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CH4OT1C! -> Ice Necromancer Cavalry and the Issues with Spellcaster lean (10/16/2021 17:16:55)
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For those of you who are unaware, Ice necromancer cavalry receives two forms of “elecomp”, or elemental compensation. This is damage to compensate for being forced to use a skill or a spell attached to an item that defends against either that same element or an aligned one e.g. a fire skill in a fire armour. Using this skill/spell effectively would normally entail either using it against an enemy resistant to that element, or using an inappropriate armour for that fight. In both cases, damage compensation is warranted for the poor elemental affinity.
For ice necro, the first of these sources was in-built compensation for using an ice element spell in an ice armour. This is commonplace and has been included in balance standards for skills/spells attached to armours/shields for years. The second source is from the Spellcaster Lean. The armour deals *0.8 damage on regular weapon attacks and takes *1.25 on damage received from enemy monsters. However, the staff have unofficially confirmed that the Ice Necromancer Cavalry armour has been nerfed because it was seen to be getting double elecomp for its built-in ice spell, which was deemed as unintended. Instead, it now only receives the damage multiplier from the Spellcaster Lean.
Once again, this change raises the many problems affiliated with the Spellcaster Lean. It’s important to note that this armour did not receive double elecomp. It received singular elecomp and then extra damage sourced from the Spellcaster Lean. You pay for this latter boost via the aforementioned modifications to damage intake/output. In practice, Spellcaster Lean has never been calculated properly, and instead just uses FO elecomp values instead.
As I have mentioned in the past, this method of calculating Spellcaster Lean already causes problems. It faces the same situation as standard elecomp, fighting either a resistant enemy or using an inappropriate armour. This handicap does not receive compensation, making the trade-off grossly inefficient. This is considerably worsened by this most recent change and has a number of dangerous implications:
i). Any skills/spells benefitting from Spellcaster Lean cannot receive elecomp, making them strictly inferior to their peers. Other skills e.g. Basketbreath from TorontoSaurus Rex Rider receive elecomp without also dealing with the downsides of Spellcaster Lean. I appreciate that the boost doesn't just apply to spells attached to the armor itself, but in a world in which FO players are looking for the strongest nuke, this is still going to cause problems. In addition, I would also argue that this is insufficient to compensate for the lean's downsides.
ii). Following this logic through, it disincentivises mages to use MP. We already have a major issue with build identity, with mages often preferring to use skills above spells due to their versatility. A lot of these issues will have to wait until a stat update to be fixed, but this new precedent will invariably make the problem a lot harder to deal with. It’s only going to make the gap wider.
iii). On a broader note, how far does this new precedent reach, and where do we draw the line? Which items will be able to receive elecomp? For example, bloodmages receive a +50% damage boost. This is lower than the elecomp from Ice necromancer Cavalry, it still represents a considerable chunk of additional damage.
With this in mind, I’d like to propose a change to Spellcaster Lean agreed upon by both @gavers and myself. This fix is centred around the premise of an omni-elemental boost:
Proposed Fix
1 standard battle lasts for 10 turns. During this time, you are expected to deal 2 turns of spell damage, plus 8 turns of regular weapon damage (which is 75% melee for mages). During all of these turns, you are expected to take *1.25 damage. Our aim is to find the damage compensating for this gap between damage intake and output.
quote:
0.75 * 1.25 = 0.9375
0.75 * 0.8 = 0.6
We would expect a mage in an FO armour to be dealing 93.75% Melee with regular weapon attacks. Instead, they deal 60% melee. Spells traditionally do not get a damage bonus for being in an FO armour, and when they are tied to an armour they get additional elecomp to compensate. As such, I feel like I can exclude this bonus here. This represents an overall difference of 33.75% melee per turn. We can multiply this up by 8 turns, then divide it by 2, as we would expect to cast two spells within a 10 turn period:
quote:
0.3375 * 8 / 2 = 1.35
…or a 135% melee spell boost. This translates to a damage boost of 67.5%.
Additional comments from @gavers (see them here):
quote:
Since we assume 16 turns of dealing 0.8/1.25 of the expected damage, we have two ways to compensate for that:
1). Use the baseline 100% expected Melee (which is what it should do)
2. Use a more conservative compensation assuming a baseline of 75% Melee since this is Mage oriented. I don't mind even taking the conservative approach, since it's going to be a pretty big number regardless.
3). Let's calculate the total penalty:
You should be dealing 75*16*1.25% (Since the baseline is a FO lean) Melee per turn, or 1500% Melee.
However, you're dealing 75*16*0.8% which is 960% Melee.
That's 540% Melee saved up, split over 4 turns is 135% Melee, or a *1.675 "elecomp".
So, overall, using the conservative approach, spellcaster lean should be dealing *1.675 universal spell damage. This is an intentionally underpowered approach though, with the nerfed assumption serving as the "inefficiency cost". Using the regular balance approach the same way we'll be getting *1.9 universal spell damage. If we want this to be element specific, we'll have to tack regular elecomp on top of it, so we'll get either:
*1.675*[Elecomp]
or
*1.9*[Elecomp]
We appreciate that this sums to a large amount of damage (and, hence, why our attempt is as conservative as possible). I can personally see a number of ways to reduce this issue further:
i). Have this bonus be fuelled into cost rather than damage. One could apply a Regain mana status proportional to the mp input.
ii). You could reduce the disparity between intake and output. For example, suppose it were *0.8 output and *1 intake, the boost would be reduced to:
quote:
0.15*8/2 = 0.6
This is equivalent to 60% melee or a 30% universal spell damage boost.
Hopefully, I've managed to convince you that, although Spellcaster Lean is currently broken, there are a number of ways that it can be fixed.
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