Dragon Master -- Bug or Feature !?!??!

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

Ironhawk said:

Drakes are technically overpriced due to thier ease of access in the spell tree. Decent summons that you can cast early, you know? In a game with hard research thier cost might make more sense. But then again, I think most people would probably just save thier gems anyway for later, more powerful spells if they had a choice. So perhaps they really are overpriced.

You make two very good points. What about if we do away with Dragon Mastery altogether, and made the cost sliding, depending on the mage's levels of expertise? E.g. if you had +1 level than required, it takes -1 gem to cast.

That would be hard for us to implement, it would take a dev. However, we can approximate it with a mod that makes dragon summoning a 1+ spell, so a more able mage would summon 1+1 or 1+2 or 1+3 all for the same number of gems. E.g. a mage with relevant primary level at +2 would get 3 dragons. Or we could change it to be a 0+X spell, so +2 would get 2 dragons.... These should be easy mods, but they might cut the cost too drastically....

Instead, it might make sense to make DM a lower order spell. Or, have a few more summoning spells, so it would depend not just on the mage's level--but also on the research level:
-summon cave drake, Ex (not sure what x is exactly, and my manual is at home), 8 gems
-summon cave drake II, Ex+1, 6 gems
-summon cave drake III, Ex+2, 4 gems

This would be an easy mod too, I think.

Summary of alternatives:
1. make DM a lower order spell
2. get rid of DM. make summon dragon spells' gem cost sliding, based on level of mage.
3. do a mod that creates new summon dragon spells that summon multiple dragons based on mage's level.
4. do a mod that creates new summon dragon spells that cost less based on mage's level and level of research.

[Endoperez]

I can confirm the bug.

There's also the option of making Dragon Master Nature 1 spell with the bonus scaling with caster's level. 1 + 1 per level of the casting mage would be more interesting. Nat 2 caster would reach the same bonus of 2, N4-5 would reach VERY nice bonus of 3-4.

[upstreamedge]

does DM boost lamias as well?

[Ironhawk]

While I am in favor of dropping the cost of the spell to 1N, I think that making it 1+ effects is a bad idea. If it is 1+ effects, you run the very real risk of someone taking an A2N9 pretender or something and spamming out 8 wyverns a turn for an effective cost of like 1 gem each. Far too powerful.

IMO, dropping it just 1N is enough, given that there are a handful of mages with 1N and some other interesting path that could summon a drake. Dropping each drake spell cost by 2 gems might not hurt either? A balance has to be found b/w making Dragon Master not suck and not allowing for extremely efficient Drake Factories to be set up.

[curtadams]

The easiest approach to the drakes being too expensive is to, well, make them less expensive. That's pretty straightforward with the spell modding tools, isn't it?

[Meglobob]

Dragon Master/drakes does need tweaking, if I am playing seriously in MP, I would never consider casting them, neither from reading this thread would anyone else.

I say go for the easy options:-

Drakes - lower to 4 gem cost.
Dragon Master - Just lower it to Enchantment 5, not too hard to research too, keep it at N3. Its very, very easy to get a N3 mage.

C'mon...lets bring drakes back into Dom 3 and not leave them as a useless feature, bit of fluff no one bothers with.

[Endoperez]

Meglobob - how easy is it to get a N3 mage that can also summon Drakes (an element at lvl two)? Much harder. Finding a mage with some skills in an element and a nature pick is much easier.