Runic Spells
Runic spells presented a few design issues. Tweaking class balance often means having to adjust spells to fix issues. With classes only having two runic spells it was often difficult to buff classes appropriately at the tier they actually needed changes. This often meant drastically buffing lower tier spells to fill the gaps.
Additionally, acquiring these spells was overly tedious. The requirement to complete the Ikisith main quest for each new character in addition to having to farm all of the parts of the spells was a significant barrier for players. Moreover, the reliance on a single zone, the Spires of Saitha, for obtaining Runic II spells created a bottleneck, forcing repetitive farming of this zone.
This is our solution for Runic spell balance and acquisition:
- Runic spells are no longer locked behind the Ikisith main quest.
- Lower tier spells that were previously buffed to provide power to high tier characters have been adjusted downwards. Examples include necromancer damage over time spells, Relic: Woundbane, Ancient: Modulative Conjuring, and Revitalize.
- General balance changes have been made to many runic spells.
- Runic scrolls now drop from any raid of Yclist, The Veiled City or higher difficulty, as well as from 12-man raids or 6-man bosses of a similar difficulty. in Ikisith.
- Pure caster classes now have access to five runic spells (Hybrid classes are still being worked on).
- Some spells from the Emerald Jungle have been moved to runic spells (More details will be provided when discussing Ikisith changes later).
AOE Spell Critical Strike Chance
Previously, AOE spells had only one-third the critical strike chance of single-target spells, which was invisible to players and didn’t make sense mathematically. This mechanic has been removed, and many AOE spells have been adjusted accordingly as part of class changes.