Balance (mostly PvP, but also somewhat PvE)

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unmerged(416891)

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Nov 28, 2011
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  • Magicka
While I really enjoy PvP in this game, I find it too much of a "rock paper scissors" game, and don't like the fact that most spell combinations are pretty useless. Additionally, there are some items that are way better than others, and select few magicks that are way better than all the other relatively-crappy ones.


As most of us know, there are currently some spells that are simply way better than any similar variation of the. Giving some select examples:

Ice Wall of Death

Ice wall of death (Ice+cold+shield+lightning+arcane), mostly used on a weapon, is the probably the most powerful short to mid-range damage dealer in the game. While easily defended with the appropriate elemental shield, I find it rather silly that when the opponent is not using that shield, and is in range, there is no better spell to use. Both lightning shocks and arcane explosions are way too powerful. Lightning wall elements should probably consumed once they shock (and possibly have their damage adjusted so that they don't become useless), and arcane wall explosions need to deal a bit less damage.

Ice Sword

Ice sword is again a short to mid-range 1-shotter if the enemy is not defending with rock/ice armor.

Giving it 1/2-physical 1/2-cold damage would mean it becomes survive-able if you have either cold or rock shield up, but not be perfectly countered by either.

Shields

Rock shields and shields that protect against arcane+lighting+whatever are also way too hard to counter (basically you must counter the elemental shield with ice sword and counter the rock shield with ice wall of death, though rocks obviously also work, tough I'll get to discussing rocks later as they are a more complicated problem). More importantly than how hard they are to counter - There is simply no reason to use any other shield. Refreshing is fast enough, aura radius is meaningless, and adding more elements is free as long as you're fast enough and aren't adding the same element twice.

Multi-element shields should probably just have reduced effectiveness by not providing full immunity. For example, a fire shield could give 100% fire resistance, but fire+lightning shield would give only 80% resistance to both, while fire+lightning+arcane shield would only give 70% resistance to all 3. Conjuring multiples of the same element for the shield would reduce the penalty, but not eliminate it, so for example 3 fire 1 lighting shield would give 95% fire resistance but only 80% lightning resistance. Of course those numbers are just examples and can be messed with for best balance.

Rock/ice shields should only defend against physical damage, but can be mixed with any other element (though, of course, cut the resistance down like any other mixed elemental shield). Currently mixing non-fire/cold elements doesn't seem to do anything, while mixing a single fire/cold element gives protection to that element for unlimited duration, making you vulnerable only to the other element and overpowered spells. Possibly slightly buff the shield to compensate, though I'm not sure if it's even necessary. Maybe just slightly reduce the movement speed penalty.


Element Mixing VS Stacking

Mixing elements is encouraged too strongly. Currently there are 2 primary game mechanics that encourage it, and I think both could use some adjusting:

1. Spell effectiveness:

Charging the same element on a spell isn't nearly as good as mixing. While in principal this is a good mechanic, it is greatly overdone for some spells. For example, ice sword, ice AOE and rock shield seem to have reasonable scaling with more of the same element, while healing (at least the self version) doesn't scale at all, and some spells only scale in radius and not damage. There are a lot of spells that need to have this aspect adjusted, so I'll list a few examples.

Fire/Arcane/Cold ball and fire/cold sprays: They (or at least the balls) seem to only scale in range. While this is good, some small damage increase would be a good idea. This is on top of sprays starting at way too short of a range and maxing out a bit too short too. Charging up more rocks doesn't seem to do anything - it should increase the damage! Rocks should increase damage more than the element itself, since they don't increase the AOE, but still not be a very large increase. Additionally, ball spells could actually get some small direct impact damage that would be increased by adding more rock elements (please correct me if this exists already, as I haven't noticed it but also haven't thoroughly tested it). Of course mixing elements here gives a direct damage addition, making them much much stronger than any single element variation, and overall deal too much damage (especially that steam+arcane ball).

Self healing not scaling makes no sense. Charging up multiple life elements puts you at a greater risk, and should reward you with a bigger heal! In the end (after all balance changes), stacking life up to 5 and then healing should provide more HP per second than just casting heal with 1 life element multiple times, to compensate for the extra risk you need to take in order to use the 5 life element heal.

