I'll have to look into that. I know that Vazkii does that mod now, and to me, his other mod Quark is a must have. But, honestly, I don't understand Botania. It's pretty complicated. But, it does have that epic spell effect of making floating islands.
Any thoughts on Astal Sorcercy alongside this one?
I'm likely going to try it. I found this incredible place with many floating islands and it might be fun to build a base up there.
I've never played Astral Sorcery.
All the tutorials on Botania emphasize that it's a tech mod with a magic theme, but I've never played with a tech mod, so that's not terribly useful information for me :). It's extremely complicated, but you do get the hang of it. There's a nice three-part spotlight that walks you through it in a decent amount of detail. It's also pretty satisfying IMHO. I'm not playing it very hard-core, but the lower-level craftables like Manasteel armor are really useful. Sort of like getting a Mending enchantment on all your stuff, provided you can produce enough mana to keep healing them.
So Botania allows you to craft increasingly powerful enchanted stuff, and combined with EBWizardry's actual spellcasting, it feels like a nicely rounded fantasy adventure world. YMMV.
I did try Botania in 1.7.10. I think I watched DireWolf20 do some spotlights on it as well. I used it alongside Ars Magica 2 because the petals were just so handy to get all the dyes needed for the runes in Ars Magica 2. But, other than that, I never pursued it very far. I wasn't able to figure out how to even do the basic farms with the flowers and such.
I think I'll have to look at it again. It does sound promising. Do you happen to know if Botania has a teleportation feature?
There were a couple of things that made me want to try out Astral Sorcery. The teleportation gates, the very nice marble blocks, astronomy, and then it being new and in 1.12.
It sounds like Astral Sorcery might be a big foot slog before one gets to the good stuff. I watched DireWolf20's 3 part series on it and I've watched a couple of Valen's videos (Mishief of Mice) as well.
You know, I've always liked Thaumcraft but for me, I found it tedious in 1.7.10. It was a huge amount of work for very little reward. The spell effects were easily outdone by Ars Magica 2 and all the golem workers weren't near as good as the NPC workers from Ancient Warfare 2.
So, when Electroblob came along, it got my attention. And I immediately understood what he was getting at by the introduction.
So, last weekend we added Astral Sorcery to the pack. And I'm going to give it a go. EchoWeaver you've convinced me to review Botania again. I'll see about finding some good videos on it.
I did this as a separate post because I wanted to mention a bunch of things I've noticed about this mod now that I've progressed further with it.
Spells in general:
These are really a lot of fun to play with. Big kudos (maybe Kind Bars) to Electroblob for his creativity here! I really like the way they're broken into different schools of magic with elemental magic being included amongst them. I swear I think Electroblob has played DnD in the past.
Summoning Spells:
I've been finding these spells to be almost unusable. The summoned creatures are acting weird but, I suspect it has to do with the fact that I'm using a lot of modded mobs. The summoned creatures do not seem to attack or target mobs from Mo Creatures, Dragons Fire and Ice, and Ancient Warfare 2.
I'm also confused as to what the Summoned Wraith is. I've used it a few times and it's a smoke cloud that pretty much stands there.
The summon creatures seem to be okay with vanilla mobs.
The Summon Iron Golem is pretty epic because it permanently adds an Iron Golem to the world.
Force Field and Shield:
I don't understand these spells too well. I thought I read in their description that they were supposed to repel or redirect arrows. But, they don't seem to. I've used Force Field while attacking a Roguelike Dungeon and also attacking Ancient Warfare NPCs and I'm getting nailed with arrows.
Blink and Levitation:
Just FYI, it's not very safe to try and Blink while levitating. I fell to my death. What is interesting to note here, is that it would be handy to have some kind of way to build while levitating thus eliminating the need for very tall scaffolding. When you stop holding down the button, the effect turns off instantly. Could there be a Master level version of this that has a bit of a delay? That way we could use this to build with?
Something like Tenser's Floating Disc perhaps?
Crafting and Research:
I've been putting more thought into this and I'm going to guess that adding a huge crafting and research option would not be part of the mod's goals. However, it does appear to be something one could add through Crafttweaker.
Custom Structures:
I've been playing with Ancient Warfare 2 for quite a while now and it seems to me that one could build special mage towers for each of the mages and then have AW2 spawn them into the gameworld exactly as I was suggesting. I think it might be kind of cool if there were say different towers for the different schools of magic as well as the different tiers. Plus good guys mages and bad guy mages. That would provide plenty of adventure and opportunities to get goodies.
Teleportation and Travel Spells:
I was able to get and use the Transportation spell which is a really nice spell. I've really come to like the spells that facilitate traveling around the world. Blink, Clairvoince, the magic bridge one, Agility, Water Breathing, Levitation, etc... these are really handy. I haven't discovered all of the Master level tier. I just got to them. But, I don't think there's a teleportation spell. We have Transportation, which functions like that scroll from Diablo 2, Town Portal. What if we could set up different stone circles throughout the world, link to them, and then be able to teleport to them? That would probably be a master level spell.
Sorcery and Earth:
I seem to like these spell groups the best. I wonder if an earth golem would be cool? Maybe an earth elemental? What does Curse of the Forest do? I can't seem to figure it out. It's AOE but what does it do other than swirl around leaves?
Fire:
I seem to like this one the least although Landar, as my DnD wizard, was a fire mage. Fire has a bad habit of setting the tent towns on fire and Fire Dragons are unaffected by these spells. Which makes sense.
