Sunday, August 24, 2014

Taking a look at the Grimoire v257

This post is about the Grimoire, specifically the "wizard's grimoire", its UI, and the art. This is v257. Again, this is specific to the wizard and how the spells are allocated for that class. I will do a separate post about the other classes and their spell-casting repertoire later. This is going to be a two-parter, with the first part dealing again with the UI in the main screen and the grimoire as an item.The second part will deal with the actual Grimoire UI. I'll do that at a later time.

1- Right off the bat, the first glaring issue is that there is no "Grimoire" button. There is a hotkey, yes, but it's not set either.

The easiest UI change is to put a little button specific for the wizard under his abilities UI.

However, I think that UI looks rather unfinished, unwieldy, and not really intuitive, so here's my suggestion: make the grimoire "equip-able" as a weapon so that it can be placed into a weapon slot. Then when it shows up in the weapon set buttons, make right-clicking the slot which contains the Grimoire in the weapon set automatically take it to the Grimoire UI as it currently does in the inventory . This serves several purposes.

First is that by doing so, you've already implemented the functionality of the cool-down that's supposed to be required when switching between grimoires. This is because now the cool-down uses the weapon-set cool down. If the developers want to make grimoire switching take shorter/longer than regular weapon sets, they can just put a multiplier on "weapon sets" that contain grimoires.

Second, it "fixes" the current exploit that wizards can equip a grimoire, a hatchet and a shield all at the same time. How is a wizard casting spells while holding three things at once?
I am Aloth, the juggling Wizard! Tremble at the sight of how I can nimbly flip through my grimoire with a shield in the same hand! Oh BTW I have a DEX of 4.

Third, it removes that weird grimoire slot (see above) from the inventory that really serves no purpose because it already makes switching grimoires impossible during combat.

"That slot can't be changed in combat." What?
  The game currently does not have a way of switching out grimoires during combat. This should not be the case.

This way if you have multiple grimoires, by placing several in your weapon slots, you already have a way of switching between grimoire spells. (If the devs consider my UI idea as mentioned on this page with the weapon sets, this becomes even easier!)

The Main Character is a wizard with two grimoires: a green and red one. The green is currently selected and spells from that will be cast.
As an aside, currently, switching grimoires between the main character and BB Wizard's does not allow you access to the spells in BB Wizard's grimoire to cast. If you place BB Wizard's grimoire in your grimoire slot, it does not allow you to cast any spells. The image below shows you what you'd see. Is this a bug?

My main character using BB wizard's grimoire. I've clicked on level I spells. I don't know any of BB's spells. Also note BB priests error image for BB priest attack. (BUG)

2- The Grimoire is also very unwieldy to use and some aspects of the grimoire I don't believe have been implemented yet. One such example is adding or removing spells from a previously owned grimoire. I've tried looking all over the place, but there's really no way I can see of learning the spells in BB wizard's grimoire. UPDATE: Oh wait, I figured it out. Woh knew, I have to right-click on the spell in the grimoire to learn it. I wonder if this means I can't cast any of BB wizard's spells because my main character hasn't learned them yet.

OK that's it for now. Till next time. Lemme know what you think.

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