Elemental shields scaling in duration and radius would be interesting if mixing different elements in a shield would receive appropriate nerfing. Currently doubling up on the same element is completely useless because you could instead just make yourself immune to yet another element. One possible idea is making a single-element shield heal you rather than just protect you, but for a small percentage. For mixed shields I already gave an example for how charging up on the same element twice can be made useful (reduce mixing penalty).

2. Conjuration speed:

Conjuring any additional element takes 0 time, while there is actually a delay for charging up on the same element! While I do think it's cool that the point of the game is to create cool mixes, this combined with #1 goes overboard, completely blowing any idea of using a single element out of the water. If conjuring elements would always grant a delay, then mixed spells might still sometimes be more powerful, but not nearly as much. In fact, conjuring is already pretty fast even with the delay, and could slightly be slowed down (perhaps made 1.2~1.5x slower), to make the game a bit more tactical and a bit less about speed. In any case, applying the same single-element delay to multiple elements will make the player have to think whether he actually wants to conjure a 5 element spell, or maybe just go along with 1-2 elements and fire it up. With some adjustments to casting and casting speed mechanics, this could still keep multiple-element spells very useful.


Conjuration and Casting Mechanics (spamming)

The last point leads me to talk about the spamming issue. Currently, you can actually start conjuring your next spell while still playing the casting animation of the last one! This is especially bad with fast cast spells, mostly ball spells but also AOE spells. It makes the game very dependent on your ability to spam rather than your ability to pick the right spells at the right time and aim them properly, and encourages you to use spells that are quick to conjure (currently mostly arcane+steam ball and its friends, with some occasional ice AOE).

Slowing down the casting animation for the problematic spell types and delaying element conjuration can both prevent spamming, slow down the game a little, and if done properly also encourage using complicated spells when you can afford it but using simple spells when you simply must cast a spell *right now*.

To make things more user-friendly, trying to conjure elements "too fast" should "queue" the next element to be conjured as soon as the game allows it to, and give some sort of minor visual sign (anything will do) when all elements have been conjured, and if possible, also show what elements are going to be conjured. For exmaple, if I quickly click 5 water and 5 cold elements, I will see 1 water element normally, then next to it 4 faded water elements and next to them 5 faded cold elements. As the delay passes, more of the "queued" elemenets will become unfaded as they are conjured. Trying to cast any spell while conjuring will simply cast it with whatever have been conjured so far, ignoring and erasing the rest of the queue. That way you will not have to actually conjure elements in any specific rhythm even though there is a delay.

Slowing down conjuration speed will also fix some problems with the magicks, but not completely, which leads me to the next topic.


Magicks

Some are completely useless, at least against players, while few are powerful on a game-changing level. I like having magicks giving extra flavour to the game, but I don't like them being spammed or never used at all. Some magicks will be automatically balanced by introducing the delay for conjuring different elements, but not all of them.

All "global" magicks (ex: rain, time warp) seem rather useless in PvP, since they hurt you just as much as the other guy (who can shield against them just like you). Not sure how to adjust those since the problem is in their concept.

Some are simply not very useful even though their concept is cool, such as grease, phoenix, summon death or vortex. They need to be adjusted, so that they are more easily used in a way that will actually benefit you against the opponent. Again, not too sure how to actually improve them, though making summon death less luck-based is a good start.

Some are extremely powerful, specifically haste, thunder bolt and fear. Summons (for magicks that would be elementals and zombies) can be extremely annoying to deal with.

Haste: Reduce speed and duration. Possibly increase the duration of the casting animation slightly.

Thunder bolt: While its main overpowered part is the damage, if it dealt less damage it would become useless. Instead, it would probably be best to simply slow down its casting animation (combined with not being able to conjure elements while the casting animation is playing, making it much less spam-able and easier to defend against with an appropriate shield). It should be slow enough to give you time to cast a lightning shield with at least half a second to spare for reaction time. Maybe even give it a more unique animation. It also shouldn't knockdown "heavy" targets.

Fear: Reduce duration, and probably range as well.

I might have missed some magicks that I have less experience with, but I hope the general idea is clear.


