Idea Class Concept: Sorcerer

So there was a pretty dank thread recently where I posted some rough ideas for a concept, and I think I've developed them to the point that they're cohesive as a class, so I guess I’ll post it as it is and get some feedback. This is my first original class concept (I’d previously done reworks and such, but they got boring), so if there’s anything I’m doing formatting-wise or conceptually that I should change, let me know.

I wanted a class based around debuffing enemies and assisting offence, but could still deal some decent damage. This class can really do a bit of everything, but excels most when fighting large groups of enemies. I chose to go the no-steak route with this, but its skills are mostly melee, and it doesn't have any means of health restoration (it’s a glass cannon, blitz the enemy flagroom and let someone else steal it).

This class is designed for Minecraft 1.9, based on the snapshots released thus far.

Here goes.

SORCERER​

Armour:​

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Diamond Chestplate (Luck of the Sea X)
Diamond Leggings (Luck of the Sea X)
Black Leather Boots (Luck of the Sea X)

Inventory:
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Slot 1: Dark Blade (Renamed Diamond Hoe, Sharpness V)
Slot 2: Curse (Renamed Eye of Ender)
Slot 3: Whirlwind (Renamed Blaze Rod)
Slot 4: Cauldron
Slot 8: Spellbook (Renamed Written Book)
Slot 9: Compass

Passives:​

Valiant: Has 15 health points and is immune to instakills. Attacks that would normally instakill a Sorcerer deal standard damage (diamond axe for pyro, bow for archer, iron sword for assassin).

Magic Resistance: Immune to all negative potion effects.

Abilities:​

Magic Bar: Experience bar displays the magic pool of the Sorcerer. This is universal across all items - there are no individual pools for different items. Magic replenishes at 2 bars a second (total of 18).

Sword Slash: Shift with the Dark Blade in hand, Magic at least half full and an enemy in a 10 block radius of the Sorcerer to activate Sword Slash. While this is active, Magic drains at a rate of 4.5 bars a second, and stops replenishing. Right-clicking an enemy within the radius, while shifting, will send you charging towards them and end up 2 blocks past them, dealing 3 hearts of true damage and no knockback. All enemies in a 2 block radius from the original enemy also take the same amount of damage. This right-click ability can be used as long as the player is sneaking and there is still Magic remaining.

Curse: Right-clicking a block with the Curse item will highlight that block purple (can be achieved by spawning a 1.9 Shulker mob inside the block, making it glow with the spectral effect, then setting the Shulker's team to purple) and revert the Curse into a regular Ender Pearl (no effect, just aesthetic and still renamed), draining 9 bars of Magic in the process. When an enemy stands on a "Cursed" block, they gain Blindness I, Nausea I, Slowness IV and Wither IV for 3 seconds, and the curse is used up, turning the Ender Pearl into an Eye of Ender in the Sorcerer's inventory. A curse can be reverted by right-clicking the Ender Pearl, but no Magic is refunded.

Whirlwind: Right-clicking with the Whirlwind item will consume 9 Magic bars, and all enemies in a 8 block radius that are within 35 degrees left or right of the Sorcerer's crosshairs (essentially a wide beam) are dragged into one block in front of the Sorcerer.

Cauldron and Spellbook:​

A cauldron can be placed on the ground (when placed, water is already inside), and it will sink into the ground like a Fashionista workbench. A HP bar is then displayed above the cauldron, with the individual bars being the colour of the Sorcerer's team. This is only visible in a 3 block radius of the cauldron. When placed, the Cauldron item is removed from the Sorcerer's inventory, but can be picked up if the Sorcerer right-clicks it with an empty hand.

In terms of building restrictions: Cauldrons can be placed anywhere on the map, but when one is placed, another cannot be placed in an overlapping area. The Cauldron and its effects have a 15 block radius both vertically and horizontally (imagine a sphere with a 15 block radius, and the cauldron in the middle). The Sorcerer must be in a 25 block radius of the Cauldron for it to function.

The Cauldron can be broken in 20 hits by any enemy weapon (arrow, sword, etc). Once broken, it will return to the Sorcerer's inventory after 10 seconds. The Cauldron also vanishes if the Sorcerer is killed.

Upon placement, the cauldron is useless, but opening the Spellbook allows you to view the various incantations you can perform. The Spellbook only shows the bold text below, but mousing over this text (in the book, not here) will display the descriptions, and clicking the text will give the Sorcerer the Incantation item.

If you want to test the Spellbook concept yourself, copy-paste this into a command block: http://pastebin.com/nrSbXC02

INCANTATION: MAGIC AURA
Makes all friendly Sorcerers in range have 1.5x Magic replenishment speed.
INCANTATION: BUFF BLOCKER
Makes all enemies in range have any positive potion effects suppressed by one level.
INCANTATION: REVEALING
Makes all enemies in range glow with the Spectral Arrow effect.
INCANTATION: DAMAGE
Makes all enemies take half a heart of true damage every 2 seconds.
INCANTATION: CONFUSION
Every 5 seconds, all enemies in range can get any of these effects for 1 second: nausea, blindness, levitation, or the direction they are looking in can be changed randomly.
INCANTATION: VULNERABILITY
Makes all enemies in range take 0.5 hearts extra damage from any attack, including ones that would previously deal no damage.
INCANTATION: PROJECTILE DYSFUNCTION
Makes all enemies in range unable to use projectile attacks.

