03-23-2023, 02:40 AM
I think I speak for (almost) everyone when I say going OOM is a terrible mechanic that's gone and should stay gone. Winning by removing your opponent's ability to play is the opposite of fun and engaging design. It's a death sentence in any verb it occurs for the person affected, and no one wants to regress back to the ancient meta where you either dipped into cosmic recharge, or accepted your defeat ahead of time against anyone who did.
There are ways to give absorption magic (the reason why this topic is being broached in the first place) a unique edge without reinventing the wheel.
Thankfully, there's already a mechanic present in the game that perfectly reflects the total depletion of someone's mana: anti-magic restraints. A flat 20% AP debuff. If OOM were to be reintroduced as a more frequent possibility, it should reflect similarly. Did the absorption user drain your entire MP bar? A twelve second 20-30 AP debuff that bounces you back to a near full mana bar after the duration, thereby conferring them a considerable reward and advantage without completely neutering you.
If the mana bar is brought to the fore again, perhaps it could serve as a gauge for potency--decreasing the power of attacks proportional to its fullness--rather than a timer for your loss.
The game should always look to be more streamlined. Merging magic damage and melee into one stat was one of those pivotal decisions that improved the game and build diversity by a vast margin. Lending more emphasis to stats like magic capacity in the manner proposed is a step backwards. It adds more convolution to the combat by adding another health bar, another variable in an already noisy system, more things for newer players to worry about, and becomes a stat only relevant to two ether trees. It's poor direction, in my opinion, to have people invest their stat points into something on the off chance they encounter the odd absorption user.
If OOM becomes a thing again, make it root and/or stun the player for 20 seconds. It's functionally the same.
There are ways to give absorption magic (the reason why this topic is being broached in the first place) a unique edge without reinventing the wheel.
Thankfully, there's already a mechanic present in the game that perfectly reflects the total depletion of someone's mana: anti-magic restraints. A flat 20% AP debuff. If OOM were to be reintroduced as a more frequent possibility, it should reflect similarly. Did the absorption user drain your entire MP bar? A twelve second 20-30 AP debuff that bounces you back to a near full mana bar after the duration, thereby conferring them a considerable reward and advantage without completely neutering you.
If the mana bar is brought to the fore again, perhaps it could serve as a gauge for potency--decreasing the power of attacks proportional to its fullness--rather than a timer for your loss.
The game should always look to be more streamlined. Merging magic damage and melee into one stat was one of those pivotal decisions that improved the game and build diversity by a vast margin. Lending more emphasis to stats like magic capacity in the manner proposed is a step backwards. It adds more convolution to the combat by adding another health bar, another variable in an already noisy system, more things for newer players to worry about, and becomes a stat only relevant to two ether trees. It's poor direction, in my opinion, to have people invest their stat points into something on the off chance they encounter the odd absorption user.
If OOM becomes a thing again, make it root and/or stun the player for 20 seconds. It's functionally the same.