Timestop Change

[Straxus]

Time stop and other spells that are 7th level or higher, should be RPd as precious and highly guarded for the wizard to use when he is most vulnerable.

Just my opinion.

yeah everyone rping being tired every time you cast summon creature from lvl 13 every day you do writs sure does generate a lot of cool stories

a wonderful and convenient litmus test for bad changes is if pnp is cited to justify them

this isn't pnp. the dynamics are totally different.

Not what I meant by that at all.
Higher level spells are more taxing on a wizard, just as making more powerful magic items drains more xp, and cost more gold.

It is the reason you have to use components for 7th and higher. That is really the only way this drain can (in the game mechanics available) be implemented. What I mean by what I said refers not to RPing that you are worn out after a spell, and need to rest right away, and should avoid all combat situations... that would be silly, and as you said no fun at all.

But there are subtle RP things you can do IG... if you chose to, that would really express the power being channeled by such spells.

Example: even though you have enough components to cast a certain spell, that may deplete your supply, and then you can't use other spells... (at the moment I can only cast 7th level, but I imagine each higher level spell uses more components)

It is something I haven't seen RPd, but I think it could add to the character if it was.

Again, I don't think it is something that could, or even should be enforced. It would be up to the player themselves.

I apologize if my post wasn't clear on that fact.

[Hunter548]

Needing a group of players to kill a single player is not a substitute for balance. If that were the case we never would have nerfed Dragonshape because "You should just come back with more friends!"

No, I'm not talking about needing a group of players to kill a single player, but the idea that all classes need to have potent killing power. Some classes are more for support or utility etc, and also will never be able to kill someone who chugs infinite potions. Wizard was designed to be a class that is for support and utility, not for potent and infinite killing power. A support bard is also probably not going to singlehandedly kill someone with an inventory stocked with healing potions. A healer cleric might not be able to, either. Idk why it's absolutely necessary that a wizard is able to do that 100% of the time.

A support bard probably can't, a healer cleric might be able to, but there's an important distinction to be made here:

Both of those classes provide way more support power than a wizard does.

Even assuming your premise about arcane casters being support shells is accurate (Citation needed?), a healer cleric or a pure 30 bard with enough lore for mass haste scrolls provides way more party support than a mage via overheal/bless/MV or bard song.


Like, you couldn't pay me enough to play any form of non-shadowmage wizard or sorcerer right now, and I've spent the better part of 15 years playing wizards on this server.

[RogueUnicorn]

I strongly disagree with your concept of a wizard or cleric. They are not only for support. A wizard or a cleric are among the most destructive forces in the Forgotten Realms. Wizard was NOT designed to be a class that is soley for support and utility. I don't know where you're getting such an idea from.

A support bard is not a wizard, yet a bad example because bards can be ridiculously OP in the current meta and dish out huge amounts of damage.

Casters in Forgotten Realms are not like casters in group-focused themepark MMOs. This isn't WoW, where a healer can only heal, and a wizard is entirely useless without a tank. There are roles, sure, but limiting us to being "you're a wizard, don't fight people.. you're a healer, you can only heal" is .. I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, I think a horrible direction for the server to take.

Yes, wizards are among the most destructive forces in Forgotten Realms - until they run out of spell slots. Then sorcerers are the most destructive force.

I said support bard, not bardadin etc, who definitely can't out damage chugging 2 heal pots per round. I said healer cleric, which also can't put damage heal pots.

No one is going to out chug a sorcerer. That's completely unrealistic. A wizard should get good and be more resourceful, like someone with 50 int would be. The great wizards of FR aren't just standing there spamming damage spells. That's what sorcerers are good at, though. If you want to be an arcane spellcaster with great killing power play a sorcerer. If you want a million bonus feats and spell focuses, be a wizard.

[Hunter548]

Yes, wizards are among the most destructive forces in Forgotten Realms - until they run out of spell slots. Then sorcerers are the most destructive force.

