Just curious about all the buffs people would like to see in the shaman spellbook.
Yes, we all know about the basics, that of strength, dexterity, agility, hitpoints, armorclass...but what else?
Personally, I love to see lots and lots of buffs for pretty much everything:
Invisibility - Shaman, Druid, Ranger, Wizard, Summoner
Invisibility to Undead - Cleric, Paladin
Levitate - Shaman, Druid, Ranger, Wizard
WaterBreathing - Shaman, Druid, Ranger, Wizard, Summoner
See Invisible - Shaman, Druid, Wizard, Ranger, Summoner
Infravision - Shaman, Druid, Wizard, Ranger
Ultravision - Shaman, Druid, Wizard
RunSpeed - Shaman, Druid
Fire Resist - Shaman, Wizard, Summoner
Cold Resist - Shaman, Wizard, Summoner
Poison Resist - Shaman, Druid
Disease Resist - Shaman, Druid, Cleric
Regeration - Shaman, Druid, Cleric
Anything new or different we might want to see? Are there some which should be shared between other classes or some which should specific to one class? Should some buffs have set durations while others have random durations?
Dont forget your run speed buffs, attack speed buffs, Str,Dex,Sta buff, and mana regen buff, pet buffs, environmental buffs, for cold, heat, wind, posion, etc. I believe thats it. Also cool spirits to summon, honestly I wish we could hunt them down and caputure in a totem, and then call them to aid in battle. As a hunter in wow I hate what they have done to pets but I still enjoy catching them. In Pantheon, it would be cool to let druids to a lesser degree and rangers capture beasts, dread lords maybe and hopefully later necro's catch undead, mages elementals, enchanters magical items, wizards imps, and little dragons, wisps, to aid their casting etc to make the classes feel more real than, Ding! you have a new spells you can learn, now you can summon X pet. Something to think about for an expansion. Not that I dont love me some ding! but you all know what I mean.
Albe said:Dont forget your run speed buffs, attack speed buffs, Str,Dex,Sta buff, and mana regen buff, pet buffs, environmental buffs, for cold, heat, wind, posion, etc. I believe thats it. Also cool spirits to summon, honestly I wish we could hunt them down and caputure in a totem, and then call them to aid in battle.
I did forget Haste. From the class reveal information, Shaman wont have a mana regen buff (aka Clarity line) nor will we have a health-to-mana conversion (aka Cannabalize) but instead we get Ancient Focus a buff (self only probably) which removes the in-combat health/mana regent penalty all other classes get. This will, hopefully, stack with the Enshire's Faint Whisper mana regen buff the Enchanter gets. The combination of the two could be very powerful.
I'd like less generalistic buffs and more focused ones, with choices to make and no possibility to stack everything all the time.
I like a wide array, but I also like how the druid seems meant to have to "choose" which imbue trait he cast on someone. Using boons as a way to buffs players for a long time, and Oaths to expand them for a short duration burst buff, making a class a killing machine for the duration.
What about buff progression? By this I mean you starting off with single target, single effect buffs but then later on you get a single target, mulitple effect buff (but with a slightly shorter durations) and eventually you get group target, multiple effect buffs. Personally I'd much rather see us starting with group target single effect and go from there. Sure, the mana cost would be probably be higher and yes, some buffs aren't needed on some classes, but it does make applying/maintaining buffs that much easier. 1 click and everyone gets it.
I get your point but that doesn't really solve the equation of giving every buffs to everyone.
People like convenience, even if it goes against choice making.
-Group buffs as an example are convenience, and I felt they were a reward of some sort in EQ after manually buffing everyone.
-Giving every single buff to every player is a convenience choice too, as it makes encounter easier withouth having to prepair to a school type of resists, etc...
I agree that group buffs go against the idea of choice making buffs, which is here a difficult choice to make for the developpers : Should buffs be meaningfulls and include some thinking about who and how to buff them, or should they just be mass applied making every character potent in everything ?
I liked how a high level shaman would monsterify his group with every stat baked in a group buff, and I agree it was tedious at low levels to maintain anything usefull on groupmates. I just don't know what will be the best solution are different approachs are appealing enough to be choices for the developpers.
I'm still hyped by a primal oath in the vein of Avatar, including a cooldown allowing only one character affected, however. something like Boon of wind : Swiftness (10% haste buff), amplified by a primal oath of wind : Raging hurricane : +40% haste +20% critical strike chance, 15 second duration and 1 min or so cooldown.
Edit : On the resist/AC side I would like healers to share NO resist at all, or a maximum of one.
