Redefining spell systems

Community General Discussion
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TLDR I want more RPG in my MMORPG as usual. Just trying to think of ways for more interactions with eachother and the magics of the world. If it ain’t your cup of tea, that’s okie. I’d also love to hear folks’ takes on a way to implement this.

Alrighty so. Done some thinking. Right now we’ve got a damage “schools”

  • Physical
  • Fire
  • Frost
  • Arcane
  • Nature
  • Holy
  • Shadow

These all can intersect - a ton of classes have intersecting damage-types now and most bosses deal multi-school damage. They are also, at the moment, just a neat bit of flavor text for spells. 49 shadow damage isn’t different from 49 nature damage.

“Shadow” damage also seems to encompass a couple different types of magic - you can find fel magic, rogue tricks, void magic and death magic dealing shadow damage.

I want it to matter. I think it’d be really neat if classes had access to multiple schools of magic with which to hurt and heal - and if they could play off of eachother.
Here’s a revised list of spell schools.

  • Physical
  • Fire
  • Frost
  • Earth
  • Air
  • Arcane
  • Fel
  • Life
  • Death
  • Light
  • Void

With “Chaos” being all of them, same as the main game.

I’m picturing these classes restructured with a class-specific spell or two increasing a type of damage - A warlock’s “Incinerate” for example increasing overall fire damage taken by the enemy.

Conversely, I’m also imagining elemental reactions. For instance:

  • Light magic on a Fel DoT will explode, Vice versa
  • Light magic on a Death effect will turn it into Fire damage,
  • Arcane damage on a Fel DoT will double it’s damage, Vice versa,
  • Void damage turns all effects except Light to x/Void effects, pairing them. If the void effect is stronger than the Light effect, the Light effect becomes a Void effect. If damaging, adds a cast time slowing effect. If healing, adds a shield.
  • Fel magic increases the critical strike damage of other DoT spells in exchange for the casters’ mana,
  • Physical damage increases existing physical effects - bleeds, physical slows, armor decreases, etc.

Things like that.
If I was gonna classify classes by their assigned spell schools, it would be so:

  • Warrior - Physical
  • Rogue - physical + life/void
  • Hunter - physical + wind/fire
  • Priest - Light + fire/void
  • Mage - Arcane + Fire/water
  • Warlock - Fel + Fire/Death
  • Druid - Life + Arcane/physical
  • Shaman - Earth + Water/wind/fire
  • Paladin - Light + fire/physical
  • Monk - Physical + water/wind
  • Death Knight - Death + physical/frost
  • Demon Hunter - chaos + fel/physical
  • Evoker

So, let’s say you have your dungeon group. You’ve got a Shaman, a Paladin, a Hunter, a Rogue, and a Warrior. You’re off to the Deadmines and Glubtok is in your way.

Glubtok is a caster, meaning cloth armor, meaning low physical defense. You can swap your Pally, Hunter, and rogue to their more physical damage focused specs to maximize their damage. Your rogue, however, could also spec into their void talents in Subtlety, and could slow Glubtok’s casting time as the DoT’s are given their Void effect. You can take him down just fine without that coordination, but it does move a little faster, and with less damage overall to the group. :3

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keep going, you might create Asheron’s Call…

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If you don’t mind me asking…what do you think made it bad? 0.0 You sound like you’ve got personal experience and I’d love to hear it firsthand.

I’m in love with the idea of elemental interactions - if it plays out in an icky way though I’d like to hear about it :3

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it falls in the game developer trap of “cool concept” translating poorly in gameplay. In this case, it’d up the immersion, while it will cause a lot of the balancing to be circumstantial.

There was a time when a fireball couldn’t hurt a fire elemental. But that forced mages to play frost. In other MMOs, customization is stronger, so any class can be ranged. This will lead to ranged-only strats, where being a melee at all is not possible with the way the fight is being executed.

WoW players are too competitive for something like this, abandoning the RPG in favor of RTS-like third-person playstyle.

to give you an example of why this might be a problem, in wow context: World first with 10 druids in the raid. Because the metagaming says that’s best. Never take your eyes off the metagaming. The majority of cool ideas die in the metagame. That is where you’ll find your answer.

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Do you think there’s a way to ignore them?
Not to crush them - metagaming is a perfectly fine way to play the game - but I feel like it belongs in the body of the game the same way bacteria belongs in your gut.

If you give it a buncha cool things to work with, it’ll refine it into a razor’s edge. Occasionally complain because what’s being put in isn’t optimal but that’s fine. You’re putting what you want in your body and it can deal.

But then you start revolving around those min-maxers. Focusing on removing the Meta purposefully instead of letting it fade. Go the path of attacking those bacteria, or directly feeding them - either way you end up with a problem. A gut that can’t process as well, or an infection.

Is there a way to kinda just…pretend they’re not there? :sweat_smile:

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yes. but wow doesn’t go in that direction.

if the groups were sufficiently large, and the number of classes sufficiently small, and distinctive, it’d work.

the game would have to be balanced around class cooperation and synergy, not against 16 dps each doing his bis rotation trying to be #1.

For example if there were 50 raid spots, and 5 classes with 3 specs each, it’d make sense to make it where you’d need at least 2-3 of each. Playing into party dynamics, the way Heroism worked in TBC, and so on.

Of course it’d delete any form of competitive 5mans like M+.
It’d make for great outdoor scaling bossfights though. With autoscaling, there’s so much potential for truly massive content, yet small group sizes, with classes balanced against each other at a 1v1 level continue to dominate the game.

It’d be very cool if we could move to a more group-based MMO like your idea suggests.

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Thank you for the explanation :pleading_face:
There’s some ideas I have a hard time wrapping my head around - I never thought of the current game as…competitive.

It got me thinking - the last time I felt like there was a collaborative experience on my end was MoP. Even then, it was just that little checkup of trying to get everyone’s class specific buffs in.

Things got…very individualized after that. I don’t think it’s the lack of buffs that did it - I do think they were kinda the last holdover from that collaborative gameplay.
Imma think about this more. See if there’s a way to…head towards that path.

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I don’t know why I’m reminded of a time. In a game from the long long ago. Where you had to type out every spell to cast them. I still have some power words memorized… anyway that was the first instance of macros in an MMO

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