Ice:
This has been a bit tricky but I'm still playing with them. Overall, I like the way these spells slow enemies down which is important in avoiding the bum rush.
Lightning:
Homing Spark seems weird. I thought it was supposed to be like a homing missile? Any advice on how to use it? I was hoping to use it to shoot around corners.
Necromancy:
This one would be so much more fun if the summoned creatures would attack modded mobs. Maybe that will be worked out in the future? As it is, the most awesome spell for me here is Intimidate. And it works on Dragons. Watching dragons run from the scrawnly little humie is way too fun. I was able to use Mind Control on a Hippogriff to make it stop flying all about so we could tame it. That was epic. You know, I always use the Gravestones Mod, but, I wonder if there could be a necromancy spell added to do something like this.
Utility Spells:
These are really good ideas. I'm really happy to have them and use them. Maybe a dumb question, but there doesn't seem to be a Conjure Shovel spell. Pocket workbench is very cool.
Wands:
There doesn't seem to be any descriptions of what the wand upgrades do. Some are pretty self-explanatory like Upgrade Range, but others make no sense like Upgrade Wand Aspect. Are there any descriptions of these out there?
Perhaps, we could use the Identify Scroll on them to get a description in-game?
Wands are also limited to 5 spells each. I was wondering if any thought had been given to making a more advanced version of the wand that could hold more spells?
Wizard Robes:
These are just so plain awesome and certainly are one of my favorite parts of the mod.
I don't understand what the Master Level Upgrades do other than make my armor glow.
One frustrating thing I've been experiencing, is that I get bum rushed by the NPCs from Ancient Warfare 2. What that means is that I get shot by a very large number of arrows. It's entirely possible for my armor to get destroyed when I get pin cushioned like this. So I had a thought, you know how in Tinker's Construct items break and become unusable, but not destroyed? Could this kind of mechanic be considered for the Robes? You would still loose all the abilities and whatnot but this way the armor could still be repaired on the Arcane Workbench.
Can Wizard Robes be enchanted with vanilla books or on the enchanting table? I should probably get Projectile Protection.
Dimensions Config Option:
Just some feedback. I was able to get towers to spawn in 1.7.10 in the LOTR Mod's Middle Earth Dimension. I don't think you can get Towers to spawn into more then 1 dimension at a time. Or maybe I didn't know how to type it in correctly?
Villager Names:
Just a thought. We also use the Villager Names mod which adds names to the vanilla villagers and it also can display their profession above their heads. I realized the Wizards are reskinned villagers, I was wondering if it's too much trouble to add some cross mod compatibility?
Overall:
I'm really liking this mod. It's been a huge amount of fun and I like the emphasis on running around and having adventures. Thanks so much for your time reading my post and thanks so much for making this awesome mod!
FWIW, I love that this mod doesn't do much research and crafting. I have it in my modpack along with Botania, which is ALL THE CRAFTING. The two complement each other nicely.
I think you've all pretty much said it, I'm trying not to have much in the way of research and crafting because wizardry is all about going and exploring the world. There are plenty of mods that do have plenty of research though, I would recommend all of the ones you've mentioned. I would also point out that Thaumcraft basically gets rewritten every major Minecraft version so TC6 for 1.12.2 is quite different to the 1.7.10 version.
The generalist guy might even spawn in the villages too.
That's a neat idea actually.
How about a quest that ties it all together? Did you ever play Master of Magic back in the day? Maybe a quest to become the Master of Magic? Where one has to master all of the different types of magic to "win" (I guess)? That might be neat.
I might have played a bit of DnD but I'm not that old... I will be revamping the advancements and adding in more lore/story/whatever in general at some point so I'll see what I can do with that.
Then, I was wondering about magical items as well. It seems to me that some of the items are craftable and that's really exciting but what about the Fire Wizard's armor for example? Perhaps, one must use rare special ingredients gotten from the nether or near volcanos or some such thing. And then through special crafting with special magics then one can create the most awesome Fire Wizard armor of much goodness!
I'd like to keep stuff as being just found as loot, but I want to make that more immersive than it is at the moment so, as you say, rather than just finding items it would be more immersive and rewarding if there was a sort of mini-quest to find a load of rare magical items that were then put together to make the armour or whatever.
And I couldn't help it. What about other things? We had rings of protection back in DnD. I have no idea how that would work even in Minecraft. But, you know maybe a ring could be imbued with some kind of effect that's always on? Bracers of Defense? I've seen others mention staves.
Rings, amulets and other artefacts with those sorts of effects are definitely happening.
I've seen this idea tossed out once before so forgive me for repeating it. In Ars Magica 2, it was possible to make a spell that I could dig with. I recall you mentioned not seeing a point to that because we have picks and shovels. Please consider area of effect. Being able to dig a minimum of 3 X 3 space at a distance meant that I could flatten land fairly quickly. Much faster than using Tinker's Tools. And I never did get around to putting the upgrades on that spell but I would have also been able to increase the AoE.
To explain, the problem I always had with dig spells is that they let you instantly mine any block, so without restricting that in some way it would probably need to be an advanced or master spell. Trouble is, that means it's very rare, which isn't helpful in the early game. I don't want to make multiple dig spells, but I think someone pointed out mining levels, so here's how I see it working:
I'll add one novice dig spell (probably earth, but I'm not 100% decided yet) which can only dig blocks that can be mined by hand or with a wooden pickaxe, but which increases in mining level if you use it with higher potency - so an apprentice earth wand would let you mine iron with it, an advanced earth wand would let you mine diamonds and a master earth wand would let you mine anything. Then blast upgrades would increase the area of effect and range upgrades would let you dig from further away.
