I'm moving your old and familiar realms to skills. No longer will you be plagued by your 100% in fire being reduced to dust by several untimely deaths! Now, with a skill level in fire, your investment will be protected!

You shouldn't notice much functionally different. The code now uses your realm skill to determine damage as opposed to your realm %. Spell skills will replace level checks where appropriate. The big difference to be tested is how quickly you can raise your realms skills in comparison to raising the %. You guys can be my guinea pigs

The big looming question is... what should we do with the info screen?



You'll be able to find your realms using the skills command:

How about saving throws?

Great idea

This is getting closer to being done. Damage is roughly the same between the old system and the new system and I think we've got the ease-of-raising-skills things worked out. The next thing I have to work on is spells - we really don't have many conjuration or necromancy spells, for example, so I need to code them.

With magic skills we could do specialist mages!

To make things easier, I decided not to use your skill level to replace caster level. In the future, your skill level would decide if you could cast the spell / how strong it is. The mud tends to round up skill level, so it's nice, but it also means you need to keep your skill level up.

Necromancy, for example, would be hard to raise, since we have essentially no necromancy spells. I've coded a bunch of them, but I don't think I can balance them all and put them all in the game by the end of the week.

So far now, your skill level will only affect your realm damage (fire, cold) as it's replacing realm percentages. We'll worry about spell skills for the other magic skills later. Things should be on track to put this live in the next couple of days.

I put this live! Keep an eye on damage/rate-of-change and let me know what you think.

I think this system weakens casting classes because gaining skills is harder and slower than gaining realms. It also caps their skill to their level. Does a skill of 400 = 100% realms? If it does, that means a level 20 lich with 200 fire skill can only cast as hard as if he had 50% realms, when a lich or a mage before can probably get close to 90 in realms by level 20 before.

With my lich, i seem to be gaining sword just as fast/if not faster than my magic skills. I think as as lich/mage, my magic skill should be overwhelmingly higher than weapon skill.

As casting classes become weakened by this, i also think non-casting classes have benefited. They can keep gaining magic skills at the same pace as a caster, even though they it should be slowed down significantly compared to a casting class. This makes it easier for a non-caster to gain magic skill, to cast spells harder than they should.

One can say the same applies because fighting classes have their weapon skills capped, but it's not as much of a disadvantage because hitting is much strong in this new system i think, so any disadvantage is not felt nearly as it is for magic.

I think to balance this, there should be no level cap to magic skills for a casting class.

You have a point regarding the rate of gain. However your analysis of skill cap is flawed. Before realms were based on experience gained, thus effectively level capped.

Bane wrote:

You have a point regarding the rate of gain. However your analysis of skill cap is flawed. Before realms were based on experience gained, thus effectively level capped.

That's true. However, when realms was exp based, I can choose to allocate all my effort and exp into 1 realm. I can put 100% of my exp into fire, giving it a large advantage over other types of magic. In a sense, I can "specialize" in fire. There is still no cap, I can still keep gaining realms all the way up to 0 tnl and beyond.

Now with the new system, we can no longer focus on one magic type in order to make it stronger than the others. We have to spread it out the casting evenly because each magic skill has been capped. And I think the magic specialization was something great about the mud, and allows each char to be more customizable. A mage with focus on fire vs a mage with focus on water would play differently and each be unique. But now that flexibility is gone. Instead of having a super strong immolate, and have other spells be weak, we now have to be , at best, mediocre across all magics.

We're doing this as a test to see how it works given the current mechanics, and will likely adjust it as needed to make it better fit the magic system. Please continue to give any constructive feedback and we'll see what we can do to improve.