I said support bard, not bardadin etc, who definitely can't out damage chugging 2 heal pots per round. I said healer cleric, which also can't put damage heal pots.

No one is going to out chug a sorcerer. That's completely unrealistic. A wizard should get good and be more resourceful, like someone with 50 int would be. The great wizards of FR aren't just standing there spamming damage spells. That's what sorcerers are good at, though. If you want to be an arcane spellcaster with great killing power play a sorcerer. If you want a million bonus feats and spell focuses, be a wizard.

Healer cleric absolutely can outdamage heal potions. A single death domain harm per round does more damage than two heal potions per round, and a single non-death domain harm almost outdamages both of them.

Between pray, a greater restoration scroll and potentially things like lay on hands and this?

Yeah, you absolutely can out-heal even a sorcerer's ability to damage you.

It's a real simple equation: A max'd IGMS only does 120 damage. A heal potion heals 155. A sorcerer only has 9 or so max'd IGMS, and each heal potion you drink negates one IGMS, and 25% of the next one (roughly simplified). You only need 7-8 heal potions before the sorcerer has to move to things that are less reliable damage like empowered IGMS, or even unmetamagic'd IGMS.


If you've got ideas about what resources a wizard should tap to kill someone, I'd love to hear them.

[magistrasa]

Sorry, I just got a little whiplash reading through this thread. When did wizards become mediocre? Jeez, I guess I need to read the forums more because I totally missed that memo.

This feedback thread is sort of inherently useless. It's either going to have people saying "bad change pls fix," which might work in some cases but obviously not this one, or "good change thanks devs," which can really just go into a kudos thread.

EDIT: Except for that idea to make Timestop a 7th level spell - I don't agree with it, but that's the kinda out-of-the-box thinking that at least feels constructive.

[Shrouded Wanderer]

As much as I can say, I wholeheartedly disagree with this change.

Timestop was not an end all button, now its useless to even cast in any viable means


Many pure wizards use timestop as a stop gap between melees bull rushing them with zero regard for damage in order to squeak out a few extra bits of damage.


Mages will now have to ENTIRELY rely on IGMS and bigbys to keep from being monstermashed by weaponmasters.
I will however say that I'll try it out. But I expect mages will get ground pounded about 7 times out of 10 now.

[RogueUnicorn]

Healer cleric absolutely can outdamage heal potions. A single death domain harm per round does more damage than two heal potions per round, and a single non-death domain harm almost outdamages both of them.

Between pray, a greater restoration scroll and potentially things like lay on hands and this?

Yeah, you absolutely can out-heal even a sorcerer's ability to damage you.

It's a real simple equation: A max'd IGMS only does 120 damage. A heal potion heals 155. A sorcerer only has 9 or so max'd IGMS, and each heal potion you drink negates one IGMS, and 25% of the next one (roughly simplified). You only need 7-8 heal potions before the sorcerer has to move to things that are less reliable damage like empowered IGMS, or even unmetamagic'd IGMS.

You can counter harm slap by doing such things as
-run away
-stay out of touch range
-have high dex
-drink neg protection
-paralyze, slow, or kill the cleric before they kill you
-drink yet another neg protection potion
-drink a third neg protection potion


Sorcerers have other spells than Max igms. They have plenty of empowered igms too. There are also many damaging AoEs. You can also have a squad of extremely deadly vampires that have no good counter.

As for strategies for a wizard, hey they also have good AoEs and access to empowered and maximized spells and also can summon extremely deadly vampires that have no good counter. You could also probably yoink a friend to help you.

You can also run away, rest, then come back to the fight- that's allowed and a good strategy.

How many heal potions does this theoretical person theoretically have on average?

You probably don't want to stand and chug while vampire squad is stabbing you, while you're getting wailed on with AoE clouds /tentacles and getting blasted with damage spells.