Shaman could have poison, disease, cold
Cleric AC, Magic (Thunder included ?), disease
Druid Fire, Thunder (Magic ? ), poison
Exclusive resists beeing : AC for cleric, Cold for shaman and Thunder (magic ? ) for druid. That way all "main" damage sources are exclusive : AC, Cold, Fire. Secondary sources like disease, poison, and magic are shared depending of the class.
The shaman beeing the witchdoctor specialist, protecting from both "DoT" sources.
The cleric protects from magic as it's his main damage source, and diseases carried by undeads.
The druid protects from natural sources of damage, magic (thunder probable school) and poison from animals.
Well we could swap cold and fire for the shaman / druid as cold is more "natural" than fire in the wild. But I don't really dig fire on a shaman in my mind.
MauvaisOeil said:I agree that group buffs go against the idea of choice making buffs, which is here a difficult choice to make for the developpers : Should buffs be meaningfulls and include some thinking about who and how to buff them, or should they just be mass applied making every character potent in everything ?
I liked how a high level shaman would monsterify his group with every stat baked in a group buff, and I agree it was tedious at low levels to maintain anything usefull on groupmates. I just don't know what will be the best solution are different approachs are appealing enough to be choices for the developpers.
I'm still hyped by a primal oath in the vein of Avatar, including a cooldown allowing only one character affected, however. something like Boon of wind : Swiftness (10% haste buff), amplified by a primal oath of wind : Raging hurricane : +40% haste +20% critical strike chance, 15 second duration and 1 min or so cooldown.
I too appreciated the sense of reward I felt when my Shaman finally had group target buffs which, as you say, would 'monsterify' the group. These were a reward for all the time and effort put in to getting to that point. If this were repeated in Pantheon I would not be opposed to it at all. It becomes yet another carrot that keeps you moving forward.
Edit : On the resist/AC side I would like healers to share NO resist at all, or a maximum of one.
MauvaisOeil said:Shaman could have poison, disease, cold
Cleric AC, Magic (Thunder included ?), disease
Druid Fire, Thunder (Magic ? ), poison
Exclusive resists beeing : AC for cleric, Cold for shaman and Thunder (magic ? ) for druid. That way all "main" damage sources are exclusive : AC, Cold, Fire. Secondary sources like disease, poison, and magic are shared depending of the class.
The shaman beeing the witchdoctor specialist, protecting from both "DoT" sources.
The cleric protects from magic as it's his main damage source, and diseases carried by undeads.
The druid protects from natural sources of damage, magic (thunder probable school) and poison from animals.
Well we could swap cold and fire for the shaman / druid as cold is more "natural" than fire in the wild. But I don't really dig fire on a shaman in my mind.
I can see your point in that depending upon the environment you might want one priest over another, not because one heals better but one gives you a slight edge because of an avaiable buff. Perhaps, though, a compromise is that resist buffs are shared amongst these classes but each has one which is their focus with the others of leser strength. This way you at least have some protection available.
If you ranked them from best to worst for each class they might look something like this:
Shaman - Poison, Disease, Cold, Fire, Arcane
Cleric - Disease, Poison, Fire, Cold, Arcane
Druid - Fire, Cold, Arcane, Poison, Disease
Summoner - Cold, Fire, Arcane
Wizard - Arcane, Fire, Cold
If you then look at buffs for HP and AC you could see:
Cleric- AC, raw HP
Shaman - STA, AC
I don't think having no resist buff would make content infeasible. Pretty much like EQ it will "offer" chances to resist either partially or totally to the damage school, but will not offer a raw mitigation against damage like AC worked in wowish games. I remember they answered about resistances in one of the stream where they said they prefered the old route of resists beeing working on binary/trinary results rather than "raw mitigation".
The same applies to AC, players would have AC baseline, buffing it would only make it slightly better over the long run, but not make it gamebreaking not to have it.
Vandraad said:Perhaps, though, a compromise is that resist buffs are shared amongst these classes but each has one which is their focus with the others of leser strength. This way you at least have some protection available.
Shaman - Poison, Disease, Cold, Fire, Arcane
Cleric - Disease, Poison, Fire, Cold, Arcane
Druid - Fire, Cold, Arcane, Poison, Disease
Summoner - Cold, Fire, Arcane
Wizard - Arcane, Fire, Cold
That is probably the best way to do it; all healers have a standard resist buff but each one has one or more particular specialties that go a little beyond.
