I've been quite busy with work, but I have been spending some well-deserved time at the code, and I'm really really happy to say that abilities and effects are now correctly picking up both the benefits of reagents and the magical ebb and flow I was talking about in my last post.
I can also see, that I do need to seriously look at balance and how powerful these things need to end up. For testing, I made up some random stats on a reagent, and went with what I thought was a pretty balanced set of parameters for the ebb - and ended up with a healing spell, that started off on a base value of healing 5 points and wound up healing me for 40 points. So you know, probably a bit of tuning to go in terms of what things do and what numbers I place into reagents.
Having said that... it all worked exactly how I expected it to. I'll need to do some proper thorough testing, but it's all looking very promising. Reagents will give abilities and spells more punch, more range, better buff/debuff-over-time and the ebb and flow of magic will enhance that even further, or if no reagents are used - enhance or subdue what you're doing depending on the phases of the moons.
Again, this is all really really dry, trying to explain it, and how it works, and what it does - so the short version is "I'm really happy with how a very cool feature is turning out, though I'll need to tune it to get it where it should be in the end."
