Rip Rune Caster, it was good pre Re:Build in Thaum/Link/Ench builds
Imo they should change the Rune Caster: Skilled Casting attribute to make all cast-time of the build variable, meaning you can unleash any skill with cast-time whenever you want while casting, adjusting the damage accordingly (e.g. you cast only 1 second of Meteor before unleashing it = it deals only 50% SFR as damage).
It should have 100 attribute levels, enabling the player to add up to 60% additional damage to any cast by continuing to cast until you’ve reached twice of the initial cast-time.
Such overcasting and the basic casting should be unaffected by any cast-time reduction like the Rod Mastery attribute or Chronos Quickcast for as long as the Skilled Casting attribute is active,
meaning the Rune Caster would be able to draw out the potential of the character by fixing the build on casting skills for a long time, thus creating a counter image to the fast-casting Rod/Chronomancer who specializes in throwing skills out more quickly.
Runecaster skills should receive additional effects when overcast, e.g. Rune of Stone doubles the summoned stone count on top of the up to 60% SFR bonus,
Rune of Destruction doubles the size of the AoE, Rune of Giants allows additional skills to be cast while being a giant, Rune of Justice reduces its CD time for every devil type or dark property monster killed with it and Rune of Ice adds an ice armor buff that reduces physical damage taken by 50% for 5 seconds.
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Just saying, while your idea in itself is interesting, Chronomancer is already useless enough to make it even more useless =.=’’ Why not think about ideas to add synergies in the game rather than cut and limit them here and there?
From my perspective it seems like they rushed to make RC full class, so it’s like the class is… I’d say lacking some more attributes other classes have at high-levels.
Still, for now I’l stick with RC for my main. I wanted to have it long ago, but pre-Re I was always unable to fit it into the build.
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Ensuring that the duration of the load influences several characteristics of the Rune Caster skills could remove the frustration of seeing the spells completely interrupted while loading and give to the player the ability to choose when the skill is launched. Modifying the area of effect, the number of targets, Increasing the damage, the number of hits or the chance that an alteration could be inflicted to a monster, this could make Rune Caster a very versatile class (but, the loading time should be very long and the risk also quite high => more damage received during casting and possibility of interrupting it).
On the other hand, i find that Hillgarm’s idea of a system of reading and combining runes could reconnect the Rune Caster with his origins and give him a strong character. But it would imply to greatly modify the functioning of the Rune Caster. Assuming that a rune is a word and that depending on where it is placed its grammatical behavior changes slightly, we could have several phrases (or magical formula) with varied and very strategic effects.
For example: If we suppose that a phrase is composed of three runes;
-The first rune could be like the main theme of the sentence or its subject;
-The second rune would be the additional subject that adds features to the first rune;
-The third rune would be the verb, and would indicate the form of the action.
And each rune would have each of the three syntactic roles:
Ice => Ice property / Chance to freeze or increases dodge / Targets an enemy and hits nearby monsters
Giant => Psychic property / Chance to knockdown or resistance to it / Targets an ally or the caster
Justice => Lightning property / Chance to shock or resistance to alterations / Beam in front of the caster
Protection => Holy property / Decreases physical defense or increases it / Wide aura around the caster
Destruction => Dark property / Decreases the magic defense or increases it / Targets the ground hits all enemies on a large area
Rock => Earth property / Chance to petrify or increases accuracy / Targets the ground and hits all enemies on a small area
Witch would give funny combinations like:
-Giant + Rock + Protection => Buff giving a psychic attack bonus and increasing the accuracy of the allies around the Rune Caster for X seconds.
-Justice + Ice + Destruction => Lightning attack that can freeze over a large targeted area.
The combinations would be very numerous and probably unnecessarily complicated for IMC to realize and perhaps not so interesting as that to play, but hey, it’s a possible path.
