A discussion of psi waves in mentalism

[Citan]

I've been thinking about this also. (Mentalism is coming up in the rotation for skill revisions.) The original goal of the waves was to let players pull off EQ1-bard-style buff interleaving. But I'm not sure that's ever going to be worth the hassle.

Originally gear was the big limiter here, it was just too hard to gear for multiple waves. But now that most treasure effects apply to multiple waves at once, it's relatively easy to gear up for a two-Wave setup. Even so, when I playtest Mentalism these days I always end up just using one Wave over and over, because it's too hard to keep track of which one to interleave each time.

So ... yeah, maybe it's time for that design to go.

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So why not just make them toggles? We could conceivably do that now (with a few days of coding) : just press the Wave you want, and you get that one at max potency forever. Switch to a different Wave and you get the new one at max potency but the old one ends.

One problem here is the Power cost (and action cost): if you only have to use it one time, out of combat, who cares about the cost? The ability doesn't need to be thought about at all. And we partially balance gear based on things like power cost, casting time, and reset time... so most of the treasure effects would get weaker as a result. In many cases, too weak to be useful.

Since so much of the mentalist's power comes from the waves, I think there NEEDS to be some interactive element, for balance purposes. It can't just be a toggle. I'm just not sure what that should look like.

I recently tested out an idea where you toggle which wave you want, and then every 20 seconds it just "casts it for you", still charging you the usual Power cost. But it's really confusing and clunky. (You still have to wait 60 seconds before that system gets up to full power, switching Waves doesn't do anything until the next 20s time is up, and most importantly, suddenly having your character stop and cast a buff during a tricky fight is ... not always okay.)

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I could definitely change the reset time from 20s to 30s. I just don't know if that'd be enough to change peoples' minds if they thought 20s was annoying.

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So anyway, more thoughts are welcome!

The most brain-dead simple way to "fix" the waves is to just make them last 20s, the same as the reset time, and have them be 3x as effective, so just using it once gets you the full potency for 20s. After 20s if you want to press a different one, you can. (There would probably be Power cost or potency changes as a result, but they'd stay roughly the same power.) What do you think of that idea?

[Jarlaxle]

I've been thinking about this also. (Mentalism is coming up in the rotation for skill revisions.) The original goal of the waves was to let players pull off EQ1-bard-style buff interleaving. But I'm not sure that's ever going to be worth the hassle.

Originally gear was the big limiter here, it was just too hard to gear for multiple waves. But now that most treasure effects apply to multiple waves at once, it's relatively easy to gear up for a two-Wave setup. Even so, when I playtest Mentalism these days I always end up just using one Wave over and over, because it's too hard to keep track of which one to interleave each time.

So ... yeah, maybe it's time for that design to go.

---

So why not just make them toggles? We could conceivably do that now (with a few days of coding) : just press the Wave you want, and you get that one at max potency forever. Switch to a different Wave and you get the new one at max potency but the old one ends.

One problem here is the Power cost (and action cost): if you only have to use it one time, out of combat, who cares about the cost? The ability doesn't need to be thought about at all. And we partially balance gear based on things like power cost, casting time, and reset time... so most of the treasure effects would get weaker as a result. In many cases, too weak to be useful.

Since so much of the mentalist's power comes from the waves, I think there NEEDS to be some interactive element, for balance purposes. It can't just be a toggle. I'm just not sure what that should look like.

I recently tested out an idea where you toggle which wave you want, and then every 20 seconds it just "casts it for you", still charging you the usual Power cost. But it's really confusing and clunky. (You still have to wait 60 seconds before that system gets up to full power, switching Waves doesn't do anything until the next 20s time is up, and most importantly, suddenly having your character stop and cast a buff during a tricky fight is ... not always okay.)

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I could definitely change the reset time from 20s to 30s. I just don't know if that'd be enough to change peoples' minds if they thought 20s was annoying.

---

So anyway, more thoughts are welcome!

The most brain-dead simple way to "fix" the waves is to just make them last 20s, the same as the reset time, and have them be 3x as effective, so just using it once gets you the full potency for 20s. After 20s if you want to press a different one, you can. (There would probably be Power cost or potency changes as a result, but they'd stay roughly the same power.) What do you think of that idea?