[NauVaseline]

like someone with 50 int would be.

someone doesn't play wizards

[RogueUnicorn]

like someone with 50 int would be.

someone doesn't play wizards

[RogueUnicorn]

like someone with 50 int would be.

someone doesn't play wizards

I do. It was an exaggeration. Also not, because I'm pretty sure I've seen a 50 int wiz build the other day.

[Frailman]

However, I'm sure that this has all been considered. We should wait for the dev.

Big yikes <insert pic of shrek taking a picture>

[Ork]

This feedback thread is sort of inherently useless.

Hate to be negative towards other peoples skill, but it you look at the people commenting on this change and weight their relative know how in mechanics-you have enough information on the impact of this change.

[Frailman]

This feedback thread is sort of inherently useless.

Hate to be negative towards other peoples skill, but it you look at the people commenting on this change and weight their relative know how in mechanics-you have enough information on the impact of this change.

This sounds like an appeal to authority to me...

[Seven Sons of Sin]

A part of my problem (and a systemic, age-old problem) with NWN arcane spellcasters is the over-reliance on IGMS.

The Timestop "problem" to me, was always more of an IGMS problem.

Eons ago Coar (the player of Trintiren Elraiendel) made a post about how the problem with arcane spellcasters in Arelith was that they didn't have to make tough choices in their spell preparation. This is a marked departure from typical PnP, where a wizard is worth their salt through the strategic selection of their daily prepared spells. NWN largely failed in this, because a few key core spells were just so amazing you never had to steer far off the beaten path to be effective.

IGMS is more of the problem than Timestop was, imho. I'm not calling for its nerfing though, because it remains the only reliably way for a wizard to deal damage because of the prevalence of the divine dip (as aforementioned).

We've added some new tools to the wizard's toolbox in the form of new spells, but they still haven't really overshadowed the domination of IGMS.

Making Time Stop less effective is just going to make IGMS' shadow become more obvious.

We need more saveless spells for arcane casters that aren't IGMS, that require some decision-making, or something. Saveless spells that COULD do more than IGMS if the situation is right, and give a wizard 2-3 to choose from, each with their own niche.

Then nerf IGMS.

[Ork]

This feedback thread is sort of inherently useless.

Hate to be negative towards other peoples skill, but it you look at the people commenting on this change and weight their relative know how in mechanics-you have enough information on the impact of this change.

This sounds like an appeal to authority to me...

It certainly is. Hardly a fallacy when they also have the better arguments.

[Frailman]

Hate to be negative towards other peoples skill, but it you look at the people commenting on this change and weight their relative know how in mechanics-you have enough information on the impact of this change.

This sounds like an appeal to authority to me...

It certainly is. Hardly a fallacy when they also have the better arguments.

Still a fallacy, you should refer to their strong arguments rather than their authority if you don't want it to be a fallacy.

[Ork]

This sounds like an appeal to authority to me...

It certainly is. Hardly a fallacy when they also have the better arguments.

Still a fallacy, you should refer to their strong arguments rather than their authority if you don't want it to be a fallacy.

sure.

[RogueUnicorn]

The Timestop "problem" to me, was always more of an IGMS problem.

The Timestop problem didn't even have much to do with igms. The Timestop problem was that you could timestop -> cast a lot of damage AoE spells that would eat the opponents' -pray while damaging them through the time stop -> when timestop is over, hellball them to push them down again -> gruin them while they're down -> if they're not dead for some reason, clean up with igms or something else.

No decent player should be using timestop just to sneak in a few IGMS, that's a poor use of the timestop.

With these nerfs, it sounds like you're still allowed to timestop someone and stack AoEs on them, eat their pray due to debuff, and blast them into next week with hellball and gruin, but they might not be fully dead as quick because they weren't eating AoE damage during timestop. But they're still probably dead as soon as timestop wears off and they're trying to crawl out of acid fog after being hellball'd

[Shadowy Reality]

It certainly is. Hardly a fallacy when they also have the better arguments.

