Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

Personally I'd rather see much more shiny VFX everywhere, the low VFX trend is old and annoying, and I'm most inclined to make a low level spell whose sole purpose will be to lit everyone in the area proportionally to how buffed they are

Wizards are generally supposed to have a certain amount of un-noticable (Without magical assistance) 24/7 wards and then a plethora of shorter acting 'combat' wards. It makes sense and rule of cool to have the 24/7 wards have less obtrusive VFX and the 'combat' ones more.

Think of it this way: Elminster has certain wards 24/7 and if someone is a spell caster it should be assumed they have certain wards in place even if they look 'normal'. Their entire buff list? No. Is Mage Armor one of the spells Wizards should have 24/7 un-noticably? In PnP it generally is, IG it isn't. Honestly I am not sure it changes much either way but I tend to advocate 'daily' wards have less VFX and wards that are not supposed to be daily don't. Makes RP easier and keeps to the setting better.

In essence the question boils down to me: Is Mage Armor supposed to be a 'daily' ward. I think so but I can easily see why it would not be considered such.

Valefort wrote:Personally I'd rather see much more shiny VFX everywhere, the low VFX trend is old and annoying, and I'm most inclined to make a low level spell whose sole purpose will be to lit everyone in the area proportionally to how buffed they are

PS: I would love to see a spell that violently detonated all wards and caused damaged based on how powerful the gear someone was wearing was. Make it a huge area and -also- always effect the caster

Its supposed to be invisible, I'de like it to be so. And its supposed to protect against ghosts. Maybe the effect appears only for a moment but what it essentially is in Pnp is an invisible replacement of something akin to a chain shirt, while we have it give enchanted armor here making it identical to magic vestments.

Do mundane fighters have to know if the armor they are wearing is +4 enchanted visually? Really though the only thing it would need is somekind of different sound effect when hit or a visual effect when hit. Rest, all invisible.

Shiney is fine for spells that call for it, but if its specificly says its invisible in lore, it goes against that. If you must, let the sparkly invisible effects show up when someone detects magic. That might make things much more interesting.

in pnp you know what wards you have up, and are told when each fades or is stripped

pnp rules don't always work well in a live action game

casters need the visual to know the ward is up. you cant pause bg in the middle of combat, like a single player game, and go through a list of wards, to make sure the ward is still active

The visual aid doesn't need to be something that makes a group of us look like Times Square at New Year. It isn't supported by the setting's lore and it annoys many players. Only Valefort seems obsessed with all the glitter. I wonder if he's half man and half moth.

we agree the visual aid is needed

as for "how shiney?" it seems the playerbase is divided, and likely always will be divided. a ward is always going to be too bright for some, not enough for others. what are the devs to do?

Blame The Rogue wrote:we agree the visual aid is needed

as for "how shiney?" it seems the playerbase is divided, and likely always will be divided. a ward is always going to be too bright for some, not enough for others. what are the devs to do?

A toggle presumably.

I am the only one that connects DM Events & heavy VFX usage & Server Lags?

Nachti wrote:I am the only one that connects DM Events & heavy VFX usage & Server Lags?

Possibly.

Lag happens when there's a crowd of people happens and server has to report something to every single one of them.
Simply havin 30 or 40 people in one location chatting to each other can cause massive lag in faraway locations.

The message being reported could be anything. Animation change, vfx, speech, combat log messages, etc.

lets change it to the original shades VFX!

Blackman D wrote:

thanks for that

i'm sure some don't know how much better the vfxs are now. much better than they were when the server launched. they've been toned down SOOOO much from nwn 2 standard

the devs have saved our eyesight

And the pendulum swung way too far in the low VFX direction