Recasting bless spells (keep them always on instead)

[interchange]

I always thought that re-casting blesses made little sense in the concept of MajorMud.  How does a spell suddenly wear off?  Shouldn't the caster be required to keep it going through concentration?  Add to that the difficulties of keeping blesses active (spells with the same messages, not seeing what blesses the party has on, problems with stacking spells), and this gets real annoying.

I propose something simple.  Let's take a cleric with a 30 mana tick (not using MME here so the numbers won't be accurate, but it's not important)
Instead of casting prev, zeal, dfav when his spells wear off and casting prev on his buddy every 60 seconds he could:
+prev
+zeal
+dfav
+prev buddy

Let's say prev takes 4.2 mana tick to cast, zeal 10.9, dfav 2.1 (not accurate, just arguing) as calculated by MME.
Now, his mana tick would be (30 - 4.2 - 10.9 - 2.1 - 4.2) = 8.6 and always round down to make it 8.

And if you wanted to remove a spell:
-dfav

Obviously, this would be really sweet for the player, but we need to balance out the pros. What makes sense to me is that, since you are always concentrating on spells, there should be an energy penalty for every bless spell you have active (similar to the energy penalty for casting between rounds).  I would also consider accuracy penalties (makes a lot of sense especially with smash) and spellcasting penalties.  Obviously, these penalties wouldn't be severe since they are assessed on every round.

There are some issues that would need to be addressed:
1) If you are ticking less than 0, what happens if you run out of mana?
2) How do you handle bless failures/mana consumed when initially casting a spell?
3) Casting spells on others (knowing what you're casting & difficult implementation with parties/different rooms)
4) Flux-type spells & how they impact a tick & could they be used in this fashion.  Personally, I think if you solve #1 appropriately, then the flux tick should be assessed on every tick instead of per-cast.

What do you guys think?

[Darmius]

I do like this idea, but only for long duration buff spells. Speed, frenzy etc..  no.

Provide a 2-way implementation. The standard timed buff duration and certain spells could be "focusable".  So a caster could:
focus bles [<target>]
dispel bles [<target>]

The 'focus' keyword would list what spells you are keeping active and on who.
Active spells:
bles
bles <target>

There are some issues that would need to be addressed:
1) If you are ticking less than 0, what happens if you run out of mana?
2) How do you handle bless failures/mana consumed when initially casting a spell?
3) Casting spells on others (knowing what you're casting & difficult implementation with parties/different rooms)
4) Flux-type spells & how they impact a tick & could they be used in this fashion.  Personally, I think if you solve #1 appropriately, then the flux tick should be assessed on every tick instead of per-cast.

1) If you tick for negative then your mana drains. When you hit 0 mana all buffs fail.  I would like to see, maybe a stun happen to the player.  <player> collapses with fatigue.  2 round stun, all buffs fail.
2)Jack up the base cost of spells (x2 or x3) and make the unfailable.  This way they are more of an out of combat buffing.  Also this will prevent buffs from being changed up, recast during boss fights without a huge penalty to MP.
3) Every time the player has a mana tick, if the target is not in the room with them then the buffs on that target release.

Bards would have to be handled with care since they have the most buffs in the game.  Hugh amount of +MP rgen could skew group combat balance, especially in PVP.

[DeathCow]

I dunno where it went, maybe never made it to the forum, but we had considered a similar system.

[Thergin]

One thing to be aware of is blessing other people, and people outside the party. Also when casting a buff/spell the next melee combat round is slower and less accurate.

[DeathCow]

Basically I was considering leaving in the traditional way, but also having a second training screen that would allow you to set up blesses and party blesses.  The in game system would by pass any spell failures or combat penalties at a mana premium. The only place you'd be able to change you maintenance spells is at a trainer. 

[Rhinehold]

I am totally for, at the very least, loooonger bless spells.  Heck even 1 hour would be a vast improvement to the... what? ... 5 minutes it currently is?

Another idea is to use the "reserve mana" program that so many other games have in the past.

Example:  Party Bless reserves 40 mana.   Your entire mana pool is 200 mana.  Casting this spell would reduce your mana pool to 160(res=40).

Example 2: You cast Party Blur which reserves 20.  Your new mana pool with BOTH spells would now be 140(res=60)

-DR

[The Crazy Animal]

I dunno where it went, maybe never made it to the forum, but we had considered a similar system.

DC we had talked about something similar to this under the topic of server side scripting. Not quite the same thing but still some type of auto re-cast bless spell management .


I like the idea of having a spell upkeep for some spells I wouldn't though suggest it for all bless spells though. I would treat it more like an advance casting ability. I'm not going to post hijack though so I'll post that in another topic