you mentioned could be done with ice, shield and lightning in the first game.

[Caridor]

I really miss the days when my spells felt like they packed some real punch. (ie. before the PVP update for magicka 1)

Now I just feel weak. It's like my magic is depressed or something.
Feeling powerful is fun. If you want to make your game hard, do it how you did in the old days, with higher hp enemies later on the game and let us rip the early game a new one.

[ɃƵ Crazy Cat Lady]

You could also make glass with lightning and earth, maybe amplify beams? or make a kind of shattered glass attack that causes bleeding. or an actual lighting bolt that comes from the sky, or even a new magnetic based spell. Think out side of the box.

[CaptThad]

Originally posted by Christian22:

Originally posted by CaptThad:

2. Earth grounds[en.wikipedia.org] lightning.

and the whole earth grounds lightning nerd-tard argument? there is metal in earth, so put a sock it in and think progressively and stop squelching peoples creative ideas to make a game better you useless ghet.

That's oddly aggro. What does 'nerd-tard' even mean? He asked why it makes sense. I offered a link to the reasoning--heh and 'there's metal in earth' does not prevent grounding.

Devs chose to interpret physics how they wanted to; my ability to 'creatively reinterpret' the basic laws of nature doesn't have anything to do with that. No point in calling me names 'cause I answered a question before you submitted a contradicting idea.

[Caridor]

Originally posted by CaptThad:

Originally posted by Christian22:

and the whole earth grounds lightning nerd-tard argument? there is metal in earth, so put a sock it in and think progressively and stop squelching peoples creative ideas to make a game better you useless ghet.

That's oddly aggro. What does 'nerd-tard' even mean? He asked why it makes sense. I offered a link to the reasoning--heh and 'there's metal in earth' does not prevent grounding.

Devs chose to do interpret physics how they wanted to; my ability to 'creatively reinterpret' the basic laws of nature doesn't have anything to do with that. No point in calling me names 'cause I answered a question before you submitted a contradicting idea.

It's because of the metals and abundant ions in the earth that it ground electricity.
Electricity travels down the path of least resistance. In the air, it has to create ions, which takes energy. In the ground, those ions are already present.

[ɃƵ Crazy Cat Lady]

You are making ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ excuses not to have lightning mix with earth, and I am giving you reasons why it should be in the game, that is why you are a ''nerd tard''
There's lots of things lightning and earth, or lightning and metal can do, including my glass idea, and lightning bolt idea.

Maybe help an idea progress, instead of hindering it? Do you want LESS things to do in the game? or MORE things to do in the game?

[CaptThad]

Originally posted by Christian22:

Maybe help an idea progress, instead of hindering it? Do you want LESS things to do in the game? or MORE things to do in the game?

I only gave a reason why their choice made sense--I didn't say they shouldn't ever consider anything else. By your logic, the actual 'nerd tards' (odd that gets censored if you add an 's') here would be the devs who used that reasoning to make their choice when resolving a design conundrum.

The reason why it is the way it is in the game is because of the nullification system. There are 8 elements, each with a null. One of those elements nulls itself. That means 7 elements remain, with each requiring a null. No matter how you slice that, you end up with one element on dual null duty.

Fire nulls frost is obvious, that's +temp vs -temp. Life nulls death, also obvious. That leaves Earth, Water, and Lightning. One has to null the other two, or their system is borked. You either have explain to the devs why earth should null water instead of lightning, why three elements should have no nullification at all, or why they should have an entirely different elemental system. More spells obviously isn't going to cut it as a reason alone, or they would've already gone with that.

If you have a solid system figured out, then power to you. As long as it all works out and stays balanced/consistent, I couldn't care less about the fine details. Throwing glass shards or lightning darts could be cool. They're not ever gonna change it for this game though; the entire game is balanced around that system. You might talk them into 'nulling' it for Magicka 3, if you're extra compelling.

[lil snood]

point 6 from OP is one of the best ideas ive heard ever.

[ɃƵ Crazy Cat Lady]

Originally posted by Россия лучше:

point 6 from OP is one of the best ideas ive heard ever.

Yeah, completely game changing.

[Kittenpox]

Originally posted by Christian2:

Originally posted by Россия лучше:

point 6 from OP is one of the best ideas ive heard ever.

Yeah, completely game changing.

I'm inclined to agree - this is a good idea.