I like the cooldown idea in general. I even don't mind including cool mechaincs like chance of negative effects if spell is cast before the cooldown wears off. Say if PC casts Acid Ball 3rd time in a row he could get significant chances to damage itself and equipment with acid too or even instead of.

But should cooldowns for pure spellcasters (Elementalists) be tweaked so that they're not punished for using weapon they're specialized in?

And our "Wish" example scares me. Once per 90 days!? Why would you want to kill Archmage, nearly the ultimate nearly-unreachable but still possible goal in game. Please don't touch it. Better remove it from the OP. One change in wishing system was already implemented and everyone regrets about it now.

Sorry, don't wanna hijack another thread... Let's move here.
Limiting Wish casting to one per 90 days makes it less desirable then wands of wishing even if it would cost zero mana and wouldn't have negative effects at all. For usual players of course, not for those who are going to dei of old age keeping wishing.
Could you think of a less severe penalties for it? E.g. make it malfunction with up to 60% chance if used more then once within 6-12 hours. And when malfunctions it can either just work as wishing for something else (first 30%), wishing for nothing (next 20%) or something bad can happen (last 10%) e.g. greater molochs could appear, allignment might change in an unperdictable way, stats might be altered, inventory partially destryed, etc.

Why would you want to make cooldown for it so large? +disallowing to cast a spell for even a short period of time could be disappointing in turn-based game.

Just for the record, if I ever give precise numbers, I am not proposing those numbers, they are not part of the idea, it is always just an example.

btw, When was 'regular' casting of wish spellbook ever more desirable to do than getting a wand of wishing?

I'll leave it up to the arch-mage experts to reconcile the idea with the preservation of arch-mage. It's not something I've come to know or love so I've no idea what I'm delivering a wrecking ball to.

Fwiw I'm more taken with my second proposal (upscale cost with each casting without leaving sufficient time inbetween, perhaps based on the duration inbetween castings, so if you cast every turn continuously you rack up huge penalties very quickly, but if you allow say, 1 or 2 turns inbetween, the penalty won't climb nearly as high).

It might make sense to have spells with varying *energy costs*. I'm not talking about pp, I'm talking about the resource that determines how soon an actor can act again. It seems like that would be a lot easier to implement. You could even display that cost in the spell menu next to the other info about spells.

That might go a long way towards balancing wizards.

Well, agree, almost never. To be honest I wanted spellbook of wish more than a wand or a ring only when I was trying to make an archmage. No ordinary character can cast it even if he was able to learn it somehow.

Wish is probably the only edge-case spell. No spell has so much risk and negative effects as this one (if any other spell could have negative effects at all). I think classic ball and bolt spells should make much better samples of what you're proposing. Anyway I'm sleeping safe as long as you're not proposing to actually disallow wishing for a huge amounts of time. :)

What exactly is the goal for this? All spells? To make mages harder? Would you add stamina to fighters so every time they attack, it adds more energy to their next attack too? If I'm in a red dragon vault and my ice bolt costs 8pp, and I cast it 5 times now it's up to 50pp per casting so I just have to teleport and wait for it to naturally return to a reasonable level again?

Not sure what the purpose is outside of that one specific scenario for teleporting. Cooldowns is the fundamentals of TOME's combat; however, TOME doesn't have things like random spellbooks or limited casting - you get spells at defined intervals and they last forever, allowing you to prepare and account for the cooldown limitation (that is, if you are screwed because of cooldowns, your build needs work).

The goal is to make you think about options and vary your strategy rather than spam a single option. And to make spellcasters feel slightly more in alignment with other classes in terms of difficulty.

Just as an example of a benefit: It gives you a reason to alternate between different elemental bolts and balls for example beyond the situational cases where the enemy has a sensitivity; a reason to value learning all of them and keeping them trained. Or to occasionally switch to melee or missiles.

The trouble with not giving very concrete examples is that the images it might be conjuring to people's minds might be very different from what I'm thinking of and give the wrong impression. ("Oh, that's what he means; I don't like that"). Hopefully that's not the case. Short term spam should have little to no impact except for certain hard-to-balance spells like the wilderness teleport, or as another throwaway example I gave: wish.

So I'm trying to think of some pseudo-code algorithm for how the pp-cost version would be implemented. Unfortunately my math sucks.

(Incidentally, maybe it could work on the inverse, leave a spell alone for a significant period and you get a pp cost reduction.)


I would not add it to anything that has no fall-back save for ... falling back and, as you put it:
The emphasis is on management and tracking ones resources. If there is nothing to manage, then yes, the feature sucks.

