USABILITY OF THE 'MAGICIAN' CLASS?

In ffxiv archers are one of the most powerful. They can shoot arrows without casting animations(so they can keep moving and dodging attacks) and they are combined with bards. Their buffs are actually amazing and their debuffs are decently useful. Mages can give themselves a status effect that boosts their MP regen to get like 20% back per tick. So when you run out of MP you switch to Ice status and your MP goes back to 100% in a short while, then you switch to Fire status and shoot fire spells for major damage. Repeat. No need for potions.

Archers usually have high agility, so dodging, and their attacks are physical. Whereas mages have low def/agi, and their attacks are magical. Plus they have an MP cost. Regardless of how they regain MP, they need it to cast a spell. An archer rarely even needs arrows, although some games put that in. Some enemies will be resistant to one type of attack(magical/physical), and mages can rarely do things on their own. They rely on the party to protect them. Archers aren't tanks, but in most games(like Baldur's Gate) they can survive by kiting enemies and shooting them from far away. If you try that with a mage you usually stop moving when casting and you'll be constantly managing your MP. RPG's would be a little different, but few RPG's have single character parties so their individual performance doesn't matter.

So I think they are usually different enough. A mage's power is offset by his defensive weakness/low hp. That's the big difference.

Well, that's the usual problem when you try to have a balanced MMO versus class differences.
Most of the time archers seem to suck. Because they usually don't come close to their mage counterparts and they don't profit from their higher agility and defenses.
Most MMO design is fairly straightforward and boring in that regard .. it's all the same in green, blue and red. But how are you supposed to make one class potentially stronger than the others without it resulting in an "imbalance" in the system? Even if it were only PvE.

Yet what difference do these classes make?

If you take more action orientated game, the style of play is different rather than just focusing on the damage output.
The main difference of caster and attack damage classes in LoL for example is mainly how you counter them (with which items), and that one is more cooldown reliant than the other.
With the surge of assassins, the two have come fairly close, though.

Whereas in games like diablo 2 (for reference, haven't really played the third), it's firstly a case of which equipment you can use, how you defeat enemies (different movement and attack patterns), and that some classes need good equipment to work.
The sorceress is in this case a fairly good starter, as she can teleport without expensive items and has a good base damage output, but has the disadvantage of not being able to defeat all kinds of enemies by herself (as enemies get resistent to 1-3 elements .. and you get 2 at maximum)

In a more interactive environment, you can clearly define their uses.
Trine does this very well - the mage has barely any fighting power at all, bare trapping enemies in cages or lifting them to some dangerous environment (like man-eating plants).
The tank has a protective shield, strong fighting capabilities and can destroy things.
The thief can shoot arrows, has the utmost mobility by swinging around with her hookshot and can go into stealth for a short period of time.


I find the approach Trine had most appealing. It defined their characters and they were all very important and offered different ways to achieve the same objective.

But it's hard to do in a restricted environment. So the difference in "play style" is what should make the difference.
SMT and Persona games have a fairly nice system, in which physical damage plays into the weaknesses as well as status ailments .. it also offers a more dangerous playstyle (as magic gives you magic defense which strength does not), but also has more potential damage (as you can crit).
It allows to deal more damage muted/while conserving MP and to exploit combinations with magic (auto-crits on frozen enemies, for example).
(we don't have a difference between archers or any of that sort, there are different attack typies in P3, but it didn't add any depth)

I can't seem to find a good solution for this.

Archers:
- High agility, high crit, not many AoE skills, high accuracy, status effects, not quite as fragile, higher hit speed

Mages:
- AoE skills, fragile, usually basic damage (no crits), spell cost, elements, high damage output

That's different enough, I think, to make both worth the bother. Of course, you can always add a twist to either ability - say give quivers of elemental-based arrows to the archer and make mages more flexible by allowing them to customise their spells (within reason, of course).

Some like playing speedsters with high crit rates (me), others prefer to have the ability for crowd control and AoE. The ability to choose is nice.

Mage's have always been the Rock, Paper, Scissors, gimmick that most other classes didn't have to worry at all about.

This gimmick is usually what makes them powerhouses, for doing 2x damage to a foe who is weak to spell being cast.

But the MP system is what in my opinion is executed very poorly in RPGs. It usually just punishes players for playing the mage character correctly by "wasting" precious MP especially on trash mobs.

