You seem to forget that high level skills still have high AP costs and high cooldown times.
If you have 1 'mega nuke', you can fire only one 'mega nuke'.
If you have 3 mega nukes, you can fire 3 'mega nukes'.
If for each 'mega nuke' you are allowed to have, even if they all take a whole turn to deploy, you are still allowed to fire an extra 'mega nuke' within a single encounter.
If one 'mega nuke' competes with one 'regular nuke', the 'mega nuke' will always win.
If a 'mega nuke' competes with a number of 'regular nukes' of a roughly equivalent total strength, that's actually a choice to make.
Again, you forget that memory isn't the only balancing tool. There are others, namely:
- AP costs
- cooldown time
- source points
Most 'mega nukes' nead at least one source point. So the number of these high-level abilities you can actually use during an encounter are already pretty limited.
In DOS 1 really high-level 'mega nukes' had really, really high AP costs for a good reason. You even had to spare points from a previous turn sometimes in order to have enough APs to be able to cast a 'mega nuke'. So there are of course ways to limit the number of 'mega nukes' a wizard can cast during an encounter. And cooldowns for 'mega nukes' should of course be pretty high as well, covering several turns.
My suggestion is primarily serving the purpose to enlarge your arsenal. You might still be only able to cast one or two 'mega nukes' during an encounter but you have more of them to choose from - which is currently effectively limited by the memory system. But on top of that I really think that climbing up the ladder in a spell school should make you effectively more powerful in using spells of this very school. If you are a pyro master with 5 ability points in this school you should be able to cast a wide variety of different pyro spells. If that's not the case being a master spellcaster feels imo pretty crippled and not very satisfying. Becoming stronger and enjoying a larger arsenal over time is one of the most important things in RPGs. Right now the system is way too restrictive.
The more I think about it the more I'm convinced that the high-value AP system in DOS 1 was actually better. It offered a higher flexibility and more player freedom. The current system is imo only better for PvP gameplay because it allows for a pretty rigid balancing. But then again I think most people will play DOS 2 for the campaign and for the RPG aspects and I'm not convinced that everything that is good for a well-balanced PvP game is equally well suited for a (SP) RPG campaign...
the more i think about it, the more i am of the opinion that pvp is the issue. i like the arena idea but it seems like pvp cripples the core game because everything only loosely related to pvp (ie eg skills) has ultimately to be balanced around pvp and hence the current system
I don't see the point. Memory and spellcasting could follow different rules in PvP and the campaign.
the point is that there are not different rules as of now. you are correct theoretically but as long as the pve rules equal the pvp rules the issues remain
True. But I really think (and you might agree with me) that this paradigm should fall. It imo doesn't benefit the campaign.
