Rune mage casting issue - my hands shake

Bugs and Technical Issues
#1

I’ve played rune mage to L4 and it’s highly frustrating. Some spells seem to work fairly well like mana shield and L1 fireball. I usually have to cast affliction 2-3 times to get it right, and I can easily fail arcane ray or frostbolt five times in a row. I just found greater fireball and this one also seems to only work 1/4 of the time. My particular problem is that I have a tremor which means my hands shake, and I suspect this is why my rune recognition rate is so poor with the game. Any line I draw is going to be a bit squiggly, not because my Vive isn’t tracking well but because my hands are actually doing that. This means I can get killed by a redtail unless I stick to the 1 or 2 spells that seem reliable. I’ve spent time just practicing the runes but it doesn’t seem to get any better.

I should point out that I’ve played Runesage and Left-hand path which both use a similar mechanic and didn’t have this kind of problem. Unless this can be improved I’ll probably have to abandon any idea of playing runemage and stick to musketeer which works well for me. Any suggestions?

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#2

not to belittle your efforts but perhaps keep practising. even if you can draw them seemingly perfectly they seem to fail at least that often. especially for the first several hours.

do you know frost II and ice lance. those two make for a good combo and can be drawn with two strokes a piece with seemingly good tolerancesfrost then lance

give those some practise before declaring it a bust. someone else teaching me those renewed my faith in the viability of runemage. the strokes in question can be done fast as well which should counter the tremoring to a degree

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#3

hey, i m now a lvl 8 runemage, i spent many hours just talking and experimenting with other rune mage (which is amazing!) in the highsteep (highsteps?), and to be honest, i still can’t figure out most spells…

Especially when you discover a carved rune, and despite drawing over what was carved, the spell still doesn’t activate…

i noticed that for example the polymorph spell, first of all i can’t cast it, if i draw it in 4 parts… if i draw perfectly parrallel verticals, it doesn’t work, but if they slightly converge (almost parallel, like if they were gonna intersect 5m over the ground) it seems to work better…
For me the best way to draw it, is to draw a bow tie…

affliction lvl 2, seems to not care about the intersection with the affliction lvl 1 rune and the bottom left corner of the U shaped rune. it seems like it is 3 runes, affliction lvl1 + U shaped + circle, and their positions relative to each other have a lot of leeway

Frost Lvl 3 is by the far the most unreliable one… i can cast it maybe once every Five tries, which is crazy because i keep doing more or less the same thing…

Anyway, my point is, that it would be nice to communicate ingame (or somewhere else), the particular point of each rune, seeing that sometime when i draw affliction 2 i get the fireball (or drawing a P to get Frost lvl 2), i m pretty sure the spell casting system doesn’t really care about line all that much…

Playing a mage, and trying to solo grind, is pretty difficult, escpecially if you can’t rely on spells to help you escape or give you more time, i don’t mind difficult spell (fireball lvl being a pretty good example), but i want them to be reliable, or a least know why it didn’t work…

#4

hi as l new player l am finding the spell system great alot of trouble come’s from bent line from the side not in front l have been seeing that when l draw a line down my arm curve’s but also the rune’s seem to been a hint if u will thats how l see it it’s the shape u want roughly some time’s it need’s to be wider or a line longer.

as said above u need to try and test for ur self don’t think omg it’s the same as the page draw a shape and turn around and look at it from the side try a longer line or smaller try and try l can now cast chicken about 8 out of ten try’s before 0 out of 50.

#5

Just the fact that tracing the spell doesn’t work about 80% of the time means there is something horribly wrong with the rune parser and needs to be fixed.

People keep saying you just need to “learn” the proper way to cast it is stupid as this means the rune itself is false, why can’t it be updated to show how you ACTUALLY need to draw it?!

#6

We have updated the Journal pages to be more reflective of the rune shape you need to draw.

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#7

Are you tracing the rune from the pillar itself or the journal entry that is created? The journal entries are definitely more accurate representations of the runes. I am able to cast the majority of the runes by tracing them exactly as they appear in the journal and we are continuing to improve the representations that are less accurate.

Have you tried retracing the runes from the journal since the update yesterday? These should be more accurate.

#8

I saw the update and I thought, “great”. Went to the journal, spent some time trying to cast the spells, can’t say my experience is much better.

I work in the game industry. I have to say, any aspect of a game that requires hours of practice to use and can still leave you with a 20% success rate is not something you can classify as a feature. It’s a bug. I hope at the least you’ve got a system for capturing failed cast attempts so you can use this as data for improving your code or at least provide feedback to the user about what they’re doing wrong.

I’ll keep trying, but at this point I really hate the spell system. I looked up teleporting and resurrecting online since these are critical skills and frankly I fear trying to learn them.

