![Novice [250]](https://i.imgur.com/lrYlde6.png)
So...Hi. It's me.
I'm here to pull up something which to my knowing has at least two times already been remarked upon in a thread specifically aimed to remark upon it. Not sure why that keeps happening, but if I had to make a guess I'd say it's because it's a bit puzzling.
In general you can assume that the Rank higher than your own is twice as powerful in pretty much every way. I think the only exception is H-Rank which, if these rules about Spell Fusion are correct, is three times as powerful as an S-Rank instead of just two (man those H-Rank guys are strong. How are there still any towns left standing?).
With every way I pretty much mean every. At some point I asked one of the staff what would happen if I just kept adding bonuses to my strength and speed until the total was a 100% bonus. The response was that if it was found out I would probably be forced to nerf it because I would functionally have the strength and speed of somebody of the next rank.
This basically means that ranking up is a cubic function (or to not sound too classy, basically every time you rank up your character just becomes twice as strong in every way). The only exceptions seem to be if for some reason your character doesn't increase in growth. Which in itself is rather odd, but that's another issue.
Twice the strength, twice the speed, twice the durability, twice the magic power, twice the awesomeness. In a standard situation there appear to be only two things, in fact, that do not follow this rule:
The amount of Spell Slots that you have, and the cooldown/duration limits on spells.
The first one makes sense. If every time that you ranked up you got double the amount of spells you'd end up with 32 spells at A-Rank, and keeping track of all of that would be a nightmare for everybody but the most meticulous people. There's also the fact that how many spells you know from an in-character point of view isn't directly linked to how strong you are. Stronger mages tend to have an easier time learning more spells, but the act of learning spells is simply a matter of dedication, effort and understanding.
The second part, the duration and cooldowns of spells, however, is a bit puzzling, at least to me.
The current ruling is that spells of each Rank have a limit to how long a spell can last and a limit to how short the cooldown can be. Both of these numbers go up with each Rank. Which means that a spell of a higher Rank is always going to have a higher cooldown, no matter what the spell actually does.
POINT OF ORDER (ignore this part of this post and I'll be assuming that you're either not fully paying attention or don't want to acknowledge it):
The rules about how long the durations and cooldowns are allowed to be are written down as supposed to be a GUIDE. Which means that they are not set in stone and one should not have to feel themselves restricted by them if the guidelines only make things more difficult.
HOWEVER, let's all for a moment be completely fair. No saving face, no attempts at trying to shove the less pleasant parts under the table:
How many staff people can honestly say that they actually go outside these guidelines on a regular basis? I say regular basis specifically so those who try to save face can't just be like 'Hey, I once allowed somebody a longer duration/short cooldown on this Blue Monday a couple of months back!'
How many people who aren't staff and who have been part of this site for a while feel secure in trying to add a spell to their repertoire which goes outside these guidelines, confident that the person who ends up reviewing their magic would not tell them to revert the numbers to those allowed according to the guidelines?
I'm a very strong pessimist, so it's very much possible that I'm thinking a bit too badly about how the staff treat these guidelines. However I still have this suspicion that a lot of people wish that they could make a high Rank spell with a low cooldown. A spell which doesn't have as much strength as a spell of that Rank could have, but instead is mostly powerful because it can be used so often. But they don't try because they don't believe that it would actually be accepted.
If I am wrong, by all means prove me wrong. In fact I would be very happy if I was wrong. My goal here is NOT to speak ill of staff or to cause more friction. So if you can show me that people can safely go outside those guidelines without being reprimanded, please do so.
END OF POINT OF ORDER.
As for those who point at Signature Spells, currently you can only have two Signature Spells. The first you get at C-Rank. The second you get at S-Rank. The amount of time it takes to get there is really, really big. The reason why S-Rank is held in high esteem is because it's a pretty impressive feat if you get all the way up there.
Not all Mages are Wizards. And by Wizard I mean the D&D definition. D&D Wizards are rather limited in casting their spells (allowed spells per day, have to prepare all spells at the beginning of the day), but they can have extremely powerful spells which can have very powerful effects. That's basically what these guidelines aim for.
But as I said, Wizards are not the only magic users. Some Mages are Sorcerers. D&D Sorcerers can cast a lot more spells each day than a Wizard can (I'm pulling the rules for the 3.5 edition here). They are limited in the raw power of their spells. But they don't have to prepare their spells. They can cast more spells each day. Rather than having displays of absolute power they are more like spellslingers.
