Should Cantrips cost energy?

[Dylan Windwalker]

One of the main reasons that players don't use Cantrips anymore, with the only exception of Magic Touch, is because Energy is incredibly valuable as its used in Gardening (which some players still do daily!), Pet Training, and Fishing. Using most Cantrip spells ultimately wastes energy because the player doesn't gain anything from using the Cantrip spells. But I'm also pretty conflicted because some Cantrips spells, specifically those in the higher ranks, it would be detrimental if used excessively and Energy costs prevent that from happening.

What's best for the game ultimately though? Should Cantrip spells cost energy?

[Pegasus Unbound]

This is just my own opinion but, simply put, there are way too many things that drain our short supply of energy: gardening, pets, cantrips, etc.

They either need to double our energy supply or provide separate energy globes for the different events.

Hugs,

Van

[Torpzun26]

Gardening, pet training, and fishing shouldn't cost energy either. Energy is a concept invented by freemium mobile games to frustrate players with long wait times so that they feel obligated to purchase a way to refill their energy faster. Players gain nothing by there being a limit on side activities.

Ok, idealistic quip aside, eeehhhh?

A lot of cantrips are used as a way to provide a bonus in more "advanced" settings such as raids, like casting Fiery Explosion on the Jaguar so that you can set up a DoT gambit. While you can absolutely use them in regular dungeons, it feels like they were intended for stuff like raids and whatever "hard content" we'll be seeing in the future. As such, I can definitely see them wanting some sort of limiter on cantrips so that you don't just cast 50 bazillion of them and turn everything into easy mode.

But as a limiter, it's a poorly-implemented one, and I am pretty confident that it was designed this way to boost the sales of Energy Elixirs. For raids, people will pop an Energy Elixir before going inside, and Vanguard players could see themselves using one between every single run. I'm also pretty sure there's some fancy thing you can do where your gift box appears during the raid, meaning that you can redeem Energy Elixirs while in the raid. So the limiter isn't limiting anything. But only if you're forking over cash.

It certainly creates a system that can be incredibly pay-to-win, though I would say it's not really at that point right now. Sure, it can be if you decide to be ridiculous about it and spend multiple hundreds of energy per raid run, but that's not really necessary unless you're going for speedrun strats (cough cough Atmoplex) or if you're hopelessly outmatched.

In any case, a lot of the cantrips individually should not cost energy. Flourishes (the ones that do nothing but display a fancy effect) especially, but I'd also extend this to the teleport cantrips, Sneak, and some others as well. Another issue with the implementation of cantrips is that they award you XP for your cantrip rank based off of how much energy you spend on it. So my solution would be for those cantrips, they should stop costing energy if you're past the cantrip rank where they give XP. Combat and health/mana cantrips could still cost energy as an attempt to limit them, at least until a better limiter can be given.

Also, I'm still annoyed that we were told that our baseline Energy wouldn't rise past 130 as there was nothing new costing energy being added, but then when we got cantrips we still didn't see that cap raised when Novus came out. That definitely warrants the energy cap being raised!

[Marcus StrongThief]

One of the main reasons that players don't use Cantrips anymore with the only exception really is Magic Touch is because Energy is incredibly valuable as its used in Gardening (which some players still do daily!), Pet Training, and Fishing. Using most Cantrip spells ultimately wastes energy because the player doesn't gain anything from using the cantrip spells. But I'm also pretty conflicted because some Cantrips spells, specifically those in the higher ranks, it would be detrimental if used excessively and Energy costs prevent that from happening.

What's best for the game ultimately though? Should Cantrip Spells cost energy?

I've always been of the opinion that cantrip spells should cost mana. It makes more sense to me logically, since it is basically casting spells outside of duel circles (where spells would normally cost mana to cast). Ultimately that won't generate more money though compared to making cantrips cost energy.

My solution: make the cantrips that are purely visual cost mana and keep the cantrip spells that provide useful functions (such as Magic Touch, etc.) at the current energy cost. This way, players will be more open to using these spells regularly and KI can still profit off of the important spells. Everyone wins!

[LookitLight]

I've always been of the opinion that cantrip spells should cost mana. It makes more sense to me logically, since it is basically casting spells outside of duel circles (where spells would normally cost mana to cast). Ultimately that won't generate more money though compared to making cantrips cost energy.

My solution: make the cantrips that are purely visual cost mana and keep the cantrip spells that provide useful functions (such as Magic Touch, etc.) at the current energy cost. This way, players will be more open to using these spells regularly and KI can still profit off of the important spells. Everyone wins!

Seems fair to me. @Arthur Wethersfield, you listening?

[Ravino.]

I remember we had this discussion back when Cantrips came out and the developers' response was that the energy costs were there to prevent "abuse" - likely in regard to combat-related spells as they were expected to be instrumental in raids. KI acknowledged the feedback but only said they might look into it in a future update.

The bigger problem seems to be that we haven't had any real update to the Cantrips system, even the combat sigil spells they teased in March 2022 haven't been implemented after more than a year. I hate to point it out, but the nonstop release of "Work In Progress" features and subsequent years of neglect is now a well-established pattern of Wizard's development.

Changes to a feature don't usually happen unless there's an expansion to said feature. If the devs are still invested in Cantrips, we may see an update this year or in 2024 where our previous feedback will be weighted in along with the release of the "in development" content we were promised last year. If not, then I guess it'll remain as another brilliant concept ruined by poor implementation.

~R

[Happy Fun Ball]

Not very many people use cantrips anymore precisely because it costs energy. Unlike fishing or gardening, there's almost no real benefit of using cantrips (no sigil cantrips except in raids, for instance). And the higher level cantrips cost a massive amount of energy. 40...50...even 60 energy each, and there was that one preview of a sigil cantrip that used 100 energy. That's just crazy.