Grace Xisthrith
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I'm not that worried about the whole imbue thing, since I think imbues are a distraction and the elelocks / weapon based skills are a much more common application. Melee and ranged on attack status weapons (usually) can inflict statuses on attacks of any element by any method, magic spell weapons with status (usually) cannot. That is a difference. I'm not really worried about it, I think the on attack effects not being element locked lets players do a lot of fun stuff, removing all cross element status inflictions would definitely limit player power, which I don't think is a bad thing, but I do think it's a good mechanic overall in terms of gameplay decisions and fun to be able to use status weapons in any situation, particularly if they scale off the original element. Objectively, removing that would decrease player power, which again, isn't a bad thing necessarily given how strong the player is (although I'd target the base power of the player that lets them basic attack through a vast majority of bosses if I were gonna start limiting player power, but that's unrelated)
I'm gonna use the thread being titled "mages are treated different than rangers and warriors" to start a related discussion. Apologies if it's against policy, but it does seem very close to the current discussion, and I'm interested to hear different people's thoughts
Something more interesting I think is discussing magic weapons be treated different than melee and ranged weapons. If you look at the most recent Frostvale Weapons, the magic weapon pays 40% melee SP and the melee and ranged weapons pay 15% and 25% in damage. From a basic usability perspective, for most people it's much easier to stack panic with the melee and ranged weapons, because you don't have to dump a boatload of MP every time you want the status. There are of course efficient spells and low level autohit spells that complicate this, but I think those factors shouldn't be considered for basic item design most of the time (maybe efficient spells should be in a lot of situations, but it doesn't seem like they have been in the past so IDK if they'll start now). Regardless, even in those cases, the magic weapon is still much more inconvenient than the melee and ranged, doing comparable damage (or much less with the low level auto hit scenario) and paying more resources to get the same status power.
In short what I hope to discuss is the balance between using really optimal ways to pay for statuses on mage spell boosting items, and using really standard / suboptimal ways to pay for statuses on mage spell boosting items, and figure out where staff should go, since I think this light panic magic weapon is just objectively outclassed by the basic melee and ranged weapon.
There's a couple methods of payment that staff use to inflict statuses / pay for effects on spells, I'll list the ones I remember off hand here, in a loosely Optimal to less optimal order:
MRM: 5x the output on however much MRM you pay, since MRM is paid every turn and its assumed one cast every five turns
Weapon damage: 4x the output for the same reason except you don't attack on the turn you spellcast
Paying 0 Proc Bonus: 4x the output for the same reason as weapon damage
Spell damage: For a lot of status effects, reducing spell damage doesn't really inconvenience the player, or it's a tradeoff that's heavily worth considering. For example, if I'm casting burning question to build a burn, which already trades half its damage, I probably won't mind trading another third of its damage with Dragonhead Archon (I forget how much it pays tbh might be 42.5%) to inflict more burn.
Indirect HP costs: MRM loss and elevuln effects on the player increase the damage taken, but often times it's by a lot less than a flat HP cost in realistic gameplay scenarios.
Flat Resource Cost: Paying extra SP or MP for an effect, while it can be powerful, generally the player doesn't get as much benefit out of the payment compared to the other sources, in my opinion. Definitely arguable for this to be more convenient than spell damage or indirect costs, but it's my opinion.
--other methods I forgot: I think I forgot a method of two they've used but I can't remember it now
I don't really know what the staff should do here. If they balance solely by the turn model then there's no issue with trading weapon damage or MRM, so there's no reason they can't do that, but obviously the game isn't played by the turn model, and it doesn't take into account MP regen sources or lower than 125% melee cost spells.
That being said, throwing a fat SP cost on every magic spellbooster that only goes even compared to melee and magic weapons doesn't feel like an effective solution, it's generally worse, and for players without somewhat optimized setups (or Lorithia forbid... adventurers!) who can't restore resources as easily as experienced players, it kinda makes it a hard item to use, particularly when compared with the melee and ranged version.
Those are my thoughts. I think spell damage is problematic because of efficient spells, I don't know if there's a coding solution to detect efficient spell usage and increase the payment (like pay 25% of spell damage for a full cost spell but pay more % damage if a spell is cheaper) that's realistic to implement with the amount of dev time available for making items, but that would solve my problems with spell damage. I think that weapon damage and MRM should be reserved for when staff want to make a really good item or explore a new mechanic (for example if they wanted to drop a package that say, permanently reduced monster stats that mages could use, and was the first set to do something like this, they could consider making the magic weapon pay weapon damage to make the set more attractive, so that more people will use the creative and unique mechanic and they can get more feedback on how it feels before bringing it to gold items for everyone to enjoy).
But all in all, I don't really like that the magic weapon feels worse to use than the melee and ranged weapon by a notable margin (in my opinion, and I should say I've only spent a little while playing around with it in game as a disclaimer), and this has happened with other items to lesser degrees (or to similar degrees, looking at the April Fools water weapons last year), and I'm curious where a balance staff could take on magic status weapons is where it's not wildly optimal, like paying weapon damage, but doesn't feel worse than melee ranged options.
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