For example: a shaman poison resistance spell might have an added "Each tick of a harmful poison debuff on player has a 10% chance to be resisted entirely"
or a druid nature resist spell could have something like "10% chance a harmful nature spell upon player will cause the next incoming healing spell to be 10% more effective" (the balance of nature)
I'd see it like this in terms of potential specialties:
Shaman - Poison, Chemical, Disease
Cleric - Divine, Curse, Magic
Druid - Nature, Shock, Fire, Cold
Shaman is the hardest for me to figure since they seem more like a Time Mage/Spiritualist to me. I picked poison/chemical/disease as those things strike me the most as being ailments that are most caused over time and over time specialist is Shaman's core.
Also : Got nothing against Wizard, summoner and enchanter having resist spells but I'm quite torn on thoses :
-Should they have subpar resist buffs you only ask when you have nothing better (healer resist buffs)?
-Should they compete with healers (support main classes) on the strength of resist buffs, or even beat them on some ?
-Should they have a buff midway between healers's main resist and healers sub resist, offering a better alternative if they are here withouth making people "naked" ?
I do feel the #3 is beeing complex but either the game's choice of spells is large enough to cover lower ranks or spells, like it was in EQ (not every class had the endure/resist lines progressing at the same speed), or it should be cut down to "having one" vs "having none".
I still prefer a lot of spells, non stacking inbetween them, offering a wide array of spells and group composition. I don't care "much" if many classes have the same redudancy, or if a cleric 30 has "resist magic +30" while a mage has a "resist +20, +15, or even +40". It's not a big deal and offer a lot of personnalization.
But there is a lot of emphasis on magical classes here (Wizard, Summoner and enchanter), and what about rogues, monks, rangers, or even tank classes. In EQ, "hybrids" had access to a wide array of low level caster spells. It seems in pantheon they will have their own toolkit instead and I wouldn't want only a handfull classes to have access to that diversity.
I'd say Wiz/Sum should have personal buffs when it comes to dealing with magic/resists (personal spell reflect or nullification). Enchanter could have some kind of mental fortitude spell to increase resistance to hard CC spells and/or interrupts. The others (Rogue/Monk/etc) also tend to have personal buffs which I think is fine.
Iksar said:I'd say Wiz/Sum should have personal buffs when it comes to dealing with magic/resists (personal spell reflect or nullification). Enchanter could have some kind of mental fortitude spell to increase resistance to hard CC spells and/or interrupts. The others (Rogue/Monk/etc) also tend to have personal buffs which I think is fine.
Yes, I love the "Armor" spell lines basically inherent to any mage class. I wouldn't mind if they were strong against their own school of magic. In truce, it's pure logic that if you manipulate an element you know how to counter it. But in this design, it might exclude a lot of healers from having resist buffs as their damage looks pretty straightforward.
MauvaisOeil said:Also : Got nothing against Wizard, summoner and enchanter having resist spells but I'm quite torn on thoses :
-Should they have subpar resist buffs you only ask when you have nothing better (healer resist buffs)?
-Should they compete with healers (support main classes) on the strength of resist buffs, or even beat them on some ?
-Should they have a buff midway between healers's main resist and healers sub resist, offering a better alternative if they are here withouth making people "naked" ?.
I think they should have a buff or two which are better than other classes and I think it should be a magic resist or an elemental resist. Perhaps even a combination buff where the Wizard might get a really good Arcane+Cold while the Mage gets Arcane+Fire. This way they do bring something in-line with their magical focus that isn't just damage.
Iksar said:I'd say Wiz/Sum should have personal buffs when it comes to dealing with magic/resists (personal spell reflect or nullification). Enchanter could have some kind of mental fortitude spell to increase resistance to hard CC spells and/or interrupts. The others (Rogue/Monk/etc) also tend to have personal buffs which I think is fine.
EQ1 had this and what I disliked about it (if memory serves) was that it was immediately overwritten by buffs from other classes. If the Summon or Wizard get a personal set of buff lines I think they should stack with other class buffs.
Vandraad said:EQ1 had this and what I disliked about it (if memory serves) was that it was immediately overwritten by buffs from other classes. If the Summon or Wizard get a personal set of buff lines I think they should stack with other class buffs.
Yes, definitely should have personal buffs stack with group buffs. Another idea for wizard would be some kind of shield/ward that would redirect an incoming spell from one type to whichever is the characters highest resist...but that actually sounds like it would be a good unique passive trait for the class with an internal 90-120s cooldown.
Strenghten grip - for climbing purposes.
Sense essence - outline other players / npc's
Timelapse - speed up in-game pathing by 20x for 2 seconds without agro, to see possible adds beforehand. (or temporarily show pathing lines)
Vision of madness - show weak points on mobs (they have a glow and change color when someone casts an environmental buff or the likes, to show what they are most vunerable to at that moment)
Essence assist - buff to CC to decrease resist chance or debuff to mob to do the same