First, compression
Compression doesn't activate when you flare using a weapon. So water is useless upon channeling for flares besides making the target wet.
Second Nova
Oh Nova...how neat and frustrating you are. One, you don't get guild points for using it. It's unbelievibly frustrating to use it and then get knocked off your mount and smoke your mount. I know Rias had said something about making it ignore mounts, this would be BEAUTIFUL. I've accidentally hit three mounts (including my own) and i've been trying to be incredible careful with it. As well, compression doesn't work with nova, so hydromancy makes people wet and sometimes knocks them down.
Also, wands don't seem to actually offer a bonus to hit.
You point your birch wand at an infested carrier while channeling extra energy into the wand.
You point at an infested carrier.
A tightly-compressed ball of water surges toward an infested carrier. (R:202 vs D:100) Dodged!
Roundtime: 5 seconds.
put wand in belt
You put a birch wand in the low-slung cordovan leather wand belt that you are wearing.
EW(h)Eng>
cast
You point at an infested carrier.
A compressed ball of water surges toward an infested carrier. (R:202 vs D:100) Dodged!
Roundtime: 5 seconds.
Finally, the big one. Skillgains.
After speaking with Rias and getting a little bit of insight into how they work (and i have a VERY minor knowledge, so I apologize if i'm completely off base.)
I compared Staff use and Hydromancy on the same enemy.
So...gains for mancy's seem to only be .01, double that while studying (Which no elemancer would be without studying) They generate 5 second round time.
Staff on the same enemy, is .02 while not studying. So they take double the amount of time to level, which does seem by design, but I'm not completely sure. Now comes the ultra sad part.
Every successful parry yields a standard skillgain on the weapon used and for less than 1/5th of the energy cost of a standard attack. This being said, at the moment, the most optimal way of skillgaining for a weapon is heading into an area with multiple attackers and guarding someone else. This generates the most amounts of parries, without being overwhelmed. So skill gains from a standard combat for weapon skill is also 5 or 7 times as fast.
Now, all ranged users have the glory of Tactics Marksmanship (Which seems to weight crits and allow for extra damage. Also adding RT, seems to mean more skil gain) which makes up for not layering on combat skill. sadly Elemancy wands/staves aren't valid ranged weapons. So we are ranged users...but not true ranged users (For some reason elemancy pulls us into engaged range.)
I do love the concept of the university, i love how mixing elements works (And i need a lot more advancement before i really see where it goes..) but i get frustrated grinding for days and only improving by half a dozen points while the people i work with improve by x20 or x30 times that in the same time.
Here are my suggestions to filling in the rift.
Improve spell gains to .04 or .06 per cast or reduce casting RTs but keeping the skill gain the same. This would increase over all skill gain and make up for not being able to gain via parry.
Allow wands and staves to be marksman'able.
Allow for a different but still viable way of skillgaining (water fields, burning weeds, tilling fields via geomancy....lots of stuff with farming it seems :P)
Thanks for listening to my rant!
-Dean
Jhordon / Cigano / Zigist
