i was having a discussion on the discord a couple weeks ago and i forgot what exactly led up to it but i brought up the idea of having arcane odyssey spells work like the spells in ars nouveau (the minecraft mod)
for those who don’t know what thats like, here’s a short rundown
to start, you must select a “Form” gylph, this is basically how the spell will work
in ars there are a few form gylphs, some examples being “Self” (applies to the spell to yourself), “Touch” (applies the spell to whatever youre touching), and “Projectile” (makes the spell a projectile)
those 3 are the tier 1 forms, and there are other different tiers but i wont go into all of them
after you pick a form, you pick an effect gylph, this is what the spell actually does (think of it like form being the catalyst of a potion whereas effect is the reagent), most of these wouldn’t be portable to arcane odyssey because its stuff like “Break” to break blocks, “Smelt” to smelt things, etc, but for arcane odyssey you could probably do stuff like “Explodes on impact” (blast), “Pierces” (cannon), “Holdable” (ray/surge), “Homing” (array) to name a few
once you select a form, you then go into the augments, these simply just augment the spell in different ways (stuff like amplify which increases the spells power and duration which makes the spell last longer), a few of these could actually be some of the last form ones like pierce but i think these would be better as like the size sliders and shape that current spell sliders have
the more you add onto the spell, typically the more it costs to cast it in the mod, so that could remain true for AO
some other ideas i had come up for it were that rather than spell scrolls, you can get special tiers for the different types of glyphs, like rare scrolls could be typeless and give you a random tier 2 glyph and lost scrolls could give tier 3 glyphs, there could also be types of items that show you pre-set spell combos (either books or just scrolls of their own)
you could make homing lasers by combing an array and ray effect, you could make like a grenade by having a throwable explosion that shoots out blasts or beams, or even just have really big meteors, possibly with the next few spells you could even make straight up domain expansions by combining zone with like construct or barrier, the possibilities are endless
with all that being said, this would be a really cool addition to make spellcasting more unique and accurate to the lore, however it’d probably be a nightmare to balance and also be really convoluted for newer players which is the main cons to it, but imagine the possibilities
