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Truly? We have synergy? Please tell me how I, a Geomancer, ur'Guard, and Ninjakari can help towards deathmark building? Please also tell me how a Cacophony builds towards deathmarks? We have no synergy. Oh, @Saz you forgot to mention the amazingness that is Nightsweats and how ridiculous that makes their synergy even further.

I still play, and by play I mean I log in semi-regularly and potter around and do my own thing.

I haven't returned to combat and I really don't intend to. Some people get a thrill out of smashing against a wall to find breakthrough but I'm not that person. I no longer have any (expletives) left to give and while I was passionate about helping my org and being dedicated and putting in a good showing, in reality losing sucks. I have never liked combat but I was always willing to give it a go and learn to do things better.

Now the two arguably strongest orgs in the  game are a massive wall that I have no real life desire to even engage with, because there's no fun in that. And the condescending arguments of 'just be positive' or 'just keep trying' are the worst. Lusternia is a game it's not real life. If something is no longer fun, eventually people will just stop playing it because there is NO obligation to try, not really.

Winning is awesome and when you're on top everything is peachy and amazing and the game should always be this great I don't see what the hell everyone is whinging about they should just try harder - THIS HELPS NOTHING. It only increases frustration in your opposition, lowers that morale...

I don't know where I'm going with this. I no longer have the same passionate love for Lusternia like I once did. The lore is awesome but I cut myself off a while ago because the toxicity quite literally broke me and sent me on a mental-health downward spiral that was not pretty. You hear people say how amazing and supportive the community is - from those same 'supportive' people I was having my alts outed and names and insults thrown at me, ridicule and real, REAL hate for existing. It quite literally broke me. And some of these people are beloved by others and lauded and praised as being helpful and friendly.

People are leaving for many reasons but to assume it's not also to do with other players, particularly those who are 'winning' (and lord knows there's poor winners out there) is naive and is only going to continue cementing this path - eventually there won't be another side to play against, and then what?

Glomdoring has the hands-down best mechanical synergy in the game for a long while now.

This is a bold claim, (Unintended pun, sorry.) but here goes its reasoning. Assuming you're a complete novice with IRE Combat, first thing you are going to learn is that it's a race versus curing. If you can put in more afflictions and/or damage than a person can cure at a time, they stack and that person eventually dies. Either swiftly, because of vital pressure. Or in a helpless state without being able to do anything, because of the afflictions those are piled on top of each other.

So what does Glomdoring have, that we should discuss them seperately from the other organizations in the game? Let's start with their designed synergy points. Poisons and Bleeding.

So what are the synergy points for other organizations in the game, you might ask?

Hallifax has timewarps.
Gaudiguch has temporary insanity.
Celest, correct me if I'm wrong, has no org-wide synergy focus that every single class can contribute to.
Neither does Magnagora.
And neither does Serenwilde.

So Hallifax, Gaudiguch and Glomdoring are already at an advantage with an overly simplified logic. Let's compare timewarps, temporary insanity and bleeding&poisons with each other.

What's TimeWarp? From AFF INFO TIMEWARP within the game.

<div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;When warped in time, you will find the quicksilver defence slower to rise and your</div><div>equilibrium slower to return if disrupted. This effect has a scaling effect depending on how warped&nbsp;</div><div>in time you are.</div>

It's nice, negligible mostly, but not terrible? Well it's something at least, some orgs have nothing at all. What's not written in those lines is that Timewarps when stacked at very high levels allow for Hallifax Guardians to instantly kill their targets. Or that in the presence of a Hallifax Bard, They cause little to heavy damage every time their songs tick. So, synergy it is. Every Hallifax class, can little or more apply timewarps in some way. No one outside of Hallifax can do that. And what timewarp doesn't do is this, they do not really synergize with anything outside of Hallifax. Someone being punished heavily by massive timewarp has little to no use for a Shofangi monk for example. That's how niche it is.

