With strike spells, you can support your gems to maximize the devastation among the lines of the upcoming monsters. These spells don’t kill any monsters themselves, but rather make them more vulnerable against gems, or in extreme cases, prepare them to be slaughtered with one shot kills.
There will be three strike spells in GC2, but let’s keep some of the features secret until release – I will talk about the first two spells now, Freeze and Curse.
Strike spells can double charge. To explain what it means and why I think it’s good, some thoughts about the classic way of charging-and-then-waiting spells (abilities, reinforcements – various stuff in games of various genres):
Spell-like things I met in many other games I played in the past, had a single chargeup. When they were ready, there was no more charging until I used the spell, causing it to start charging again from zero. Many times I felt this annoying, because:
-When there was no enemy coming by, my spells were sitting there ready, awarding no extra charge for my resourcefulness.
-In dangerous situations, some extra charge would have come in handy, but I had to wait until my recently used spell charged up again.
but the most annoying was this:
-I had my spell charged and ready, and I had some targets to cast it on, but I was hesitating and waiting for a good moment, and with every passing second, I also felt frustrated as I was wasting the charging time I could have if I used my spell already.
So, to make the use of both strike and gem enhancement* spells less stressful, there will be a double-charge game mechanic in place. Once the spell is charged, you can use it any time, but it continues charging until reaches two full charges, so you can either take you time and pick the best moment to strike, or stack up your spells if you see some tough foes coming in a shortly starting wave.
*Update since previous posts: gem enhancement spells work the same way and have a max charge of 2 as well (a screenshot showed “maximum charge: 2.2 spells” – it’s gone now in favor of this universal double charge mechanic).
Using strike spells is simple: wait until the spell charges to at least 1, select the spell, click the target location, and wait for the spell to hit the ground.
You can strike anywhere on the battlefield, that’s one of the fundamental differences between strike spells and shrines ( -> see them in the next blogpost).
If you look at the spells’ info panels, you can see they talk about some “flares”.
When brainstorming about these spells, I liked the idea of something that has a delay and rising of tense before the real thing smashes in, something like the orbital downpour in Red Alert 3 (lots of small debris hitting the ground and causing some minor damage before a large decommissioned satellite falls from the sky as the main hit), but I wanted to give those pre-impact little hits some meaning, something that boosted the power of the spell itself.
So, using Freeze as the example, before the big icy splash appears and lots of monsters get frozen, some monsters get hit by small ice drops, highlighting them visually, and adding them to the list of targets hit, regardless of their distance from the impact location). These pre-strike droplets can hit monsters in a slightly larger radius than what the spell’s main effect has, to make the spells visuals look more scattered and to add some random bonuses that make up for the spell effects’ powers diminishing towards the edge of the main area of effect (just as with the splash damage of the Barrage enhancement, monsters at the exact location where the spell or shell touches the ground, get 100% of the damage and effects, and going towards the outer rim of the effective area, the effects diminish to zero – monsters painted by flares (icy drops for Freeze) suffer some extra freezing in addition to the base value calculated from the distance from the center of the impact).
The various spell attributes can be increased with skills as well as an other way to be told about in a later post.
Coming up next:
23rd of July:
Shrines
6th of August:
Shards, monster beacons
