Design Notes

October 02, 2013

Battlemage Breakdown

Mages! Swordhaven Needs Your Help!

What do you do when your entire city has become chaorrupted, and your spellcasters just aren't sturdy enough to handle the fight? You train them to cast spells while encased in solid steel, of course!

How to Become a Battlemage

Only the most loyal defenders of Swordhaven can train to be Battlemages! Once you have reached rank 10 in Swordhaven rep, you'll be able to buy this class from the Swordhaven rep shop - talk to Sir Vival in /castle or Roald in /ceremony. You can also buy this class by talking to Ragnar in Battleon for 2000 ACs. This is not a member-only class.

Built like a tank, but mana-friendly!

Battlemage Skills Breakdown

The Battlemage focuses on taking down his opponents as quickly as possible. He is capable of focusing greater amounts of mana into each spell for the maximum effect. He specializes in wearing heavy armor for defense in order to spend all of his mana on offensive spells.

Battlemages excel at taking down multiple enemies at once with their devastating AOE attacks, but can also focus their damage on a single target when fighting tougher enemies.

ARCANE STRIKE

2 second cooldown

Battlemages are rejuvenated by their Arcane Strike granting them bonus mana with every successful blow.

This ability replaces auto-attack. It functions similarly, except that as a Battlemage it also restores some of your mana.

ENCHANTED BLADE

15 mana, 12 second cooldown. Requires rank 1.

Removes the explosion (AOE) effect from the Battlemage's attacks but increases all spell damage and accuracy by 50% for 12 seconds.

Use this whenever you want to focus on one enemy at a time. Awesome for boss fights due to its damage and accuracy increases, and imperative for those times when you want to avoid pulling more than one enemy.

ARCANE FIRE

45 mana, 15 second cooldown. Requires rank 2.

Summon an explosive fire ball burning with arcane energies on up to 3 targets.

Just a nice boost of extra damage. Unless you have Enchanted Blade up, this will aggro enemies that you're not currently fighting if you're standing next to them.

EXPLOSIVE SHIELD

29 mana, 45 second cooldown. Requires rank 3.

Break apart surrounding raw mana and form it into an Arcane Shield transfering most incoming damage to the Battlemage's MP instead of HP, as well as reducing mana costs for 10 seconds. The initial break explodes damaging up to 3 enemies.

This is a pretty sweet shield. While it's up, you'll mostly take damage to your mana pool instead of your health. And to make up for it, your spells will cost less mana. As a bonus, you'll do a burst of AOE damage when you first cast it. Again, you will aggro nearby enemies with this unless you're using Enchanted Blade.

HEAVY ARMOR EXPERTISE

Passive. Requires rank 4.

Physical Damage received reduced by 30%.

BATTLE HARDENED MAGE

Passive. Requires rank 4.

Wisdom increased by 20%.

ARCANE DEVASTATION

62 mana, 18 second cooldown. Requires rank 5.

Conjure a powerful, explosive, arcane blast damaging up to 3 targets. If Enchanted Blade is active, your target will be weakened and take 30% more damage from all sources.

When you're fighting multiple enemies, this serves up a nasty chunk of AOE damage. In a boss fight, this attack is even stronger, as it will cause your target to take extra damage from anything and anyone that hits it while the effect is up. The effect lasts slightly past the cooldown, so if you use this ability every time it becomes available you'll be doing 30% more damage for the entire fight.
 

Oh, and once more: you will aggro nearby enemies with this unless you're using Enchanted Blade.

In summary: This is a great class for boss fights, just make sure you use both Enchanted Blade and Arcane Devastation every time they cool down if you want to be at your most effective. It's also a strong class for farming/questing, since you can use your AOE abilities to smash several enemies at once.

EDIT: The following changes have been made to this class!

• Arcane Fire mana cost increased from 40 to 45
• Explosive Shield mana cost increased from 23 to 29
• Arcane Devastation mana cost decreased from 65 to 62
• Arcane Devastation's Enchanted Blade buff now lasts past its cooldown. This means subsequent uses of Arcane Devastation can do 30% more damage if you time it right.
• To make up for increased mana costs, Arcane strike returns more mana per hit.

December 20, 2012

Tomorrow is Just Another Day

December 21, 2012

It's all over the news. Tomorrow is the end of the world as predicted by... well, by the fruitcakes of the world. 

Some say it has to do with the Mayan calendar. Some say it has to do with our alignment to the galactic ecliptic. Some say it has to do with aliens. Some say it has to do with a secret hidden planet populated by giants and angels that is going to brush up against ours. But happily, one thing upon which they can all agree is that tomorrow, December 21st, 2012 at 11:11 AM Server Time (EST) (CORRECTION: it was 11:11 AM GMT, which was 6:11 AM Server time) is going to be the end of the world...

...again.

And once again, "they" are wrong. Tomorrow is going to be just another day, like any other. I'm sure some crazy people are going to do some crazy stuff but crazy people fo crazy stuff every other day too. That's why I've been counting down to "Just Another Day" at the bottom of nearly all of my Design Notes posts since the very beginning of this year. 

Seriously, you can go back and check.

Called it.

I expected some people and some media outlets would get all worked up about this and so I've been spending all year trying to send out this tiny, reassuring message to you guys. Let's take a look at some of the other doomsday prophecies that fizzled out:

1919 CE: Albert Porta, meteorologist at the University of Michigan, predicts that during the third week of December 1919, an alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune could focus enough of a gravity line to cause a huge solar flare and make the sun EXPLODE. Wrong. 

1921 CE: In 1910 Pulitzer Prize-winner Henry Adams works out a model of human civilization based on the dissipation of energy and states quite clearly that human civilization would wipe itself out in 1921. Wrong. 

1982 CE: Back in 1974 astronomer John Gribbin and author Stephen Plagemann, in their book The Jupiter Effect, claimed that the alignment of seven planets in 1982 would cause the magnetic poles to shift, slow earth's rotation messing with gravity, cause earthquakes and tidal waves and basiclly everything that happened in the movie "2012". As it turns out the tide was 0.04 millimeters higher than average on that day in 1982. Nice try but Wrong. 

Just in the past few decades we've seen the Heaven's gate cult try and catch a ride on a UFO trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet to try and escape the end of the world. The Y2K bug was supposed to send planes tumbling from the sky and send us back into the dark ages but failed to do anything more than make a lot of programmers half-blind from sifting through millions of lines of code. Either this year or maybe last year there was ANOTHER failed prediction of the biblical rapture (there have been THOUSANDS of these starting as far back as 200 CE) and, as always, bunkers and bunkers full of your standard tin-foil-hat-wearing individuals holding signs letting us all know that "The End Is Near". 

Nobody knows the future. Not even me. I could be wrong. But I go by the numbers and there is NO reason to believe that tomorrow will be anything other than a lovely Friday in December. Here at the Lab we are working furiously, just like always, to get Part 2 of the End Of All Things ready for you to play because we may believe that earth will be here tomorrow but saving Lore is up to you. 

Kezeroth has a point. All things DO end. But unless we do it ourselves, I believe that the earth will finally be destroyed when it gets consumed by the sun after it goes through it's change into a red giant. That will be a few BILLION years from now and by then I expect that we will have spread out through the galaxy (or further), colonizing other, fresher star systems.

If one of your friends or one of your family members is nervous or scared about the world ending tomorrow, just remind them of all the failed doomsday predictions and try to get them to laugh it off with you. Your courage will give them hope and hope is what tomorrow is built on. 

1 day until Just Another Day