The current guidelines make it rather hard to be more like a Sorcerer and less like a Wizard. Of course our system is too different from that of D&D to compare the two perfectly, but I think this example still somewhat gets the point across.
If I rank up (which I recently did), my first instinct is not to think of newer, stronger spells that I could put in my new Spell Slots. Instead my first instinct is to upgrade the spells that I already have, and just add new spells at the bottom. However that doesn't really work: if I have a spell that does C-Rank damage in a C-Rank Spell Slot, I would like to put it in a B-Rank Slot where it does B-Rank damage. And that's about the extent of how it would change. But right now I mostly get the feeling that if I tried that I would be told to also increase the cooldown. Even if the duration is instant, so I wouldn't even get that advantage, I'd still have to increase the cooldown, even though the spell I put in that B-Rank Spell Slot would basically be exactly the same as a C-Rank spell except with a bit more strength behind it.
I completely understand that if somebody uses a high Rank Spell Slot for a very impressive spell it needs the cooldowns and durations used in the guidelines. But if I instead just want to take lower ranked spells and then make those a bit more stronger (basically take all the C's in terms of effects and make those B's) then that spell is most likely not going to be on the same level of raw power as a spell which was intentionally made for a B-Rank Spell Slot.
In fact, I once wished that I could put a low and weak spell in a higher Spell Slot, keep the actual effects the same, and use the fact that it's in a higher Spell Slot to decrease the cooldown. If higher Spell Slots are supposed to be more impressive feats of magic, wouldn't it also be impressive if somebody could also just use a weaker spell with more raw power? Wouldn't it be impressive if a powerful mage could at high frequency use the same weaker spell over and over when weaker mages can only cast that spell once in a while?
If your power basically doubles when you reach the next Rank, why would a spell need to have a higher cooldown if the only change to it is that I double the amount of power I put behind it?
Well, that was basically it. I once again refer to the POINT OF ORDER, because it's rather important.
So...bring it. Say what you think. Although I would ask everybody to do their utmost best to avoid speaking as if from a higher vantage. It's one of the most common causes for friction.
I'm here to pull up something which to my knowing has at least two times already been remarked upon in a thread specifically aimed to remark upon it. Not sure why that keeps happening, but if I had to make a guess I'd say it's because it's a bit puzzling.
In general you can assume that the Rank higher than your own is twice as powerful in pretty much every way. I think the only exception is H-Rank which, if these rules about Spell Fusion are correct, is three times as powerful as an S-Rank instead of just two (man those H-Rank guys are strong. How are there still any towns left standing?).
With every way I pretty much mean every. At some point I asked one of the staff what would happen if I just kept adding bonuses to my strength and speed until the total was a 100% bonus. The response was that if it was found out I would probably be forced to nerf it because I would functionally have the strength and speed of somebody of the next rank.
This basically means that ranking up is a cubic function (or to not sound too classy, basically every time you rank up your character just becomes twice as strong in every way). The only exceptions seem to be if for some reason your character doesn't increase in growth. Which in itself is rather odd, but that's another issue.
Twice the strength, twice the speed, twice the durability, twice the magic power, twice the awesomeness. In a standard situation there appear to be only two things, in fact, that do not follow this rule:
The amount of Spell Slots that you have, and the cooldown/duration limits on spells.
The first one makes sense. If every time that you ranked up you got double the amount of spells you'd end up with 32 spells at A-Rank, and keeping track of all of that would be a nightmare for everybody but the most meticulous people. There's also the fact that how many spells you know from an in-character point of view isn't directly linked to how strong you are. Stronger mages tend to have an easier time learning more spells, but the act of learning spells is simply a matter of dedication, effort and understanding.
The second part, the duration and cooldowns of spells, however, is a bit puzzling, at least to me.
The current ruling is that spells of each Rank have a limit to how long a spell can last and a limit to how short the cooldown can be. Both of these numbers go up with each Rank. Which means that a spell of a higher Rank is always going to have a higher cooldown, no matter what the spell actually does.
POINT OF ORDER (ignore this part of this post and I'll be assuming that you're either not fully paying attention or don't want to acknowledge it):
The rules about how long the durations and cooldowns are allowed to be are written down as supposed to be a GUIDE. Which means that they are not set in stone and one should not have to feel themselves restricted by them if the guidelines only make things more difficult.
