Most games just give you a dude with one handed sword and he's not strong in anything but not weak in anything, he's also the easiest to use. Any other character or build like the slow strong guy or fast weak character don't seem viable and is shit almost all the time.
Then you've got mages that just hide like pussies and fire off shots if they can actually charge something. Chances are this is broken because the Ai is retarded.
So how do we fix it Any Forums?
Little witch Nobeta did something nice, where you need melee to charge up your spells, so you just play as an aggressive battle Mage. You can't pussy out as you need to get hits to do spells and you can't just wack all the time as you do so little damage. Would you want something like that? Or what about souls where magic is just taped on to regular gameplay and any dude can fire off beams or just fight normally. Tales of arise made the Mage much more mobile and they just kept chaining magic to another which was nice, even for short distances they had spells just for that so it was kinda melee.
Still there may be more options and stuff out that that works. What do you prefer?
This thread won't be about video games But I do want to have this discussion regardless I have always wanted a grimoire system, where you simply pick elements and modifiers and then turn that into a spell. So for a very basic example, you could pick "fire" and then pick "projectile" to cast a fireball. You would then be able to add more modifiers and elements as you got stronger to cast all sorts of crazy shit. None of which would really require you to just sit back casting spells, cast "fire" on "self" to immolate yourself and go run close to people to set on fire for example.
That seems interesting reminds me of ratchet gladiator and another game but I forgot. Still won't they just be clones of another? Like if I pick projectile fire and then swap fire for ice. Would that just be a an element swap and color swap? Is there any big change to it? If it there is, I can see it being pretty useful. Ratchet gladiator could make grenades have poison which seems nice but make it have splash damage is better for larger groups, like wish the splash damage isn't that good for a sniper rifle. It was fun to experiment.
Tyler Lopez
Little girls in big wizard hats, worked for Nobeta
Isaiah Watson
who does this even appeal to?
Hudson Torres
Never heard of it, but considering how crazy minecraft modding turned out to be I don't doubt there's a mod that does something similar. I do agree with the OP that mages are boring when they are exactly the type of character that should be the opposite of boring in any game, no reason for them to just be sitting back casting flashy balls from their hands
Alexander Clark
*But make it have slash damage and it's better for large groups, while splash damage isn't that good for a sniper rifle
Fuck my grammar
Xavier Myers
If you keep your modifiers simple then yeah, you would just be casting an ice ball instead of a fire ball. But of course you could also suggest you can combine elements together, and give special properties to certain elements. The most basic example I can give you is making fireballs set someone on fire, but again you don't need to be this creatively bankrupt for something like this, mages should be the most creative of all characters in any game they appear in.
Christian Murphy
There's many ways to handle it. In most MMOs for example mages cannot get away with hiding behind tanks or whatever because any player worth a damn immediately dives the back line to murder the mages and priests. This means most PvP focused mages are highly mobile and are constantly watching for this.
That's pretty much the balance, they have the tools and abilities to escape and take advantage of an opening, but they need to be hyper aware of what's going on or they die. Its a glass cannon build and that's fun as fuck to play. On one hand you can nuke an entire group and crit them for a 1 shot, on the other the moment a warrior looks at you you're stun locked to death.
Other games have other builds, leech mages are pretty common as well, essentially turning themselves into regen tanks.
But mages should always be focused around having to be aware of their surroundings and focusing on the battlefield as a whole rather than just standing there afk casting. I only see them get away with that (and function effectively) in single-player games or PvE shit. but PvE shit is always piss easy baby mode.