How so?

Read the RFE.

Again, read the RFE. Did anyone even come close to mentioning that? No, of course not, fighters aren't OP. You are just making things up now. Are you hoping people will confuse the irrational argument you are making with something the OP actually said? You might as well have said "Are you trying to say that now it will be impossible to save Khevelaster!!!???"

No. You wouldn't. Teleport would have a cooldown also. That's the whole point. Really, read at least a little of this discussion. You are just making things up again.

What do you *think* the purpose of this is? You are basically pretending no one has explained anything in this topic, even though all your questions have been addressed already.

Yeah I kinda see part of the goal, though I am worried about other things which may or may not be an issue depending on implementation. To give an idea of what goes through my mind when I see "encourage a more balanced spell casting rotation/discourage spamming", I think: ADOM is a game with a ton of monsters, and while that's an interesting idea for regular dungeon levels, how do you deal with vault or bug temple - will it make it more fun/balanced or just make it tedious/slower? Could encouraging spell variety unintentionally cause even more homogeneous classes (you're doing Darkforge and your lightning bolt is limited somehow, so you use melee/missile attacks in the downtime)? Will you be severely hindered if you find 3 of the same spellbooks in the early game with no other spell options?

So, I guess I was actually hoping for more of a concrete idea to get an idea of what all the potential implications are. As far as things like Teleport or Atlas, I'd be in favor of something like this, and I don't really see any downsides. The smaller, spammed spells I'm not so sure about without more info.

I don't mean for the darkforge situation to ever occur unless one is fairly careless. Once you learn the patterns, then, like most things in this game, it's more something that is affecting your behaviour without you actually seeing the negative consequences of not behaving that way. Only complacency or forgetfulness or a deliberate conscious decision to spam for a key situation would push the penalties into the stratosphere.

(And just to reiterate once again: I prefer the pp idea, because rather than the game simply saying 'no, you can't cast it yet' it gives a logical incitation to hold back from casting without forbidding it; just saying 'if you do, there are consequences'. Still, I'll leave the OP unedited since my preference for it may not be shared).

I think if you pit this feature against vaults, it fails, but I think that the flaw lies with vaults. They aren't very good, just row upon row of enemies like little soldiers or dominos waiting to be knocked over. I'd like to see more devious layouts with traps that trigger the opening of pockets of enemies (kind of like that one place in the ice queen domain, but smaller and more of them), or shifting walls, enemies that fall into groups and adopt new A.I behaviour to surround you. I don't know how far it can be taken but I think more can be done than what we have.
I didn't mind what he said. I think it was pertinent to compare it to the fighter, there is a respect in which they are similar and it's a harmless experiment to proof the idea with questions. Even if we know the important differences between the fighter example and how it works in the proposed idea, there is no harm in articulating them to avert the risk of just assuming it is understood.

Hey, I think this idea rocks! Here's some math, I think this is kinda what you were thinking?

Base pp cost=B Temporary pp cost=T spell effectiviness/5=E #turns passed=P
so how about T-P(E+1) is the formula to return to normal
but every time you cast a spell the value of T is multiplied by T(2) whereas initially T=B

So for instance you cast fire bolt with base cost of 7 the new cost is 14, if your effectiveness Is 1 (or E=1), then in 4 rounds it returns to normal. But then 2 rounds later you cast it again, it's new cost is now 20.

Guys, @auricbond, what do you think about more creative penalties, chances of critical failures with negative effects specific per spell if spell is spammed too much? One still would be able to cast taking tbe risk.

Hey I'm a guy too. ;)

I think it's a variation on the same theme; not sure which I prefer, I think it would depend on the type of drawback. I think your idea might be a little less lore friendly or lack justification. Maybe it could be an alternative to the system I suggested for a future 'wild mage' class. ;)

Lol, mentioned you specifically since it's your thread ;)

Hapro, it's not that I don't respect your opinion about stuff like this, it's just that over and over again in RFE's we hear reasons that they won't work which seem to assume that they will be implemented with a total absence of judgment or critical thought. I mean, the things you have pointed out *would* be real problems, but at the same time you have to keep in mind that whoever posts RFE's cannot cover every possible obscure consequence of implementation, and so to some extent you have to give them and the creator the benefit of the doubt in those areas.

I just wish that people would contribute by finding ways that new ideas *would* work, instead of reflexively finding reasons that they wouldn't.

Another thing to point out is that if you had posted this RFE I would be defending your ideas just as vigorously. It's not that I have anything against you in particular, I just know that this game needs new ideas.