I wonder if some kind of storage option could be done? Like a craftable bag of holding or say a spell that lets me teleport items from my inventory to a chest at my base?
The vanishing box spell lets you access your ender chest from anywhere, and it's already in the mod!
And one outrageous spell idea (I know it's done in Botania), something along the lines of a spell that you cast to make a floating island. I know crazy!
One for a spell pack, I think!
My son and I noticed a bug. [... etc.]
Sounds like a client-side issue, could you post it on the issue tracker?
Awesome, thanks for replying to my ahem, many posts.
I see what you're saying about the dig spell. I hadn't thought about the types of things that could be mined ie mining levels. I was simply searching for some way to make it easier to level out an entire area for building a structure. That would probably be things like dirt, sand, stone, that sort of thing. The construction term is site prep and I've done so much of that in Minecraft you know. Oddly enough, I've done some of it in the real world as well running a backhoe. But, that's way too much fun in my opinion.
A place block spell would also be handy as we know there's always the odd hole here and there. But, it would obviously require one to have the blocks on hand.
If I understood your ideas of the Wizard Armor, that's I think a really cool idea. The whole emphasis of this mod seems to be about going out and doing stuff, you know having adventures. If one had to go on mini quests to get all the ingredients together to make the uber armor. That sounds pretty exciting.
I played DnD alot about 25 years ago in college. My wizard character was my namesake and he was a fire elementalist from the 2nd edition special handbook. But, I remember that a part of the idea behind the wizards was that I had to go around collecting rare and wonderous ingredients for both my spell casting and also for crafting magical items.
I never did get to make Staff of the Magi. I did find it in DND nether. LOL.
But, I was able to make a staff that was alot like a flame thrower. That was pretty cool.
Say, I was wondering. The wand upgrades. Is there a description anywhere on what they do? I figured the aspect wand upgrade would allow me to change the wand from the basic un-aligned wand to a wand of a particular school. But, when I used it nada. I don't know what its for. If it did allow me to change the wands alignment/school/whatever it's called, then that would mean I could craft my own wands. That seems cool to me.
Thanks again for making this incredible mod. Really excited to see what is to come.
A place block spell would also be handy as we know there's always the odd hole here and there. But, it would obviously require one to have the blocks on hand.
I'm not exactly sure how I'd see that working. The only way I can think of to specify which block to place is by holding it in the offhand, but then you might as well just place it. I can see the point of placing blocks from further away than normal though.
I played DnD alot about 25 years ago in college. My wizard character was my namesake and he was a fire elementalist from the 2nd edition special handbook. But, I remember that a part of the idea behind the wizards was that I had to go around collecting rare and wonderous ingredients for both my spell casting and also for crafting magical items.
I played 5th edition fairly casually for a couple of years, but that was a while ago - before I really started writing wizardry. I was a halfling rogue, if you're interested. One of the party was a wizard, so I when I came to thinking up spells for wizardry I took some inspiration from the spells I remembered.
But, I was able to make a staff that was alot like a flame thrower. That was pretty cool.
Wizardry has a spell that's a lot like a flamethrower (two, in fact). Wouldn't be complete without it!
Say, I was wondering. The wand upgrades. Is there a description anywhere on what they do? I figured the aspect wand upgrade would allow me to change the wand from the basic un-aligned wand to a wand of a particular school. But, when I used it nada. I don't know what its for. If it did allow me to change the wands alignment/school/whatever it's called, then that would mean I could craft my own wands. That seems cool to me.
The wiki has you covered there. I'm going to add some descriptions in the tooltips for those items. I assume by aspect upgrade you mean attunement upgrades - what they do is add a spell slot to your wand.
That's awesome that I can add a spell slot to the wand. I'm surprised I didn't notice that.
Please take another look at the Intimidate Spell. I think it may be a bit overpowered.
What I discovered both attacking dragons from the Dragons of Fire and Ice Mod and also wiping out groups of Ancient Warfare mooks, is that the Intimidate Spell pretty much was my "I Win" button. Here's how: when my targets got close to me, I'd cast that spell and switch my wand to my Ice wand. Then I would blast the heck out of the groups with AoE spells that also either froze them or slowed them down. The whole time they're trying to run, I'm blasting them hard.
I want to say the Intimidate effect lasts 30 seconds. That was enough time for me to almost kill anything I attacked using this method. It actually got to a point where we decided to take a break from our medieval pack because I was too powerful.
I thought of a couple ideas that could better balance the spell.
1. Just like the Mind Control spell, give the mobs a chance to resist the effect.
2. Shorten the duration of the effect.
3. Make the spell a higher level spell. Currently, it's an apprentice spell. If you don't want to adjust the other parameters, perhaps make it a Master level spell.
4. Perhaps, a weaker version of it could be apprentice whilst the more powerful full onslaught one could be a Master spell?
5. I don't know if this is possible, but maybe more powerful mobs have a better chance of resisting the effect. Zombies are pretty dumb so maybe they're easy pickens whilst dragons are epic and perhaps they never flee?
I figured maybe it's easier to read all of this when I split it up into separate posts.
Some more thoughts on balancing and dealing with the different schools of magic.
Perhaps, an aspiring mage should be forced into choosing a specialty?
