bob that mage is picking spells to cast.

Power bolt has drain of f/2 +1, and is resisted by body
flamethrower has drain of f/2+3, as an indirect spell the target rolls Reaction, then body + inpact/2.

so, for more drain, the target get's more dice to resist (includeing a chance of being utterly missed), on average over twice as many, and the only advanrage is the elemental effect. yipee.

what if you take the elemental effect out of the equasion?

stun bolt drain is f/2-1, resisted by will
powerbolt is f/2+1, resisted by body (Pysical damage)
clout is f/2. resisted by resistance+body + impact and does stun. hmm, I still llike both stun bolt and powerbolt better.

Or am I missing something?

I'd say the "added effect" of setting someone on fire isn't something to laugh at. The powerbolt is the lowest-versatility of all combat spells... all it does is damage. If you want a big, flashy, intimidating spell, want to start a fire, want to keep some people pinned down rather than just killing them, want to scorch someone's windshield so they have a hard time following you, or just want to get a cigarette lit in a stylish way, then Flamethrower would be the choice.

If memory serves, the direct combat spells are also Forbidden (i may be wrong). Some characters care about that

Yeah. Elemental manips aren't about doing damage, so much as they are about doing damage and something else, too. If you just wanna smoke somebody, a manabolt is your best friend. But if you wanna kill someone while setting a room on fire, stunning them, or melting them into a non-recognizable puddle of goo... hard to beat them elemental spells.

there is also the problem that you can add up to +6 dice of fire protection, insulation, etc.

actually, for turning someone into a puddle, i think you really want to use the turn to goo spell.

but yeah, sometimes it's just really handy to be doing elemental damage.

for example, acid can dissolve the evidence of your attack. it can destroy walls without chunks of the wall crashing to the ground and drawing attention.

fire could be used to create light. it can be used to blow up the enemy's weaponry all at once, and do extra damage to them as well.

electricity has a chance to automatically knock people out temporarily (or temporarily short drones).

sure, in raw damage they don't compete, but in terms of versatility... well, sometimes, you really just wanna light something on fire.

But is all of that really worth their sheer inefficiency when compared to other spells?

You are looking at doubling their defense, allowing armor and possibly other modifiers to come into play, raising the drain, all for some small versatility.

I am really not so sure it is worth it. Heck, I think elemental effects by themselves would be worth either the increased drain OR the doubled defenses, but not both.

sometimes indirect spells are also what you need... which the elemental spells are.

they have their good points and their bad points. and certainly, i would have to agree that i wouldn't personally choose, say, fireball over powerball (or even stunball) as my main offensive spell. but given the time, i would certainly strongly consider knowing the spell for those "just in case" situations.

(if nothing else, i'd have it handy for conjuring spirits of man... although, technically, you can achieve more or less the same effect for the single target versions by using the elemental attack of some spirits, the element of which is never really specified...)

Remember also that while an elemental attack can miss, if it doesn't then your target has to resist the whole damage. And counterspelling adds to the damage resistance test, not the defense roll. That means that if your target is an Ork with some magical support laying down heavy counterspelling, you won't be able to even touch him with a powerbolt, while a lightning bolt is quite likely to get a few points of damage through (and maybe short him out for a round or two).

So in both cases, your opponent reduces DV with Body + Counterspelling. With an Indirect attack your target also gets Reaction (or less, they get wound and multiple attacker penalties) and half their impact. They might even get elemental resistances if they happen to be wearing any. But the direct spell actually fails if the Body + Counterspelling roll gets as many hits as your spellcasting + Magic. And the Indirect spell doesn't.

That being said, Clout is a craptastic spell, and I've never seen anyone take it. But lightning bolt is high on everyone's list. Fireball is the spell to cast at Wizkid Gangs.

-Frank

Well played, Mr Trollman, well played?

Any consideration for what elements are useful/not useful?
Anyone care to write up a review of the different elemental effects.

Fireball
Firewave

Lighting Bolt
Lightning Ball

Etc etc. Which spells are better single target and which area of effect?

I know they have an Ice Sheet spell...but i always wanted to make Ice versions of the Indirect Attack spells...

Would 'Ice Bolt' and 'Wave of Frost' or something be too farfetched?

Secondary effects(helped resisted by Insulation), would be freezing liquids of course, and at higher levels, freezing more kinds of liquids and possibly even jamming stuff succeptible to cold, and maybe frostbite?

Could follow the listed Elemental drain table.

Acid is nothing to be scoffed at -- armor damage makes the opponent easier to take care of and visiion modifiers make it harder for them to take care of you.

