Thread about banishment and how to cure the land of this :)

[serina]

Mages "need" banishment, no doubt about that. But in it's current form, banishment works for everyone else also. And far too well with "unlimited" charges.

I feel that banishment should have some sort of depth restriction so it'll only work on creatures with base depth less than 3k for instance. That way you wouldn't be able to banish some of the nastier opponents like bone golems, wyrms, nasty undead and nasty demons. You'd still be able to *dest* these, but not simply enabling you to scoop up the loots without risking to "lure" the opponents out.

If the dev-team has some thoughts, perhaps one of you could take 2-5 mins to describe what you're thinking of doing about this? Or post the discussion you've had around this spell?

ZAL

[Ace]

Maybe the stonger the mage the stronger the abnishing power, but then the health penalty should be reduced...? or some other advantage should be given maybe...

[Warrior]

Well, many things have been discussed through the years, we could make it more expensive as far as health goes (more hp's lost pr monster), we could make it more random (1d10 hp's pr monster), we could put monster level into it, making monsters resist, we could add weird effects like monster level / player level * factor chance that the monster will instead be teleported TO the player (basically backfire in a way, similar to clone monster), we could make banishment cost health even when you fail. We could and most likely will make staffs explode like they used to, when recharging. That will probably fix quite a lot of recent balance issues.
But, we're open to suggestions and ideally as many people as possible would voice their opinions as it's a rather big part of the mages bag of tricks. We could make banishment only banish very weak monsters or a very small percentage of monsters for everyone but the top mages. But even the top mages should ideally not have completely unrestricted access to perfect banishment, it is too powerful a spell in my (personal) opinion. There's also related problems with Word of Destruction/*Destruction* and to a lesser extent even the relatively harmless looking womans toy, "Teleport other".

[serina]

If you make staves blow up regularly, I would expect 1 more change to make mages/priests playable at the bottom. This change might be complicated, but it would involve that if no monster comes within line of sight or within 5-10 squares of you for 7-10 seconds while resting, or a certain amount of turns at dungeon speed, your SP (and maybe HP) are fully restored. I ´think this is required, because sitting around waiting for your mana/hp to get restored is a major pain at 3k feet and beyond because the dungeon is as slow as it is. Staves of healing/magi help greatly with lowering the amount of time you need to sit resting while being aware looking for Morgoth or Huan or even Tselakus/Maeglin. And such a change wouldn't be very exploitable I think unless you can come up with a trick where a character can kill something they shouldn't be able to fairly easily anyway. ( a mage won't be able to rest up like this on Sauron, Ungoliant and Gothmog, but they might be able to do it against Polyphemus, Khamul, Dwar or similar lower uniques, but a high-level char should be able to kill these anyway without using more than a few charges/potions.

The game is really fun and fast in it's current state, and I fear putting back some of the timesinks would be a major step backwards. The end-game is already extended far with the increase in required XP and farming of *heals* and life potions to fight Morgoth. Sure some people die while doing this, but it's more of a hassle than fun to many it seems (look at the list of lvl 40-50 characters not being played because they need gear/potions or because the owners would rather play new characters).

Or granting mages/priests a spell that doesn't blow up the wand/staff might be another solution to this. I dunno what would work best without being exploitable by anyone.

ZAL

[Warrior]

When resting with time bubbles it'll only take a few seconds to regain all your mana :)

[schroeder]

I fear the time when I can no longer guarantee a recharge on a destruction staff... To this day, I still have flashbacks to when I ran into a grand master mystic, and was killed by summoned aether hounds... Oh god. Even now I remember my deaths from potion mimics and the like after i did not banish them.... So many horrible, horrible memories... Ever since those times, i've moved via destruction or stone to mud (destruction when i come to an aria with less walls, or if i want to move faster). I greatly fear death. I have no idea how time bubbles would work, but they better work well enough so that being summoned upon by powerfull hounds is not necesarily death. Either that, or you implament the code I heard powerwyrm said he put in his variant. Variable window size... Then, you WOULD know what was around that next corner, and you would not have to stone to mud or destruct in order to be safe!

[PowerWyrm]

Why not simply stick to Vanilla? No limits on the spells but staves blow up again when overcharged... Mages are already penalized enough with 4 bpr and very low hps. Spells like banishment and destruction only counterbalance those penalties.