Hey Crea-tins!
We know everyone is waiting breathlessly for the huge update coming, and wondering when it will hit. We’re a little way past when we thought it would be out, but there is a good reason for that: even more is being added! Jasson has been tirelessly pouring over all the feedback posts and continuing to work on improvements to the game, as well as revamping the combat, magic, and other major features. Today we want to tell you a little more about the changes to magic.
Our faithful mages out there were definitely not happy, the current system felt clunky, took excessive toolbar space, and the elements seemed altogether useless. This excerpt from Jasson’s Dev Blog explains some of what he has planned, and the new direction for Crea’s spellcasters.
“To remedy this we decided to split spells into two categories: channels and forms. A channel spell will channel the powers of an Aer (god-type creatures from Crea's mythos). Forms are essentially spell types such as projectile, support, enchant, etc. The resulting spell of casting a form will change depending on what you're channeling. Channel Aegnix the Aer of fire and cast a enshroud form to create a Firestorm spell that envelopes your character dealing damage to nearby enemies.
In addition to this I'm going to play around with the idea of adding this concept of a channeling level. By using a channeling spell and some lower tier spells you can acquire additional channeling levels. Some higher tier spells will require and consume the channel level. With higher channel levels some spells will even be altered to gain additional effects. Such as casting a projectile spell with a high channel level would cause it to be slightly homing or possibly explode on impact dealing aoe damage. Changing what you're channeling always resets the level to 1. I like the idea of this because I can see it causing a nice ebb and flow of using magic in combat along with posing some potentially interesting strategizing on spell use. With that being said I am a little weary of the additional complexity that comes with it.
As you can see, this new system is much more scalable and will allow us to add new forms in with only requiring a single toolbar slot. We currently have 5 channel spells and 8~ forms planned which is 40 different possible spells but only takes up 13 toolbar slots if you wanted all of them. With the addition of a secondary toolbar players will now be able to fully focus on being a mage.”
We should have some fun stuff ready to show off soon, so keep an eye on the forums and social channels for more news as we get closer to the big patch. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time for the Crea Chronicle!