Piecing together a spell had a lot in common with schoolwork. Not so much the history or literature, but the more scientific stuff, and a bit of the punctuation from writing. It still doesn't make classes worth it though; I could have figured it out without them. Best thing that's come out of it is the speed I get through all that work so I can get back to playing the game and tweaking my spells.
Most of the mages who I see in the game don't even make their own spells, they copy templates off other people or use the in-game spell creation tool to get something playable. There have been very few times this has put anything dangerous in their hands. Sure they can throw around fireballs or rays of ice, or magic shields, but the only thing that gives them any utility, or that they use for any utility is the flight spell every one of them has. Flight also has the tendency to leave you a sitting duck with a target on your back while it guzzles away your mana to power itself. That leaves the mages that build their own in the more hands on spell creation tool.
I'm relatively certain it was the original debug and/or creation tool that the developers used, then put in as an afterthought before they added the sleeker, more dumbed down interface. It was horrible to learn at the start of it all. When I transitioned from just knives and stat boosts to a magic casting version, I lost quite a few times as things backfired or didn't work quite like I expected, or just didn't work at all. This all happening after the testing I put them through beforehand to make sure they would work.
First spell I got working correctly was the magic vision spell. I hadn't seen it circulating around the VR forum boards before I got it working, so it was either new, or people didn't spread things like it around. The people who I've run into who do make their own spells makes me think it's the later.
Once I got that one to run smoothly, the rate at which I managed to work them all together just kept going up. Look at the code for the stat boosts and a spell to do something like them is easy. Look at the rules that drown characters underwater and creating a underwater breathing spell took a week. The glimpses I get at spell-creators shows that they either work faster than I do, or they spend half a year tweaking the way the fireball looks when they use it. For some reason, I don't run into enough of them in matches to really pick their brains at it.
Currently, I'm piecing together a teleport spell. Not the easiest thing. Either it works well but uses way too much mana to be viable, or it has very glaring faults and can't be used in a tactical sense. Somehow it needs to soak some power from somewhere other than the mana reserve, but if it does that too much it makes the whole thing too complicated to fit the targeting in and the failsafes so as not to leave me stuck in a tree. Tricky to balance it. Might be impossible, but there was a rumor going around about some teleporting mage a week ago. Could have been replicas, or huge speed, but I might as well try to get it working.
It figures that this is the exact time I get kicked off for server maintenance. Some new patch, the notes are up already. Gamemode changes top the list. Half of it seems like gibberish, as if the fantasy world sim got mixed in with the fantasy arena. Forum posts seem to indicate that that is in fact what is going on. The maps that we play on are already taken out of the world, so now they just aren't separating the servers. More update downtimes, I guess. People are complaining for the same reasons I would, if I were to post anything. I don't though. The feeling is slipping back into my toes as I wiggle them, waking up for me. If I'm not playing I'd rather be out of bed doing something.
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