I think the last one would be great but that would be basically a straight buff to the ability since you no longer need to give up attacks mid combat to maintain the 3 buff effect stacking. As it is right now, there's times when I forgo recasting it because i'm in a fight and recasting it means I would be giving up an attack, which sometimes can mean the difference between living and dying.

[Crusader2010]

I don't know your actual goals with this skill and the waves, so I'll start from what I wrote on the first page. This is just a reiteration of my idea, in a hopefully better form.

I see two choices:

1. Limit the number of active waves we can have active at one time (suppose to a max of 2) and either:
1.1. Disallow the use of the same wave multiple times
=>
- the waves would need to not have shared cooldowns;
- we'd need to have all waves useful in most situations so as to have a real choice of which to keep active (even having more mentalists, each keeping up their own waves);
- the duration shouldn't matter that much in this case, as long as it's not too low, but it should be equal to the cooldown;
- I would like to make them instant cast spells (no GCD, no stopping to cast);

1.2. Allow the use of the same wave multiple times
=>
- no shared cooldown;
- the waves would probably need to remain on the global cooldown, so you can cast the same one twice in quick succession;
- recasting the wave (or casting another one) should replace the one with the lowest remaining duration;
- all waves should be good enough, such that casting any of them twice isn't the best thing to do (except for very specific situations/bosses etc);

2. Don't limit the number of waves you can have at any one time.
=>
- do not allow the casting of the same wave multiple times;
- the waves would need to not have shared cooldowns, but individual ones;
- I'd make them last longer than in the first case above (over 1 minute, maybe towards 2, maybe allow their duration to be enhanced by certain skills etc);
- their cooldown should probably be longer than the duration (by how much - is completely subjective, and only playing with this will give the feeling if it's actually fun/better or not);
- they should probably be more powerful than they are now, especially if their cooldown is going to be longer than the duration;
- in this case I would definitely make them instant cast spells (because they won't be up the whole time);

Additionally, it would be interesting to have a few more waves (sorry if they are already in the game - haven't reached the max level yet): a "thorns" wave that reflects some psychic damage back at ALL attackers, a resistance to stuns/interrupts/etc wave, a speed increase but only in combat, a percentage reduction of all cooldowns (maybe 5-10% at most), a percentage increase in fighting skill experience gain (situational, good while leveling), a percentage reduction of debuff durations and/or ticking damage, an elemental resistance wave, a physical resistance wave, etc.

Maybe even more Mentalism skills (probably focused on damage). Don't really have any ideas for those, but I do feel some things lacking. At the same time, Psychology doesn't seem that good in my opinion. Could be an idea to redesign these together: list all the skills (except the waves), and see what might fit in mentalism from psychology and vice-versa.

[Mbaums]

So anyway, more thoughts are welcome!

The most brain-dead simple way to "fix" the waves is to just make them last 20s, the same as the reset time, and have them be 3x as effective, so just using it once gets you the full potency for 20s. After 20s if you want to press a different one, you can. (There would probably be Power cost or potency changes as a result, but they'd stay roughly the same power.) What do you think of that idea?

I don't think it's wise to rob thought from a skill called mentalism, but it would be an improvement to what we have.

Is it possible to go in a whole different direction? Crazy idea, what if psi-waves became a channeled skill balanced around the idea that the player can have 2-waves up? Instead of one wave being strong, the strength comes from weaving multiple ways together.

How I imagine this working is like... if you held down the skill, and for every 1-seconds it ticked, it added a buff for 2 seconds and had no cool down. The buff would have a cap at 20 seconds. The mentalist can twist psi-waves like... hold down Healing wave for 10-seconds, then armor wave for 5, and adrenaline wave for 5 and for a small window get 3-waves up then repeat. Maybe 1 held/3 sec buffed is a better ratio, so that the mentalist can have time for his 2nd skill bar.

And if its un-uninterruptible I think it could be something interesting.

[Yaffy]

One idea that might be interesting would be to make Mentalism waves a toggled ability, but also cost a large amount of power to upkeep in the form of a constant power drain overtime.

For example, Health wave could apply a very powerful overtime healing effect on all nearby party members until toggled off, but it would drain a huge amount of power overtime from the mentalist as well. The idea would be that the power cost would be high enough to eventually drain the user's power completely, so the Mentalist must manage toggling their waves on and off or regaining power somehow. If the Mentalist runs out of power, the wave turns off automatically. Instead of the effect of the skill being limited by cooldowns like other healing/support skills, it would be limited by power instead.

