Various Suggestions For Resolution I Guess

[Phyllody]

I left a bunch of suggestions in Resolution general and Mahj suggested I put them all in a thread here, so I'm making this and will put suggestions in the posts after it. I'll be keeping each post to a singular suggestion to make things easier to parse and consider.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: don't make any potentially double-edged buff an area buff. This includes ones that are purely beneficial but conflict with other buffs someone may be using. Quick Charge can ruin a build that isn't set up to sustain the increased costs it imposes. Bravery, Wizardry, and Trickery are all mutually exclusive, and casting one will cancel any other currently active on anyone within your casting radius, which can be very annoying if they rely on the one they cast to prop their build up. Another suggestion in the same area as this is for there not to be exclusive debuffs as well. The Nature curses can be a huge help to a build, right up until someone uses a different curse and cancels your own on all targets within their range. It's perfectly fine for each curse to only apply once, not stacking with other instances of the same curse, but them being mutually exclusive with each other can be annoying for party play. If stuff like that has to be lowered in effect in Resolution to account for this, then I'd prefer that.

On another note, I find Thought Seize's '-mana regen' effect to be very odd. Do mobs even have mana? It seems largely like a PvP effect, while Dissolution is most certainly not balanced for such at all. This is even shown in that very spell, as the amount of mana regen it cuts is immense enough to easily utterly destroy the mana economy of anyone it hits with its huge range. In addition to this, I find the placement of '-hp regen' and '-speed' in the curses odd, as the former is on the most tank-like curse, cutting phys damage, while the latter is on one of the two offensive curses, increasing phys damage taken. It feels like the '-speed' should be paired with the '-phys damage' and the '-hp regen' paired with the '+phys damage taken', just thematically, making the former pair into a good control spell and the latter pair into a good offensive spell. Not too big of an issue, just something I felt odd.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: remove over-leveling as a mechanic. It pushes a +level meta, since each level will make every part of a spell better, and heavily incentivizes devoting half or more of your gear to runed items for Chains of Honor and an ONI for a +2 to all spells, ignoring pretty much every other runeword there is outside of Last Wish for a DoT build. If over-leveling wasn't a mechanic, all someone would have to worry about is having enough spell points to max out the spells they wanted, rather than having them worry about gear for that as well. You could even make spells generally cost more points, so someone may want some +levels to make their spells cheaper to max. Or you could remove +level effects entirely. I think that either would promote much more variety in builds, such as by allowing someone to run more damage spells than is currently normal due to the need to focus points.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: confine any mod-generated structures that'd normally spawn in the overworld to the mirror dimension. It's annoying when you find a nice place to build in only for a huge floating airship or castle to be sitting in the sky some distance away, ruining your scenery. Underground dungeons also fall off hard after level 30 or so, and it's a nuisance to have one near where you want to build, as you have to find and destroy every spawner it has, for no reward, to avoid a mass of entities gradually building up underground and potentially causing lag. The mirror dimension falls off around the same point these dungeons do, so having them only in that dimension would make life in the overworld just a bit more enjoyable and terrain a bit less occasionally ugly. I think the overworld should be more of a place to explore and build rather than a place to track down and complete dungeons.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: don't have spells that scale on defensive values. Spells that scale on HP, MS, and armor have honestly been all over the place from update to update. Magic Burst has had its scaling flail all over the place, Soul Shred has absolutely pathetic range for a higher CD DoT setter, and Retribution is currently almost literally useless. If it is difficult to balance spells like this, then it may be better to just not have them. It may still be a good idea to have spells that consume portions of your HP or MS to cast, maybe even spells that exclusively require the latter to make MS builds more relevant, but I don't think it's a good idea to have anything scale on such values. They've all had problems and currently are all pretty universally weak, some more than others.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: make Bolt damage more universal. I think Bolt damage is a good mechanic for enforcing balance for certain things that may otherwise get out of hand. I also think it may be better to leave it able to be applied to things outside of just one theme, like the Storm tree in Dissolution or the Mage class or whatever in Resolution. Making something not scale on spell damage would be a good limiter if used intelligently, especially if it already scales on something else. For example, Flame Blade is really powerful and often does more damage than the spell you cast to trigger it. This is because it scales really high on your attack damage and also scales on spell damage on top of that. Bolt damage could also be used to make different hybrid spells, like non-attack spells that scale on attack damage really well but don't scale on spell damage, or an outright attack spell that does the same.

An example of the former would be a warrior having some kind of 'force of will' projectile they can fire as a non-attack spell, like a monk with a force palm, but that scales on their 'might' (attack damage) really well instead of having any spell damage scaling.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: make passive mobs not have M&S scaling. It's pointless for something that is literally unable to attack you to have M&S scaling. Literally all it does is make them take more hits to kill and make certain structures from MineColonies useless, such as the cowhand, as they cannot deal enough damage to do their job. Horses could be an exception, as they have a function to which stats would be relevant, but outside of that, I don't see the point of any passive mobs scaling with M&S.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: don't enforce long periods of downtime on spells. My own preference, and suggestion for others, is that if they cannot get a spell to 100% uptime, they should drop it. Combat is very often fast and hectic in this pack, and having a spell constantly on CD and unable to consistently help you doesn't seem like a good mechanic to me. If a spell needs to be balanced, I'd vastly prefer it get its actual stats changed, like its damage or range. Spells like Recharge are just universally ignored because of its massive 50% downtime, on a resource spell, not even a damage spell. I honestly don't like CD locking as a mechanic, and if a spell becomes broken when its CD is lowered by the mechanics available, then I believe it should either be balanced in another way or the mechanics that allow it to become so powerful balanced, as they are technically the root cause of the problem.

Recharge in particular is a very odd situation to me, as I don't think it's powerful enough to warrant such a harsh nerf. Resourceful and Blood Mage engines are already much more powerful than relying on mana, and curb stomping one of the only spells that can make a mana engine compete just seems like a very weird thing to do when mana is already that far behind.

[Phyllody]

Suggestion: make more healing spells that scale on the HP of the target. Healing spells have long had very large scaling issues with HP scaling far faster than their ability to replenish it, as well as lifesteal often being an objectively better choice, even after the new lifesteal cap was introduced. Healing spells with percentage scaling wouldn't have nearly as much of an issue remaining relevant, as their base would always be equally viable. If you don't want lower-level players to be able to effectively heal much higher-level ones, then perhaps make the percentage healed not only scale with the spell's level but your own as well. More lifesteal-adjacent spells would also be interesting to see, stuff like Life Siphon. Even spells that both heal you and do something else, such as damage things, but without that heal scaling on your damage, life Life Siphon does, would be neat to see, just to see more hybrid spells and variety in general. I noticed you added more of these with the release of Force and I like the idea.

Another option I thought of would be to provide some form of solid scaling to healing spells for them to more easily keep up with accelerating health values. I don't think it'd be wise to make them scale on defensive values (see suggestion 4 posts above this one) but having some healing spells scaling on mana may be nice to see, even scaling on energy to give a sort of 'using your innate vigor to replenish yourself and others' vibe. Maybe even something like a 'Second Wind' spell that scales on and consumes a lot of your energy to give a powerful short burst of health regen or a flat heal. You could even do all of the above for variety.

On another note, energy-based healing spells not requiring mana would be nice to see, if they're added at all that is. I really like how Force spells often don't require any mana, only requiring energy. I think more attack spells and other effects can use this, like some physically-oriented buffs taking from energy instead of mana or even a mix of both. I just like the idea.

[Phyllody]

Closing this because I'm an idiot and was unaware that there was a Github for Resolution. This has all been moved there.