Alangara

Death spells I don't like either.

Insta-kills No. Maybe if those were converted to damage a bit or render a target weaker in some way perhaps? That might work.

The mindspells , off the top of my head right now, I just remember looking at NWN's stats in the in game spell book at Charm Person, and I was thinking it was worthless, even for Single Player campaign. I normally used Daze cantrip a lot in other servers when playing a caster ... , first off it's non-damaging , and a good party/RP spell to use. It usually looses it's effectiveness about 5th level ... here the first set of monsters via quest you encounter are undead.= Immune to mind and sleep spells. Not long after are rats and goblins , both of which seem to make that save quite often.
While it wasn't game breaking or anything , It did set a tone for the rest of my spell selections , I avoid pretty much any spell that doesn't have a direct impact for combat or defense in some way.

Considering NWN has like an odd ratio of spells, something like : 80% Buff or defense, and 18% offensive , with 2%= innocuous or badly made for even Single Player campaign.
You can further break that 18% offensives spells even further, minus the un-effective ones due to immunities , and negating any insta kills ... drops the amount of spells you could memorize , to just a handful.

I hadn't looked over the spell changes yet, I just got the overrides ... not sure if I need to do anything else for them to kick in or not.

I must admit , I am probably a tad ..disillusioned when it comes to spells in NWN I think.

I'm from the old TSR days ,and you could use spells creatively to work while you role-played table top. A Game engine cannot do what imagination does of course. DnD 3.0 and beyond, rather ripped up all the age old favorites and changed them that they had numeric effects and the imagination aspects didn't matter anymore.

And I think,I got spoiled on that one server I told you about ,where they had the extra spells and advanced magic/skills/abilities ... ever since then , I have looked at casters in a different way, and normal NWN way, just seems so bland and restrictive once I experienced that.

so,please don't take it I am complaining,just saying what I see point of view.

Fair enough but as we are trying to make each and every class interesting your points and inspirations from another server isn't really a bad thing...

Infact if you tried cool stuff with casters elsewhere AND they were not all powerfull still maybe see if you can either find some of the spells or describe in some details about it and see if we can either copy these things or come up with brand new on our own.

I have FX been considering if if would be possible to turn death magic into some sort of cold magic ranging from slow/low damage to temporarely petrify/high damage og perhaps for game balance issues slow/high damage - petrify/low damage. the effects makes them better than normal damage alone but the chance to safe versus death is the balance, or maybe overall they do less damage than pure damage spells and the saves are versus the special effects...

Just one line of thoughts...

/tara

I kinda see all points of view with casters and spells.. My first attempt was with an enchater and finding out around lvl 15-20 that nearly all the Alangara hostiles were mind spell immune was disheartening. Given this was quite a long time ago and creatures have now been better balanced, the fact remains that an Arcane caster will be used for buffs, summons, damage.. Save or Die spells don't quite fit into those three catagories (IMO) as there is a chance that the death spell won't kill the target and instead do minimal damage. Elemental damage spells have all been rebuilt with very good results, buffs are balanced out between the caster classes now so that "full" casters are more evenly matched, summons I will touch on later.

Tara I think your on the right track with changing the death spells to instead do damage however I would lean more towards negative energy damage rather than cold. Aside from undead there are very few creatures with resistance to it and would require less trips to the creature templates for balancing. Higher lvl death spells could include: slow, paralysis or even stat reduction along with the full damage that comes with a failed save. While on the death spell rework I would also throw in spells like Weird.. A 9th level spell that is similar to a death spell, requires 2 saves and is a death OR minimal damage effect.

Summons 1-9 are fairly well balanced, especially with the new dragon templates. The mummy dust golem isn't TOO overpowering if facing creatures at appropriate levels. My ONLY complaint on summons this far is the 2 minute duration on dragon knight BUT I know how powerful it is and mostly agree with you.. Granted this is summoning spells accessible via the "full caster" classes.

Again this is just my opinion, yours may vary.

Sounds good to me ...

On the extra magic systems of the other server, I have NO IDEA , on how it was created or implemented.
From my point of view , I thought it had to be a hak , or server sided Override ( as I only downloaded CEP to play there. ) ... but the owner claimed, it was all done by scripting ...

The issue there is, there's nothing like it for download on the vault, and that guy is uber stingy with his "building/Scripting Secrets" , and will not share details or the system at all.

Problems with using negative damage is that its fairly easily countered for players via immunity spells. Also as for cold immunity the Icedark is by far the smallest continent ( yet ) and thus not many monsters are cold immune.

If I am to sit down and recreate an intire spell school i would love to see it useable for the monsters also. Might turn out rather interesting and might also bring more balance as "fighters" would be challenged more by such type opponents...

/tara

If you're going to recreate a spell school, why not have the damages random. One idea could be Prismatic Cone. Use the prismatic spray effect, and the damage can be one of 5 different elements. The Prismatic Blast, using the mysterious explosion effect, and the random damages. Just some ideas to consider.

If that can be done I actually think its a great idea

/tara

Nice Idea Rose, random stuff would always keep ya guessing!

Well Met, Tarashon.
Couldn't seeker use something similar to a random number generator for this?
Perhaps some sort of variable array?
To me, though it sounds like you guys just want to make a wild mage class.