Weapons and Staves

Some weapons simply deal terrible damage. Damage and attack speed of such weapons should be increased! I have not yet experienced with all weapons, so I can't really make a list of all the overpowered/underpowered ones, but I know enough to tell they need some major balancing. Especially the firearms, with weapons like the RPD and M60 being monsters, and M16 being a pretty evil killer itself. And don't even get me started about that RPG, which really needs to reduce damage to 1800, reduce indirect damage even more, slightly increase reload time, and remove knockdown against heavy targets, and be changed to 1/2-fire 1/2-physical.

For staves there are obvious stuff like the double HP staff. I also don't really like the staves that have powerful effects on very long cooldowns. I find staves like the staff of liberty (with the grenades, though the AOE in which they kill in 1 shot might need some slight reduction), or epic staff (though I think its +damage should just be constant and not activated) much more interesting, and it would be nice if most staves would be brought to about the same power as those staves.


Robes

Some robes are just way too awesome! Stuff like decent physical resistance and increased HP are way too good compared to the life resistance or even immunity, or a weakness to some random element. Robes should have flavor, but not overpowerness. Epic robe's life resistance could work better to balance it if the healing ice wall nerfed (both through slowing down element conjuring and by mine/wall changes discussed later).

The vietman soldier robe is a nice example for a middle-of-the-road robe, where you get a nice firearm and staff but no cool attributes.

Rogue robe is way too extreme on the vulnerability and the speed. A bit more HP and less speed would make it more interesting.

Robe and Hat, Patched Robe and Vanilla robe really need some more usefullness.

Overall there's way too much imbalance in the robes department to really write down what needs to be fixed. First the amount of variety needs to be set, then the attributes adjusted to fit into that standard.


Misc stuff that didn't fit anywhere else

Rock stalements - When one player casts a right-click shield and both players charge up a rock, the first to release the rock once the shield is down wins. If one didn't charge a rock in time, he must hide, and in some situations can never come out of hiding, resulting in a terrible stalement. Something needs to give you the ability to get to the player, such as being able to keep advancing by casting more shields forward and/or getting an ability to make him drop the rock through the shield by, say, using water spell (regardless of his weight, if he's heavy it won't knock him down but still make him drop the rock), or by allowing rock weapon imbues to go through shields and increase their 5-charge range (so that you can knock him down "through" the shield that prevents him from killing you, forcing him to release the rock). I personally like the last solution the best.

Mines are too powerful and dense. Damage needs tuning, and especially the AOE. It's currently almost impossible to only get hit by a single explosion.

Walls cast range/radius (with right-click cast or AOE cast) is too small. Arcane mines are almost close enough to hit you, and healing ice walls are close enough to heal you to way more than full HP. Spreading out the wall elements a bit more and increasing the radius will somewhat tune down all the extreme effects that wall can create, without making them useless (a single arcane explosion should still deal decent damage and knock up, and healing explosions should still do reasonable healing). Increasing range of right-click will also allow to slowly advance by casting a normal shield, advancing and then casting a new one, until you are in range to break the rock stalement with the suggested shield-penetrating rock weapon enchant.

Fire needs a bit of direct damage (or a bit more of it so that it is actually noticed), and a tiny bit less damage over time to compensate.

Cold needs to deal more damage. It should still be much lower damage than any other element, however currently it deals practically 0.

Spray spells (both on right-click and weapon cast), unless I'm missing something, are pretty useless. Cast on weapon should at least give some more noticeable burst of damage, and right-click channeling should be somewhat comparable in damage to beam spells, especially when you consider the spray spells have a much shorter range.


Overall, I think many of these balance changes will also positively affect single player and coop gameplay, though obviously there are probably many more changes that could be made to improve that experience (ex: Add more elements to revive to make it slower to use with the suggested slower element conjuration, make "new game +" noticeably harder, nerf some super-big AOE stuff).

There's probably much more, but if 1/2 of that will be taken into account by the developers I'll be one happy customer :)
 
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PvP is pretty well balanced. The only balance changes that need to happen are with regards to the robes. The space marine and epic robes are simply too much, especially in krietor mode where your health resets every round. The space marine is imbalanced because you can't water bomb it so there's no good way to counter elemental resistances(the tank and zombie robes have significantly reduced speed which gives them a drawback to match this). The epic robes are just better than standard in all respects(the reduced healing is a joke since QWER still heals for near full).

