Arena talk:The Known Spellbook

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I respect the original decision to group the spells into circinates as the designers imagined, but really the circinates are not helpful. It would be better in my opinion to dump all reference to the circinates and group the spells according to offense, defense, etc. Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Dr. Memory 10:48, 26 February 2008 (EST)

It seems like the information on the circinates should be kept in some form: if a player comes across the information while playing the game, I think they'd expect to see some mention of it here. However, arranging the tables first by general spell type would be more consistent with what's been done elsewhere (e.g., Oblivion:Spells, Morrowind:Spells). The circinate level could then just be a column in the new tables.

I'll leave it up to you to figure out what to do about the fact that Arena doesn't have defined spell schools that can be used to group the spells. ;) We had put together the approximate schools for all of the spell effects on the Arena:Magical Effects page, but I noticed that you decided to delete them all. I personally think that the information was useful on that page even if the schools don't exist in Arena. Players of any other Elder Scrolls games are used to seeing the spells grouped by those schools. And clicking on the previous "school" column allowed all of the healing-type effects and all of the offensive-type effects to be automatically grouped together. It seems to me like you're just going to have somehow create that same type of grouping to do what you're proposing here... in which case, why not use group names that will already be familiar to players? --Nephele^Talk 12:50, 26 February 2008 (EST)

You raise some good points, Nephele; let me explain.

While playing the game, the player will never come on anything relating to "circinates", nor will the player ever be implicitly affected by the concept; if the original manual didn't mention them, you'd never even guess the concept existed. That's why I think they should go; they're a hindrance to understanding, because they have no effect on the game in the least. Ditto the schools; as Arena had no schools, sure, you could put the spells in schools, but that would give the impression (particularly to anyone coming to Arena from Daggerfall, Morrowind, or Oblivion) that the schools meant something, when in fact like the circinates they are completely arbitrary.

I definitely am proposing that the spells be grouped according to type. If you were willing to trust my judgement (not a for certain thing, I know!), allow me to demonstrate. If we don't like it, I'll put it back. What do you say? --Dr. Memory 08:43, 27 February 2008 (EST)

"Silence gives assent," as they say. Here I go! --Dr. Memory 09:24, 6 March 2008 (EST)