This would be a lot more interesting than the current "Press the button every 20 seconds" for many reasons:

1. This would allow all waves to be usable at once, because the power cost balances out the use of multiple waves. You could use health, armor and adrenaline wave at the same time to super boost you and your party, but the power drain would be immense. This means Mentalists can think of how many waves to use. Should they go for just one wave for an easier to maintain, but small boost to the party? Or do they want to stack all the waves at once for a short but very powerful boost to the team? Or maybe something in between?

2. Different levels of waves could drain more or less power, which would give even more flexibility to how players want to use mentalism as they gain new skills. For example, one player might prefer using a high level health wave skill for a shorter, but stronger healing effect, essentially acting as an AoE heal over time skill. Another player on the other hand, might prefer using level 1 heal wave for a very easy to maintain or possibly essentially "permanent" small regeneration effect (Since they have more power regeneration than it costs). Combine this with the ability to mix and match different waves and there's a lot of possibilities!

3. The power cost would allow for much more interesting Mentalism builds. Power is important for any build, but there is a limit to how much power is helpful even on the most power hungry builds. By giving Mentalism something to potentially dump massive amounts of power into, Mentalists will have a reason to consider building humongous amounts of power boosts, far more than any other players. A Mentalist who doesn't want to focus on waves could skimp out on power regen, but a Mentalist who wants to build very heavily on waves should consider getting tons of power boosting equipment, abilities and items. This would give Mentalism builds more complexity and allow for a lot of variation.

4. The player can decide themselves on how much they want to focus on using waves. If a player wants to use tons of super powerful wave skills, they will have to manage turning on/off waves to balance their power and/or using abilities to regenerate power to upkeep them. This is a lot more interesting than "Press the button every 20 seconds". However, if a player doesn't want to bother with juggling all that, they could build lots of power regeneration and/or use lower level waves, which would be much easier to maintain but give a weaker effect. This allows players to easily change how much effort they want to put into waves whenever they want, so you can relax if you're fighting weaker enemies and don't need your strongest buffs.

Basically, this would make waves a lot more interesting and give players a lot more choices in how they want to play with Mentalism while removing the mindless tedium. Additionally, by having a heavy power cost it would be much easier to balance their treasure effects compared to a toggled ability with no cost. Plus, it feels a lot more flavorful and fitting for a mental skill to have a heavy focus on how much willpower and focus (Aka. Power) the player has.

[Celler]

I actually quite like the waves as they are, I tend to use only health for group play with the delayed heal after cast.I like to cast this before boss fights so I know everyone is getting a little something that may help.I seldom maintain triple buff and would only set it up before a boss. I just tend to use the waves as a grp heal here and there.
It pairs nice with my shield team buff. I don't consider myself much of a team buffer, but like to do a little to help at least.

The power wave with extra power on cast I use for a power boost for long flights.

Once you reach a higher lvl of ment and you have the extra abilities from the mushroom trainer there are too many better things to have on the bar than double waving for me anyways.

[Vish]

So why not just make them toggles? We could conceivably do that now (with a few days of coding) : just press the Wave you want, and you get that one at max potency forever. Switch to a different Wave and you get the new one at max potency but the old one ends.

One problem here is the Power cost (and action cost): if you only have to use it one time, out of combat, who cares about the cost? The ability doesn't need to be thought about at all. And we partially balance gear based on things like power cost, casting time, and reset time... so most of the treasure effects would get weaker as a result. In many cases, too weak to be useful.

Cost mhm then maybe when toggle skill (wave) it will have constant effect of deceasing mentalist (player) Max power by % or fixed (like 30% or -150 max energy when wave is acttive) and there may be added extra cost when switching wave in combat

[Celler]

Don't really want what would in effect be a passive ability on the bar.

If it's gonna be passive it should be a side bar ability I feel.

Also would lose access to the mods that only work via triggering the ability.


Maybe add 2 new abilities to ment and chuck the 4 waves on the side bar as an active buff from there. But at a lower than 3 wave lvl I'd imagine.

[Crusader2010]

Cost mhm then maybe when toggle skill (wave) it will have constant effect of deceasing mentalist (player) Max power by % or fixed (like 30% or -150 max energy when wave is acttive) and there may be added extra cost when switching wave in combat

I would love having something like this in the game. PSI waves might be fit as initial test subjects and new skills/abilities later on. Basically I'm thinking of "aura skills" (permanent buff) that "reserve" a percentage of your mana pool. This is also employed in a few other games (e.g. path of exile) and could be really interesting to have in a multiplayer environment!

