Some Spells Are Easier to Cast Masterfully Than Others
GlastonEverfang
Posts: 42 ✭✭
So the game's been out for a few months now. I've seen all the all the spells that are currently available (13). I've noticed one, immensely troubling thing. Some spells are super easy to get masterful casts with and others are incredible difficult. For me, ebublio, aguamenti, and alohomora are easy to cast green, sometimes I mess up and go outside the lines and miss part of the spell's shape, but it still counts it as a good, green colored cast. On the other hand, diffindo, arresto momentum, and especially incendio (my worst spell by far) are terrible to cast. Despite repeated practice I have an awful time getting a green cast on these. I've gotten a lot better with diffindo and arresto momentum, but not "missing 10% of the glyph and still getting a masterful cast" good like ebublio or aguamenti. What's frustrating is sometimes I'll cast those 3 difficult spells almost perfectly (nearly all of the glyph is covered) and get a yellow cast (no spell score bar movement) or a green-yellow cast (spell score bar moves a little). I've even tried casting these spells very slowly, not even worrying about whether the foundable is returned or not. Has anyone else noticed this? Am I losing my mind? Admins, can we get a fix for this or a detailed explanation about exactly how spells' effectiveness works? I get that speed of the cast and the accuracy of tracing the glyph is common knowledge about how effective a spell will be on each cast, but there's got to be more to it than that.
Comments
Tracing then slowly is the issue. You need to trace as quickly as possible and along the glyph line.
Speed seems to be the best tactic and will usually cast “good” or “great” unless you’re glyph tracing is really bad.
If you can't do quick and accurate, it's better to do it quickly.
Niantic has this same oversimplification in ingress. We can draw "glyphs" as part of hacking portals. Speed and accuracy count, but every glyph is worth the same in value and speed bonus, so "gain" and "lose" which involve connecting two points are worth as much as "search all" with 11 and no two 3 points in a line. The speed component of casting should be scaled to the difficulty of the somatic component. Distance the finger must travel, number of times it must change direction, inflections in curves, varying radii in curves.
Arresto momentum takes a while just because you have to cover so much linear distance, with 5 changes that ... arrest your momentum.
Aguamente, on the other hand, is two gentle curves inflected across a short diagonal. I'm glad to see fire confundables because I know I'm going to raise my masterful count.
The long ones make you have to go so fast sometimes the phone doesn't catch all the points. No, I don't do the patronus by jumping from the top of the spiral directly to the tail, or flat-bottom my epublio - but when I move fast, that's what's recorded.
It shouldn't be difficult to scale the time evaluation. It wouldn't even have to be algorithmic - just stochastic. All the data comes back to Niantic, so the target time for "great" speed would just be the cutoff for the top quintile for that glyph, with the good and fair covering the 4-3 and 2-1 quintiles. Then the accuracy numbers would be comparable between spells.
@ni0h Wow, that was an impressive comment. I understood what you were saying. I like everything you said and it makes sense. Some of those glyphs are much longer than others and some have those angles, those direction changes, and that will mess a player up easily. I definitely like this part,
That quote above, that is gold right there. Can we get some developers to look at this? Anyone?
And what's up with the glyph disappearing as you trace it? I always found that to be frustrating. I'd like to practice tracing them slowly and build up a muscle memory of a spell's glyph shape before trying to do it fast.