Currently, there are 4 tiers of spells and a bunch of different schools. But, perhaps one shouldn't be able to become a master of all? The idea is that tier 1 and 2 are available to everyone whilst 3 and 4 are only available to a specialist. I don't know if a person would be restricted to 1 single school or maybe if they could have a primary specialty and then another secondary one. So maybe a person could master just 2 schools? Or perhaps they could become a Master in one and then advanced in another?
Another idea is to look at how these schools are aligned with each other. DnD did it back in 2nd edition and I don't know if they kept that trend or not. Also, Ars Magica 2 Mod did this as well. But, basically schools such as Fire and Ice would be opposites on a wheel. Air and Earth are opposites. Healing and Necromancy as well etc... What would happen is that when a person chooses their specialty they won't be able to use spells of the opposite school. As a trade off, when one specializes they get some nice bonuses to their specialty school. I don't know exactly what.
So as we can see with these two ideas, that one must choose their school carefully. But, we could also allow a person to change their school by choice as well. Maybe their initial choice is done by performing some ceremony, but there could also be a ceremony of undoing too.
Once there is an idea of school alignment, that opens up the door for that idea I mentioned in a previous post about a "secret" special quest to become the "Master of Magic." This idea is totally based on an old video game called "Master of Magic" (of all things). But, basically this would mean that the person would methodically go through the trouble of leveling up as a specialist in all the schools until they unlock the final tier 5 spell of mastery. They then cast that and maybe some special thing happens like this cool looking wizard with sunglasses appears before the player and awards them some special certificate or something, congratulating them, before disappearing in a puff of smoke. Roll credits!
That might be a lot of fun.
Along with this, I thought it might be fun for there to be a set of aspiring magician robes that only an advanced student (or master) could wear. The robes currently in the mod are epic and I love them. They could be reserved for the Masters of their field.
Lastly, regarding wizard towers. I'm glad to hear you liked the idea of placing them around the world in such a way that the placement makes sense for their school. Perhaps the Fire Wizard's tower would appear next to the lava lakes? That sort of thing. But, expanding on the idea above, it would become really important for a mage wanting to become an advanced student to seek out these specialists. Because, the specialists would sell spells and items related to their specific school. The idea being that the player is seeking out these folks as their teachers. Advanced specialists would have a cool looking building that fits their school and would be more common than the masters. The masters would be epic and have awesome lairs.
Another idea relating to this has to do with the bad guy wizards. Typically Necromancers are thought of as evil. So most of the necromancer npcs that spawn in the world would be of the evil type. Healers are usually consider to be shining examples of goodness. So, they would always be the good guy npcs. The other schools might be split more evenly. I don't know fire wizards might have a higher percentage of evil types than good. But, maybe the reverse is true of earth. Maybe, 75% of earth mages are good and 25% are bad. And so on.
Necromancers might favor swamps and their buildings might have a ruined graveyard next to it. I'm kind of thinking that I might make example builds of these ideas for their buildings. I thought that healers might spawn in villages either as apothecaries or perhaps in a church. The earth mage would probably spawn in forested areas and have a beautiful garden. The master Earth mage would probably even have a stone circle built nearby. The non-aligned guy maybe would be the town apothecary or just some nice old wizard on the edge of town.
I also thought that advanced mages would not have as awesome a lair as a master. Sort of like building levels so to speak.
There's already a tower rarity config option, but it sounds like you mean a minimum distance allowed between towers rather than the actual rarity of them. I'm going to redo some of the code for structure spawning so when I do that I'll add in a default minimum distance anyway and then allow it to be changed in the config.
A biome blacklist would also be easy enough to add.
Hey, my friend and I recently added this to our server and we've been having a blast with it! Just wondering, is there any way for us to tinker around with the cooldowns and mana costs of spells?
Hey, my friend and I recently added this to our server and we've been having a blast with it! Just wondering, is there any way for us to tinker around with the cooldowns and mana costs of spells?
Not currently, though I have been considering adding something like that. It will probably be some kind of JSON-based system if I do, because I think it should be aimed at pack makers and server owners. Was there any particular spell you wanted to change? If it's a sensible change I might do it myself.
Not currently, though I have been considering adding something like that. It will probably be some kind of JSON-based system if I do, because I think it should be aimed at pack makers and server owners. Was there any particular spell you wanted to change? If it's a sensible change I might do it myself.
Not sure how high up that feature is in your list of priorities, but I'd love to have something like that if you could add it.
From what I've seen so far, the mod has been pretty well balanced, so I don't think any spells need to be changed in the base files. My friend and I are playing in a relatively low power server, so we were just thinking of bringing the cost of a few spells up and maybe fiddling around with the cooldowns.
We're still really loving this mod. You've done a great job with it!
I noticed with the latest upgrade, we can't get the Wizard to follow us around anymore when we're holding the emerald block via Quark.
I guess that's what you meant by making the Wizard to be less like a villager?
It's too bad because we wanted to build a town with his tower in it. I might have to resort to MCedit.
We took down a stage 5 dragon from Ice and Fire mod. I died many times but my spell casting friend playing with me used Black Hole on the dragon. Which worked beautifully.
Not currently, though I have been considering adding something like that. It will probably be some kind of JSON-based system if I do, because I think it should be aimed at pack makers and server owners. Was there any particular spell you wanted to change? If it's a sensible change I might do it myself.
