Age of Conan Spellweaving Explained

Ever get tired of tossing the same spell over and over again in MMOGs? Funcom did something little different in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, with its unique system called spellweaving.
Spellweaving gives the spellcasting classes a way to significantly alter the ability they deal damage while simultaneously risking their virtual lives.

There are six classes in the game that can be considered as magic classes. But only four of them actually fling magic at opponents as a primary method of attack. Spellweaving is available for the Priest-type (Tempest of Set and Priest of Mitra) and the Mage-type (Demonologist and Necromancer) characters in AoC.

Basically, this system works like a stance. As in soldier-type classes who are the most effective at fighting and who have the ability to shift between defensive and offensive stances at will, affecting their damage output and capacity for resistance in the various situations, it's the same for casters with the spellweaving. Mages are now able to use spellweaving as a stance whenever it might be appropriate in the combat.

Spellweaving's major benefit is that it drastically powers up a spell damage and adds various kinds of special effects that increase in power the longer the player is in spellweaving mode.

The downside of the spellweaving is that it can be lethal to the caster. When the spellweaving state is first entered, stamina bar of the player begins to drain. Once that stamina bar is depleted, the spellweaving state will then begin to drain health, so if player is not careful, character might keel over and be forced to respawn. Spellweaving can be stopped with a simple press of a key.

Although, the longer player manages to keep spellweaving active, the more powerful player becomes. After it is enabled, spellweaving progresses through six stages, with a sort of a transition between stages occurring around every ten seconds and occasionally when an offensive spell is cast.

Each stage increases a passive spell damage buff, which will max out at around 25 percent. Once the stage six is reached, the progression cycles back to stage one and repeats the process all over again, retaining the passive damage bonus.

Additionally, each of this stage transitions is accompanied by a chance to gain either helpful or harmful effects. While the positive effects will be of short life, the negative side-effects will last until even after the player stops spellweaving, leaving player vulnerable to attack. How vulnerable players will be, depends on how much time they invested in spellweaving.

Here are some specific examples of what happens through each stage for a Necromancer (provided by Funcom).

Necromancer - Positive Effects

Parasite Host: An eight second buff that causes you to gain a parasitic soul pet whenever you cast one of your nukes, although it costs you some health when this happens.

Arcane Surge: This is a short buff that causes you to inflict maximum damage with your spells.


Necromancer – Negative Effects


Infested: Players become infested with grave-worms that inflict unholy damage over time. This can stack up to five times.

Arcane Drought: Players' spells will inflict minimum damage

Frailty: Players take more damage from physical attacks. This can stack up to five times.


Also, these are the few more details on how another spell is affected.

The Flesh to Worms spell is the Necromancer's primary DoT [damage-over-time spell] and it is a single-target DoT spell.
The first "step" of spellweaving doesn't affect this spell, but it gets modified from step 2 and up. First, the critical chance and critical damage is increased. At step 3 of spellweaving an interesting change happens. At this rank, the Flesh to Worms spell gains splash damage, which means that every time that DoT is ticking, it will inflict an amount of its damage to nearby enemies, which means the percentage of damage inflicted and the number of enemies taking the splash damage increases as the spellweaving step progresses.

Other three casters in Age of Conan have their own effects while performing spellweaving.

Demonologist

Flames of Gehenna is their primary fire spell It will gain increased critical hit chance and critical damage, as well as become a column-affecting spell.
Additionally, the secondary burning effect - Incinerate, that Flames of Gehenna places on the target, will start to inflict splash damage.
This will become more interesting if the player has also trained the Field of Fires feat, which will cause the Incinerate effect to inflict pulsing area-of-effect damage, so while at the higher ends of spellweaving, a character with that feat trained will be inflicting double doses of damage from the Incinerate effect – one source from the feat, and the other from the spellweaving-enhanced splash damage.

Tempest of Set

The Tempest's main spell is the Lightning Strike spell, which is an area-of-effect spell. Under the effect of spellweaving, the area this spell affects will increase. Lightning will start to arc between the enemies hit, so that each enemy hit inflicts splash damage, causing a cascade of arcing damage when groups of monsters are clustered closely together.
The same sort of thing will happen with the Storm Field spell, which projects pulsing electricity around the Tempest. When enemies are struck by the Storm Field, they will suffer a higher chance of sustaining critical damage, and also inflict splash damage around them.

Priest of Mitra

One of the feat-trained spells for the Priest of Mitra is the Lance of Mitra. This normally inflicts column-based damage from the Priest, with each target hit inflicting a smaller amount of damage to one nearby enemy.
If the player trained the Divine Lance feat as well, the Lance of Mitra causes area of effect healing around all of the enemies that it hits.
Under the power of spellweaving, both the damaging and healing aspects of the lance are increased. The Lance of Mitra gains a higher chance of inflicting critical damage on the enemies that it smites, while the energy from Divine Lance heals more damage.

It’s obvious that this system adds pretty much on how spellcasting works, but that’s not all. During spellweaving, the caster can activate a special power that turns the numerical keys 1, 2, 3 and  Q and E keys into ability keys that control the ebb and flow of the phase, pushing it for increased damage or slowing it down to prolong the process.

As a bonus, every class gets specific graphical animations for spellweaving.
In case you still didn’t see them, check the YouTube, where you’ll find a lot of spellweaving clips.