Why Blade Spirits takes MUCH longer than Energy Vortex to be cast ?

Blade Spirits is a Circle 5 spell.

Energy Vortex is a Circle 8 spell.

Now, the casting time for Blade Spirits is way longer as compared to that for Energy Vortex which, by the way, does also more damage as compared to Blade Spirits.

Why is that ?

An Energy Vortex is a whirling mass of magical energy, and a Blade spirit is a complex construct of steel manifested from thin air. It takes longer to turn energy into solid matter than it does to manifest swirling energy.

When I was learning magery, always wondered if I would live long enough to finish casting this spell.  There is a previous discussion on blade spirits in this forum.  In a nutshell most likely reason is that blade sprit cast in the past was much stronger than it is today so it had a longer casting time.  Developers weakened the spell but did not adjust the casting time.  Maybe the graphic takes awhile to form.  It’s a much more complex graphic in EC than the energy vortex graphic.

even before ec came out it took a longer time to cast its always taken more time than an ev to cast. im not sure about stronger, but the bs passable lasted longer so some what make it stronger ?

You'll probably get the same answers like the last time you asked this...

Blade spirits is the way I completed the quest to put spellweaving on a character that was too new to have enough magery to cast EVs. 

PlayerSkillFTW said:

Blade Spirits were a lot stronger pre-AoS than they are now, they were capable of inflicting Greater Poison on hit as well (EVs could inflict DP, Curse, and Mana Drain on hit back then). Sometime after AoS, they limited the amount of EVs that could be active in a 5x5 area at a time (dispelling the older EVs if newer ones entered it), but that didn't apply to BS. They then made BS take 2 Control slots. The Blade Spirit summon is basically completely useless nowadays.

Well, if Blade Spirit is now a basically useless summon, which only characters with lower Magery skill might have a point in using, I really wonder what is the point to keep it having such a long casting time...

Perhaps, its casting time should be significantly reduced, especially when mostly lower Magery skill characters might be those using this summon ?

@Kyronix , would you perhaps want to consider such a change ?

when did they make the change to bs ?

Skett said:

when did they make the change to bs ?

• Energy Vortices and Blade Spirits will now take two control slots
• Energy Vortices and Blade Spirits now have double the hit points
• Energy Vortices get a massive boost to their dispel resist to bring them into parity with blade spirits and most of the controlled summons in this regard
• All magery summons, uncontrolled and controlled get a boost to their dispel resistance
• When Energy Vortices and Blade Spirits are idle they will now actively scan for nearby creatures to attack. This means they will now notice and attack creatures that spawn beside them instead of continuing to sit idle
• Blade Spirits now take 3/5 the time to cast as they used to

its been a long time since i cast a bs lol

Mariah said:

Skett said:

when did they make the change to bs ?

https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/technical/previous-publishes/2005-2/publish-31-14th-march/

• Energy Vortices and Blade Spirits will now take two control slots
• Energy Vortices and Blade Spirits now have double the hit points
• Energy Vortices get a massive boost to their dispel resist to bring them into parity with blade spirits and most of the controlled summons in this regard
• All magery summons, uncontrolled and controlled get a boost to their dispel resistance
• When Energy Vortices and Blade Spirits are idle they will now actively scan for nearby creatures to attack. This means they will now notice and attack creatures that spawn beside them instead of continuing to sit idle
• Blade Spirits now take 3/5 the time to cast as they used to

@Mariah

Thank you for the info.

The last line, says that the 2005 Pubish "reduced" the time to cast Blade Spirits to 3/5 as they used to...

Does that mean that before the 2005 Publish it took even longer to cast Blade Spirits ?

WOW !!

To me, the casting time now seems extremely long especially, when compared to the casting time of an Energy Vortex which is a Circle 8 spell and does more damage when Blade Spirits instead, is only a Circle 5 spell and, as others have mentioned, is seen by many UO players as a not much useful Summon as there are better ones in UO which can be cast...

To be honest I don’t use probably half of the spells in the Spellbook.  Other than liking the way they look can’t see any advantage to casting blade spirits.  Although if they do physical rather than energy damage that might be a point in their favor.  But, if you are a up and coming mage, you need them until you are able to cast an EV, and you have to think about just when and where to cast them because of the time it takes to cast one.  They are a good training tool.

• They still attack victims normally, and the caster is completly responsible for their actions.

• This includes being cast as a murderer should the blade spirit/vortex attack and contribute to the death of the victim.

• However, merely running into a blade spirit or energy vortex will no longer be grounds for reporting the caster for murder. The caster will become criminal should someone take indirect damage from such a spell, but much like fire field, they will not be reportable for murder.

On December 22, 1999, the following was published:

• The exploit that allowed people to gain magic resistance using blade spirits without taking damage from the blade spirits has been fixed.

Publish 17 on February 11, 2003

• Blade Spirit and Energy Vortex creatures now have fewer hit points.
  

Publish 18 on May 27, 2003

• The Hit Points and damage for Energy Vortices and Blade Spirits have been lowered.

but were undone to a degree by the publish I linked, in 2005?

Damages seem fair to me.  Blades are for low level mages. You can have 2 EVs.  Can only have 1 RC.

Some players do everything with 2 EVs and fireballs. 

Pets are the next level.

Trallic said:

We used to use blade spirits for training parry and healing back in the day. It was the best option if you were alone or the wall wasn't up in Deceit.

Quite literally its the most nerfed spell in the game. They kept making changes to it and eventually it became utterly useless even for its intended purpose.

Yes, mind blast.  Have no idea why this is a fifth level spell.  It does next to no damage even to creatures weak to cold. Have set up all the direct damage spells as macros on the calculator pad on the keyboard of my computer so I can quickly cast them all with one hand held over the pad.  After several years of not pressing the mind blast key replaced the mind blast macro with a cure poison macro a couple weeks ago that I use a lot.  When I look at how strong energy blast and flame strike are really wondered why mages did not have a fairly powerful cold spell.  Thanks for the background on mind blast.  Honestly, even the name of the spell never did make any sense to me.  Magery 120 now and intel. near 150, maybe will try it again to see if that makes a difference.

As mentioned, think it's just legacy balance. Summon animals also takes long to cast