What's TemporaryInsanity? AFF INFO TEMPORARYINSANITY

<div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;When temporarily insane, you will find yourself acting as if you were touched by Astral</div><div>Insanity, albeit to a lesser degree, based on how insane you are.</div>

It's a command failure, offensive and defensive both. So, it's better than TimeWarp in my opinion and does cause more ruckus for the target if it was being targeted by anything non-Gaudiguch as well. While it's pretty good, I don't find it that overwhelming to be honest. Very much like Timewarps, Gaudiguch Guardians can instantly kill massively TemporaryInsanity stacked targets and their bards drain more ego&mana with higher insanity levels. Different vitals, yet a mirror match-up to Hallifax.

Now, Bleeding&Poisons.

Bleeding. HELP BLEEDING

<div>When you are hit by a cutting weapon in Lusternia, you will usually begin to bleed. After you begin<br></div><div>bleeding, you'll continue to bleed health points every so often. Your body will gradually clot the&nbsp;</div><div>blood, but this will take time.</div>

What the help file is missing is that clotting consumes mana as well. But as you can see, bleeding is by no means a mechanic that's limited to Glomdoring. Every warrior, every druid, every monk in the game can make you bleed. It's just that whenever you bleed around Glomdoring, you bleed more and consequences are even more dire. So this is already a problematic design flaw, as you can see. Not only Bleeding is a vital pressure that is never useless to have on your target. It also can enable for anyone and anything to kill your target faster, by design. And losing mana to clotting is still very beneficial to Glomdoring as they have the powerhouse of Shadowdancers that can instantly kill anyone below %50 of their mana pool with Toadcurse.

Let's take a quick look at Harbingers' Shadowbeat skillset, bard archetype from Glomdoring.

This means whenever you clot, you lose double the mana or whenever a Shadowdancer uses twists, you lose double the mana.)<h2>BloodyCaps</h2>Any enemy who hears this sound will begin to bleed profusely.<br><h2>Shadowpulse</h2>Personal enemies who hear this haunting tune will find their heartrate increased dramatically, causing additional bleeding damage. In addition, those who bleed profusely will find the melody freeze their blood, causing paralysis.<br><h2>SlaughFest</h2>Barghests, redcaps and slaugh who hear this music will be driven into a frenzy and attack faster than they normally would.<br><h2>NightshadeBlues</h2>Those enemies who hear this sad melody will find that most things that causes their mana to go down will cost twice as much. (

Glomdoring Bards, have 2 songs that directly buff the bleeding damage and amount and another one to increase the mana drain that can potentially come from clotting to enable Shadowdancers. And another one to directly increase the manadrain a Shadowdancer's ents are doing. And if you didn't know how bards function, those songs can be used together, and they actually stack on top of each other. Although I am not sure if they stack with different Harbinger bards, I think they probably do not though. Okay comparing those 4 songs to Hallifax. We've one song, that adds one stack of Timewarp and does little to heavy damage, it scales. And Gaudiguch also has a single song that only does mana and ego damage, which also scales. There're already 3 songs worth difference for us to enable our Guardian archetypes. And that's between the three orgs that thematically have synergies. It's even worse for the rest on that regard.

And Glomdoring monks, Nekotai does have stances to cause more bleeding, et cetera. I do not wish to bore you to death with details, but I want to paint a clear picture where this parity can be observed easily.