Personally, I'd like to see all of the spells opened up to configuration via json files. I'm making a magical based modpack and would like to tinker with stuff as well.
You indeed can't use emerald blocks to lure wizards any more... but I'll be replacing that with crystal blocks in the next update, since it is very handy!
Yeah, I've thought about it and I think I've worked out a decent way of exposing spell attributes so that different spells can have different ones. I just have to write it now...!
@arisalanna, I had a bunch of ideas too. But, sadly I haven't done any coding since the days of Fortran. To give you an idea of how old that is, we had a command that would allow us to rewind the tapes on the tape drive. LOL! Uh, do you even know what a tape drive is?
I might have to come out of the stone age! LOL!
If anyone here has played with the Ancient Warfare 2 mod, they have a really nice way of handling research that doesn't become the huge thing that was Thaumcraft 4. My God, I did hours of research in that mod and I'm not still not exactly yet sure what I could do with it all.
But, the mechanic in AW2 is far simpler. You have a special table and you put various things onto it sort of like a crafting table. That then unlocks new blocks and items that you can then craft on their special crafting table.
That was an idea I had for this mod to add a research component. Not anything on the order of Thaumcraft 4 or say Ars Magica 2. And it definately should be an addon, you know maybe Electroblob's Advanced Wizardry Addon! Something like that.
I also thought it would be cool to have something with the different elements as well. I don't remember if I mentioned that before.
But, in the end this mod is a huge amount of fun and really helps us take on some epic monsters.
I've never played Astral Sorcery.
All the tutorials on Botania emphasize that it's a tech mod with a magic theme, but I've never played with a tech mod, so that's not terribly useful information for me :). It's extremely complicated, but you do get the hang of it. There's a nice three-part spotlight that walks you through it in a decent amount of detail. It's also pretty satisfying IMHO. I'm not playing it very hard-core, but the lower-level craftables like Manasteel armor are really useful. Sort of like getting a Mending enchantment on all your stuff, provided you can produce enough mana to keep healing them.
So Botania allows you to craft increasingly powerful enchanted stuff, and combined with EBWizardry's actual spellcasting, it feels like a nicely rounded fantasy adventure world. YMMV.
I did try Botania in 1.7.10. I think I watched DireWolf20 do some spotlights on it as well. I used it alongside Ars Magica 2 because the petals were just so handy to get all the dyes needed for the runes in Ars Magica 2. But, other than that, I never pursued it very far. I wasn't able to figure out how to even do the basic farms with the flowers and such.
I think I'll have to look at it again. It does sound promising. Do you happen to know if Botania has a teleportation feature?
There were a couple of things that made me want to try out Astral Sorcery. The teleportation gates, the very nice marble blocks, astronomy, and then it being new and in 1.12.
It sounds like Astral Sorcery might be a big foot slog before one gets to the good stuff. I watched DireWolf20's 3 part series on it and I've watched a couple of Valen's videos (Mishief of Mice) as well.
You know, I've always liked Thaumcraft but for me, I found it tedious in 1.7.10. It was a huge amount of work for very little reward. The spell effects were easily outdone by Ars Magica 2 and all the golem workers weren't near as good as the NPC workers from Ancient Warfare 2.
So, when Electroblob came along, it got my attention. And I immediately understood what he was getting at by the introduction.
So, last weekend we added Astral Sorcery to the pack. And I'm going to give it a go. EchoWeaver you've convinced me to review Botania again. I'll see about finding some good videos on it.
Hello again,
I did this as a separate post because I wanted to mention a bunch of things I've noticed about this mod now that I've progressed further with it.
Spells in general:
These are really a lot of fun to play with. Big kudos (maybe Kind Bars) to Electroblob for his creativity here! I really like the way they're broken into different schools of magic with elemental magic being included amongst them. I swear I think Electroblob has played DnD in the past.
Summoning Spells:
I've been finding these spells to be almost unusable. The summoned creatures are acting weird but, I suspect it has to do with the fact that I'm using a lot of modded mobs. The summoned creatures do not seem to attack or target mobs from Mo Creatures, Dragons Fire and Ice, and Ancient Warfare 2.
I'm also confused as to what the Summoned Wraith is. I've used it a few times and it's a smoke cloud that pretty much stands there.
The summon creatures seem to be okay with vanilla mobs.
The Summon Iron Golem is pretty epic because it permanently adds an Iron Golem to the world.
Force Field and Shield:
I don't understand these spells too well. I thought I read in their description that they were supposed to repel or redirect arrows. But, they don't seem to. I've used Force Field while attacking a Roguelike Dungeon and also attacking Ancient Warfare NPCs and I'm getting nailed with arrows.
Blink and Levitation:
Just FYI, it's not very safe to try and Blink while levitating. I fell to my death. What is interesting to note here, is that it would be handy to have some kind of way to build while levitating thus eliminating the need for very tall scaffolding. When you stop holding down the button, the effect turns off instantly. Could there be a Master level version of this that has a bit of a delay? That way we could use this to build with?
Something like Tenser's Floating Disc perhaps?
Crafting and Research:
I've been putting more thought into this and I'm going to guess that adding a huge crafting and research option would not be part of the mod's goals. However, it does appear to be something one could add through Crafttweaker.
Custom Structures:
I've been playing with Ancient Warfare 2 for quite a while now and it seems to me that one could build special mage towers for each of the mages and then have AW2 spawn them into the gameworld exactly as I was suggesting. I think it might be kind of cool if there were say different towers for the different schools of magic as well as the different tiers. Plus good guys mages and bad guy mages. That would provide plenty of adventure and opportunities to get goodies.