Electricity's worse, though. It does Stun damage and Physical damage at the same time.

As written, Acid and Cold don't really do much. Acid creates "heavy smoke", which is pretty cool. And that's it for the both of them.

Now, Cold has implied abilities to freeze water, and possibly reduce the armor or structure values of metal objects. It even has the implied ability to do no damage to electronics, which is a sweet power for an area attack to have. Acid has the implied ability to turn armor and electronics into worthless slag. Unfortunately, these are all given in fluff text - there are no rules guidelines.

As I understand it, the purpose of the Elemental Effects is supposed to be:

Acid: Covering escapes. It creates bad visibility, which is bad for attackers from both sides. But it happens after your attack, so the first people to get hurt by it are your enemies. An acid attack is like transfering dice from drain resistance to your defense rolls. Note that you get a cloud of smoke regardless of whether you shot a ray or a wave, so there's little benefit in upgrading to the area version.

Cold: Transmute enemies to loot. In addition to whatever use you can squeeze out of it by freezing water or making ferrocrete shatter, it does all its damage without damaging commlinks or armor. The corpses left over will even be pretty. The low level of collateral damage is a bigger deal for an area spell, and you'll have an easier time getting the gamemaster to agree to letting you build an ice flow bridge with an area spell. Frostwave is thus looking pretty good.

Electricity: Knocking fools out. Any victim who gets hit by an electrical attack has a quite good chance of being "temporarily" incapacitated for longer than any fight in SR is likely to last. That's great, and is good both as a single target and as a mass spell.

Fire: Destroying evidence. Fire is the gift that keeps on giving, catching flammables on fire and perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Fire is one of the deadliest things you can do to a combatant, as ammo cook offs are only slightly less deadly than they are in Battletech. Personally, I find that anything I really need fire for, I can do by setting one thing on fire and then walking away. Others feel differently, and want to set fire to entire mercenary companies at one go. Fire has a strong selling point as a single target and area spell, though I personally get more mileage out of the single target version.

-Frank

Thanks for your posts Franck

Thank you Mr. Trollman. That was exactly what I was looking for.

Now, as a matter of curiosity, Dumpshockers what would you do to make the mechanical effects of the elemental attacks stack up?

I.e. they all seem somewhat useful, but could they be more finetuned?

Maybe make acid actually have mechanical effects for sludging things, or that sort of thing.

Don't Elemental Manipulations also bypass the added threshhold for damaging non living targets (example powerbolting a drone is really difficult, while lightning bolting said drone is somewhat easier and more effective)

Steve, you are correct in that assuption.

How Cold does the spell make things.
I would assume it would be based upon the # of successes.
A Draconic number should be equivalent to dipping the item in liquid nitrogen.
Where one success might cause mild numbness, low grade hyperthermia,
and get your drink to that perfect temp.

even with what frank said, I still say elemental spells are on the weak side. Basically there purpose is to be used when you don't think your successes will outnumber your targets successes on the resistance test, so in those cases which IMO aren't that common, you can at least do some damage to them with an elemental effect spell. The vast majority of the time they are flat out weaker, they should not cost lots more drain in order to be usually weaker but better in a uncommon circumstance.

electricity may be an exception to the rule since its elemental effects actualy do something useful.

Setting fire to someone carrying 20 kilos of explosives isn't useful? I think you're overlooking the utility aspect of elemental spells in favor of "How many boxes of damage can I do for the drain?"

The thing I like about Elemental spells is that, due to their indirect nature, you can use an area-effect spell to nail people outside your line of sight. Normal combat spells are Direct, and thus require that you actually see the target in order to sychronize auras. Fireballs don't care what you see, only that you can see the center of the blast area.

It depends on how close you're standing to the explosives carrier.

Well, I wouldn't make a mage who only used Flamethrower and Fireball . Still, there are times when fire is definitely the way to go.

Will a lightning bolt to a drone still KO the rigger? That's why I always carried lightning bolt. Zap anything a rigger is directly controlling, and you take the rigger down too.

A Cold effect could make streets or floors slippery - it could also fog or frost up glasses or goggles that people are wearing. If my enemies suddenly have to yank off their smartglasses, cold attacks become worthwhile. Don't forget that freezing liquids can burst pipes and plumbing. Iced over engines don't run well (sometimes at all) so secondary cold could suck some performance out of a drone.

You take elemental spells for two reasons:

1- The chance to get secondary effects in addition to damage.

2- You want to force the other guy to stage the damage all the way down (assuming you hit).

3- You are worried about counterspell protected opponents

Did I miss any?

