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| Thread: Is using the Knowledge stat for spell learning a bad idea? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 · NEXT» |
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Mystic_Genie
Adventuring Hero
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posted August 27, 2019 03:23 PM |
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Poll Question:
Is using the Knowledge stat for spell learning a bad idea?
I should probably start by mentioning I am not familiar enough with heroes 7 to comfortably comment on the Arcane Knowledge stat, so I will mostly be focusing on heroes 5 and under.
Ok now to set up what I mean. Heroes 2 and 3 only let you unlock tier 3 and higher spells through the use of one secondary skill, Wisdom. This, in my opinion of course, had the negative effect of restricting magic heroes when compared to might heroes. While might heroes started off with various pairs of 2 skills, magic heroes were always a combination of Wisdom and another skill due to the importance of having access to high level spells.
Future heroes game have made it a point to increase magic hero variety. Heroes 5 notably merged spell learning with spell mastery (Summoning, Destruction, Light and Dark) which in theory would have resulted in less restrictive combos, if not for the hero specific skills of 5, which is a different story for a different day.
My problem with what heroes 5 does is that this setup makes it hard to encounter high level spells being cast at basic level, which bugs me more than I care to admit.
So with that out of the way I present you with this question. Is linking spell learning with knowledge a bad idea? Instead of having individual skills for unlocking high level spells, you'd naturally gain the ability to learn spells once you hit an escalating knowledge cap, and the magic skills exclusively focus on enhancing the spells. (For example you need 1 point in Knowledge to learn tier 1 spells, but you need 5 points for tier 3).
I feel that this change more or less address all my previous problems, It makes it possible to encounter low mastery high tier spells from a hero, does not require spreading unlocks over multiple skill and it's intuitive (prevents you from learning magic skills before you have the mana to cast them).
What do you think? Is the idea good? Bad? Do you feel heroes 5 handled it well? Or is there something I'm missing?
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monere
Bad-mannered
Supreme Hero
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posted August 27, 2019 04:38 PM |
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I think it's a bad idea because it gets even harder for the heroes to learn high tier spells. With wisdom skill at least they need 2 levels to learn level 4 spells, but if you condition learning level 4 spells by having 10 knowledge (or whatever) 10 knowledge is even harder to get than advanced wisdom, and cripples the heroes even more because you force them to take knowledge instead of any other primary attribute. And any of the other 3 attributes are more important than knowledge in my opinion, especially if you're might hero.
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Mystic_Genie
Adventuring Hero
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posted August 27, 2019 04:59 PM |
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monere said:
...And any of the other 3 attributes are more important than knowledge in my opinion, especially if you're might hero.
Ideally shouldn’t all the primary stats have a similar level of value though? If my idea is implemented in a way that makes knowledge as desirable a stat as the other 3, wouldn’t that be for the best? Or at least, shouldn’t Knowledge be more desirable for a magic hero over Attack and Defence?
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monere
Bad-mannered
Supreme Hero
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posted August 27, 2019 05:18 PM |
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ideally they should be, but they're not, and they're not ideal because idealism is hard to achieve even in video games, let alone in reality 
Knowledge is pretty desirable as it is because in H3 the might heroes need to cast spells to win, so they will pick knowledge regardless. And for what it does it's good as it is.
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Mystic_Genie
Adventuring Hero
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posted August 27, 2019 05:31 PM |
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Heh. Well that won’t stop me from trying. So then, do you like how H5 handled spell learning?
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monere
Bad-mannered
Supreme Hero
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posted August 27, 2019 05:57 PM |
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try all you want. It's your game
Yeah, I prefer H5's way of learning spells.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted August 28, 2019 09:20 AM |
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Edited by Elvin at 09:24, 28 Aug 2019.
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Too bothersome, that would not allow the design of magic classes with low knowledge like H5 necromancer/warlock. I might even go a step further and ditch wisdom too, I'm not sure it offers much to the gameplay. Let heroes learn spells freely and add a level requirement for casting or better yet add a hero level component to restrict their earlygame power. Might heroes would not have much spellpower/mana anyway.