Teleportation and Travel Spells:
I was able to get and use the Transportation spell which is a really nice spell. I've really come to like the spells that facilitate traveling around the world. Blink, Clairvoince, the magic bridge one, Agility, Water Breathing, Levitation, etc... these are really handy. I haven't discovered all of the Master level tier. I just got to them. But, I don't think there's a teleportation spell. We have Transportation, which functions like that scroll from Diablo 2, Town Portal. What if we could set up different stone circles throughout the world, link to them, and then be able to teleport to them? That would probably be a master level spell.
Sorcery and Earth:
I seem to like these spell groups the best. I wonder if an earth golem would be cool? Maybe an earth elemental? What does Curse of the Forest do? I can't seem to figure it out. It's AOE but what does it do other than swirl around leaves?
Fire:
I seem to like this one the least although Landar, as my DnD wizard, was a fire mage. Fire has a bad habit of setting the tent towns on fire and Fire Dragons are unaffected by these spells. Which makes sense.
Ice:
This has been a bit tricky but I'm still playing with them. Overall, I like the way these spells slow enemies down which is important in avoiding the bum rush.
Lightning:
Homing Spark seems weird. I thought it was supposed to be like a homing missile? Any advice on how to use it? I was hoping to use it to shoot around corners.
Necromancy:
This one would be so much more fun if the summoned creatures would attack modded mobs. Maybe that will be worked out in the future? As it is, the most awesome spell for me here is Intimidate. And it works on Dragons. Watching dragons run from the scrawnly little humie is way too fun. I was able to use Mind Control on a Hippogriff to make it stop flying all about so we could tame it. That was epic. You know, I always use the Gravestones Mod, but, I wonder if there could be a necromancy spell added to do something like this.
Utility Spells:
These are really good ideas. I'm really happy to have them and use them. Maybe a dumb question, but there doesn't seem to be a Conjure Shovel spell. Pocket workbench is very cool.
Wands:
There doesn't seem to be any descriptions of what the wand upgrades do. Some are pretty self-explanatory like Upgrade Range, but others make no sense like Upgrade Wand Aspect. Are there any descriptions of these out there?
Perhaps, we could use the Identify Scroll on them to get a description in-game?
Wands are also limited to 5 spells each. I was wondering if any thought had been given to making a more advanced version of the wand that could hold more spells?
Wizard Robes:
These are just so plain awesome and certainly are one of my favorite parts of the mod.
I don't understand what the Master Level Upgrades do other than make my armor glow.
One frustrating thing I've been experiencing, is that I get bum rushed by the NPCs from Ancient Warfare 2. What that means is that I get shot by a very large number of arrows. It's entirely possible for my armor to get destroyed when I get pin cushioned like this. So I had a thought, you know how in Tinker's Construct items break and become unusable, but not destroyed? Could this kind of mechanic be considered for the Robes? You would still loose all the abilities and whatnot but this way the armor could still be repaired on the Arcane Workbench.
Can Wizard Robes be enchanted with vanilla books or on the enchanting table? I should probably get Projectile Protection.
Dimensions Config Option:
Just some feedback. I was able to get towers to spawn in 1.7.10 in the LOTR Mod's Middle Earth Dimension. I don't think you can get Towers to spawn into more then 1 dimension at a time. Or maybe I didn't know how to type it in correctly?
Villager Names:
Just a thought. We also use the Villager Names mod which adds names to the vanilla villagers and it also can display their profession above their heads. I realized the Wizards are reskinned villagers, I was wondering if it's too much trouble to add some cross mod compatibility?
Overall:
I'm really liking this mod. It's been a huge amount of fun and I like the emphasis on running around and having adventures. Thanks so much for your time reading my post and thanks so much for making this awesome mod!
Thanks!
I think you've all pretty much said it, I'm trying not to have much in the way of research and crafting because wizardry is all about going and exploring the world. There are plenty of mods that do have plenty of research though, I would recommend all of the ones you've mentioned. I would also point out that Thaumcraft basically gets rewritten every major Minecraft version so TC6 for 1.12.2 is quite different to the 1.7.10 version.
That's a neat idea actually.
I might have played a bit of DnD but I'm not that old... I will be revamping the advancements and adding in more lore/story/whatever in general at some point so I'll see what I can do with that.
I'd like to keep stuff as being just found as loot, but I want to make that more immersive than it is at the moment so, as you say, rather than just finding items it would be more immersive and rewarding if there was a sort of mini-quest to find a load of rare magical items that were then put together to make the armour or whatever.
Rings, amulets and other artefacts with those sorts of effects are definitely happening.
To explain, the problem I always had with dig spells is that they let you instantly mine any block, so without restricting that in some way it would probably need to be an advanced or master spell. Trouble is, that means it's very rare, which isn't helpful in the early game. I don't want to make multiple dig spells, but I think someone pointed out mining levels, so here's how I see it working:
I'll add one novice dig spell (probably earth, but I'm not 100% decided yet) which can only dig blocks that can be mined by hand or with a wooden pickaxe, but which increases in mining level if you use it with higher potency - so an apprentice earth wand would let you mine iron with it, an advanced earth wand would let you mine diamonds and a master earth wand would let you mine anything. Then blast upgrades would increase the area of effect and range upgrades would let you dig from further away.