Each wave reserving between 5-20% of your max power could work just fine, coupled with some improvements from gear and other skills that can reduce this amount by 5-33% (of the 5-20%). If more types of waves are added, they can have their own values according to how powerful/important they are overall. This will also help balance them out (e.g. instead of using one with 20% mana pool locking, maybe you choose 3 worse waves for a total of 15%). Imposing a limit of 4-5 max active waves at one time could work for this scenario.

The only issue with it is how to balance the bar slots. I mean, it could be required to have all the used waves on (any) ability bar. But if we want versatility instead (like being able to combine 4-5 waves), it won't be feasible anymore. Instead, maybe they could be cast directly from the skill book, without needing them on the action bars (i.e. cast once and forget). Or, as a middle ground - your two most expensive waves should always be present on an action bar (i.e. you can cast any wave which is strictly less expensive than the second most expensive wave you got on the action bar; if you have only one wave, you can only cast that one, maybe with an increased effect?). Other skills and gear mods could also improve this in some ways.

When we have macros, these types of abilities will see a lot more use probably (different macros for different wave combinations etc).

[Sunchaser]

Hi Citan, thank you for the reply (and sorry for the long delay, was a little caught up in... crafting).

The others have already posted a lot of great ideas, each of which could probably work. So I guess I'm gonna take a stab at what the waves should be thematically, in hopes that this could help constrain/sculpt out their form. You said in your reply the original idea was bard-style buff interleaving, but I guess you wanted to deviate from this (and I think there are other skills that would fit more aptly with it, like bard ;p). Below I'll post what I think of as psi-waves. Obviously, there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes. However, my guess/hope is that so long as you chose one according to how you imagine the skill would be, and get rid of its most prominent flaws (non-interactive, and stacking which), then people should be generally happy, at least accepting of it. Still, feel free to pose your current vision of mentalism/psi-waves, and I'm sure the community would love to pose suggestions based on it, and help sculpt the skill.

The way I think of psi-waves, are body waves one gradually attune to. In that sense, psi-waves should be slow and accumulating, and changing them should be costly (if possible at all). In addition, as you mentioned it should also allow some interactive, perhaps reactive, aspect for gameplay reasons. Now, based on this the first two aspects ('slow' and 'accumulating') the most direct implementation might be something like the current psi-waves. But this doesn't has to be true.

For 'slow', I'd really hope the newest design of mentalism/psi-waves would keep this aspect. Sure the implementations of something faster others have suggested would be really cool, but that could be implemented in other skills like bard or some kind of combat dancing skills. Indeed, A large proportion of the skills require a fast, reactive gameplay (stunning/rage control before their rage attack, healing near-death teammates, fearing extra foes etc). Having a slow skill could actually be refreshing, and catering for people with different combating styles. That is, I really hope the waves will last for 60s (and without/ with minimal stacking).

For 'accumulating', I think it's clear that having it as 'stacking' is really hard to work well - either one has to constantly stack it, even while idling and waiting for a boss fight, or one has to accept that the waves will never be at 100% performance (which leads to a balancing dilemma as well, as you cannot really balance around both populations). So perhaps this aspect, if we were to implement it as 'stacking', should be removed, at the very least de-emphasized.
Another option is to implement it in ways other than stacking. For instance, the wave effect can increase gradually over time. I don't think I'm in favor of directly implementing it like that, as it would just add a layer of complexity that is hard to optimize on and not worth strategizing over, similar to the current psi-waves. On the other hand, if we have psi waves with accumulating pros and cons, this might lead to something Yaffy was describing (see more on the 'costly to change' aspect).
A final alternative is to have perks that are available only at the later part of the wave (e.g. last 30s if waves are still 60s long). I'll discuss several options at the end.