I liked how H3 gave you a big spell pool to choose from, whether you were proficient in them or not. H5 was worse in that respect, even if you could learn spells from other schools they would not be worth using. And you could not even cast them unless you had the corresponding magic skill.
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Mystic_Genie
Adventuring Hero
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posted August 28, 2019 01:41 PM |
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I'm not gonna pretend like the thought didn't cross my mind, but would it even be considered a heroes game if we just do away with one of the 4 primary skills?
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted August 28, 2019 08:41 PM |
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They are both a blessing and a curse.. I hated how in H5 they made some of your skill choices useless or how ridiculously random the stat allocation was at times. But when H6 made stat progression non-random I honestly got sick of seeing all heroes from the same faction get the same stats. Yuck.
But what H5 also did was provide unique gameplay to certain classes, just by giving them wacky stats. 30/10/45/15 warlocks, 10/30/45/15 necromancers, 10/15/30/45 wizards or 15/45/10/30 rangers were a stroke of genious  Mana starved but offensive warlocks, necromancers that depended on spirit link for mana, wizards that used motw and knowledge to make up for lack of spellpower and rangers with avenger making up for their crappy attack.
I think I prefer having primary stats though a more accurate RNG would be nice.
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Map also hosted on Moddb
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magnomagus
Admirable
Legendary Hero
modding wizard
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posted August 30, 2019 02:24 PM |
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You actually mean a less accurate RNG, it is perfect randomness that creates chaos. You want a biased system where for example 1 out of 5 losses is converted in a win.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted August 30, 2019 03:19 PM |
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Not quite. Take the original warlock for example, 30% attack and 45% spellpower. Sometimes you'd get high attack and meh spellpower which.. was rarely a good thing for a mainstream warlock.
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Map also hosted on Moddb
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magnomagus
Admirable
Legendary Hero
modding wizard
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posted August 30, 2019 03:41 PM |
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..which is the result of near perfect randomness. If one result has 10% chance of happening it can still happen 5 times in a row, it will happen rarely, but it will happen at some point.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted August 30, 2019 03:47 PM |
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Please. You must have played plenty of H5, the RNG is pretty bad. The problem is not when ridiculously rare situations happen very rarely, it is when they are not rare.
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Map also hosted on Moddb
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magnomagus
Admirable
Legendary Hero
modding wizard
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posted August 30, 2019 04:04 PM |
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Skeggy
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted August 30, 2019 09:06 PM |
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In general, H5 addressed spells issues very well with the exception of the low cost of mass spells.
You can even buy a magic tome of specific magic school and gain access to high-level spells even if you don't have the appropriate skills.
What H5 missed, is to make SKILL_NONE of high level spells more available to specific creatures and possibly specific heroes (like Solmyr had chain lightning in H3).
One of my mod, for example, replaces iffy-effect of cleansing with SKILL_NONE level of magic immunity that lasts 0 seconds but completely cleanse the target of every spell effect. And that zero-level spell is given to mages that have good alignment
Mages that have evil alignment received SKILL_NONE vampirism that also lasts 0 seconds but remove only negative mind effects ( basically it turns target under for 0 seconds)
Does that somewhat address the issues?
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted August 31, 2019 10:32 AM |
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Wouldn't that waste two perfectly good spells?
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Map also hosted on Moddb
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Gandalf196
Disgraceful
Supreme Hero
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posted August 31, 2019 03:27 PM |
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Elvin said:
They are both a blessing and a curse.. I hated how in H5 they made some of your skill choices useless or how ridiculously random the stat allocation was at times. But when H6 made stat progression non-random I honestly got sick of seeing all heroes from the same faction get the same stats. Yuck.