99% of the time a mage who is out of mana is a useless mage and hopes to the gods that the player supplied some MP potions for them so they can be useful again.

I'd like to see Mage spells cost 0 MP for the most basic of spells (fire, thunder, ice, water, etc) and those spells generated MP to be consumed by more powerful spells similar to the TP system for melee classes.

Or maybe just have spells on cool down timers instead of really high MP costs. (cool down timers crossing over to future battles and not reset on battle end)

Just something that doesn't make them at the mercy of consumables or using Defend each turn until the boss battle finally shows up.

If cooldown doesn't reset between battles, you're just encouraging the player to kill all enemies save one and then just defend for a few turns.

The problem with the offensive mage is often that the spells aren't necessary, just convenient. This means that limited MP isn't a question of using them smartly or losing (or having to retreat from the dungeon, which most early limited MP RPGs allowed you to do instantly), instead it's a limit to how long you can fight in a convenient way.

The elemental weakness system is also usually poorly executed. You have a fire spell, a lightning spell and an ice spell and you encounter an enemy that's weak to lightning, but resist the other elements. Which spell will you use? This is just an insult against our intelligence.

The solutions seems to be everything except making the spells require thought.

Yeah. People checking the forums looking for simple, generically applicable ways to make their games more complex and unique are likely to be disappointed. Examples of games that did it well and explanations of how they did so are still really helpful though.

The spells-per-day system in the NES Final Fantasy games was nice. Much better than the MP systems in Dragon Quest and later Final Fantasy games. It gave mages enough basic spells to last through an entire dungeon without letting them use their good spells on anything except the boss ,and dire emergencies. This meant that mages didn't feel the need to avoid spellcasting on normal battles just to conserve MP, which leads to boring gameplay. It also helped ensure that their balance of "good on hard enemies, bad on easy enemies" was maintained. It also made the choices more complex. Mages in those games had a lot of other problems, but I feel like the spellcast system was better in at least this regard.

The idea of giving them free signature spells that don't cost MP would have a pretty similar result. Like the FF1 method, it would let you cast some spells all the time and make you save other spells for the hardest battles. The difference is that FF1's method turned your former big-damage limited-use spells into your semi-freely-usable signature spells as you got new tiers of even stronger spells. That creates a really nice feeling of power progression, but is harder to balance, because the parts of the game right before and right after you get a new tier of spells will break your mold (though that differentness can help break monotony).

The ability to freely restore MP isn't inherently a good thing. It *can* be but it completely changes the gameplay pacing of the entire game.

In 99% of RPGs, normal battles in dungeons pose no actual danger - the only challenge in them is trying to conserve the most resources possible. If you make it possible to replenish your resources mid-dungeon, then the normal battles become totally and completely devoid of gameplay - nothing you do in them has any effect whatsoever, the same outcome (victory without any cost) is guaranteed no matter what you do. To counteract this you have to make the normal battles far more difficult, so that each one is as hard as a boss battle and cannot be won unless the player fully utilizes their resources. To get away with that you have to drastically reduce the number of normal battles per dungeon, and make each one longer.

In the end you end up creating a complete different type of game, which completely lacks the resource-conservation that makes up 99% of the combat gameplay in most RPGs. If you change the entire purpose and goal of 99% of the battles in the game you're not really even making the same genre of game any more. I'm not saying this is a bad thing - it's what I'm doing in my game! - but don't suggest that it's simply an improvement either. It's a categorically different approach.

Ugh...it's done wrong so many times...

Freakin' Phantasy Star Online...Mages/Forces were a money sink in that game. You had to also be running a Hunter or a Ranger to generate money to feed your Force's endless need for MP. -_-

I try to work around this in my own design. I like having all classes depend on MP and unless it makes no thematic sense I have that MP regenerate slowly so that you don't always need to spam pots. I've always hated mages being screwed over by the system.

I would strongly suggest that rather than starting with an idea of how to solve the problem with mages, ask yourself how you want them to play. How do they differ from damage orienter fighters in terms of how they play? Do you want the player to have to household their MP and if yes, then how do you envision the player should do that? Then figure out a system that accomplishes your goals.

Starting with an idea like "lets give their basic attack an useful property" may end up not solving anything or creating a new problem.