The whole argument here is that mages need Timestop to be competitive. Which is more or less true. But is not the best argument. Mages can definitely still do things and kill people without that, it is just harder. Like it became harder for melees after the original Timestop nerf, after this nerf and after the KD nerf.

Reverting Timestop to what is was is not the solution, but rather tackle the WHY mages are not competitive without Timestop. That is a step in the right direction and it starts with the update we just had. And many people here refuse to consider this alternative, or seem to take it as an offense that that these other changes did not come with this update too.

We have new possibilities now, we can alter healing potions, we can add deadlier spells for mages, without having to balance them around Timestop.

[Cataclysm of Iron]

This sounds like an appeal to authority to me...

It certainly is. Hardly a fallacy when they also have the better arguments.

Still a fallacy, you should refer to their strong arguments rather than their authority if you don't want it to be a fallacy.

Agreed - I think not only is 'people who agree with me know more about this than people who don't agree with me' unfalsifiable, but also the dimension is being missed that there are orders of magnitude more things to this server to a lot more people than the finer points of balance in the PvP meta fully scrutinised by a sliver of the playerbase.

I'd guess PvP is somewhere between functional and literal zero percent of the experience or priorities of a lot of players. I have no idea on the dev's lines of thinking or logic but it's possible that, for example, they agree that this weakens mages in the 'optimised PvP meta' (and I honestly hate that that's a thing that is even a consideration, but I fully recognise that's personal preference) but they've weighed that against, for example, the fact that for the majority of people who don't take this game so damn seriously being killed helplessly in a PvP timestop is a real buzzkill, whereas not being able to kill someone in a PvP timestop can still lead to fun encounters.

There's so, so, so, so much more to this than raw numbers and the people who, it is alleged, are best at crunching them.

[Shrouded Wanderer]

It certainly is. Hardly a fallacy when they also have the better arguments.

The whole argument here is that mages need Timestop to be competitive. Which is more or less true. But is not the best argument. Mages can definitely still do things and kill people without that, it is just harder. Like it became harder for melees after the original Timestop nerf, after this nerf and after the KD nerf.

Reverting Timestop to what is was is not the solution, but rather tackle the WHY mages are not competitive without Timestop. That is a step in the right direction and it starts with the update we just had. And many people here refuse to consider this alternative, or seem to take it as an offense that that these other changes did not come with this update too.

We have new possibilities now, we can alter healing potions, we can add deadlier spells for mages, without having to balance them around Timestop.

I 100% agree with this. I think that if timestop was made to be this way then there should have been a bit of a harder look at what can be used to balance out the loss of this spell.

And dont misunderstand me, this spell is entirely lost. As a wizard id rather use this spell slot for something else now that I cannot use the spell for anything pther than a... Admittedly horrible escape.

We do need to look at why wizards wont be viable without this spell, or at the very best hy their rank in the pecking order is dramatically decreased. As a serious look

It certainly is. Hardly a fallacy when they also have the better arguments.

Still a fallacy, you should refer to their strong arguments rather than their authority if you don't want it to be a fallacy.

Agreed - I think not only is 'people who agree with me know more about this than people who don't agree with me' unfalsifiable, but also the dimension is being missed that there are orders of magnitude more things to this server to a lot more people than the finer points of balance in the PvP meta fully scrutinised by a sliver of the playerbase.

I'd guess PvP is somewhere between functional and literal zero percent of the experience or priorities of a lot of players. I have no idea on the dev's lines of thinking or logic but it's possible that, for example, they agree that this weakens mages in the 'optimised PvP meta' (and I honestly hate that that's a thing that is even a consideration, but I fully recognise that's personal preference) but they've weighed that against, for example, the fact that for the majority of people who don't take this game so damn seriously being killed helplessly in a PvP timestop is a real buzzkill, whereas not being able to kill someone in a PvP timestop can still lead to fun encounters.

There's so, so, so, so much more to this than raw numbers and the people who, it is alleged, are best at crunching them.

I would go so far as to state that any conversation about balance is a conversation about PVP. People may not like it but thats the harsh reality.