The vanishing box spell lets you access your ender chest from anywhere, and it's already in the mod!
One for a spell pack, I think!
Sounds like a client-side issue, could you post it on the issue tracker?
I really appreciate how seriously you take game balance. Just sayin'.
Hey Electroblob,
Awesome, thanks for replying to my ahem, many posts.
I see what you're saying about the dig spell. I hadn't thought about the types of things that could be mined ie mining levels. I was simply searching for some way to make it easier to level out an entire area for building a structure. That would probably be things like dirt, sand, stone, that sort of thing. The construction term is site prep and I've done so much of that in Minecraft you know. Oddly enough, I've done some of it in the real world as well running a backhoe. But, that's way too much fun in my opinion.
A place block spell would also be handy as we know there's always the odd hole here and there. But, it would obviously require one to have the blocks on hand.
If I understood your ideas of the Wizard Armor, that's I think a really cool idea. The whole emphasis of this mod seems to be about going out and doing stuff, you know having adventures. If one had to go on mini quests to get all the ingredients together to make the uber armor. That sounds pretty exciting.
I played DnD alot about 25 years ago in college. My wizard character was my namesake and he was a fire elementalist from the 2nd edition special handbook. But, I remember that a part of the idea behind the wizards was that I had to go around collecting rare and wonderous ingredients for both my spell casting and also for crafting magical items.
I never did get to make Staff of the Magi. I did find it in DND nether. LOL.
But, I was able to make a staff that was alot like a flame thrower. That was pretty cool.
Say, I was wondering. The wand upgrades. Is there a description anywhere on what they do? I figured the aspect wand upgrade would allow me to change the wand from the basic un-aligned wand to a wand of a particular school. But, when I used it nada. I don't know what its for. If it did allow me to change the wands alignment/school/whatever it's called, then that would mean I could craft my own wands. That seems cool to me.
Thanks again for making this incredible mod. Really excited to see what is to come.
Thanks!
I'm not exactly sure how I'd see that working. The only way I can think of to specify which block to place is by holding it in the offhand, but then you might as well just place it. I can see the point of placing blocks from further away than normal though.
I played 5th edition fairly casually for a couple of years, but that was a while ago - before I really started writing wizardry. I was a halfling rogue, if you're interested. One of the party was a wizard, so I when I came to thinking up spells for wizardry I took some inspiration from the spells I remembered.
Wizardry has a spell that's a lot like a flamethrower (two, in fact). Wouldn't be complete without it!
The wiki has you covered there. I'm going to add some descriptions in the tooltips for those items. I assume by aspect upgrade you mean attunement upgrades - what they do is add a spell slot to your wand.
Hey Electro,
Thanks for those tips!
That's awesome that I can add a spell slot to the wand. I'm surprised I didn't notice that.
Please take another look at the Intimidate Spell. I think it may be a bit overpowered.
What I discovered both attacking dragons from the Dragons of Fire and Ice Mod and also wiping out groups of Ancient Warfare mooks, is that the Intimidate Spell pretty much was my "I Win" button. Here's how: when my targets got close to me, I'd cast that spell and switch my wand to my Ice wand. Then I would blast the heck out of the groups with AoE spells that also either froze them or slowed them down. The whole time they're trying to run, I'm blasting them hard.
I want to say the Intimidate effect lasts 30 seconds. That was enough time for me to almost kill anything I attacked using this method. It actually got to a point where we decided to take a break from our medieval pack because I was too powerful.
I thought of a couple ideas that could better balance the spell.
1. Just like the Mind Control spell, give the mobs a chance to resist the effect.
2. Shorten the duration of the effect.
3. Make the spell a higher level spell. Currently, it's an apprentice spell. If you don't want to adjust the other parameters, perhaps make it a Master level spell.
4. Perhaps, a weaker version of it could be apprentice whilst the more powerful full onslaught one could be a Master spell?
5. I don't know if this is possible, but maybe more powerful mobs have a better chance of resisting the effect. Zombies are pretty dumb so maybe they're easy pickens whilst dragons are epic and perhaps they never flee?
6. Or maybe some combination of the above.
Thanks for your efforts!
Hi Electro,
I figured maybe it's easier to read all of this when I split it up into separate posts.
Some more thoughts on balancing and dealing with the different schools of magic.
Perhaps, an aspiring mage should be forced into choosing a specialty?
Currently, there are 4 tiers of spells and a bunch of different schools. But, perhaps one shouldn't be able to become a master of all? The idea is that tier 1 and 2 are available to everyone whilst 3 and 4 are only available to a specialist. I don't know if a person would be restricted to 1 single school or maybe if they could have a primary specialty and then another secondary one. So maybe a person could master just 2 schools? Or perhaps they could become a Master in one and then advanced in another?
Another idea is to look at how these schools are aligned with each other. DnD did it back in 2nd edition and I don't know if they kept that trend or not. Also, Ars Magica 2 Mod did this as well. But, basically schools such as Fire and Ice would be opposites on a wheel. Air and Earth are opposites. Healing and Necromancy as well etc... What would happen is that when a person chooses their specialty they won't be able to use spells of the opposite school. As a trade off, when one specializes they get some nice bonuses to their specialty school. I don't know exactly what.
So as we can see with these two ideas, that one must choose their school carefully. But, we could also allow a person to change their school by choice as well. Maybe their initial choice is done by performing some ceremony, but there could also be a ceremony of undoing too.