Otherwise there is the possibility to create a general loading skill that can store up to 5 loaded runes and that would be a skill common to all other Rune Caster spells. Other techniques could be launched instantly, but the Rune Caster should regularly move away from the fight to charge 1 to 5 runes for max 10sec to cast the next five spells on a row (or the number of charged runes). It could be an interesting compromise. Maybe even give a bonus to all the techniques of the Rune Caster if this new skill is fully loaded, working like the skill [Sniper’s Serenity].
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I would call Rune of Justice another version of Gravity Pole rather than Rubric, since Exorcist came after Rune Caster.
But I agree that Rune Caster doesn’t really deserve 3 rank slots for what it gives. It used to have a really fun synergy with CryoKino. Now Rune of Ice is Elementalist’s Ice Sphere, which nobody really used, under a different name.
If we do some simplistic math taking a minimum of 6 skills with 3 runes per cast Rune Caster would have 120 (unable to repeat runes) to 216 (using the same rune multiple times) potential skills alone (excluding if the possibility to do shorter combinations adding more 30/36+6). That’s an awesome way to implement magic in a game but it doesn’t suit ToS’ as it can act as the whole class system as a single class, not to say it can be hard to incorporate a leveling factor and a nightmare to program and balance.
A less oppressive variant of this idea that fits the casting aspect more is to change all runes to be buffs applied to offensive skills, this way runes have to be casted to grant you a buff for the next spell used changing some properties like elements, target method (AoE to targets), size and others. It could be done in a way that only one buff can be used at time or to stack them up, taking the first option the ideal approach is to have the SP consumption applied with the skill cast and not the buff use as it could be possible to overwrite the buff several times and lose all SP without using a skill. Tho this still brings the question on how to make the leveling aspect fair and engaging.
What i pointed out was way simpler than this as if each skill had 2 versions since runes have two meaning depending on how they are presented (horizontal or vertical), in this case it would have 12 skills (or 2 variations for each one of the 6 skills) such as having Rune of Ice (Isaz) to deal damage to enemies and freeze them in AoE as effect A and shorten the regeneration interval to 1s and grante knockdown immunity as effect B.
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@Anadriel I’ve thought about the possibility of making “words” with runes but that would be debugging nightmare at best.
@Hillgarm I think that the ideia of making runes change based on the reading is interesting, but again it falls on the problem of doubling the number of skills.
The problem with runes being modifiers for other skills is that each compatible skill needs to be coded separately and depending of how skills are structured, it would mean having a copy for each possible rune caster variant.
One thing I thought about is having the possibility of pre-casting runes, in rest mode you select a rune and a rune caster spell and save it, creating an item, then in combat you can use the item to instant cast the skill, the item would have twice the cooldown of the skill and you could only carry a limited amount of pre-casted runes, say 5 total, they are of course untradable. It would fit the ideia of rune caster and be rather easy to implement, making the class some sort of burst mage.
With the removal of surespell adding an atribute that increases power but allow the casting to be interrupted would be interesting.
Allowing Rune Caster to “overcast” skills would fit the original proposal of the class, but with current casting mechanics it would just go overpowered.
In general I’m fine-ish with rock, justice and destruction, protection needs to be reworked into something else, or just made in a 1 point skill with the attribute effect built-in, giant needs to be either scrapped or reworked into something else, it never worked well and was always a gimmick, current Ice should be recursively deleted from all builds of the game and made into something decent, preferably to the old 300% damage bonus to cryomancer, or into an ice version of the fire fox shikigami that gave omnyoji a better version of the old RoI > ice wall >> PP combo (I admit being really salty about that).
Actually the “ice rune shikigami” might be a nice solution for Rune of Ice, I might even say the best, easy to code, fits with the class (rune caster costume mentions it is made to deal with both cold climates and hot, ice magic being “stronger in cold places” and the class having an workaround when in hot areas) and can be made as flashy as the class deserves (also having a nice uptime since it would be a reskin of fire fox shikigami), can even summon an ice fairy as an equivalent of the fire fox (not sure if it fits but would look cool), even the rune just floating besides the character would work.
At this point I’m willing to accept anything so long as IMC comes and say what they want rune caster to be. Of course if they say “skill scroll crafter” I won’t be happy but at least it will help give the class some direction
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