Shattered Kingdoms

I feel theres too many wands and such available which make it so sorcs / magic classes don't have to actually cast. Look at what Syn done with Ealuriel. How many skirmishes did she actually cast color spray or acid blast? Very few as in most logs she was zapping cone of cold wands, op acid blast wands and such.

Imo, wands, scrolls and staves are what make magic classes so powerful because they have very little downfall to them, well the exception is staves due to the lag. Wands however, need some serious retweaking because you can zap wands uber fast. And when you have an OP wand of say, cone of cold, doing the amount of damage a GM warlock's cone of cold is -every round- it's easy to see how broken is that. A melee needs crazy enchants + heal vials JUST to survive that on top of the insane damage from the gstr, hasted furied barb the sorc has. The introduction of these tools are what, in my mind, destroyed the whole system of checks and balances.

Spells are meant to be powerful, and you should always opt to casting a spell over zapping it, but that's not the case nowadays. Things like the papyrus and other insane scrolls that are easy to get make shelling out magical damage just as easy as a fully buffed melee shelling out damage.

Op wands should never have more than 1-2 charges imo and people should be forced to cast spells. That's the whole reason spells hit for so much is because of that casting time. When it's nonexistent then you have things messed up.

That's just my 2 cents.

The problem is that in conventional D&D, wands and staves are commonly crafted items, like scrolls.

Wizards were made to have limited spells per day and were designed to craft magic items as part of their viability. They got scribe scroll for free and received bonus feats that could include item creation options. That crafting had a scalable cost in both experience points and gold, and a detailed crafting process that took time. Hell, wands used to be able to only hold spells of up to 4th out of a possible 9 levels, and staves used the caster level of the wielder.

However, when these items are available at no cost and infinitely accessible, all of the balancing factors from their original system no longer exist. All of the benefit has remained, but none of the drawbacks are present perhaps with the exception of forced lag, which is a ridiculous mechanic anyway.

So we are left with an inherently "unbalanced" aspect of the game. Removal is an option, or the addition of balancing factors as well. Do you trust Dulrik to come up with a fun system of requirements, though? He seems to believe pain is the only valid form of currency when it comes to these sorts of things.

Casters in general have it pretty easy compared to how it was in a system where even with all these missing factors they were still hideously overpowered.

Well there are way more pressing issues such as "double voodoo" on a single victim that could really use a code protection albeit this hasn't happened in a while.

A similar approach can be applied to ethereal form. When one enters ether, they would gain a debuff on them that last 1-2 ticks, preventing re-application of ethereal.

In addition, taunted spellcasters really could gain a small adjustment in casting speed and/or damage.

Just a couple of things to say about this. First off Voodoo isn't over powered anymore in my opinion, let's not bring that into our discussion about etherealform.

What I would really like to say is if you take etherealform out of the combat equation for sorcerors they will be utter garbage. They will be totally ruined. Anyone who can use an xbow/bow will be able to rape them if they dare show their faces anywhere. Thats not including the people with skirmish.

Sorcerors are very strong, but they are supposed to be. Back when I started playing though, you had to earn that strength. It was really really hard to gm a sorc or necro. Back then a necro could ravage like you wouldn't believe. Now it's just get behind a law NPC and a pet, peel off two holy words and there goes all the work a necro did for like an hour getting weapons and getting undead and crap.

There's lots of ways to fight a sorc. Cancellation/remove compulsion. go ethereal yourself if you can use wands/scrolls/secret weapon from far away., Voodoo. Holy word I think can get rid of charms if you are opposite aura.

I strongly reccomend not altering etherealform. If any change is done it should be that you can no longer give orders to pets/charms from the etherealplane. That's not much of a wimping I know but sorcs aren't as great as people make them out to be.

wands and scrolls are completely broken due to the fact that one can sit on mood defensive and keep zapping/reciting with no extra lag placed on the spellcasting. This coupled with the fact that zap/recite have less lag than a lot of the spells that can be placed on them. The lag on zap for instance is so short it's barely noticeable. Gaining the defensive stance bonus with no penalty is completely overpowering, especially since the defensive stance completely neuters ranged combat.

In response to Orac: They can always just quaff a word of recall if they're getting owned by ranged. OR they can cast etherealform BEFORE they go in.

I strongly disagree. They would still be the strongest class in the game, actually. Range is a joke if you bother to get a proper suit and buff up the right way. You can go energy with lots of MP or cloth with MV and good MP, and that will probably be enough. Throw in sanc, protection, SS, MI, ironguard and it becomes clear that sorcs should not get raped by range combat.

You truly know nothing about the class if you think they are garbage without eatherealform.... Sorc's are by far a strong class in the hands of a "skilled" player.