DangerDolphin wrote: ↑Sun Apr 18, 2021 3:14 am
First of all, wanted to agree with the OP that failed scry shouldn't both burn components and trigger cooldown.
On the matter of scry immunity bard song, which I'm directly responsible for, bards already have this through one of their spells - and it lasts 3 times longer without metamagic. The spell is also useful in combat, whereas the song forces you to swap from a battle song to activate.
The overarching issues with scry though:
Risk
If you want to spy on someone by following them, you run the risk of being spotted. They could feed you false information, kill you, or trap you somewhere. Each round has a spot/listen check, and you have to weigh how long you want to listen and learn for, versus the chance of being seen. How close you want to get, against missing whispers. The concern that someone else will turn up to the meeting who has great detection. That if you're killed, you won't be able to act on the information.
If you're scrying, you hit the button and off you go. You can only be caught by other scriers, and even then it doesn't matter, as you're safe in your room.
Counterplay
If you're being scried as a mundane, you have no warning - until the gank squad turns up and kills you. You can certainly block it afterwards, by carrying around four or five crafted cloaks, but really it's too late by that point.
There is of course 'counterplay' by using blocking, but that's not so much counterplay as outright walling yourself off.
What scry is good at
Ganking people. Change servers, check the player list, find your enemy who's off doing some PvE in part of the server you would normally not think to look for them, and PK them while they're injured. This doesn't really generate any RP, but more meaningless PvP - PK is the endgame to any conflict - it can't escalate past that.
Another thing it's great at is spotting necromancers and warlocks PvEing. Fantastic to spot them when they're low level and have little access to countermeasures, as the spells expire quickly. Screwing over low levels is exactly what you don't want epics doing with their buckets of spare time.
What Scry is bad at
It's terrible for listening to plots and plans. Provided someone is actually silly enough to not use countermeasures, or go to a scry-proof room, it will last a few minutes and you'll get a snippet out of context. This isn't like a movie where the hero listens to the villains for one minute and is lucky enough to hear
YES, WE'LL PLANT THE BOMB AT THE EIFFEL TOWER AT NOON TOMORROW, HEY, WHAT WAS THAT NOISE?
You're far more likely to get
*Scratches nose* Yes indeed.
Chances are, you won't often get anything that can be acted on in a fun way.
The solution
Scry should have back and forth counterplay, require effort and provide clues and conversations.
Let anyone have the means to detect it, so you're not sure if you're getting great information, or being fed lies because they noticed you.
Let people lay traps for scriers to reveal their identities, or cause a backlash effect on them.
Let it last longer, 30-60 minutes, but hide the location and identities. You just hear voices discussing plans, not find out where they are so you can go and kill them. Give clues about who they are, where they are. It's a dark room or a bright forest, one figure is female, another is male and sounds orcish. Link them to figures from the deck of stars.
Remove the outright blocking of scry, have silent rolls to defend against and penetrate it depending on the strength of the defences. Once scry is no longer overpowered, this becomes feasible and reasonable. Nobody can be entirely certain they're not overheard when they speak, but the longer the scrier listens, the more risk they're detected.
If you want the current scry of zoning in on top of someone, you should have to do something risky, like getting a cut of their hair that only lasts 24 hours, or asking them to carry a ring you enchanted, so you can watch allies freely.