Now, I’m usually not a super duper great cook with lost spells, but I really think I was going somewhere with this, I posted it on my art thread, but this acts as a more detailed explanation on the spell and what it’s capable of.
trapeze is a short ranged blast that creates a flat, deflective barrier after it travels. the barrier itself deals low damage when enemies get close to it, but other than that it doesn’t do much on its own and has a decently long lifespan before it despawns. magics with worse clashrates will be able to last longer than ones with good clashrates, for reasons explained later in the suggestion.
what makes trapeze such an interesting spell though is how it interacts with projectiles. if a projectile hits one of these barriers, it will either bounce off towards another barrier nearby or towards the opponent with 1.1x the travel speed
“trapezes”, or the barriers, appear as diamonds that float in the air with their respective element’s magic symbol in the center of the diamond.
-barriers can be hit by your enemies, and depending on what magic it is, the “durability” of a barrier varies, heavy magics can handle attacks from enemies better, whereas lighter magics can last longer, but will shatter and nullify if hit by an enemy attack faster
-you can have up to 3 barriers at a time, intensity scales with this and you could possibly even have like 11 up at a time lol
-barriers explode when they deflect an attack, dealing the same amount of damage as a beam normally would in a small AoE
-Any type of projectile deflects off of these. (axe slash, primal swipe, bullets/arrows, blasts, etc etc)
-beams and shot can deflect off of them, for cool anime fighting power aesthetic purposes + fun strategy reasons
-pulsar, however, DOES NOT deflect off barriers, that would be too OP and kinda confusing.
-affecting the size of the barriers affects how long it lasts for, smaller size = longer lifespan.
-trapeze spell can deflect skills that give players mobility, such as crash, crushing judgement, uppercut, rushdown, and selino (possibly?, maybe not, unsure how it would work.)
-allies in your party can also use your trapezes, allowing for tons of teamwork potential to be added, imagine a berserker uses an ult art thermo crash into a mage’s trapezes, that’d be awesome.
-as proposed by @AnUnoriginalUsername, everytime an attack bounces off of the trapezes, the projectile will grow in size for each barrier deflected. it also gets faster. HOWEVER, this, in turn, causes you to suffer from extended endlag, as well as your attack’s damage being lowered in exchange for the size buff and the speedboost. This allows trapeze to be a chaotic and strategic spell to use and deal with, but it prevents it from being too overpowered and allowing for certain scenarios where unfair cheese could arise.
-diagram created by @darkbitlike that demonstrates very roughly how this scaling works:
(normally you’d only get at max like 3 trapezes but for the sake of the argument we can assume this was used with intensity to demonstrate the snowball effect of the size/speed buffs/and the damage nerfing)
-the damage decrease from each bounce most likely has a cap somewhere, same with the size and the speed, most likely at 5 reflections off of 5 barriers, you will reach the maximum size and speed buff of your projectile/attack while also dealing with the lowest possible damage nerf from the spell.
(this makes trapeze a really fun gimmicky spell that allows certain builds to have insane combos with a high skill ceiling, the possibilities are endless here, you can even use trapeze as a setup spell and combo it with crash to travel farther while also being able to ambush your target from unexpected angles)
-unlocked with a requirement of 200 magic
-some common misconceptions:
“isn’t trapeze a defensive spell?”
-no, trapezes, once they bounce off your attack to another trapeze (or towards the enemy), the trapeze instantly vanishes, requiring you to recast it. though the trapezes can act as “shields”, it wouldn’t be very efficient since trapezes aren’t super large to begin with. (and running high attack size to make them huge, is obviously not a good idea)
-“do your enemies attacks bounce off of the trape-”
no.
-“isn’t this spell aimbot as it automatically aims towards your enemy when it finishes bouncing off?”
somewhat, but not quite. your projectile travels towards the opponent, but it doesn’t lock onto their location, making the attack dodgeable/readable/blockable, but still somewhat of a threat to be wary of.
-“wouldn’t this be too OP for pvp games because it can redirect things and it acts like a tiny shield?”
if you’ve read the other points I’ve listed here, the actual “barriers” this spell makes are horribly inefficient as defensive tools, and you do need to actually map out where to place trapezes/barriers in order to create combos, placing 1 trapeze won’t work as effectively as placing 2 or 3 down, which, can be risky in a lot of situations due to leaving you open.