But what H5 also did was provide unique gameplay to certain classes, just by giving them wacky stats. 30/10/45/15 warlocks, 10/30/45/15 necromancers, 10/15/30/45 wizards or 15/45/10/30 rangers were a stroke of genious Mana starved but offensive warlocks, necromancers that depended on spirit link for mana, wizards that used motw and knowledge to make up for lack of spellpower and rangers with avenger making up for their crappy attack.
I think I prefer having primary stats though a more accurate RNG would be nice.
Agreed! But has OP has also made an excellent point. Knowledge is kind of the ugly duckling of the primary skills; while the more of the other 3 you got, the better you perform, knowledge's usefulness is not always perceived (and one could even argue that most of the time higher spell power makes up for the lack of knowledge, especially when you reach a certain knowledge level).
In fact, I believe Heroes of Might and Magic I (yeah, the very frst one) handled the situation the best: knowledge represents the number of times you can memorize your spells, which not only increases the value of the skill, but encourages strategic moves (you really have to manage your learned spells, not just spam lightning bolt).
Last but not least, wisdom could be modified to reduce the knowledge required for spell learning (basic/advanced/expert reducing the total required to 80/70/60). That and modifying the formula for spell duration (maybe to something like 1/3 of SP, rounded down) would certainly steer the magic aspect of the game in a more meaningful direction.
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted August 31, 2019 06:14 PM |
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I agree that H1 may have been on the right track.
Crazy idea: Knowledge should affect how many individual spells a hero can know at a time. It makes sense that a Barbarian with 1 Knowledge wouldn't know many spells, even if they're wise. And it's separate from magic schools - maybe you only know a few spells, but you've specialized so you're really good at casting them. Higher-level spells would be more expensive, representing them being more complicated.
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Eccentric Opinion
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Gandalf196
Disgraceful
Supreme Hero
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posted September 01, 2019 07:09 PM |
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Gandalf196 said:
Elvin said:
They are both a blessing and a curse.. I hated how in H5 they made some of your skill choices useless or how ridiculously random the stat allocation was at times. But when H6 made stat progression non-random I honestly got sick of seeing all heroes from the same faction get the same stats. Yuck.
But what H5 also did was provide unique gameplay to certain classes, just by giving them wacky stats. 30/10/45/15 warlocks, 10/30/45/15 necromancers, 10/15/30/45 wizards or 15/45/10/30 rangers were a stroke of genious Mana starved but offensive warlocks, necromancers that depended on spirit link for mana, wizards that used motw and knowledge to make up for lack of spellpower and rangers with avenger making up for their crappy attack.
I think I prefer having primary stats though a more accurate RNG would be nice.
Agreed! But has OP has also made an excellent point. Knowledge is kind of the ugly duckling of the primary skills; while the more of the other 3 you got, the better you perform, knowledge's usefulness is not always perceived (and one could even argue that most of the time higher spell power makes up for the lack of knowledge, especially when you reach a certain knowledge level).
In fact, I believe Heroes of Might and Magic I (yeah, the very frst one) handled the situation the best: knowledge represents the number of times you can memorize your spells, which not only increases the value of the skill, but encourages strategic moves (you really have to manage your learned spells, not just spam lightning bolt).
Last but not least, wisdom could be modified to reduce the knowledge required for spell learning (basic/advanced/expert reducing the total required to 80/70/60). That and modifying the formula for spell duration (maybe to something like 1/3 of SP, rounded down) would certainly steer the magic aspect of the game in a more meaningful direction.
Also, knowledge as a requirement for spell learning and spell casting would ensure that knowledge artifacts are not used only to gather mana when you sleep in town.
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Skeggy
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted September 02, 2019 10:23 AM |
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Elvin said:
Wouldn't that waste two perfectly good spells?
Every spell in H5 has 4 levels; none, beginner, advanced and expert. If you buy the specific magic tome and equip it in the appropriate slot then you have access to every spell of specific spell school without the need to actually have a skill that enables the access to high-level spells, but you can only cast them at level none, which is a level below basic level.
In those circumstances, you can't really expect to have usual standardization; it is not only more interesting but also more game-wise to change below basic spell mechanization.
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