Now Poisons for Glomdoring. This will be short. Remember the IRE Combat code. Yeah, Bleeding was feeding the vitals end, now Poison synergy is feeding the affliction stacking end. Now maybe in the past it wasn't actually a huge deal, I do not know. But I feel like, with the new monks potentially throwing off 10 afflictions in one balance. I think every single extra affliction on your target matters. If a Nekotai monk, A Blacktalon druid and a Harbinger fights a Shofangi monk, a Hartstone druid and a Spiritsinger bard. The Glomdoring group can do 3 extra afflictions, without even spending anything, just passively, to their targets. And that's because of the extra passive affliction capability that comes from poison synergy each of those classes have in their skillsets in opposition to their counterparts. And yes, it does actually matter. It matters so very much, if it doesn't, then ask the current high-tier monks why they are using their Beasts to spit, or why do Ascendant monks benefit more from two affliction spitting at once beasts more. This is a very clear cut, offensive advantage that stacks just too well. Yes, Serenwilde at the same time has access to pathtwist, stagtotem in that scenario. But eh... Their usefulness are a bit niche, just utility advantage, if not blatantly useless in today's combat.

So, these are just synergies. But there're other certain advantages to combat tools that Glomdoring has. To my game knowledge, Glomdoring skillsets have the two most fool-proof, least effort-most success aliases coded in the game. In other words, easier to get into combat skills, just spam this forever and you win abilities.

One of them being twist. You just spam a single alias, it drains vitals, is one of the strongest hinders in the game and it progresses towards your kill method. All in one pack. Just earlier today, while I was reading Aetolia Forums for their class balance (because I'm kind of pondering where to go), and I saw someone stating this:

S Tier - Luminary, your hinder is your kill path.

Okay now that does remind of an ability! Albeit, Toad is the actual kill method, twist is still the path to that ender. And it does everything else that's possible to do, as well.

The other skill is Noose, for wyrdenwoods. We've all been novices at one point or another and people kindly adviced to us that we should just have an entangling enchantment so we could spam it on their targets. Or using our bashing attacks on them to help out with the damage. We chose one way and then went with it right? Well! Glomdoring Wyrdenwood novices did not, I assure you! And that's not even the full extend of what Noose is capable of.

So Noose: A regular 2.5s to 3s balance attack, if I recall correct. That entangles your target, while doing a moderate (Roughly 1.2k to 1.5k) %50 cutting, %50 asphyxiation health damage. )Very much like a bashing attack) That costs no power at all, that has no cooldown at all. It also does Bleeding, obviously since Wyrdenwoods are in Glomdoring, duh. And the best part is here... They can also throw either one Rune (Either an affliction or %25 of your maximum mana (Haegl), or Rad Rune) or two Runes for the cost of very cheap 1 power only. OR even better! If the Wyrdenwood is a Dreamweaver that can attach a Blackout mote and the Wyrdenwood can spam a Blackout+Entangle+Health Damage+A bit bleeding for no power cost at all! Note that simply applying blackout on someone costs 3 power for Shofangi. But that's noose for you, grab a novice by hand if they are on entangle spamming duty and tell them that "They can do so much more." Do it today. As a former Glomdoring Envoy has stated once:

(https://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/comment/183650#Comment_183650)

January, 2018 - Moi said:
So I do not know what happened to Noose, or if there were truly an effort to change it. But there it is. 

So the numbers, the situation. Thank you for reading this far, honestly. But I think this isn't where it ends with Glomdoring. No, and I'm afraid this might be where it gets a bit more personal. If these were the problems, and they mechanically are, in my opinion. These could be fixed. Very easily too. The question is, why aren't they resolved? We're in 2019 for God's sake? Why have all the people given up trying to touch your skillset?. I've read it multiple times from Xenthos' own words. That he believes the players using the skillsets should have more of a say in what happens to their skillsets. Yes, I understand that. And they should. But why didn't the players using those skillsets do something about their own abilities? Why is the game still in this place? Is this seriously not an indicator that something is obviously wrong that most people you've played against are gone? The ones those are still playing against you are slowly but surely getting jaded? And it's completely unimaginable for me to grasp the logic that Veyils advocates,"The game is fun, you guys aren't trying enough and being negative to each other. That's the only problem." Well to that argument, I honestly have no words against. Throw everything out of the window and everyone should retire to Starmourn.

