Best Of

Strap in. Having slept on it, Ascension was certainly interesting, and as it turned out I had as much fun as was possible this time around. Lag was not crippling most of the time, no PATH SHORTEST bug directly contributing to victory, etc. Kudos to Gaudiguch members for having the audacity to change things up. Getting a few combat victories with the entire basin against Glomdoring (+3 Celest people) caused a glimmer of hope that this game can persist to be engaging from a combat perspective, but honestly, it’s just indicative of the state of the game. I try to steer clear of posting in the quitting/frustration threads, but the recent ones about why people are leaving, and the Glom one, were really disheartening to read. This isn’t about any individual, and absolutely does not aim to insult the work certain players have invested to maximize their org potential. Anyway, enough disclaimer, here are my thoughts from a Magnagoran perspective, hope they are not too jumbled.

The biggest singular reason as I see it is combat imbalance on a skill/org synergy level. Overhaul shredded warriors (Rivius’ post here perfectly summarizes my thoughts further: https://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/comment/192465#Comment_192465) and Magnagoran skills, and there’s no urgency or timeline for it being addressed. Warriors are straight-up hot garbage, have no quick and significant hindering methods to build towards an instakill, and only are effective in niche situations. They can be helpful in utility, but only reasonably when you are already crushing enemies. The warrior hot-fix/deathmarks/sacrifice change gave Mag warriors a path to a kill, but it's not effective most of the time in practice, and actually has anti-synergy with ourselves and groups as a whole. ANTI-SYNERGY, seriously… Deathmark from one source greatly reduces it from all other sources briefly. I walk into a fight knowing I’m useless. I only have 2-3 warrior attacks worth using. Didn’t we just get a warrior hotfix not long ago? Yes, and I tried to give input but it was a band-aid with restrictions of resource that prevented a re-design, though I am grateful the puissance2.0 idea got put in or we’d even be more useless. When whole classes are so broken, adding things like new combat/whatever mechanics like Timequake things is perceived as insulting at worst, or misguided at best.

Synergies in other orgs, Glomdoring for example, actually exist. Every class in their org builds copious amounts of bleeding, with two of their classes amplifying/manipulating it for other maluses or toading. NSB+bloodycaps+shadowpulse is super strong. Pretty much anything that hinders/drains mana/bleeds/slows healing amplifies the kill speed. Toading also only requires half mana, which is not hard to get in a couple seconds which every single class can contribute to by way of mana drain (it's common for 1-2k mana drain on fae, double haegl, etc). Stuff like this goes on and on.

Mana kills are simply too strong in comparison to every other kill method. Combine that with the above synergy, and it’s even more potent. No matter the situation, a minor focus of a couple people over a couple seconds is largely assured to get a kill. Getting a snapshot of half a statistic is not that hard in groups. Factor in a little lag and passives/fae/aeon rapidly become enough to do it by themselves.

Damage kills are no longer viable except when the target is completely wrecked with afflictions and generally unable to recover/move. There are too many buff/refill sources, and that dynamic shifts for the worse every year. Illusoryself is insane (being changed but the damage is done). Aegis is okay by itself but with the rest it's really good, but only a few have access to be fair. Vitality pendant. Wonderbelt quickened shield. Wondercure. Refresh. Targetted Trueheal. Timeslip spam. Serpent+shielding spam. Insane Rooting levels prevent gusting/moving people to counter critical skills like Octave/timed instakills. The list goes on and on. Individually some are not too bad but combined with the other issues here and it compounds exponentially. All of this amplifies the mana kill discrepancy, too.

Overhaul put things into a buff system because there were too many buffs, and yet there are a plethora of things outside the buff system. There are so many, it’s not surprising that one of them was not noticed during the justice challenge this year. Let’s take an easy topic of influencing. Buff system locked to 13/13. Fine, but then there’s Resolutions, wonderbrazier soulfire, mints, and so on. For hunting, it’s probably even worse.

Population dynamics suck. Mag, because of player preference and those willing to do combat, has a poor distribution of classes. There are tons of useless warriors like me. Magnagorans generally prefer warriors, and don't want to jump to a class they hate. Sure, that’s a personal choice, but why should they have to? We don't have geomancers/nihilists anymore. As mentioned before, our one realistic kill method of sacrifice negatively synergizes with others. So instead of amazing mana drain synergy that adds to each other's value, our most viable kill method in 99% of combat is put under diminishing returns versus people added to help.

