Quote Originally Posted by Archwizard View Post
it'd make nouliths far and away the most overloaded and laggy weapon to boot.
I've... yet to see a frame drop just due to a physical animation, or for an animation to stutter over load. And I've mostly played on a laptop. Particle effects, sure. But the actual physics, such as when particle effects are culled via the graphics options? Have not seen that.

So, simply put, I don't think I'll be considering that a constraint worth worrying about.

But I also don't quite understand, practically, how programmable flight formations would work/benefit the job? It's a nice descriptor on paper but it really depends how much it actually adds to the job besides micromanagement.

And this is all ignoring the lore implications to boot, where the first thing you learn as a SGE is that the four adderstones/nouliths create one circuit for spells... so all flight formations would have to be in predetermined isometric shapes anyway.
If the lore tells you a Soulcaliber-style blade-whip can't actually be used as anything like a whip (instead of just a sword that can curve a bit more and grab onto enemies a bit between its blade-plates), you dispense with the lore, not the obviously available functionality of the blade-whip.

Personally, I'd like to see Sage as actually being able to go in, from time to time, and kind of wreck shit. Allowing nouliths to be oriented in more than just a pyramidal formation with one's mis-torso palm thrusts at the center would be vital to a lot of those prospects.

With that, you might have them... funnel energy into you from behind, chain into one another into a sort of lance in order to empower a physical attack [via a launched noulith] for stunning purposes (where a mere beam would not suffice), carry off each other's momentum into a sort of cleave or additionally physically-based shield (using the sides of the nouliths, say, with exhaustible/rechargeable fortification runes), use short persistent beams that could uniquely impel and siphon simultaneously (but are limited to functioning temporarily as short-swords), or even stack them close, touching each other, for an extremely dense but small shield (e.g., single-strike miti).

While that would shift Sage's former identity from being just a backliner with a fancy 4-part staff, instead letting it extend into anything that would seemingly make use of those varied shapes, I wouldn't mind that. I'd prefer whatever tool it picks be the primary organizer of its kit, even if subtly constrained atop that by intended vibe.

To spitball something slightly more concrete, let's say that you have two basic phasic modes (essentially, inflow/drain and outflow/release), two overlying modes (impulsive and stabilizing), and a variety of commands that perform a dynamic action in themselves and set up a given formation of your nouliths. You have an energy gauge separated among 5 cylinders, one larger one in the center (your own), and 1 for each of the nouliths. The lower their energy, the more they can drain (inflow). The higher their energy, the more they can release (outflow).

As a creative exercise, let's imagine that's basically where it ends. A dozen or so buttons across two switches, a handful of dynamic actions, a power release (2-charge CD or whatnot) and/or maybe a noulith overload or full burst command (temporarily puts noulith out of commission if its energy isn't sufficiently high/low, though with certain added advantages from that crossover atop the burst throughput itself), and a few specials. Total actions actually possible, on the other hand... maybe 30-50.

If you want a mock-up beyond that, I can come back to this in a few days when work has calmed down.

For now, I'll just leave that...
  • The means by which a job forms its given capacities (its "micromanagement") ARE what makes a job feel like that job; else we could simply modulate auto-attacks for a given burst window length and height and given cleave formula and that'd already provide a unique throughput profile (which, without building out of the different means of interaction is all that could differentiate jobs beyond a couple of arbitrary and unrelated utility --or variants on bog-standards-- that'd just be slapped on after).

  • No, SCH would not be more capable of accomplishing what I want out of SGE, in a practical manner or otherwise.