After watching a video of someone playing the game it was pointed out that when drawing runes for spell casting it has to be correctly drawn in all three dimensions.
This means that even if your rune looks perfect from your perspective it can still fail to cast because it isn’t flat in the third dimension.
generally this is caused by the fact that when drawing in the air, you aren’t drawing against a solid surface you don’t have any way to make sure that your strokes are perfectly flat when drawing them in the air with only one point of perspective to view from. because of this, using any but the most basic of spells can get ridiculously difficult in actual combat.
My suggestion would be to change the way the game perceives the spell. instead of the game looking at what you have drawn as a 3 dimensional filament, you could give the system a way to translate that into the 2 dimensional rune that is intended from the casters perspective.
The most simple way that I can think of to achieve this would be to ray-cast from the player perspective camera along the line of the drawn rune at the time that they click to cast, and then cross section that perpendicular to the casters perspective to get the 2 dimensional version of what the caster has drawn, and then have the system interpret that instead of a 3 dimensional filament.
Processing the rune this way means more room for error when drawing the runes in a 3 dimensional space, and less failures when the caster has drawn what they perceive to be a correct rendition of the rune being cast.
while i like the idea this does take away from a lot of the skill of runemage and for runemages who have mastered the level 3 spells (there aren’t many) this would almost be an insult to the time they spent learning / practicing the level 3s as they are. Some certainly need to be reworked like it doesn’t make sense no one i’ve seen / heard from can cast frostbolt level 3 with the left hand but if you take too much away from skill required it makes the class less challenging and it makes most rune mages run of the mill if everyone can do what they do. Coming from a warrior i respect runemages who can cast their spells accurately / quickly because of how face roll my own class is and the skill i know it requires to be an above average runemage
Maybe at least apply it to the simpler spells so that when you are in a battle situation and you are rushing too much to get that kind of finesse, and people do panic, at least you can fall back on the simpler and more easy to draw spells without having to worry about such a high failure rate.
There is also the possibility that making the casting mechanic simpler opens the game up to some more complex runes and more spells available without having to worry as much about whether you have stuffed up your cast in the third dimension.
There are reasonable arguments to both sides of making it easier or harder. for instance, when you open the game up to a broader audience, you are going to find people wanting to play the game as a rune mage who have impairments or impedements that make dealing with that 3rd dimensional spell casting much harder.
It’s part of a runemages skillset to be able to draw on a 2-D plane. I feel like it has more to do with how your using your shoulders and elbows while drawing, but that may just be my personal style.
@Dean_T The people who have spent their time perfecting the level three spells will find it much easier themselves to use those spells and enjoy that, and it will open up the possibility for them to perfect even higher levels should the developers feel that they want to expand on their spell list. there is nothing stopping the game from becoming more complex for the perfectionists.
@dogtato If there are 3D spells, there could be a way for the system to discern between the two when casting. It could do it’s regular trace, and then do a 2D trace upon failure to recognise a rune from the 3D attempt.
Valway has it nailed here. Riley himself suggests you draw with your arm fully extended to keep your runes flat. Personally, I lock my elbow in at my side. My runes have a slight curve to them when I look at them from the side, but I typically have no issues casting.
I’m fairly certain that caster perspective at the time of drawing does play a role in the spell. I was playing around at one point, seeing if I could draw runes “backwards”, and it wasn’t really working. So you have to draw them relatively flat (doesn’t have to be perfect), and in the correct orientation.
I haven’t checked that. I have drawn a spell, been forced to teleport away, then activated successfully, even though I was not even looking at the rune. So it’s just my guess that it depends on what you’re looking at when you start drawing.
It has to be flat enough that there are some spells that should be relatively simple, but use multiple strokes (Eg, the polymorph spell) which actually become fairly difficult when you have to line up the strokes.
Although the spell uses two parallel vertical lines and then an X spanning the two, drawing all four strokes in line and perfectly in all three dimensions gets challenging.
All that the spell does is turn a creature into harmless livestock, perfect in a clutch situation where you need to react spur of the moment to survive, but impossible to cast in a cinch due to the potentially unintended complexity of the rune.
The system is honestly pretty forgiving on the whole “3rd dimension” on spells that are intended to be “2d” like say Fireball Lvl 1. But I agree that learning to draw the spells (including learning to draw them mostly flat) is an intended part of the learning curve.
Just out of curiosity when you say that it’s impossible to cast Polymorph in a clutch situation, how many hours have you played the class for at this point?
I found this an odd suggestion because if you lock your arm fully extended, you automatically can only draw a small area “flat” due to how your arm rotates diagonally in any direction. Most people use hand/wrist/arm locked positions to draw because a full extension gives you no control over any 3D drawings that require depth, or 2D precise spells (like knockback) that require a flat plane.
So I did some minor testing. It matters what you draw when you’re looking at it. So I was looking forward, drew a standard fireball 2, moved away and looked at it from another angle, and it still worked. I drew another one backwards, moved away and looked at it from the other side, so it looked like a normal fireball 2, and that doesn’t work (or just triggers the decurse spell).
figured it made no sense that drawing something that looked pretty much spot on from players perspective would fail because the drawing wasn’t 2 dimensionally flat.
I noticed that there was a greater margin for error within the 2 dimensional space for runes that were drawn roughly, and in some cases shortcuts to drawing them, but that the system looked fairly unforgiving on the third axis.
As someone who is a level 20 mage & can chain cast Frost 3, I can tell you that the opposite is true. Frost 3 is allowed to be uglier than Frost 2. Frost 2, being only on the 2d plane has to be quite “straight” on the 3rd plane even though it can be ugly on the second plane. Frost 3, being on the 3rd plane, can actually be a little crooked on the 3rd dimension and you can get away with it. You can actually cast frost 3 without your arm extended straight all the way and get away with it relatively easily…
Frost 3 is essentially an uglier version of frost 2, and the entire challenge is in drawing the line going through the F. Frost 3 is the 3rd axis line, that is what makes Frost 3.
With other spells, you gradually learn(if you tinker) what makes a certain spell that spell. For example, drawing an R (which is no spell at all) can cast either Frost 2, Fireball 2, Affliction 1, or Affliction 2. Small tweaks in the shape of the R - to meet certain criteria of the other spells, makes all the difference. Many spells can be drawn quite horribly, as long as you get the right things about it correct. For me, this is actually one of the more interesting points to being a mage. Learning shorthands can be really exciting and provides a real sense of progression as a mage, cutting down your cast time & surpassing new challenges.
The only spell that is absolutely horrible is Pushback 2. God help us all.
Quite a few of us can chaincast pushback 2. It just takes practice. Here is a video I posted over a month ago of me chain casting pushback 2 and frost 3.
