Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
[Offical] Spellweaving Article and Video IGN
Betaguy
Member UncommonPosts: 2,629
There you have it folks, released this evening.
Age of Conan's Spellweaving Revealed
Video and plenty of details on how casters can supercharge themselves.
by Charles Onyett
April 28, 2008 -
Do you ever get tired of tossing the same boring fireball over and over again in massively multiplayer online games? Funcom is trying something a little different in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, an MMOG set in Robert E. Howard's sword-and-sorcery fantasy realm that's set to release at the end of May. The system is called spellweaving, and it gives the game's spellcasting classes a way to significantly alter the way they deal damage while simultaneously risking their virtual lives.
Though there are six classes in the game that can be considered "magical," only four actually fling magic at opponents as a primary method of attack. Spellweaving is available for the Priest-type Tempest of Set and Priest of Mitra and the Mage-type Demonologist and Necromancer. Basically, it works like a stance. Soldier-type classes, those who're most effective at fighting on the front lines of battle, have the ability to shift between defensive and offensive stances at will, affecting their damage output and capacity for resistance as the situation necessitates. It's the same for casters, able to switch into spellweaving stance whenever it might be appropriate to combat what's onscreen.
Before we go any further, you should know the following information likely won't make sense to anyone who hasn't been following our Age of Conan coverage. So, to catch up...
Spellweaving's major benefit is that it drastically powers up your spell damage and adds various kinds of special effects, all of which increases in power the longer you're in spellweaving mode. The downside is spellweaving can be lethal to the caster. When the spellweaving state is first entered, your stamina bar (used for things like running and melee combos) begins to drain. Once that bar is depleted, the spellweaving state will then begin to drain health, so you'll need to carefully monitor what's going on or your character might keel over and be forced to respawn. Should you need to, it's easy to stop spellweaving with a simple press of a key.
The longer you manage to keep spellweaving active, though, the more powerful you become. After the state is enabled, spellweaving progresses through six stages, with transition between stages occurring around every ten seconds and occasionally when an offensive spell is cast. Each stage increases a passive spell damage buff, which will max out at around 25 percent, says Funcom's senior systems designer Andrew Griffin. Once stage six is reached, the progression cycles back to stage one and repeats all over again, retaining the passive damage bonus. Additionally, each stage transition is accompanied by a chance to gain helpful or harmful effects. While the positive effects will be short duration, the negative side-effects will last until even after you've stopped spellweaving, leaving you vulnerable to attack. How vulnerable you are depends on how much time you invested in spellweaving.
Instead of writing more about spellweaving's generalities, here are some specific examples of what happens through each stage for a Necromancer. The following was provided by Funcom.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Necromancer - Positive Effects
Parasite Host: An eight second buff that causes you to gain a parasitic soul pet whenever you cast one of your nukes, although it costs you some health when this happens.
Arcane Surge: This is a short buff that causes you to inflict maximum damage with your spells.
Necromancer Negative Effects
Infested: You become infested with grave-worms that inflict unholy damage over time. This can stack up to five times.
Arcane Drought: Your spells will inflict minimum damage
Frailty: You take more damage from physical attacks. This can stack up to five times.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------While that's not all that's possible with the Necromancer, Griffin gave us a few more details on how another spell is affected.
"For example, the Flesh to Worms spell is the Necromancer's primary DoT [damage-over-time spell]. This is a single-target DoT spell. The first "step" of spellweaving doesn't affect this spell, but it gets modified from step 2 and up. First, the critical chance and critical damage is increased, but it is step 3 of spellweaving that an interesting change happens. At this rank, the Flesh to Worms spell gains splash damage, which means that every time that DoT ticks, it will inflict an amount of its damage to nearby enemies (the percentage of damage inflicted and the number of enemies taking the splash damage increases as the spellweaving step progresses)."
Griffin then went on to detail a few of the changes in play style for the other three casters in Age of Conan.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Demonologist
Flames of Gehenna, their primary fire spell, will gain increased critical hit chance and critical damage, as well as become a column-affecting spell. Additionally, the secondary burning effect, Incinerate, that Flames of Gehenna places on the target will start to inflict splash damage. This gets interesting when the player has also trained the Field of Fires feat, which causes the Incinerate effect to inflict pulsing area-of-effect damage, so while at the higher ends of spellweaving, a character with that feat trained will be inflicting double doses of AOE damage from the Incinerate effect one source from the feat, and the other from the spellweaving-enhanced splash damage.
Tempest of Set
The Tempest's main nuke is the Lightning Strike spell, which is an area-of-effect spell. While under the effect of spellweaving, the area this spell affects will increase. Additionally, lightning will start to arc between the enemies hit, so that each enemy hit inflicts splash damage, causing a cascade of arcing damage when groups of monsters are clustered closely together. The same sort of thing will happen with the Storm Field spell, which projects pulsing electricity around the Tempest. When enemies are struck by the Storm Field, they will suffer a higher chance of sustaining critical damage, and also inflict splash damage around them.
