Hi Wizards!
Kind of random thought yesterday while I was playing Going Medieval. During a cold snap (and all of my villagers were starving - oops!), the screen "frosted up."
And I thought to myself - man - that's such a simple effect (probably quite low effort on the part of the developers?), but it made a really big impact.
So - my idea: When we get frosty from frost spells, give us a frosted over screen. When we're extra arcane-y, give us a magical aura around our screen. Same with fire. Maybe don't actually set my monitor on fire, though, please.
I suppose it'd make people happiest to have it toggle-able on and off, so if you hated it, you could just turn it off.
I remember leveling from 23 to 24 (I think) in Everquest, and my spells suddenly looking WAY cooler. And then from 38-39, and my spells suddenly being explosively awesome. I think this idea would scratch some of that itch.
But I also think that lower-level spells should look less awesome (bigger, brighter, flashier) than higher-level spells. Why would a level 1 wizard's ice magic look just like a level 50 wizard's?
Yeah, the screen effect is a good idea but it has been used to show climates for quite some time now. So I think it would be confusing to have it also signify other effects.
I agree about the spell effects starting out very subdued and gaining visual impact as a Wizard levels up. I hope they can make a decent spectrum of progression for them from start to level cap (with room to grow even further in expansions). Realistically, we might only get an increase every 5 or even 10 levels at most, since 50+ individual increases would seem to require a huge amount of art creation.
There is SO much background info to learn, and much of it scattered in casual comments from many years of Developer's Newsletters, Devstreams, Gameplay Streams, Dev Rountables and Forum posts from years gone by. Nobody here knows ALL of it (though some will claim to). All you can do is jump in, make suggestions and ask questions.
And it's good for the Devs to hear support for ideas like graduated spell effect intensity. They said years ago that they wanted to do it, but of course not everything that they (and we) want will make it to release. So we need to speak up about the stuff that matters the most to us.
I think it still could work in some fashion. Imagine if you were super fired up, you could gain cold aclimation. because the fire spells physically heated you up. but you may get to hot in like a desert.
I would also love graduated intensity. my favorite thing about rpgs is when you get the upgrades to say fireball, and it covers half the screen and deals tons of damage and sets everyone on fire.