It is simply the nature of the game that some combination of elements will be better than others. Arrowhead has done exactly what they should have done and that is make the combat involving those most useful combinations interesting. There are a lot of useful spells and in a good fight you need to use almost all of them. On weapons, you have IWD, the ice sword, rock sniping, water bombing(with both meteors and walls), steam bombing, fire bombing, and frost bombing. On defenses you have elemental wards(SAFE, QFSAFE, RASE), physical armor, and simple shields. You can even get fancy and mix them with cannonballing or armor spiking(rapid EDRQ at close range). That is a huge amount of variety given how hairy the topic of balance can be.

Not only do you have a significant variety of things that work, you also have to think about what you're casting. You cannot just spam things. If you do your opponent will simply protect against what you're spamming and kill you. You have to approach with a strategy in mind, a way to get them to expose a weakness that you can exploit. For example, being able to cast IWD so fast that you can do 10k damage in a second doesn't matter if your opponent has it completely negated with a ward and he'll probably use that time to kill you with a quick rock snipe. What does matter in terms of casting speed is the ability to switch between spells that require different defenses to kill your opponent, this isn't spam though, it's a combination of mechanical and tactical skill.

Any sweeping changes could easily break both the variety and the strategy(as can be seen with the space robe which is both fast and immune to water bombing).

I also strongly disagree with any nerf to haste. That spell makes fights much more interesting and dynamic. Sure it's way more useful than most other magicks, but why is that a problem? It's not like it's directly competing with the other magicks, you'd only use them in addition to haste if they were powerful enough to justify it(and some of them are).
 
Haste is a problem simply because the downsides of using it are minimal. Just like all magicks, it should be something you think whether you want to use right now or not, rather than just spam it mindlessly because it's so good. Same goes for all the other spells to which I call "overpowered". The possible amount of combinations in this game is so massive, yet so incredibly few actually have a use.

Especially when stuff like 5X fire being slower to conjure than an ice wall of death while 5x fire is basically useless while ice wall of death is a 1-shoot with similar range makes no sense, especially when 5X fire is also easier to block.


Of course in the end when you have a match PvP will be "balanced", with the only truly game-breaking problem being the stalemates (mostly with rock charging). That is, however, simply because everyone have the same spells. Note that even in Starcraft, when Protoss vs Protoss was almost always 4-gate vs 4-gate, Blizzard nerfed the build so that Protoss vs Protoss games are more interesting (and while they're still boring, they're much better than they were before). Even in a mirror game you need to "balance" stuff so that you don't just use a few spells.

That said, of course the robes will be the only thing with broken balance, since it's the only thing that isn't symmetric, and even then both players can pick the same robes resulting in a "balanced" experience, but it would still be much more boring compared to what we would have if all robes would be equally useful.

I think with the changes I suggested the game would become much more interesting and many more spells may become useful. Numbers can always be tweaked to make sure it really happens in the end, but currently even the basic game mechanics completely eliminate any reason to use many of the possible spell combinations.

In the end, only 5-10 spells are actually useful, which is ridiculous for a game with so many possibilities. And again, it's the basic mechanics that simply nullify any point for using those other spells. It's not just that those 5-10 spells pay off the most. They have 0 disadvantages over the other spells. This, in my opinion, is bad design and makes the game much less interesting than it could have been.


A few more changes I forgot to mention:

Fire needs a bit of direct damage (or a bit more of it so that it is actually noticed), and a tiny bit less damage over time to compensate.

Cold needs to deal more damage. It should still be much lower damage than any other element, however currently it deals practically 0.

Spray spells (both on right-click and weapon cast), unless I'm missing something, are pretty useless. Cast on weapon should at least give some more noticeable burst of damage, and right-click channeling should be somewhat comparable in damage to beam spells, especially when you consider the spray spells have a much shorter range.
 
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Haste is indeed a no-brainer most of the time but sometimes that half second you need to cast it is the half second your opponent uses to kill you. More importantly, it just makes the game more fun and interesting. The base movement speed is pretty slow.