For 'costly to change', this is an aspect I think would be really cool, but at the same time realize it'd be hard to implement. For now, there are also no real reasons to switch waves, due to a lack of reactive aspect of psi-waves. Still, I'll briefly talk about several ways to implement this.
The simplest idea would be to make the power cost of other psi-waves much higher while another self-initiated wave is on (or impose a health cost to generate a wave while another wave is on). I am very much against this, unless there's a meaningful reason to switch waves (which would probably require a complete over-haul of the waves/mentalism design anyways).
Another option is to have some perks being only available after awhile, as previously mentioned. Switching would thus mean forfeiting the perks. Still there are currently no real reason to switch waves, and the devs would probably need to modify the skills quite significantly to lead to waves people would actually reactively switch to and from.
The final option is to combine this with the 'accumulating' aspect. One implementation might be to have the waves will have gradually increasing benefits and drawbacks, which would eventually force the player to switch to another. This would lead to a combo-like playstyle similar to what Yaffy suggested, and would require mentalism gameplay to have psi-waves in the central stage, while weaving off other 'normal skills' while the player can. I'm not sure if I'm too interested in such gameplay, but others might and this might be worth considering. One thing to note is that this gives the skill an interactive aspect by forcing players to switch waves, and indirectly solves the current issue that some skills are just straightly better leading to no reason for wave-switching.




With these constraints, here are some potential implementations:

1) A combo like playstyle where the implementation will force the player to keep switching waves. You could probably construct it from what I described above, but if this is what citan and others than the way to implement it would be as Yaffy's proposed (my view is that the construction I described above is unnecessarily complex and doesn't add anything meaningfull). In this way, mentalism will be focused on cycling the waves, and the normal active skills (ie normal skills to hit foes and heal teammates) have to take a backseat. I'm not sure if I'm too interested in such focus-on-your-own-minigame playstyle, but can see if others and citan like it.

2) A very simple implementation: waves last 60s and have no cooldown, but only 2 waves can be online simultaneously, and 'switching waves (casting waves while others waves are online) have additionally cost. There are details like whether the same wave can 'stack' and and whether there should be any self/inter-wave cooldown. But the point is to remove the 'accumulting'/'stacking' aspect and emphasize on the 'slow' and 'cost to change' aspect. The issue again is that with the current types of waves, the players might just stick to the same 2 waves all the time. So the detailed wave abilities have to be changed to incentivize players to switch waves (see below). For example, perhaps all regen waves (which seem clearly superior) should be gone and waves should be purely buffs, then the player will need to use different buffs at different times. Perhaps the buff waves will also need to come with distinct drawbacks as well - more damage but heavier power cost/ longer cooldown, more defense but slower movement etc. The regens/healing in mentalism than should be switched to active skills. I'm not really sure to be honest, how to encourage reactive wave-switching seems like a really hard question.

3) Having perks only available in the last 30s of 60s waves. This way, the 'accumulating' aspect becomes 'attuning' instead of stacking, and there's also the 'slow' and 'costly to change' aspect. These perks could simply be buffs, but what I'm thinking about is something related to 'synchronization', (which might also fit well with mentalism/waves thematically). One example would be to have random windows when one of nice/core/epic/debuff/support attacks be enhanced, prompting people to use those attacks in that window. Similarly, the window can be such that if multiple people use a nice/core/epic/debuff/support attack together, there will be extra effects (either to the mobs or the players), similar to dancing. (Instead of nice/core/epic etc, it could also be the 1st/2nd/3rd/.../6th skill, but I think that makes less sense). This way, the interactive aspect of mentalism gameplay would not be at the individual level, but at the group level, while keeping mentalism still somewhat simple/slow-paced to the user themselves. This might over-complicate the already fast-paced end-game combat however.
In addition, this implementation doesn't encourage switching waves itself, so other changes such as that discussed in implementation 2 might be needed. On the other hand, such additional implementations might make the waves really complicated, and I'm not sure how much we'd still want reactive wave-switching, if the focus of mentalism is switched to such synchrony. So perhaps it'd still be fine to keep the current waves, but maybe make it such that the perks of different waves be different (e.g. synchronized action of power/heal/armor waves be damage/healing/defense oriented respectively).

4) As an extension of implementation 3, entirely focus the 'synchronization' aspect of mentalism, such that these perks are available at all time (i.e. no more 'accumulation'). We could remove the 'costly to change' aspect as well, but otherwise it could simply be done in as extra cost while other waves are up. This will be a new direction of mentalism.. a synchronizing minigame across the party, without all the aforementioned complexities.


Finally, the 3 aspects of 'accumulating', 'slow', and 'costly to change' are just how I imagine mentalism should be. I'd love to hear Citan's vision of the mentalism/psi-waves, and would guess that others would too and could help shape the skill.