Where are all mages?

[An_Evil_Llama]

I mean, really? I didnt saw any. What do you think about them? I asking this, becose i have nice idea to reveal magery-users over Pandora and pease all users, i think.

[GM NollKoll]

If you are talking in the terms of pure mages, as in players using only magery and spells..  Then there arnt many. I do have ideas and plans for this.
And since freezing is over, the priorities can switch over to some more awesome stuffs.

I have written about it before, but i will rewrite it again.
The first thing ima do, which i guess in terms of when, is very soon.
Is that check each spell, timing etc. Since alot of spells have been fiddled with over the time etc.
But the main thing, is that i want to introduce spell penetration, and the biggest issue on a server where everyone can have everything (pretty much), is to purely give those that only wants to rely on spells their chance to shine, and not give magery an overall buff, which would make warriors still use weapons and weapon abilities, and spells to give them a edge.

But instead, having a permanent buff, which would make part of  your spells, ignore the opponents resistance in certain percentage. This will ofc req. alot of fiddling around, alot of small minipatches to balance it in. But to have certain percentage penetrate the resistance, depending on the casters intelligence. The amount of intelligence needed to have the "first tier" of spell penetration would lay around where normal users start to have diminishing results of other abilities, such as bandage speed, weapon attack speed and damage etc. And then go up, to reach the maximum amount of spell penetration at a level where you are almost maxed of intelligence, both raw stats and bonus intelligence from items. (Thanks Drakania and those others that have been gathering, reading and giving me data on this)

So, pure mages will probably never exist, but they will be mages, that uses spells to defeat their opponents, but using some weapons just to give them a small edge.

(sure then i got some other plans of having a magic combo system, but thats a bit furthur in the future i guess, if needed.. but using different elementals in a row, will give you a spell damage increase bonus, ie using fire, energy, cold, poison, physical spells, in that order for example, would give each spell after the third or so, an increased damage output, but at a maximum amount of for example, 5 spells in this case, continuing to switching elements would just let you to stay ontop if you can keep the temporary buff up, but if you spam a spell, would mean that the spell would do less damage... But this is just in a theory stage)

[Tyrone Biggums]

At the moment it's jut so much faster to kill people with weapon specials then to cast spells. I still use curse strangle harm poison bombard lighting evil omen and ebolt on the regular but weapon specials do so much more damage and are effective so why hangs it. I only cast normally to cure/heal or if I'm in the field. During duels you mainly use weapon specials and curse and poison till someone's dead. That's just how I fight tho. It seems to work 

[The Winter]

It'd be nice, at some point, to see magery be a viable "stand alone" option for pvp and pve. One of the main reasons I don't run around pvping or pveing is because I always played mages in UO as well as other games. Never liked dex monkeys. 

If magery were to become more potent, I'm sure I'd dedicate more time to playing. I'd rather have a tome or scrappers in my hand than a melee weapon or bow.

Remember the days of clearing champs with EVs or blade spirits? Good times.

I think some consideration should be made for pve first, so people can start to use magery more often and then transition to pvp. Start simple...try to to give some AOE spells a little love to put them on par with the sparkle bow and double axe AOE effects. Look at a few single target spells and give them some armor ignore potential. Don't try to fix it all at once...gradually give boosts here and there and let progress dictate adjustments and changes.

James