In a game like this, having 5-10 spells that are actually useful is huge. Have you ever heard of impossible creatures? It was an RTS where you combined your own units. You had in the vanilla game 50 different base units. You could combine any two of them and pick the limbs essentially arbitrarily. There were orders of magnitude more combinations than what magicka has and despite substantial efforts to balance it, there were always a tiny number of units that dominated their tier(usually 2-3 per tier). It's the nature of games that give you the freedom to combine, you can usually find a "best of that type" combination such as IWD. It simply does the best damage across a range of types. If you tweak walls to reduce its damage there won't be a good way to counter rock armor which will seriously break PvP and it won't increase variety because another spell will take its place as the best at the midrange elemental damage role.

What they could do to increase variety is try to differentiate the more useless spell types. Things like sprays, mines, and elemental "weather" walls. Mines are like crappy walls that take too long to do their damage. Sprays are just weaker beams with a range that puts them in competition with IWD(a competition that they simply lose). "Weather" walls(such as RRRRE) lack the AoE radiation of IWD and don't explode. Fixing these things might increase variety, but it's not exactly easy to come up with new mechanics for them that would actually fit in the game. Mines could submerge and become mostly invisible after a second(maybe just rip starcraft off and have a shimmer effect) but I can see how that might make the gameplay a lot more defensive. Weather walls might be more useful if they had to be actively removed by casting their opposing element on them. That might also make the game a lot more defensive. I'm not sure how sprays could be made more unique.
 
Like I said, introducing delay and eliminating spamming would already go heaps and bounds to fix a lot of the problems. Suddenly you can't protect yourself from everything at an instant, or cast ice wall of death at an instant (the only thing in ice wall of death that has a delay is the cold element you need to use twice).

Ice wall of death should not be the only counter to rock armor. Currently rock armor and ice wall of death are both overpowered. Both needs nerf. For both I think I suggested reasonable nerfs that will not break the game.

Eventually, the only way to balance is to constantly nerf the most powerful and buff the weakest, until you eventually reach the point where people cannot agree on what is the most useful/powerful spell. If one guy tells you to use ice wall of death and another insists that arcane mines are better, and they go on a 3-page forum discussion arguing which is better, then Paradox can go ahead and sleep happily knowing they balanced the 2 spells properly. Just look at Diablo 3 as a nice example - Even though the game isn't out yet, skills and effects are constantly being nerfed/buffed, to the point where I already have several builds I made on their website's skill calculator that have been nerfed, without me even playing the game yet. That's the kind of design cycle that these sorts of games really need.

A good start would, again, be to give *some* kind of advantage to the useless spells, as currently there are many many spells that are at an obvious disadvantage compared to many other spells. Once all/most spells have at least some sort of an advantage, once could proceed to discuss whether that advantage makes it too good, still not good enough, or actually balanced.

For example, haste has a downside, but it's an extremely small one. Too much gain for too little risk. Tuning it down is obviously possible without killing its usefulness and the variety it can add. Rock shield slows you down but has too few counters (mostly overpowered ones that need nerfing anyway), so the downside of rock shield surely isn't enough to compensate for its power.

Overall, yeah, I agree you can't just change one thing and ignore its implications. You have to fix ALL the overpowered and underpowered spells in order to make the game more interesting without breaking it.
 
Good to know I'm not the only one who thinks robes need to be balanced. I think every robe should have its own passive abilities and negative traits. Robes that only spawn with their own equipment are at a kind of disadvantage since they will have no benefits of being that character should they pick up new equipment. Staves of War are pretty tempting.

I have never done PvP, but I noticed that some magicks such as Fear are very ineffective in PvE. While magicks such as Summon Elemental can make the game much easier. (My connection is pretty terrible so I can't play multiplayer unless it is LAN)

I agree that stacking more of the same element into one spell needs to have greater effects when compared to mixing, especially Life.
 
