by Nybbles Tue Mar 19, 2013 12:39 pm
i think that part of the reason why magic lost so much of it's versatility is due to pyromancy. previously, the pyromancy school of magic were integrated within the sorcery school of magic. having been separated the way that it was, sorcery was left with allot of spells that are essentially variations on a single theme (firing blue bolts of energy in a straight line). not including an equivalent to the talisman of beasts, limits sorcerers even further.
perhaps pyromancy spells should be reintegrated into the sorcery school of magics or we bring back the talisman of beasts. we wouldn't need dark magic if a sorcerer could cast fire balls without having to equip two separate catalysts at the same time.
i don't personally like having attunement slots and having to dump a bunch of points into a stat so i can get more castings of a single spell. which also comes with the fact that i have to play through NG+ to get another copy of the spell i already have. there is enough farming in this game already, i don't want to farm copies of spells as well.
i would prefer a mana system where dumping points into a stat meant that i could get more castings of all the spells i know. of course you would still need attunement slots, but you would need fewer of them because you not wasting slots on multiple copies of one spell … and i wouldn't have to waste several hours to beat the game multiple times so i can have enough copies of the one decent spell so i can cast it a useful number of times.
not only would this save time and forgo the need to complete yet another play-through. it would also help to add versatility to my caster. instead of two copies of one spell i could have two completely different spells for instance … thats versatility!
i also like the idea of mana because it would add a different flavor of strategy other than cast the same spell over and over until it runs out or i kill you. but it needs some method of refreshing, or regenerating over time. having a regenerating mana bar i think would be better than spice or manstus (estus but for mana). this would mean that a sorcerer would have to manage their casting the same way that a soldier has to manage how they swing their sword.
stamina regen was over done in Dark Souls the same way that health regen was over done in Demon's Souls. so i think there should be a limit on how fast mana should regenerate for the same reasons that there should be a limit on how fast stamina can regenerate. mana should regenerate slower than stamina though. you could have as many items as you want in the game that increase regeneration speeds, just don't have them stackable … problem solve'ed.
this also opens up room for a variety of upgraded paths or tweaks to the existing ones. occult could add a stamina stealing quality or possibly a health stealing one (but not both), bring back crescent weapons but have it steal mana instead of regenerate it over time … and so on.
if mana isn't your thing and you feel that limited casting is the way to go, how would you feel about having a few basic spells that had unlimited castings? perhaps low damage, unscalable or whatever other limits on them but you could cast them as many times as you liked. though you'd still have to attune it to use it. if a soldier can stab you an unlimited number of times then why can't a sorcerer blast you an unlimitd number of times.
or perhaps i am looking at this all wrong and magic was never intended to be anything more than supplemental. to used in conjunction with melee and not just by itself.
EDIT: if nothing else is done, i think the power of sorcery should be tweaked, pyromancy feels right to me while many sorcery spells either feel OP because they OHKO pretty much everything or they are completely useless … and do we really need 4 versions of one spell and two versions of another? no we don't!
Regen would make my Forest Build beastly