When an incantation is clicked, a piece of paper renamed with the Incantation name will appear in the Sorcerer's inventory. Throwing this into the cauldron will cause it to bubble, and two seconds later purple particles will start to emanate from the cauldron, showing that the Incantation is active. Throwing in another Incantation will erase the previous one.

Reasoning:​

Here's a skippable, badly-formatted section where I go more in-depth as to why I made certain decisions, added certain features, and the gameplay of the class. If you just want to skim over the class, I totally understand if you skip this section, but if you plan on critiquing it I'd recommend you read most of this (or at least the parts relating to the features you're going to comment on). I'll start out by discussing the armour, passives, and regular attack.

This class has no means of health regen, so I was happy with giving it an extra 5 hearts and pretty decent armour. While it's pretty good, it isn't enough to steal a flag, deal with recovery and make it all the way across the map to cap - which is why it's the ideal offensive support class: it can dish out high damage to multiple opponents, annoy them and distract them, but it doesn't have the survivability to last very long doing it.

As you can probably tell, Whirlwind is the most crucial ability the class has to offer. It takes the other two class abilities, which are both effective in 1v1 scenarios and makes them extremely lethal against multiple enemies. Sword Slash is already somewhat effective against multiple enemies, since you could probably chain multiple single-target attacks and pretty much blaze through a flagroom and speed through the other end. Meanwhile, Curse is useless against multiple enemies, since it wears off the second anyone touches it. It would work in a 1v1 situation, but ideally you want to curse a block, and use Whirlwind to suck all the enemies on to that block to maximise its use. I made each of these abilities, Curse and Whirlwind, take up half the Magic bar, since I know they'll be used in conjunction very often.

Now, on to the whole Spellbook/Cauldron thing. I'd originally intended for the class to be a snowball, in that it gains more and more debuff passive abilities as its health gets lower. Then I decided that was stupid and went for a structure instead. I'd originally intended for there to be a large pool of ingredients that get thrown in the cauldron in a specific order to cast a spell, and the spellbook had a list of all the recipes. Then I decided that was stupid and simplified it a lot to the Incantation system I have in place now.

Now on to the specific Incantations: I had to make a list of buffs/debuffs that didn't have one that was universally accepted as the best, and have them diverse enough that people would choose different ones for different situations. I think I've done pretty well in that regard.

First off is Magic Aura. It basically exists only as a self-buff mechanism (though if you have another Sorcerer friend, that's a bonus), so if you're defending or you decide you want to take down a flagroom solo, it's your best bet.

Buff Blocker is next and it's probably my favourite. Defence with a couple chemists and buffed heavies/soldiers? Buff Blocker. Got a teammate bringing the flag down mid with a pack of ninjas and assassins chasing them down? Buff Blocker.

Revealing is good if you're in a flagroom with corners everywhere, and you want to see where an assassin or ninja might be hiding out, ready to spring on a flagcarrier. Damage is pretty mandatory and self-explanatory.

Confusion is probably my second favourite out of these - it's the ideal one for letting a teammate take the steal. The confusion will probably trigger twice in the time that it takes for a teammate to get in, steal, and back out again, and that would make a pretty sizeable difference in disrupting recovery.

Vulnerability is also pretty self-explanatory, which brings me to Projectile Dysfunction, the one I'm probably going to receive the most complaints about. I'm kind of on the fence about this also, and I might remove it if it gets enough criticism, but I'll try to explain my reasoning as best I can. All projectile classes (sans Mage) have a secondary way of dealing damage. Archer has a sword (gasp), chemist has a sword, pyro has flint and steel to light enemies on fire, elf has a sword and a shield. Also keeping in mind that the ideal place for a cauldron is at either flagroom (it should be placed in a populated area to be effective, and it or you will get trampled at mid), it isn't often you see a lot of range-dependent classes defending. But again, if this is taken poorly, I'll be happy to remove it.

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That about sums it up. To conclude: the Sorcerer class is a powerful "glass cannon" class - one tanky enough to survive a few fights but not anything ridiculous. It has a fun skillset based around debuffing enemies, can deal decent damage, and assists offence effectively.

If any of you read that entire text-wall of a class concept, tell me and I'll PM you and tell you that you're awesome (not that my opinion matters). Unless you're @dorf in which case the PM will read "dorf".

Thanks for reading, everyone. Please post any criticisms you have below!

im going to stop typing now

 

You don't have to read the last section, that's purely if you want to read about the gameplay of the class and the situations in which you'd use the abilities.

 

That's purely aesthetic, just so the armour glows.

 

Yes, but keep in mind the class only has 15 hearts and no way of regenerating health (within the class's abilities). It can be taken down just by beating it up, so I didn't want it to be even easier to kill, hence the instakill and potion resistance.

Yes, you're correct in that it doesn't have a direct counter. However, the low health pool negates this issue, in that it isn't high enough to be survivable farming kills at mid, and certainly isn't enough to steal the flag and make it back to your own flagroom. This is why I'm considering it a glass cannon - high damage output, low survivability.

You'll notice most of the abilities make use of true damage, also. It doesn't have a defined counter, but doesn't exactly hard counter anything else.

 

Hm, I'd make an argument for Heavy or Chemist being able to beat it easily. Perhaps even Soldier would stand a fair chance.

 

I could see an argument for "instakill" attacks dealing something like 1.5x damage, or true damage, or something, but I'm not too keen on making an a low-mobility, low-health class instakillable.

 

Both mage and archer have ranged attacks that can keep enemies away. Archer has a sword to block assassins.