AveeDiscussion through Suggestion.
#1
Hello, peers. It's me, Avee.

After a bit of thought and looking at recent spell additions and the general status of spells as a whole, I've come to personally recognize something that while I don't believe is a huge issue now, might be looked at with a healthy degree of caution.

More and more spells seem to be popping up that have some function beyond just simply damaging an opponent, while I don't think this is a bad thing, and I do actively encourage these kinds of things into the future, I believe the time has come where we take a step back, and consider what might best benefit balance moving forward.

Debuffs/Status effects make for interesting combos and theblike which enable the big damage numbers we all like to see. There is nothing shameful about using stuns or slows or roots or blinds to better enable you to deliver damage. However, I believe more counterplay should be added to compensate for these features. It has become much easier to land beams and whips and such than it was in the past, almost to the point where unless you are lagging, or your enemy is -just that responsive- to where, for all intents and purposes, it's not terribly difficult to do. (This isn't shaming people who use these spells, it's just my opinion.) This isn't even accounting for the number of homings and such that stun, root, confuse, etc. Naturally, you have some spells which have the "semi-homing" effect, and whilst this is nice and cute and makes for interesting stories, I am of the opinion that there is currently enough in play to make these hit fairly reliably if you plan for it. (Again, this isn't shaming people who use these spells, it's just my opinion.)

Now then, what do I mean when I am discussing counter play? Simple. Crystal Aura is a passive counterplay to builds which rely heavily on stun combos to do their damage. Crystal's blue crystals enable a more 'active' counterplay to various status effects. Yet, not everyone wants to build into Crystal, in exchange for this counterplay, you are losing a bit of overall damage, yes this is slightly mitigated by red crystals, but that is outside of the scope of my point.

I'm of the opinion that instead of removing or adjusting these spells and the status effects they cause, we allow other spells, newer and more exciting spells to come in and compensate for these things. Things beyond the generic cleanse, which while a good spell, only casually hardwaves these effects. Instead, counterplay, as the name entails seeks to punish over-use of a specific status effect, to the detriment of builds that over-rely on the, for lack of a better word, handicap that multiple stuns and roots and such gives the user. (This isn't a dig against metal users, I promise!!)

Examples of this would be something akin to the spell 'Spectral Sight' being adjusted to give reasonable stats when used, but having an immunity to blinds, and infact providing an active boost to FM when the user is actively blinded, this could be thrown in the summoning tree if/when it is completed.

The idea here is that these spells are fairly niche, to prevent an oversaturation of counterplay, but allowing players to adjust themselves accordingly to whatever the 'meta' might happen to be, thus diffusing that meta before it actually becomes dominant, and we have 30 players with suspiciously similar builds running about.

The main problem I am having with concepts such as these is fitting them into what are considered to be fairly populated trees.

Knowing that the name of the game here isn't mitigating the debuff, but actively turning a bad situation into a good one, I'm curious to see what kinds of concepts people might come up with, as having been racking my brain about this idea, I've only been able to mull up a single idea, which is the spectral sight concept.

Thanks for reading, if in fact you have, and please, discuss below, suggest below. I'm not -promising- anything, just trying to encourage discussion about what I consider to be a strange quirk of the 'balance' as it exists at the moment.
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