NPCs dont get a vote on what they get killed by, PCs do.

PVE balance can have its place. But timestop is a purely PVP spell, I canot think of a single reason why anyone would slot it for Pve. At all.

[Hunter548]

You can counter harm slap by doing such things as
-run away
-stay out of touch range
-have high dex
-drink neg protection
-paralyze, slow, or kill the cleric before they kill you
-drink yet another neg protection potion
-drink a third neg protection potion

Nowhere did I claim harm spam is some undefeatable tactic with no counter (Though I certainly think it's stronger than you seem to). Just that it outdamages heal potions.

Sorcerers have other spells than Max igms. They have plenty of empowered igms too. There are also many damaging AoEs. You can also have a squad of extremely deadly vampires that have no good counter.

Heal potions trade even more favorably with empowered IGMS than with maximized IGMS (1 heal potion = 1.25 max'd IGMS, 1 heal potion = 1.50 empowered IGMS, on average).

Please be specific: which damaging AoES? Keep in mind that most of the ones at 8/9 are less efficient for single target damage than IGMS, and the ones below that are even worse.

Vampires have plenty of counters: If you have more than 50-55 ac, they can't really hurt you (Since their AB is what, 35-40?). They also can be WoF'd away, or hit with a halt undead consumable. Clerics (and shamen) also do vampires better since they can SR their vampires, and make WoF consumables basically a non-issue.

As for strategies for a wizard, hey they also have good AoEs and access to empowered and maximized spells and also can summon extremely deadly vampires that have no good counter. You could also probably yoink a friend to help you.

You can also run away, rest, then come back to the fight- that's allowed and a good strategy.

You probably don't want to stand and chug while vampire squad is stabbing you, while you're getting wailed on with AoE clouds /tentacles and getting blasted with damage spells.

1) Taking both ESF conj and vampires on the same wizard is extremely uncommon, and usually a waste of feats (Since necromancy and conjuration basically fill the same niche of buffing summons)
2) Which AoES? Which empowered and maximized spells?
3) The counters to vampires are the same as when sorcerers make them
4) Running away isn't a strategy to win a fight, and running away to rest and come back only really helps if you have the ability to pressure them effectively. My whole point is you really don't, without timestop to confirm a kill.

How many heal potions does this theoretical person theoretically have on average?

A lot. I posted a screenshot earlier of a character with 300 of them. Not even ten minutes ago I found a stack of 30 for less than 150k. Having gigantic stockpiles of them even without the ability to produce them yourself (Or a friend who produces them and gives them to you) isn't outside the realm of possibility at all.

[magistrasa]

you have enough information on the impact of this change

I think to be able to see an impact, you have to give it some time in game. This thread coming out so aggressively against the change, so soon after its emergence, is really hard to take seriously because it can only be based on conjecture and hypothesis. We're guessing at the impact, and guessing doesn't really count as information. My point in calling the thread "useless" is that it's just hard to take such apocalyptic warnings about a fresh and untested change seriously. No matter how experienced some of the dissenters may be, it's obvious that this response is in large part inspired by a kneejerk reaction. And kneejerk reactions aren't the metric for how devs judge their decisions. From the way I see it, this thread cannot fulfill its intended purpose - unless its purpose is simply to stand as a place for people to use their opinions as cudgels with which to beat each other to death - hence, "useless."

(Jesus you people type fast, quit getting in the way while I swing my cudgel.)

[Shrouded Wanderer]

As well to add to the above post. Item scarcity is a fallacy when talking about game balance.

You have to assume that each player is at full advantage of anything or else balance means nothing.

For example, if breach didnt exist youd have to say that NEP and shadowshield were overpowered. And that necromancy spells were utterly useless.

But it does exist so it will be used.

Same with items.

Assume a player has an infinite amount of potions for any example becuase, effectively, they can and do.

[Irongron]

Well, I hope everyone enjoyed that.

Quite a week we're having.