4. You are worried about Object Resistance protected opponents (just like Counterspell protected opponents really, except more so in that it doesn't even apply to indirect attacks).

5. You want to take advantage of elemental resistances.

5 is sort of the most subtle use, but when you hit something with a powerball, everything takes damage. If you hit things with a flamewave, ceramic items don't take any damage. That can be big fun if you are actively looking for certain ceramic items.

-Frank

I'd like to see a spell or two that you could use like suppressive fire. Sure, a sammies uzi3 or fn-fal chattering exex at you is cause for sphincter pucker. But what about a mage flinging arcs of lightning or gouts of fire downrange?

Oh, yes, off to the lab. Sustained Elemental combat spells, here I come!

6th use (only for the prepared): a friendly fire spell. You get your boys to load up on Non Conductivity Armor Mod, then throw Ball Lightning Spells knowing that your buddies will easily resist even if they are in the area of effect.

I personally also like the use of a well placed Lightning Bolt or Ball Lightning to people who insist on kilos and kilos of plastic explosives.

Yeah, the cold effects could be quite useful. And easy to create. Don't forget at real high force, frostbite could also be a factor. I wouldn't doubt a force 12 or something insane like that Cold spell could freeze alcohol.

Non-electronic AR for a mage? I doubt it.

...

What?

How would that mage get his Augmented Reality input? Cybernetic? Using AR goggles makes it impossible to cast spells because it is electronic vision.

I think what Oracle was getting at is the rule that mages can't cast through electronic vision devices.

This thinking is that since electronic vision devices put up a little screen with a video image (and thus the photons of light from whatever you're seeing have been converted into electrons in a charge couple device and back to photons again by the display), they don't actually grant line of sight. You're not actually looking at the target, but rather at his image on a screen. (Fiber-optics is fine because the actual photons from whatever you're looking at actually get bounced along the inside of the fiber-optic line to your eye. And optical magnification in old-fashioned binoculars is fine because the actually photons are passing through a lens to your eye.) Casting a spell at a guy you can see through an electronic vision device is like casting a spell at an actor by aiming it at his image on your TV... completely impossible.

EDIT: Oracle explained it with more speed and brevity. Never mind.

That was exactly what I meant.

use ones that provide a HUD style setup, they add in the AR stuff but let the real light directly through their transparent make up

At least that is not standard equipment.

why not? it is hhow RL AR systems work

Well, here, get an AR vision overlay that keeps your glasses transparent (thereby not destroying LOS to your environment). Except, you have an Analyze+Edit agent running that creates a HUD overlay of your teammates in your glasses, overlapping their exact positions with live images of them.

So effectively you're translating the images of your teammates into an electronic format but leaving the rest of the environment unrepresented in your otherwise transparent glasses.

You won't be providing counterspell cover for them, but AoE to your heart's content.

There was a rule in SR3 about how taking measures like that causes the spell to fail. Something about not being in the right frame of mind. It was a balance rule, plain and simple, so don't tell me why the AR goggles get around this by doing it automatically. I don't care why it should logically work. In my games, it fails.

Hey, lets not get to defensive here. Azralon has an interesting use for AR, a completely new tech, and we're shooting him down, mostly from a "I don't want it to work that way" Standpoint.
I can't find any hole in his logic, except that even for a 2070 computer, there will be a bit lag in the overlay. Meaning that your friends with wired reflexes will tend to jolt out from under their overlay image, ruining the effectiveness and maybe giving you distraction penalties since you see two of your friend. I'd say that this system would only grant AOE cover to designated individuals with a lower inititive than the Agent you've set up to control the device.

OH, that's how to set that up, by the way. And Agent with edit using every action to edit your feed.

Now what if your hacker fed that same agent into an enemy mages's AR? It could seriously disrupt his day, and if the edit proggy was good enough, he may not even know why he can't target things he can plainly see for a few rounds. Once he realizes, he'll pull of his AR googles (Which denies him tactical information, a vicotry) or switch to astral perception to target spells (Making him dual natured and vulnerable on the astral, a victory). This one is going into my hacker repitiore. (at this point I pity the poor GM who has me as a hacker character.)

It's just the Hellsing spellcasting method that you've been able to do since first edition. Put your hands out in an "I'm crushing your head!" sort of way that conceals your friends, and blast away. With the improvements in informational overlay systems that have happened in the late 2060s, it can now be done quickly and reliably by a commlink instead of by hand.

Covering up targets in your vision isn't a new idea for firing area of effect spells into crowded areas, it's just that now the tech exists explicitly to do it very very well.

-Frank