Certain combat skill changes have proven poor. Abilities like demon shackles were given to angels when they were never needed for Celestine kills (even beyond wrack needing entangle vs toad/absolve not needing it). Active, spammable targetted aeon was given to SDs, when they absolutely don't need it. Twist has always been horribly broken before overhaul, and now as well.

We have had a huge exodus of retirements that hurt us badly. This is more a result than a cause, but it’s a factor we’re dealing with. Even with that, we still have more than some other orgs proportionally speaking, but pretty much no one wants to be in combat at all. Why don't we train people more/work harder/get good? A couple years ago that would have been a reasonable question. At this point, it’s mostly a lost cause. When you die instantly every time, and see the others give up because they also have no chance even, it doesn't motivate anyone to get in there and fight/learn/grow. Snowballing is a thing. We haven’t defended Nil really in a couple years now. It is crushing to have a class that you’ve been for over 14 RL years be neutered and becoming an utter noob mechanically. I can’t even imagine how sad this feels from a new player perspective.

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Changing gears to a couple other topics.

Overhaul put things into a buff system because there were too many buffs, and yet there are a plethora of things outside the buff system. There are so many, it’s not surprising that one of them was not noticed during the justice challenge this year. Let’s take an easy topic of influencing. Buff system locked to 13/13. Fine, but then there’s Resolutions, wonderbrazier soulfire, mints, and so on. For hunting, it’s probably even worse. In fact, there’s so many post Buff-system buffs that I made a note to remind me all the crap out there because it’s too much to even remember.

Lack of IG consequences. When people would get too big for their britches, one thing we enjoyed doing was knocking them down to size. You want to mouth off, fine, we’ll go wreck the supernals for example. Have a nice time with rezzing them, see you next week. The last serious attempt was with ~30 people about 2 years ago or so. That should have been the easiest wipe in history, but instead the game lagged for 3 full minutes and we all died. The avatars have not died for several years now as far as I recall (I do not count the bug/oversight where smobs were not hitting through shields like they were supposed to).

Ascension is really bothersome, thematically. Soulless. End of the world. Panic. Horror. No one gives a dang as long as me and my org wins. Which of those seem out of place? We’re supposed to be raising a TA to literally stop a soulless from destroying creation, and yet we all know there’s plot armor by the very nature of us being players, so no one actually cares and just want to win. It’s disconcerting to see such a core aspect of the game be ideologically inconsistent. Honestly, seeing the orgs struggle and then come together to banish the soulless for another cycle would be awesome. Imagine if each or a couple orgs could raise a TA, and the TAs could Captain Planet Avechna to victory. Beauty TA, anyone?

Even further, some of the seal challenges themselves are not really indicative of the seal they represent. Harmony is the one that sticks out the most as needing tweaks. It has nothing to do with influencing the most, and everything to do with who can hinder the most since you can’t kill on prime without invoking avenger status. Side note not really worth much given all the issues aforementioned, but the discrepancies in TA powers depending on what seal is staggering. By weight, death has 95 weight in powers (good ones at that), and nature has 60 weight, you get for free.

Lastly, it would really be cool if everyone could try to follow Ianir’s parting words of “Never forget the people behind the screen.” It’s tough when tensions boil and things are a mess, but I really tried to think about that every time I played in Lusternia.

Keegan said:

"Not at all but nothing stands in a vacuum. If you are looking at how good somethings synergy is and you compare it to another org and they have very similar synergy then its a good way to see the game standard."

Keegan said:

I mean, that's great and all, but compared to the same combination of specs in an equally sized group from Serenwilde and I'm 100% sure that the Glomdoring group is biased to win.

Lycidas said:

You can read it as being hostile and treat it that way, but we know it isn't. I'm not swearing at people, I'm not insulting them, I'm not even belittling. The attempt was made, absolutely, but deathmark isn't even a kill strategy, it just reduces power costs for Necromancy abilities...that only two classes can even use. We do not have any kind of synergy relatable to Halli, Gaudi, or Glom. If plague affs are our 'big theme' and synergy, why do we have zero kill methods to utilize it? Nihilist is either crucify or demonmark, Geomancer is EternalSleep, ur'Guard is attrition, Ninjakari have their monk insta, and Cacophony have their universal bard stuff. Nothing these classes do outright aide each other except by affliction stacking, which is pretty much just vanilla combat.