Once there is an idea of school alignment, that opens up the door for that idea I mentioned in a previous post about a "secret" special quest to become the "Master of Magic." This idea is totally based on an old video game called "Master of Magic" (of all things). But, basically this would mean that the person would methodically go through the trouble of leveling up as a specialist in all the schools until they unlock the final tier 5 spell of mastery. They then cast that and maybe some special thing happens like this cool looking wizard with sunglasses appears before the player and awards them some special certificate or something, congratulating them, before disappearing in a puff of smoke. Roll credits!
That might be a lot of fun.
Along with this, I thought it might be fun for there to be a set of aspiring magician robes that only an advanced student (or master) could wear. The robes currently in the mod are epic and I love them. They could be reserved for the Masters of their field.
Lastly, regarding wizard towers. I'm glad to hear you liked the idea of placing them around the world in such a way that the placement makes sense for their school. Perhaps the Fire Wizard's tower would appear next to the lava lakes? That sort of thing. But, expanding on the idea above, it would become really important for a mage wanting to become an advanced student to seek out these specialists. Because, the specialists would sell spells and items related to their specific school. The idea being that the player is seeking out these folks as their teachers. Advanced specialists would have a cool looking building that fits their school and would be more common than the masters. The masters would be epic and have awesome lairs.
Another idea relating to this has to do with the bad guy wizards. Typically Necromancers are thought of as evil. So most of the necromancer npcs that spawn in the world would be of the evil type. Healers are usually consider to be shining examples of goodness. So, they would always be the good guy npcs. The other schools might be split more evenly. I don't know fire wizards might have a higher percentage of evil types than good. But, maybe the reverse is true of earth. Maybe, 75% of earth mages are good and 25% are bad. And so on.
Necromancers might favor swamps and their buildings might have a ruined graveyard next to it. I'm kind of thinking that I might make example builds of these ideas for their buildings. I thought that healers might spawn in villages either as apothecaries or perhaps in a church. The earth mage would probably spawn in forested areas and have a beautiful garden. The master Earth mage would probably even have a stone circle built nearby. The non-aligned guy maybe would be the town apothecary or just some nice old wizard on the edge of town.
I also thought that advanced mages would not have as awesome a lair as a master. Sort of like building levels so to speak.
Thanks again for making this awesome mod!
There's already a tower rarity config option, but it sounds like you mean a minimum distance allowed between towers rather than the actual rarity of them. I'm going to redo some of the code for structure spawning so when I do that I'll add in a default minimum distance anyway and then allow it to be changed in the config.
A biome blacklist would also be easy enough to add.
Hey, my friend and I recently added this to our server and we've been having a blast with it! Just wondering, is there any way for us to tinker around with the cooldowns and mana costs of spells?
Not currently, though I have been considering adding something like that. It will probably be some kind of JSON-based system if I do, because I think it should be aimed at pack makers and server owners. Was there any particular spell you wanted to change? If it's a sensible change I might do it myself.
Not sure how high up that feature is in your list of priorities, but I'd love to have something like that if you could add it.
From what I've seen so far, the mod has been pretty well balanced, so I don't think any spells need to be changed in the base files. My friend and I are playing in a relatively low power server, so we were just thinking of bringing the cost of a few spells up and maybe fiddling around with the cooldowns.
Hey Electroblob!
We're still really loving this mod. You've done a great job with it!
I noticed with the latest upgrade, we can't get the Wizard to follow us around anymore when we're holding the emerald block via Quark.
I guess that's what you meant by making the Wizard to be less like a villager?
It's too bad because we wanted to build a town with his tower in it. I might have to resort to MCedit.
We took down a stage 5 dragon from Ice and Fire mod. I died many times but my spell casting friend playing with me used Black Hole on the dragon. Which worked beautifully.
Thanks again,
Landar
Personally, I'd like to see all of the spells opened up to configuration via json files. I'm making a magical based modpack and would like to tinker with stuff as well.
You indeed can't use emerald blocks to lure wizards any more... but I'll be replacing that with crystal blocks in the next update, since it is very handy!
Yeah, I've thought about it and I think I've worked out a decent way of exposing spell attributes so that different spells can have different ones. I just have to write it now...!
Cant wait till people make a bunch of addons for this
I would make an addon for this it is just I am busy and no one plays 1.7.10 anymore. I can't code anything but that version.
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Hi guys,
Good to know Electro!
@arisalanna, I had a bunch of ideas too. But, sadly I haven't done any coding since the days of Fortran. To give you an idea of how old that is, we had a command that would allow us to rewind the tapes on the tape drive. LOL! Uh, do you even know what a tape drive is?
I might have to come out of the stone age! LOL!
If anyone here has played with the Ancient Warfare 2 mod, they have a really nice way of handling research that doesn't become the huge thing that was Thaumcraft 4. My God, I did hours of research in that mod and I'm not still not exactly yet sure what I could do with it all.
But, the mechanic in AW2 is far simpler. You have a special table and you put various things onto it sort of like a crafting table. That then unlocks new blocks and items that you can then craft on their special crafting table.
That was an idea I had for this mod to add a research component. Not anything on the order of Thaumcraft 4 or say Ars Magica 2. And it definately should be an addon, you know maybe Electroblob's Advanced Wizardry Addon! Something like that.
I also thought it would be cool to have something with the different elements as well. I don't remember if I mentioned that before.
But, in the end this mod is a huge amount of fun and really helps us take on some epic monsters.
Thanks again,
Landar