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I also think that making the robes more varied in terms of gameplay mechanics, it would greatly increase the replayability. I really like the idea of the tron-robe for example. Too bad it's too weak becease of the double vulnerability. Removing either water or arcane weakness could make it interesting.
Also agree on epic and SM robes. Maybe make epic even more resistant to life (or as you say, nerf icewall of healing).
I hope future robes will be more freaky in terms of gameplay (healed by other element, imunities and weakness, etc.), but I also realize that's very hard to balance.

Support robe would be cool if it's modifier was a staff activated ability. (middle mouse to decrease own activity in favor of boosting your party).

I really like what they did in the last couple of patches balancewise, and hope the existing robes too will see some love.
 
i see the game as pretty well balanced, it's just skill based now.
This is where it feels unbalanced, more so in PVP.
One player may be faster quicker and more tactical then the other and thus seem like an unfair advantage.
in Challange and adventure modes the balance is based on your knowledge of your targets what they are weak agains we need a magickaDex q:)
 
In challenge/story it's all about ice wall of death (or life if enemies are undead, which is then even easier since it heals you too). Just another reason to nerf it, but not the main one. To be honest, all the "overpowered PvP stuff" at least have a counter in PvP (except rock stalemates), but in PvE the enemies just die so fast when you spam almost nothing but ice wall of death.

In PvP, like I said, of course it'll feel balanced (other than rock stalemates), since you're playing a mirror! Both sides have the same tools! That also means, however, that my changes can't actually break the game in terms of PvP balance. At most they will make it more interesting or less interesting. I think they'll make it more interseting, though, as more spells will be useful and the best spells will actually have some kind of a downside. Notice that I don't want ice wall of death to become weak. I want it to still be strong. Just not the instant kill it is right now. Same goes for rock armor and ball spamming. Since currently the only real counter is spamming balls or ice wall of death, nerfing all 3 will make you think about maybe actually using other things.

In the end I think this game has a LONG way to go in terms of making it more interesting in PvP. However I think it does have a lot of potential, as it doesn't need to be completely redone. Most adjustments I have suggested are rather small and simple. And remember, just because the mirror aspect balances it, doesn't mean it doesn't need adjustments!

The only thing that needs a major adjustment is the robes, which is why I haven't gone into much detail there, since there are so many ways to completely redo them, and they definitely need to be almost completely redone. This is obviously especially in the PvP department, but also in PvE.
 
Rock armor over is NOT overpowered. Throw a few SDFQ bombs at it and watch how fast it crumbles. Or charge a DDDDD, or QRQRQRQRD. Or throw an element at him that he isn't immune to. When he changes, throw the next one he isn't immune to. Set him on fire, and while he's busy dealing with it, change up your attack and throw him for a loop. It's all about putting your opponent in a position where he has to react and is unable to attack.

It seems to me like everyone wants this game to be easier. Nerfing things causes games to lose their replay-ability. RQSEA (Ice wall of death) can be used through the entire adventure, yes. But so can SDQ, SDR. Does that mean those should be nerfed? No. It means you should use different combinations. What you're really showing is a lack of creativity if you're using the same spell over and over. I use so many spells when I play through the adventure it would be hard to name them. The fun part about this game is the ability to combine most anything, the experimentation aspect. Could I run through almost the entire game with one spell? Yea, but it's no fun, so I don't. There's nothing wrong with RQSEA in PvP either, because when you get hit with it, you STILL have time to throw an SARE immunity on yourself before you die. You just need to get your fingers faster.

The biggest issue with PvP is the people who get on who haven't even finished the campaign. If you do that, you're going to die a LOT. I don't have sympathy for people who do that, because ANY game you play online is significantly harder than the single player mode. Learn the basics before you get online.

Some robes do need to be balanced, but some of them should be left alone. I actually like using weak robes in PvP matches, even if someone uses a powerful one. It's more of a challenge for me. Challenges make the game fun.
 
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You can't bring up something that needs major nerfing as an excuse for why something is not overpowered. Rock armor is only counter-able because there are other overpowered spells that can destroy it. Both need tuning down. I agree that tuning down just one of them will break the game, but that is not what I'm saying should be done!

