What’s the point of negative synergies anymore? Like sure, it makes sense that fire is weak when coming in contact with water and all that, but if someone wanted to go with fire as their primary and water as their secondary, let them! Why penalize them for wanting to go for what they want?
I’d argue positive synergies would have to go too, most magic users are basically forced to go a certain second magic just so their first can be good. Like why? Why encourage variation in builds if most of them are forced to be roughly the same thing? Like, what, you’re ice? OK. Your only options as a second magic are wind, water and snow. Enjoy.
Okay cool, but let’s say I’m ice and DON’T want to go water or a magic that works well with ice, instead I wanna go for something with puddles that do damage, so I’d go with acid or magma! But why would I be penalized for wanting to use those? What? Because I wanted ice as my first magic? Cause I wanted variety?
EDIT: This actually reminds me, negative synergies heavily discourage teamwork. If your friend’s a fire user and you’re water, PvPing alongside each other already puts you in a disadvantage just because you and your friend like and chose different magics.
I think the negative synergies give the game depth. Like it rewards players who take the time to learn about what’s good and what’s bad in order to improve themselves.
Note: This is not going to stop me from going Poison and Ash so I can create twice the clouds.
Yes, they learn and then they’re told that whatever magic they were looking forward to using, they can’t use anymore or they’ll be penalized for it, or could miss out on powerful benefits.
I don’t see how having less options in choosing variety makes the game more in-depth.
Honestly this isn’t a bad idea - for a game so keen to make every magic viable, it’s going to punish players hard for not picking meta-synergies.
Metamancers are already getting really good synergies and range/clear coverage with their builds, I don’t see the need to punish non-metamancers players further with -% anti-synergy. The opportunity cost is cost enough - water/fire is unviable garbage even without the negative synergy.
I dunno how you’d implement it though. Removing the negative multipliers is easy (just don’t have negative multipliers), but removing the status clearing is less easy. If I hit a burning target with water magic, that should put the fire out - maybe effects are tagged with the player that inflicted them, and a player can’t clear status effects they inflicted (barring synergistic clears)?
seems complex
but then there’s gonna be must have magics like Shadow with no downsides whatsoever
and you’re forced to have Shadow as one of your magics or you’re gonna get shit on metamancers
The only thing that’s holding Shadow back is that all interactions it has are negative
No, the thing holding Shadow back is that none of its interactions are positive. It doesn’t have negative interactions either (besides unimportant ones like Blinded) - Shadow is a very boring magic.
There’s 380 combinations, and metamancers are going to be running the best of them.
Shadow/Crystal doesn’t hold a candle to Light/Crystal, which is pretty much strictly better. Why do 0.975 damage with a 1.4 speed magic, when you can do 1.1 with a 1.9 speed magic?
Shadow isn’t competing with Wind anymore. It’s competing with the best of the best of the 380 total combinations. There’s some good ones in there - taking an example, Wind/Ice has the solo capabilities of Wind, solid range (1.4 to 0.8), frozen synergy, a good damage multiplier, and clears every DoT status effect plus Petrified.
Shadow/Water clears like half a dozen statuses (crucially missing Bleed, Poisoned, Frozen and Petrified) and has no synergy.
Removing negative interactions doesn’t make every build equal - it just means the worst builds are a bit less shit (though they’re still pretty shit).
Imagne getting frozen solid over and over again by someone while 2 other people are hitting weak powder magics or something still hitting you with 180 dmg per hit.
