Overall thoughts on balance in SKUME for mage
Happy new year everyone. As a new years gift, I have summed up my overall thoughts on balance on Solomons Keep before you go completely dormant. I hope this helps a bit.
Items
Overall thought: items should not be too impactful and rare for it may force people to grind which makes it less appealing for light players. However, items should also be unique to make it feel useful. Otherwise, I cannot say more yet since I do not know what kind of item will be out in SKUME.
XP items: too op. needs to be removed.
orb pickup range: too useless. also needs to be removed.
Water skills
Overall thought: No problem yet so far
Air(lightning) skills
Overall thought: this one is also fine except disintegrate.
Disintegrate: very minimal impact. requires complete rework that is useful and different from hurricane.
Fire skills
Overall thought: fire-only build gets easily get outclassed by other builds. require better late game for fire-only builds.
Ember to imp: it is not a bad spell but too redundant and looks like alternative immolation. needs rework to make is feels different and has different strength.
Burn: buffing this may help out fire-only build a bit.
Firewalker: this needs huge buff to be useful.
Ring of Fire: it is not good enough to be useful in late game. the damage part of this skill needs buff.
Ether skill
Overall thought: The main problem with ether is that it lacks a characteristic compared to other. IMO ether should be more like support-ish spell: something that relies on other spells to bring full potential like various secondary spells or spell welding.
Smart Missile: Not impactful at all after level 1. Needs to be reworked to fit the characteristic of ether. (I think making enemy to receive increased damage on attack other than basic attack would work)
Call Leviathan: It is a decent in early game but it gets outclassed by magic storm and primary spells. It needs an enhancement that makes it viable in late game.
Other skills
Thoughts on mana skills: The main problem is that mana up is very ineffective and battle mage is too effective. To make sure people use both mana up and battle mage, battle mage should not affect secondary spells to force players to get mana up to use high level secondary spells.
Thoughts on secondary spells: right now, flash freeze, magic shield, teleport, prismatic shock, magic storm, and stoneskin is the only viable secondary spell in late game. This means, rest of the secondary spells are outclassed by these secondary spells unless these meta secondaries don't appear. Considering there are limited amount of skills you can get, non-meta skills(acid rain, call leviathan, earthquake, magic circle, ether drain, fire wall, firewalker, magic trap, phasing, planewalker, ring of fire, regenerate) should be buffed or altered to be more competeable and prevent rigid build path. (for call comet, mindstar, raise golems... ...i don't feel like these need changes)
Thoughts on welding spells: Besides the earth related stuff and steam jet, they all seems to be fine. Steam jet just need projectile deflection, Meteor Swarm needs complete rework, hailstones is fine, grounded bolt is very dull and boring, and ethereal boulder is basically an inferior version of piercing magic missile.
Comments
Not yet my friend, still in the making.
This is just pepper wanting to lay down his thoughts on the different classes and hear out our thoughts as well.