Nerfing things reduces replay-ability? If anything, discovering those overpowered spells have ruined any replay-ability. I now have to intentionally play like a noob in order to get any challenge out of the game. I have to decide on my own what is overpowered and what isn't, and then not use it, just to find the next most overpowered thing and use that. I had enough of that in Skyrim (which makes me sick in terms of how poorly balanced it is). I don't need it in Magicka too. A good game will make you think about what you're using in order to do the best. In order for Magicka to get to that point, nerfs are needed.

How can you even compare SDQ and SDR to ice wall of death? It's not even on the same scale in terms of damage done.

Having the PvP all about "throw down the immunity before the 1-hitter hits you" makes for a very boring game. My friends are already unwilling to play against me in PvP anymore because they realized that's all there is to the game, and all the other cool spells they know and liked using are actually useless. And to be honest, after spending some time playing against someone of equal level that is willing to give it a bit more of a chance, I doubt I'll keep playing much. Rock-paper-scissors with some finger dexterity only stays fun for so long.

This isn't about making the game easier to play (though some things suggested may make PvP a bit less finger-quickness and a bit more tactical). It's about adding variety, and lots of it. Less completely unbreakable stuff unless you use the 1-2 possible counter(s), and more thinking about which spell you want to use in a given situation. The only reason PvP is sort of balanced is because it's a mirror matchup, with both sides having equal access to the same overpowered abilities. It doesn't mean it doesn't tneed fixing.

Gimping yourself in order to increase challenge only last so long. Much less than anything else, too - In my experience at least.


In the end, I think Magicka has great potential to become much more interesting than a "Press A. If he pressed A first, press B. If he pressed B, press C" game. The systems are in place. They just need tuning.
 
Because when you freeze your opponent with a combo of SDQ then SDR, damage done by cold is vastly increased, and it's even worse when you use SDFQ. I can clear out an entire wave of enemies with very little effort using that combination.

"Ice wall of death" is useless if you use SARE+self cast. PvP is mostly about using the proper defenses.

Every spell in this game is overpowered compared to the robes. If you don't counter them, they'll kill you very fast. I don't play "like a noob" either when I play the adventure. I think of new ways to kill my enemies. Try using a ring of SDQQE, then throw RQSEQQ through the middle of it and watch what happens. Take powerful spells and combine them. What I'm getting from your post is that you only rely on a few spells, when in reality, there are MANY very powerful spells in this game that you can combine in a lot of ways.

"Having the PvP all about "throw down the immunity before the 1-hitter hits you" makes for a very boring game."
Maybe for you. For lots of other people, the challenge of reacting to all the the different spells and surviving an opponent's best attacks is fun in itself. Kind of an "in-your-face" kind of thing.

The thing that makes the challenges hard is the variety of enemies and their strengths and weaknesses. Nerfing all the spells so nothing does good damage will just make the game suck. It's FUN watching enemies explode in pieces, and there are plenty of them that don't die from your so-called 1 hitters. For PvP to be fun, balance needs to be in the robes more than spells. I would say that of any spells, SD** walls need to be more powerful. SDFE, SDFQE and SDRE do only a small amount of damage.
 
You say "all these spells" but in practice there are a very few such spells that one would actually use in PvP (and PvE) if he's trying to do his best. Sure it's not just 1-2 like other crappy games, but it's still a lot less than what this game has potential for. This is my point. You shouldn't have a select few spells trump all other spells on every single aspect.
 
There are LOTS of spells that I use in PvP when I'm trying to do my best. Not all of them cause damage. Some of them are for damage, but some of them are to set up other spells and/or disable my opponent long enough for me to mount an attack. It's not 1 or 2 spells that trump others, it all comes down to how well you can defend yourself while you're reading your opponent's tactics. You have to use spells that are opposite to what your opponent is defending. If you throw an SDR bomb at someone using SARE+self cast, of course it's going to be useless. You have to adjust for what your opponent is defending.

Want to play? Piker is my steam name.
 
Latency from Israel will unfortunately not work too well, unless you want to hop over to Israel too :)

In any case, my point is that I think the game can be much more than just a rock paper scissors, and currently the #1 most important thing in PvP is doing the rock-paper-scissors correctly. Sure there are a select few other tricks you can do, but the main thing is to just throw the right counter. While this is somewhat OK, again, I think this game can do much better without extreme changes. Counters will still be relevant, but other things will actually become very important too.