Greetings .

Hello everyone, sorta new (know vortex from way waaaay back when it was all ctf all the time)

So I was bored and started playing on the official server, now that it's down I thought let's check out this one.

I understand it's still a work in progress, here's a few experiences of mine:

1) Mage build with boms, used free 5 levels for 5 pc and 5 bombs.
Official:
In the official server I used both targetted bombing and area bombs to fight monsters.
The trick was the insane spam caused by 0.5 sec delay area bombs. For fighting monsters in invasion or other maps, it was quite balanced actually, no idea how annoying 600 cube spam is in pvp. I liked it because it was a way other than becoming another laser/turret engy to help my team get to 15 min in invasion.

I was transforming into a tank, and slam attacking everything too strong back into the insane bomb spam, so much they had trouble walking forward. But one mistake, some bad luck and it's over. Anyway fun , I worry a bit about much lag that causes if we actually had 5 ppl doing it.

Cubes was also balanced, I slowly ran out, and only with the talent I sometimes managed to mirror myself while maintaining the screen of bombs making it hard but not impossible for monsters to pass.

In contrast I'm pretty sure, just spamming lightning is better, but this was interestingly different, and bombs dont hurt yourself much.

New vortex server:
There seems to be a 4-5 second delay after using area bombs, with a longer delay before they come. I spent 10 min in pvm just trying to hit a monster (since they actually know it's dangerous, same reason you can block a passage with lightning they dont want to walk there).

But the worst is you can't use any ability after calling a rather silly low damage bomb storm.

The forward bombs are the same as the official (I end up never using them, can't kill anything with it, better to just sword a monster). But it's probably nice for pvp.

The follow bombs seem to be slightly worse, I had many monsters with like 3 spells going escape the bombs.

In short I think a bomb mage is a little too weak for pvm.

Also there seems to be a problem with the bombs often not coming at all. At first I thought it was a line of sight thing, but that's not true it seems. Not sure what it is, but I waste alot of cubes using area bombs. Making that 4 sec delay even more annoying.

Is it possible to make the delay count only for using bombs again? but not other abilities, if you want to limit a skill like that, I might try and use area for safety, and try to target ppl with follow bombs, but as it is you can't do anything if you use area other than using a weapon and noticing you might as well only use a weapon

btw the bomb spam with 0.5 sec is extremely fun, and alot worse than an engy camping wasted (ie you have to work for it a bit). So I hope we can find a way to balance this without making people in pvp go wtf

I've always kinda liked the idea, of a simple rule that does something the way monsters fighting works. Like ungibbable corpses for necromancers only when a monster does the shooting. But it's gotta be something simple I think that doesn't ppl to require an excel sheet to know how it affects their skills. The idea if to make it easier to balance both pvp and pvm with less interference from eachother (something that's good in pvp might be bad in pvm and vice versa)

2) Necromancers
I like it so far, more monsters options, pvm seemed a bit less die every sec, but still death is common. I actually ran away from a parasite today who touched me for 0.1 sec. In the official server i'd have turned to dust particles while the monster was still in invulnerability spawn time.
I really like the idea of high health, high strength monsters except their movement speed so at least u have a chance to press fire

anyway did notice some bugs, maybe I'm doing it wrong but I can't get monsters to follow me.
Making them walk to head works, but they get really confused, something to do with what they can see and what i can see, but often they'll first walk somewhere where they cant see the head anymore and go crazy :p it's often faster to just push them.

Anyway thought this necro was actually closer to good balance for pvm.

Would it be an idea to add a telent, ungibbable corpses? or perhaps just make it that way for invasion. Right now necros arent the high damage class they were when I played back then (I still remember those unhittable flyers, and railchick with an instant 100% accurate rail :p).
But by giving them ungibbable corpses we'll lose the 'glass tank' idea. Where a medic revives the tank only to have it die from one bullet and the second bullet turns the corpse to dust. If the monster dies too fast necros already do no more damage, and it'll give them a chance to keep helping in invasion. As it is now it's kinda sad that if u do reach lvl 20 in invasion because theres good chars on, you cant even help, it usually goes build medic, build tank, tank fires, tank dies, corpse gibbed :p

Anyway I like the attempt at balancing stuff, I haven't yet thought everything out really well, but just thought I'd share this, since we dont have many ppl giving it feedback