Priest of Mitra
One of the feat-trained spells for the Priest of Mitra is the Lance of Mitra. This normally inflicts column-based damage from the Priest, with each target hit inflicting a smaller amount of damage to one nearby enemy. If the player trained the Divine Lance feat as well, the Lance of Mitra causes area of effect healing around all of the enemies that it hits. When under the power of spellweaving, both the damaging and healing aspects of the lance are increased. The Lance of Mitra gains a higher chance of inflicting critical damage on the enemies that it smites, while the energy from Divine Lance heals more damage.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Clearly this system adds quite a bit to how spellcasting works, and there's actually another layer to it. During spellweaving the caster can activate a special power that turns the 1, 2, 3, Q, and E keys into ability keys that control the ebb and flow of the phase, pushing it into overdrive for increased damage or slowing it down to prolong the process. While we haven't gotten to check it out yet, it sounds interesting. And as a bonus, every class gets specific graphical animations for spellweaving. In case you haven't watched it, the embedded clip shows off the Necromancer
"The King and the Pawn return to the same box at the end of the game"
Comments
Nice info! Thx for the link!
Cheers!
MMO Vet since AOL Neverwinter Nights circa 1992. My MMO beat up your MMO. =S
Awesome, that's really good news! Glad that things are turning out the way they are supposed to.
Cant wait to try this out it beta. Tanks for the post
Oh look !!!!
Spellweaving is in Age of Conan.
Where are the 3 people who said Sieging was not in game last month? and this month say Spellweaving will not be in the game??
Oh the misinformed beta leakers going from old info again..
"The longer you manage to keep spellweaving active, though, the more powerful you become. After the state is enabled, spellweaving progresses through six stages, with transition between stages occurring around every ten seconds and occasionally when an offensive spell is cast. Each stage increases a passive spell damage buff, which will max out at around 25 percent, says Funcom's senior systems designer Andrew Griffin. Once stage six is reached, the progression cycles back to stage one and repeats all over again, retaining the passive damage bonus. Additionally, each stage transition is accompanied by a chance to gain helpful or harmful effects. While the positive effects will be short duration, the negative side-effects will last until even after you've stopped spellweaving, leaving you vulnerable to attack. How vulnerable you are depends on how much time you invested in spellweaving."
I like it!
This is Spellweaving, you wont find it done like this in other mmorpg's.
Damnit... I thought I was all decided on rolling a Dark Templar, but then this info has to come out and now I am torn between that and a Tempest of Set. Way to go Funcom....
----------------------------------------------------------------
AMD FX-4300
8gb DDR 667
Nvidia GTX 770
Well Tempest looks pretty powerful now hehe. Who would of thought a priest could have these abilites, even a group of them :P
Well Tempest looks pretty powerful now hehe. Who would of thought a priest could have these abilites, even a group of them :P
I know, though I fear we will see more groups/raids saying "heal me" instead of "unleash the leet DPS"... I was kind of hoping HoX would get some spellweaving, as that was my second class choice. But I guess I understand seeings as they get some pretty sweet melee abilities. PerhapsI will just have to level 3 characters....
----------------------------------------------------------------
AMD FX-4300
8gb DDR 667
Nvidia GTX 770
Awesome. kudos to funcom for trying something different with spellcasting.
If successful, I bet other mmo's will copy.
It looks great.
What is even better is how the AoC hatebois are being shot down one 'issue' at a time.
As a wannabe PoM, this looks awesome
We think very similarly... couldn't be happier how the haters, WoW and WAR fans are getting taken apart one limb at a time.
Really makes me want to play a mage class now when I was at first planning to play a bear shaman...
Man, I am not big on playing casters but spellweaving might change my mind. I am going to have to roll a caster in beta and see how that goes. This system sounds extremely cool. I cannot wait to see it in action.
This reminds me of something you might see in the more creative table top RPGs and really fits the Conan world nicely.
Imagine some tanks body blocking with collision detection the enemy whilst some major weaving is going on ready to unleash!
Or off some fortification from a wall on a keep!
Also will add a whole lot of depth to Raids I would think. When to Spellweave, how to set up the tanks so the Mages won't be insta fodder for the bosses etc etc. All in all, sounds like a neat system, but of course, will have to be tried out for real first. Possibilities are there, let's see how it plays out!
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
hehe imagine a line of casters whipping up their mojo to meet a seige attack...
Should be pure spectacle
Great info I like the way this sounds I just hope the negatives don't outweigh the positives but Im sure that is something that gets smoothed out as more and more play.
Im really suprised that i havent see any posts saying "Wow this is it!?!? are you kidding me?!?! its just like WoW!??!"
Because its what i have come to expect out of these boards, buti should knock on wood right?!
BTW spellweaving looks AMAMZING!!!
