Are Moon Spells essentially dead? Is it worth brining back?

[Dylan Windwalker]

Nobody uses them anymore. In fact, whenever I'm helping out in Celestia through team up, I rarely see other players bothering to use Polymorphs. In fact, I don't even recall myself ever using it (though I did learn a few use cause the moon spell polymorphed into a school the same as my wizards). Honestly, the moon school really boils down to players training all of them for the "Master of Shapes" spell when Free Training Points rolls around and then immediately forgetting the spells upon receiving the badge. The main reason is simply because our wizards get significantly stronger than the polymorphs themselves and having the ability to use different school spells is not useful in comparison to using a prism or pierce blades. Certainly, beyond level 100, polymorphs essentially weaken the wizards. To say Moon Spells are dead is really an obvious question with an obvious answer. Yes, they are.

However, now we have Archmastery!

Now with higher damage and pierce in a secondary school. If a player uses the right school polymorph that matches the school the moon spell changes the wizard into, then the wizard will be able to deal a significantly increased damage than before they had their Aeon/Eternal Novus Gear. The player wouldn't have to train spells for their secondary school with the limited training points some players have left because the moon spells provides the player with the spells of their secondary school for free when they polymorph. Plus, players wouldn't have to clutter their main school deck with secondary school spells (instead putting in 1-2 polymorph spells). Say new moon spells come around fit with increased health (around the 8k-10k health range that a wizard would likely have with Novus Gear) and it's own special spells, I think a lot more wizards would be willing to try moon spells again!

Would you be willing to try using moon spells again (alongside Archmastery)?

[LookitLight]

Essentially, yes. Moon spells are dead. But, as you pointed out, Archmastey could be a REALLY effective way to bring them back.

I had an idea a couple of months ago that I shared on the official forums, about making the Shift spells in Khrysalis compatible with Archmastery Pips. The idea was to reduce the cost to just 1 Pip, plus an Archmastery Pip based on the spell's damage type. I thought they would make it more accessible due to actually being worth the cost on the card, and open up new options for utility in both PvE and PvP.

I, for one, would happily add Shift Piscean onto my Storm Wizard's deck if this idea actually became a thing.

[Flash33]

Sadly yes the school is dead, and outside of Archmastery and Shift spells it'd take a major rework of Polymorphs for them to be actually viable outside of niche strats. It's a shame too as in theory they can be good but in practice their implementation is bad, and my theory is that in an effort to prevent them from being too OP KI decided to give them fixed stats, which ended up having the opposite problem.

[Ravino.]

Yes, they are dead, but so is everything other than Frenzy, blades and your school's rank 7 AoE. Even shadow-selves, heals and other utility spells we would occasionally use in hard battles have become a redundancy in light of KI's gentrification of story content.

Battles are now designed to be over in 2-4 rounds, even in raids, and this mean there's no point in using a spell that's not directly contributing to ending the fight. In this fast-paced meta, every round has huge impact which means polymorphs would need to give a fast and powerful return - with short decks and stats very close to a player's.

But even if KI tried to make polymorphs as good as anything else they audit, it still wouldn't be enough: classical players would continue to Frenzy+AoE and advanced players need to be mindful of raids' timer, they can't waste rounds polymorphing - Moon would need to be a game-changer to justify a break from convention, and we know that's the last thing KI wants - they've even stopped making item cards so players don't deviate from the established meta.

Between their desire for a tightly controlled meta and the emphasis on fast combat, I can't see polymorphs ever working out under this dev team.

~R