Mage Update
Recently I've had to re-structure a lot of code that handles how abilities and attacks work. The result of this is that all 117 abilities are broken, and I need to go through each of them and fix them manually. This is a ton of work, but it also gives me the opportunity to update a lot of old abilities and add new features to them. With this update we'll be covering some of the changes I've made to the Human Mage.
Abilities
Arcane Barrier got a very nice visual update, with a new distortion shader that really gives it that magical look. In addition, it received a boost to its shield, at the cost of an increased cooldown, making it a stronger ability that should be used less frequently.
Arcane Barrage has been updated again (for the 4th time in its history). Arcane Barrage is once again a channeled ability but now with new flight curves, and a new visual look. In addition, Arcane Barrage now scales the amount of hits as well as the projectile speed with the number of stacks of Arcane Power that are currently on the mage.
Empowered Barrage still makes Arcane Barrage very interesting, and synergizes with a new ability further down this list.
Mass Recall has had its visuals updated, but otherwise remains an excellent ultimate ability for pulling your entire army out of an engagement.
Force Push received some minor visual work, as well as an adjustment to its knockback and slow effect. Force Push is an excellent tool to keep expensive mages alive when they're pursued by melee opponents.
Spellsnare is a brand new ability for the Human Mage. Spellsnare fires a projectile in desired direction, exploding on contact with the first unit or obstacle struck. Spellsnare then snares (slowing movement speed by 100%) the first 3 enemies struck. If the enemies take more than 25 damage the snare breaks and the units are free to move once again. Spellsnare is a good way of separating some of your opponents army during an engagement, as well as another way of keeping your mage alive.
Teleport is still the same as before. A high mobility, short-cooldown ability that gives your mage complete control over where he is on the map. An ability as amazing as it is simple.
Rimnir's Blink is a modified version of the standard Teleport ability that piggybacks off of Arcane Barrage's code to fire off two projectiles whenever the mage uses Teleport. Part of the code re-write allows me to re-use other abilities in conjunction with new abilities. We'll be seeing a lot of modifier abilities soon, which should make abilities more flexible and builds more interesting.
Arcane Power is the basic ability that every Mage has. It increases the power of the mage through the gameplay and multiple abilities scale with how many stacks the mage has. In this update, I've cleaned up the visual effects for this ability. Each stack of Arcane Power adds a new visual effect to the mage. The gif below shows a mage with all 5 stacks.
Smooth Visual Effects
Another recent improvement is a change to how many caster visual effects work. With our new system, visual effects will never disappear immediately if the caster dies, is knocked back, silenced, or otherwise incapacitated. Check out how smoothly the visual effect fades out!
Next Week
I'll be working on cleaning up some of the Human Priest abilities next week, and we've also got a brand new map coming up very soon. Stay tuned for more updates, they'll keep coming every week for at least the next month or two.