I want to play a necro again.
-Jive
Just wait a bit longer. They will come. Doubtless. While the overall response on the Public boards has been positive, there's already people there claiming the system is dumb, boring and whatnot. So I am very sure there will be people coming here saying the same things.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
A nice improvement I think that adds to the immersive factor. Something that also encourages paying closer attention to your character and gaining a greater benefit out of it.
That sounds awesome, I can't wait to give it a go myself!
Oh look, Funcom's mouthpiece / viral marketer is back. It would be nice to hear about AoC flaws also, at least once in awhile.
Let us see how the game behaves in its compleatness rather then drooling on individual features that might or might not work.
Nice job of building up hype though, it will be even nicer if the game can live up to it. Eighty levels to grind, end game focus on raids, single player mode at the start, no free roaming world etc. You know, little thingies that other MMO's have probably done better.
Then again that is why I don't trust viral marketers, we will wait and see.
Oh look, Funcom's mouthpiece / viral marketer is back. It would be nice to hear about AoC flaws also, at least once in awhile.
Let us see how the game behaves in its compleatness rather then drooling on individual features that might or might not work.
Nice job of building up hype though, it will be even nicer if the game can live up to it. Eighty levels to grind, end game focus on raids, single player mode at the start, no free roaming world etc. You know, little thingies that other MMO's have probably done better.
Then again that is why I don't trust viral marketers, we will wait and see.
Hah! I knew it.It didn't take long for someone to come out and continue the bash-festival by predicting how the game will be bad in areas which no one can give accurate feed-back about yet. Grind, focus on raids, single-player mode. Either unconfirmed or blatantly wrong. Like the single-player mode part. Did someone mention to you that you have the option to switch between Multiplayer and Singleplayer?
OK, you want to hear about flaws. Let me see. PR was lacking with their pre-order mess-up and the "Open" Beta confusion. SIeges and Spellweaving will be in, but are apparently not tested in Closed Beta, which leaves with a vague feeling of "hope the QA was good enough but could backfire". Some issues are still unanswered about the NPC sieges (personal interest).
Happy?
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
To Illyrian:
From the negative things that you posted, the zoned (as opposed to a seamless) world is the biggest drawback of the game. Somehow I knew from the start that this would be the way the game will be though, just by reading who the developers were. It usually makes sense to work on an existing in-house game engine, if such a thing exists.
From what I've been reading, end game is focused too much on PvP actually and not on raids. Or maybe they are promoting the PvP aspect more. One more negative thing from my standpoint is that they are trying to tackle too many things on launch, which may lead to problems. Balance wise, I hope they pick either to focus on PvP or PvE and stick with it, regardless of the server (PvP balance is a more obvious choice).
The quests are presented in a storytelling manner, which does up to the immersion factor (as opposed to the non-seamless world). In fact, I think the way the quests are presented (dialogue between player and NPC) is probably the best overall approach (better than reading block of text, even an interesting block of text).
I don't think that people will feel the grind to max level (if there is such a thing). I am however skeptical about the random gang-squads that will roam the land looking for easy kills. They will definitely make things harder for late-comers and soloers. It will be interesting to see how the population will be divided after the initial rush, between the FFA PvP and PvE servers. Some people will definitely won't like being the hunted.
There are also plenty of untested features, left as surprises for release. That may be so, or it might just be marketing hype. I'm not overly worried about announced features not being there at launch. For me, end game features like mass raids and Keep building and maintaining can be delayed a couple months. What worries me is that the features not tested may not integrate well with what's already tested and presented. Or that it will create server problems and new unforeseen bugs when the game launches.
I guess the last paragraph is the only one related to the topic at hand. There are negative things to the game from a design standpoint and there are negative things that stem from opinion. One player's heaven is somebody else's hell. The features presented are intriguing enough to warrant a test of the released game. Whether it will hold it's appeal in the test of time is another issue.
I disagree about the grind feel or questing implementation, good points though.
Just for an example - the dialogue usually consists of the options - yes sir, it is white / offwhite / cream without and option to say - no sir, it is black.
Anyways it is a nice reply, thank you Xasapis, I agree with majority of what you said (as usual).
And for those that throw a fit at every post that doesn't state AoC is the greatest thing since sliced bread:
http://www.destructoid.com/ten-golden-rules-of-videogame-fanboyism-83502.phtml
Enjoy it.
I would like to point out that you came off as overly negative. Maybe to balance out some of the blatantly positive posts, but then again, this thread was specifically about Spellweaving and what has been revealed about it, yet you brought the discussion off topic, which is basically why I replied to you. Still, I'm not throwing a fit. I posted my own negative views and I would like to hear your opinion on those, too.
After all, keeping it -just- negative is just as bad as keeping it -just- positive. Two sides of the same coin, the coin named extremes.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
My jaw dropped watching the vid. Is that how it's going to look like IN-GAME? No effing way