Necros and protection creature

[Xerties]

I was thinking that it might be nice to open up necro's protection creature to be able to be cast on others in order to increase their usefulness to a group, particularly at the low levels.

[Soldier]

Thats not that bad a idea but necros are supposed to be lone killers (besides the golems and zombies.) So it wouldn't be to practical to do that.

[Davairus]

Yep. Its only there to help them raise zombies.

[Burzuk]

Given how much better rend life is than chill touch for leveling at lower levels, as well as toxic flux being a more than adequate high-level leveling replacement for acid blast, I'm not sure why we'd want to make necros any easier to level than that. Rend life and toxic flux already makes necros better for groups than they used to be.

Necros are about offense, not defense. And getting there is supposed to be harder with a necro than with, say, a warrior.

[Xerties]

Just thought I'd put it out there and see what everybody thought.

[Davairus]

Psionicists had a "ballistic attack" sort of lowbie spell, where you can animate any object and send it flying at the target. This would be funny on lowbie necromancer, probably with body parts restriction so it requires dead people/mobs.

[Xerties]

Talking about giving psi spells to other classes; should we take that as the closed classes have a snowball's chance of being reopened?

[Soldier]

Well how about a shadow spawn not really strong but casts random spells so its not a great help and it can't go past rank 20.

[Davairus]

For psis reopening? I wouldn't say a snowball's chance. That might imply there's actually a chance.

[Xerties]

Sweet. Go through all the trouble to code a class, then don't use it. Makes sense.

[Burzuk]

[Xerties]

Probably time to take out the guilds then.

[Davairus]

Way to detail your own thread Xerties.

[Xerties]

You mean deRail? Come on, this is the Queen's english here!

[Davairus]

I was using the example to show that its possible to "synergize" two concepts to create something more interesting, at the same time making an "insightful" observation that lowbie mages can probably use more fun spells. I did that because I felt the idea lacked creativity, and rather than just say that, I even went the extra mile to come up with an original example that actually shows the creative thinking process. Obviously I have an incentive to help you come up with better ideas - with more of us pooling ideas together, along with our diverse cultural backgrounds, we can potentially come up with LOTS of ideas, and together build an extremely appealing game with it. The more ideas you throw at a problem, the more good ones you get, as long as you learn from your mistakes. Didnt it take Edison 2000 tries to make a lightbulb?

Thing with creativity is, it tends to be most effective when targetted at unpopular choices that go against the mainstream. To use the edison example again, everyone was quite happy with gas-powered bulbs at the time. Then one day, he changes the mainstream in an instant, and immediately moves on to inventing film equipment or whatever. For AR, racial legacies make a lot of unpopular race/class combos more interesting, we can add one of those, and move on to the next unpopular choice. Necromancers have their rend life stuff, so they're not really looking that unpopular now, although before that, going damroll with any mage definitely was. But what about drow necros? That's still an unpopular choice. Lowbie mages are still extremely unpopular with vets, although not so with the newbies flooding in. You might have had more success if you targetted your idea directly at drow necros, knowing that you can counter "they already have rend life" with "they have 18 str", which was the obvious response to your idea. Or lowbie mages, who it can be argued they don't have a damroll for rend life anyway, there's a case against that being the be-all and end-all because it encourages eq multi strongly.

I gave an example to avoid posting the above theory crap, which isn't so easy to read. I posted that here because I wanted to talk about ideas, not to bring up psis. But the one-line sarcastic quips are dissuading me from giving you constructive criticism in the future - if you don't learn from your mistakes, then your ideas aren't going to get used.

[Smotpoker]

[Xerties]

Thing is about 'more interesting lowbie spells' is that if you design them purely to help people rank at the low leves vet's aren't going to practice them because they can better use the practices elsewhere. If you want to give lowbie mages a little extra 'umph' at the low levels maybe increase the power on the wands in the elemental canyon? It seems to me at the moment that wands isn't a highly practiced thing because there isn't much use for them, aside from that cabal item. Most of the other cure items are scrolls and staves, so if you made those wands a little more attractive then you'd get two things out of it; 1, help lowbie mages level, and 2, it's not really a free thing because people will have to use the practice sessions to practice wands, but they're not really wasting them because wands can be useful at the high levels and it's only 2 pracs instead of 4 or 6 for several lowbie spells. Maybe even have some sort of chain interaction with the wands. Like if you use an ice wand and a fire wand the temperature swing causes extra damage or something.

[Xazappith]

[Erlwith]

[Xerties]

Another idea with the wands/spells in general. Maybe there could be some sort of relationship akin to 'duet' where if person A uses icicle, person B uses flame arrow, then they combine somehow and do extra damage.

So we've got several ideas going here, what do you think?