alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted March 26, 2008 05:32 PM |
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Thoughts on Spell-casting creatures and their Spell Mastery
Here was a thought I had the other day. Many of us know how you can abuse small stacks of spell-casting creatures - I'm not talking about Sprite creeping due to silly logarithmic spell power increase (although I could make a lengthy rant about that) - but rather use of stacks of Inquisitors, Matriarchs, or similar to cast Light Magic / Dark Magic spells on appropriate targets. A stack of 1 Inquisitor casting Advanced Divine Strength on 100 Marksmen - increasing damage by 2-8 to 6-8 - or a stack of 1 Shadow Matriarch casting Basic Confusion on the same stack - decreasing damage by 50 % - are very good examples of such abuse.
My thought was this:
What about letting Spell Mastery be dependant on the relative size of the two stacks, Caster and Target?
Here's how it would work:
You would calculate a "Mastery Modifier" (from here: MM) depending on the Relative Power (from here: RP) of the two stacks.
RP = Power(Caster Stack) / Power(Target Stack) = Power(Caster) x Number / Power(Target) x Number.
To give an example, 7 Inquisitors (Power 1487) cast a spell on 89 Marksmen (Power 199). This would yield a RP of (7 x 1487) / (89 x 199) = 0.59, or said with other words: The Inquisitors are 59 % as powerful as the Marksmen.
The Mastery Modifier could look something like this:
RP MM
< 0.25 -3
0.25 - 0.50 -2
0.50 - 0.75 -1
0.75 - 1.33 0
1.33 - 2.00 +1
2.00 - 4.00 +2
> 4.00 +3
Effect of Mastery Modifier
The MM would determine what level, the spell was cast on. Creatures would still have some "Base Mastery" (BM)- for instance, Base Mastery of Divine Strength for Inquisitors will be Adcanced. However, the Actual Mastery will be calculated as:
AM = BM + MM
Thus, to return to the example above, with 7 Inquisitors casting Divine Strength on 89 Marksmen. The Base Mastery is Advanced (= 2), but because of the RP is only 0.59, there will be a Mastery Modifier of -1 - this means, that the Actual Mastery of the spell will only be 1 = Basic.
Thus, small stacks casting spells on large stacks will be relatively weaker. On the contrary, large stacks casting spells on relatively small stacks will have higher mastery. The result will be, that it's more difficult - or at least, less profitable - to abuse small caster stacks - and that you will benefit from large caster stacks, which is currently a waste (who needs an effective spell power of 57 when casting Divine Strength!?).
Extension ...
One could even imagine extending this to heroes casting spells on creatures. I haven't thought exactly how this would work - it might include hero Level and/or Spell Power but could be a way of balancing the importance of Light / Dark Magic with relatively weak magic Heroes like Knights.
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What will happen now?
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