#9

Post a video of you tracing it, and include looking at its side to make sure it’s flat hombre. Mindless complaining doesn’t do anything.

@Chris_C2 you too.

That is something that would actually be helpful.

#10

Rocket League takes hours of practice to play and you can easily have 0% success in a sitting.

It’s frustrating to constantly fail a spell and have no idea what you’re doing wrong. I think we just need immediate in game feedback when casting.

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#11

I had trouble in the beginning but now I am able to cast resurrection and portals, I just had to practice. My hands shake somewhat too because I have bad nerves but if I draw the runes at a fair pace it negates the shake somewhat, for me at least.

#12

Yeah. For something super fundamental as “being able to actually use the class in some manner other than standing around”, visual feedback is a huge area of improvement this game could have. In rocket league everyone almost immediately knows how to “drive the car” and “drive into the ball”. In OrbusVR, I’ve watched mages sit in the witch hut for an hour trying to cast their first spell. It shouldn’t be THIS hard for level 1 spells.

Runemages: it would be great if the game literally tells you which part of the spell it did not recognize.

Example, you draw ice lance, and it tells you in red highlight which line segments it did not take well. This lets people correct and improve rather quickly.

Warriors lack a LOT of visual feedback as to whether their combo has triggered or is stuck on a previous combo that they don’t know about and thus will fail until they reset it.

Example: A bleeding visual is applied for a bleed skill. The cleave skill has a bigger, more impacting and visually lasting cleave wave going outwards that matches the distance and arc. Provoke should have more visuals than a purple effect at the feet of the enemy, like maybe an effect on the sword so you know it worked or even make the enemy tint red for a flash only for the warrior. There are tons of solutions that beat out the purple splotch.

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#13

I think level one spells should be much easier / more reliable to use. When you move on to level 2/3+ then it should be more precise.

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#14

It’s the person that’s unreliable. The spells in general have pretty good flexibility. Some aspect has to be pretty off to fail

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#15

honestly i just spent 20 minutes only casting frost lvl 3, when i successfully did it, next time i would try to do the same and look around my drawing, and even when i got 2 in a row, after that i could fail 30 times in a row… i can’t figure that one out… at all

Every mage i meet, i ask them… and i couldn’t find one (yet) that is able to reliably cast it…

If someone has any pointers…

#16

It’s about the 3d line’s placement and angle, when I show someone in game they always get it almost immediately.

#17

so what ppl want is to play for 5 mins and have it down cos that’s fun to have thing’s just given to u with out having to work for it l for one like having to work to get it right and to get it working cos then l feel rewarded for being good at my class so if u want an easy to use and learn class maybe mage is just not for you.

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#18

It’s not so much about being handed anything. It’s about being taught properly. I was struggling with quite a bit of spells until someone stopped by and helped me learn why things weren’t working/what works whatever else. I went from not being able to kill anything to being able to quest/kill things with ease. There should at least be something in game that gives hints to what works/doesn’t work

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#19

There are runes around the world showing you how to cast spells.

Also practicing makes perfect, if something is not working for you try changing how you draw.

Ice lance isn’t working?
Try making the arrow angle a small or larger angle.
Try making the stem a little longer.
Try combinations of both.

#20

I spent a bunch of time today focusing on Frostbolt 2, Ice lance and Fireball 2. For Frostbolt 2 I tried both the rune as it’s supposed to be and as kind of a Nordic ‘P’. In either case I probably had a 50% success rate, a 25% chance of total failure, and another 25% chance it would instead produce a Firebolt 2. Firebolt OTOH always came out as what was intended, with a fairly low failure chance. No idea what’s up with a frost run producing fire but it’s a strong indication the system is a bit busted.

Ice lance was another story. It was quite a while before I could get up to a 20% success rate and even then I couldn’t predict after drawing the rune whether it would succeed or fail. I finally discovered that it seems important for the rune to be vertical relative to the ground which feels very odd to draw. My success rate is probably 50% now and I can at least tell you why some failures occur. If the arrow is lopsided for instance, it will fail. That’s part of the issue with my tremor–I can’t always control how even it is (especially if I’m being attacked). I spent a little time trying to do screen shots but my VR system is exclusively for VR and doesn’t have good tools for that kind thing. I will find a way to make that work.

Some feedback from the system might be nice but I doubt there’s a way for it to tell you “you almost made an affliction”. I’d be very curious to see the game telemetry around casting success rates. What percentage of casts are failures, by caster level? Most of the casters I’ve talked to seem to indicate it’s a problem, and some non-casters have told me they won’t play mage because it didn’t work well for them in the beta. Again, I’ve recently played two games that used this type of rune system and my cast success rate was probably 75% or better at the outset and 90% after a short time playing. It’s the difference between fighting monsters or fighting the game interface.