HOWEVER, let's all for a moment be completely fair. No saving face, no attempts at trying to shove the less pleasant parts under the table:
How many staff people can honestly say that they actually go outside these guidelines on a regular basis? I say regular basis specifically so those who try to save face can't just be like 'Hey, I once allowed somebody a longer duration/short cooldown on this Blue Monday a couple of months back!'
How many people who aren't staff and who have been part of this site for a while feel secure in trying to add a spell to their repertoire which goes outside these guidelines, confident that the person who ends up reviewing their magic would not tell them to revert the numbers to those allowed according to the guidelines?
I'm a very strong pessimist, so it's very much possible that I'm thinking a bit too badly about how the staff treat these guidelines. However I still have this suspicion that a lot of people wish that they could make a high Rank spell with a low cooldown. A spell which doesn't have as much strength as a spell of that Rank could have, but instead is mostly powerful because it can be used so often. But they don't try because they don't believe that it would actually be accepted.
If I am wrong, by all means prove me wrong. In fact I would be very happy if I was wrong. My goal here is NOT to speak ill of staff or to cause more friction. So if you can show me that people can safely go outside those guidelines without being reprimanded, please do so.
END OF POINT OF ORDER.
As for those who point at Signature Spells, currently you can only have two Signature Spells. The first you get at C-Rank. The second you get at S-Rank. The amount of time it takes to get there is really, really big. The reason why S-Rank is held in high esteem is because it's a pretty impressive feat if you get all the way up there.
Not all Mages are Wizards. And by Wizard I mean the D&D definition. D&D Wizards are rather limited in casting their spells (allowed spells per day, have to prepare all spells at the beginning of the day), but they can have extremely powerful spells which can have very powerful effects. That's basically what these guidelines aim for.
But as I said, Wizards are not the only magic users. Some Mages are Sorcerers. D&D Sorcerers can cast a lot more spells each day than a Wizard can (I'm pulling the rules for the 3.5 edition here). They are limited in the raw power of their spells. But they don't have to prepare their spells. They can cast more spells each day. Rather than having displays of absolute power they are more like spellslingers.
The current guidelines make it rather hard to be more like a Sorcerer and less like a Wizard. Of course our system is too different from that of D&D to compare the two perfectly, but I think this example still somewhat gets the point across.
If I rank up (which I recently did), my first instinct is not to think of newer, stronger spells that I could put in my new Spell Slots. Instead my first instinct is to upgrade the spells that I already have, and just add new spells at the bottom. However that doesn't really work: if I have a spell that does C-Rank damage in a C-Rank Spell Slot, I would like to put it in a B-Rank Slot where it does B-Rank damage. And that's about the extent of how it would change. But right now I mostly get the feeling that if I tried that I would be told to also increase the cooldown. Even if the duration is instant, so I wouldn't even get that advantage, I'd still have to increase the cooldown, even though the spell I put in that B-Rank Spell Slot would basically be exactly the same as a C-Rank spell except with a bit more strength behind it.
I completely understand that if somebody uses a high Rank Spell Slot for a very impressive spell it needs the cooldowns and durations used in the guidelines. But if I instead just want to take lower ranked spells and then make those a bit more stronger (basically take all the C's in terms of effects and make those B's) then that spell is most likely not going to be on the same level of raw power as a spell which was intentionally made for a B-Rank Spell Slot.
In fact, I once wished that I could put a low and weak spell in a higher Spell Slot, keep the actual effects the same, and use the fact that it's in a higher Spell Slot to decrease the cooldown. If higher Spell Slots are supposed to be more impressive feats of magic, wouldn't it also be impressive if somebody could also just use a weaker spell with more raw power? Wouldn't it be impressive if a powerful mage could at high frequency use the same weaker spell over and over when weaker mages can only cast that spell once in a while?
If your power basically doubles when you reach the next Rank, why would a spell need to have a higher cooldown if the only change to it is that I double the amount of power I put behind it?
Well, that was basically it. I once again refer to the POINT OF ORDER, because it's rather important.
So...bring it. Say what you think. Although I would ask everybody to do their utmost best to avoid speaking as if from a higher vantage. It's one of the most common causes for friction.
![Grand Master [2000]](https://i.imgur.com/SGD5XSW.png)
![Master [1000]](https://i.imgur.com/AQXM4xC.png)
![Senior [500]](https://i.imgur.com/Nmfn8cD.png)