The last argument will be that Admins have a Glomdoring bias, some people share. I just very recently read a comment:

Anaklusmos said:

The bias towards Glomdoring has been present for years, in every instance that I've managed to convince myself to try Lusternia again (and again, and again). It's going to continue to be present, and its presence will continue to be denied.

I don't want to believe this is true. And this is honestly very hard to accept as a player, to state that's what they truly believe about a game they're invested in. But I did feel and I still occassionally feel sympathetic to this idea. Despite I don't know who they are, and that I've never interacted with this person not even once. The thing is it's like, I've a long memory of events that were left for administrators to decide, and they... Well, let's just say they were decided in Glom-favor. But I've also grown an administrator allergy in this game with some very good reasons as well, I am very sensitive about when and how I get scolded. Because it happened so many times, whereas certain individuals got away with everything they've done in the game and out of it. I'm sorry @Orael for backlashing at you like that in a passive-aggressive manner in that other thread. But I just can not overlook how much de-rail Veyils can do and get away with it and only when I finally respond and call him out on that, it's that point we're being reminded we're going off-topic. Deepdown I truly hope I'm just being immature, and over-sensitive, but yeah, there's that too.

Who am I?

(The following diatribe has "Glomdoring" sprinkled pretty liberally throughout it.  That can be replaced with pretty much any other org.)

I lump all Glomdoring members together when I say "Glomdoring" just like I lump all admin together when I say "admin". It should be obvious to anyone who isn't trying to be pedantic that I (and the rest of us) don't actually mean "all Glomdoring players ever" any more than we mean "All admin ever".

A vast majority of Glomdoring players are not toxic. A vast majority of Glomdoring players are constructive, helpful people who want to see Lusternia succeed. A vast majority of Glomdoring want to actually fight evenly matched foes, win or lose,  and go home satisfied at the end of the day knowing they represented their home well, and it's worth it to stick around.

But there are some in the org that take it too far. They urge people in their org not to join certain clans, or discord channels, or the forums because they don't want those people seeing the complaints against Glomdoring or knowing that anything is wrong. "They hate us because they ain't us." is a sort of motto for these people, and they're pretty vocal about their disdain, both icly and oocly, for people who aren't part of their group. They overlook the toxicity from themselves and other members of their org, and instead focus on pointing out the toxicity in other orgs,  using this as some sort of explanation of why things are the way they are.


------------

Let's face it, Glomdoring has been on top for some time now. They've snowballed and haven't lost very much momentum. This snowballing isn't just because their skills have great synergy, though this feeds heavily into it. This snowballing isn't just because they work their asses off and train to succeed, although this is a massive part of their success. The snowballing isn't because the admin favor Glomdoring. Probably.

Something that hinders changes that might effect Glomdoring is that a vast majority of the well-known players in Glomdoring are long term players. They oppose changes which might weaken their skills because they haven't had to spend irl years fighting against these skills. They see them as balanced because they use them. It's a sort of privilege in one way, if you think about it, because it's not a big deal to Glomdoring because it doesn't effect them.

If it wasn't for my love of this game's lore and roleplay I would be gone. It's the reason I am here yelling at people to wake up instead of just going back to Achaea or starting out on Starmourn. It would be a lot less painful.

Because when one org wins the game and refuses to let other people have their turn, people get bored and GG.

Deichtine said:

If the admin think scent is a vital skill everyone should have then remove the artifact and put scent in as a common skill.

By this same reasoning, I request that cubix is put as a common skill in planar.

I've only been playing for a little while (again; I've played Lusternia before!) but even in Gaudiguch, there's a sense that we don't at all want to rock the boat with Glomdoring by the sheer fact that we will end up losing big-time if we do. That's how much power Glomdoring has over the game. 

Your sentiment is exactly why we lost a slew of players to Starmourn, @Niwynne. It saddens me to know that after multiple months and attempts of trying to correct a system, they left what they saw as a sinking ship. I lost a lot of friends to retirement, all who echoed each other's frustrations.