Grimrock

Compared to the amount of texts referring to how "four elements oppose each other", I find the magic system really lacking.

1) Earth sucks completely - highest spell is level 2 poison arrow which does laughable damage over time. Compare to that, fire is much better than everything else. However, the game does not warn you in the beginning that earth sucks, and fire is OP, so I consider that a bad design.

2) Inconsistencies - elements should oppose each other, but while fire elementals are weak to water/ice damage, fire giants are not. Air elementals are not harmed by earth spells (poison cloud and arrow), which breaks the symmetry. Earth elementals are not vulnerable to shock spells.

The magic in the game is underwhelming and disappointing overall.

Fire is relatively more powerful, but it is also still quite weak. Melee Fighters/Knights/Rogues/Barbarians have far higher damage output and do not rely on Energy as much.

Spells in general are highly underwhelming. Low selection, no scaling with attributes or level, and as you pointed out, sometimes elementals are not weak to opposing elements.

It isn't a given that elements should oppose one another, although it might be nice (if perhaps too much to add to LoG2 at this point) if there were some interactions between them. Divinity: Original Sin handled this well; the LoG equivalent would be doing something like creating a poison cloud (with earth magic) and then igniting it (with fire magic) for a double-dose of ouch. D:OS had various interactions with all of the elements; a puddle of water could be flashed to steam with a fire spell, electrified with a lightning spell, etc; each of those things has further effects on anyone in it. Again, LoG2 isn't really set up to handle most of those since most effects aren't persistent; poison clouds are the main exception.

Part of the problem is that earth magic is restricted to poison damage and a lot of things are unaffected by that. Earth magic might be helped out by equating it to caustic as well as toxic effects (D&D and some other computer games have taken this route), since more things would be thematically susceptible to corrosion/dissolution than to poison. It might even be a way to address the lack of high-end Earth spells: add an Earth 4 or 5 "Acid Spray" line-AoE and a lot of the balance issues with it would be solved. It wouldn't even need to be purely damaging - it could do some damage and reduce enemy protection, for example.

Neutronium Dragon wrote:It isn't a given that elements should oppose one another, although it might be nice (if perhaps too much to add to LoG2 at this point) if there were some interactions between them. Divinity: Original Sin handled this well; the LoG equivalent would be doing something like creating a poison cloud (with earth magic) and then igniting it (with fire magic) for a double-dose of ouch. D:OS had various interactions with all of the elements; a puddle of water could be flashed to steam with a fire spell, electrified with a lightning spell, etc; each of those things has further effects on anyone in it. Again, LoG2 isn't really set up to handle most of those since most effects aren't persistent; poison clouds are the main exception.

Part of the problem is that earth magic is restricted to poison damage and a lot of things are unaffected by that. Earth magic might be helped out by equating it to caustic as well as toxic effects (D&D and some other computer games have taken this route), since more things would be thematically susceptible to corrosion/dissolution than to poison. It might even be a way to address the lack of high-end Earth spells: add an Earth 4 or 5 "Acid Spray" line-AoE and a lot of the balance issues with it would be solved. It wouldn't even need to be purely damaging - it could do some damage and reduce enemy protection, for example.

I think he is talking more about what the entire game is based around. It says without the 5th Element, the elements would cancle eachother out. As soon as earth touches air, both would NOT exist. this isn't, each takes more dmg, they would instantly stop existing, period. And yet... In the game it doesn't work like that, using an element magic doesn't instantly cancle out an elemental of the opposite element, or even massively hurt them compared to normal weapons. Heck, the Air Elemental is immune to Earth Magic, it's opposite! How does that make sense?! Also there is the Dispel, spell. It's a weak lvl 1 'water' spell, and yet it hurts ALL elementals, even water elementals. Also, if I remember right and judging by the name, Dispel is also suppost to be an Instant kill to Elementals, or very very deadly. But it's a lvl 1 spell, needing only 1 point in water, and I think does the lowest amount of dmg. It's really only in the game to have a magical way for mages to hurt the Air Elemental and that's it.