Why doesn't Spell Power = +% Damage?

#0 - Nov. 11, 2009, 12:06 p.m.

It seems to me like it would be simpler to scale spell power similarly to haste or crit. Make it a Spell Power Rating that requires X rating for +1% spell damage.

The current system seems clunky and unintuitive. It serves no purpose other than to make instant-casts and spells without +Coefficient talents worthless at higher end gear levels. Particularly of concern is the poor scaling of instant cast spells, which hit for less and less of player's relative health as higher levels of PvP gear are introduced.

It would make more sense to balance spells at their baseline, and not have the extra headache of balancing spell power coefficients and odd scaling. IE: If this change would make instant-casts hit too hard, a simple reduction of their base damage would suffice.

I'm not sure how Attack Power works in relation to melee classes, but a similar AP Rating could be constructed there as well.

Ghostcrawler

#41 - Nov. 11, 2009, 5:26 p.m.

It's an interesting concept, but we do like different spells being affected differently. As Luph (I think) pointed out, part of the fun of gearing up is analyzing whether it's time to change what you do. If you're casting Shadow Bolt at level 1 and Shadow Bolt at level 85 and the only thing really varying is the amount of damage it does, then you may have very intuitive, linear scaling, but it also might be boring. Being able to tweak coefficients also gives us a balance knob to adjust as well as making different spells act differently.

We penalize instant spells in part because they have so many other benefits, such as the ability to move and avoid interruption.

We're definitely sensitive to the fact that there can be a fine line between depth and needless complexity. When gear is too simple, the game gets boring. When gear is too complex, the game gets overwhelming. The trick is to try and have simple mechanics (You. Get Spell Power.) but try and add a lot of depth (But it affects different spells slightly differently.)