Spellements: Why I likely will not be returning to PvP soon
I used to PvP a lot (4th age warlord, 1700 rating), and I have come back from a brief hiatus playing. I am excited to quest through Novus, although I do not have any plans to PvP. This post is intended for the devs in charge of PvP (i.e. Ratbeard and co.) to enlighten them on why a fraction of the playerbase doesn't want to participate in PvP.
Reason 1: Spellements are way too grindy. It costs 75 spellements to upgrade a spell once. Even more beyond that. If this stays the same, I will likely never PvP again. I don't want to spend hours (and tons of skeleton keys, that are now near-impossible to obtain) farming for thousands of spellements.
Reason 2: Many spellemental paths are banned from PvP. Using my main school, ice, as an example, this includes Reindeer Knight, Handsome Fomori, Celestial Intervention, Shatterhorn (Karamelle spell), and Freeze Ray (Lemuria spell). Given the vast number of audits (not necessarily a bad thing!) and how grindy spellements are, I don't want to spend hour grinding for spellements just to find that my upgraded path got banned from PvP. This actually was the case with SMore machine on my fire. I spent many hours grinding to be able to upgrade it to seven pips. It is now banned from PvP. Not only did I waste well-over 10 hours farming for spellements, but I also need to spend 100 crowns to undo this. Because of this, I almost certainly will never spend this long farming spellements again.
Proposed Solution: I think spellements have the opportunity to be an amazing mechanic if implemented correctly. Ideally, I believe that spellements should allow players to slightly *modify* spells to fit their preferred play-styles. In other words, I think there should be way more branches for spellement trees that are only 1-level deep. I think this would be good for a variety of reasons: (1) much less grinding. players now need at most 75 spellements and will not need to spend hours. (2) more variety allows players to feel more unique. As of now (since basically every spell has only one PvP-allowed path, one path in general, or an obvious choice as to which path to take), there is very little diversity between similarly-levelled wizards of the same school. This way, not only can players feel that their wizards are more unique, but playing against players of a given class will be more fun since there is much more variation within schools. One mechanic that I particularly enjoy is how spellements are given to wizards while questing in the later worlds. If there was some way to map that onto quests and sidequests for all spells, spellements wouldn't at all be a grind but rather something that is naturally obtained.
I don't want to speak for everyone in the community, but these are my thoughts on the matter. To summarize, I believe: (1) spellements are too much of a grind; (2) given the constant audits, it feels like grinding for spellements is useless; I don't want to spend 10+ hours trying to max out a spell just for it to get banned or nerfed into oblivion; (3) there is no real choice into how spellements should be upgraded, making it even more of a toxic system.
I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter (other players and devs).
Re: Spellements: Why I likely will not be returning to PvP soon
Travis GiantTalon on Jan 2, 2023 wrote:
I used to PvP a lot (4th age warlord, 1700 rating), and I have come back from a brief hiatus playing. I am excited to quest through Novus, although I do not have any plans to PvP. This post is intended for the devs in charge of PvP (i.e. Ratbeard and co.) to enlighten them on why a fraction of the playerbase doesn't want to participate in PvP.
Reason 1: Spellements are way too grindy. It costs 75 spellements to upgrade a spell once. Even more beyond that. If this stays the same, I will likely never PvP again. I don't want to spend hours (and tons of skeleton keys, that are now near-impossible to obtain) farming for thousands of spellements.
Reason 2: Many spellemental paths are banned from PvP. Using my main school, ice, as an example, this includes Reindeer Knight, Handsome Fomori, Celestial Intervention, Shatterhorn (Karamelle spell), and Freeze Ray (Lemuria spell). Given the vast number of audits (not necessarily a bad thing!) and how grindy spellements are, I don't want to spend hour grinding for spellements just to find that my upgraded path got banned from PvP. This actually was the case with SMore machine on my fire. I spent many hours grinding to be able to upgrade it to seven pips. It is now banned from PvP. Not only did I waste well-over 10 hours farming for spellements, but I also need to spend 100 crowns to undo this. Because of this, I almost certainly will never spend this long farming spellements again.
Proposed Solution: I think spellements have the opportunity to be an amazing mechanic if implemented correctly. Ideally, I believe that spellements should allow players to slightly *modify* spells to fit their preferred play-styles. In other words, I think there should be way more branches for spellement trees that are only 1-level deep. I think this would be good for a variety of reasons: (1) much less grinding. players now need at most 75 spellements and will not need to spend hours. (2) more variety allows players to feel more unique. As of now (since basically every spell has only one PvP-allowed path, one path in general, or an obvious choice as to which path to take), there is very little diversity between similarly-levelled wizards of the same school. This way, not only can players feel that their wizards are more unique, but playing against players of a given class will be more fun since there is much more variation within schools. One mechanic that I particularly enjoy is how spellements are given to wizards while questing in the later worlds. If there was some way to map that onto quests and sidequests for all spells, spellements wouldn't at all be a grind but rather something that is naturally obtained.
I don't want to speak for everyone in the community, but these are my thoughts on the matter. To summarize, I believe: (1) spellements are too much of a grind; (2) given the constant audits, it feels like grinding for spellements is useless; I don't want to spend 10+ hours trying to max out a spell just for it to get banned or nerfed into oblivion; (3) there is no real choice into how spellements should be upgraded, making it even more of a toxic system.
I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter (other players and devs).
I was gonna post something on this as well, I think its a general bad idea to audit spells to a point that its made no pvp when players are grinding or opening packs just to obtain these spellement paths to obtain some type of edge. Giving how the troll minion spell was literally incentives on micro transaction to now having a some what decent effect makes me wonder on future auditing of certain spells and who's behind this.
Please Developers Do not push something out, with the incentive to get players to pay for something to then later say its unusable or given an effect so useless that I can't believe these spells still exist and having been updated or audited. I am talking about you Grendel Amends. Absorbs are useless shields are better period! If you don't want myth healing in pvp lets talk about how satyr is still one of these most viable 4 pip heal out here. This is why some of these audits makes no sense.
