Best Of

I agree that fixing or removing or restricting lust and clearing the afflictions is the best place to start. While it still leaves you open to coordinated attacks from multiple bards, it's less critical than a lucky roll on compatriotofchaos letting a bard solo-kill you in 3s for 10p ... and then refreshing power and doing it to your neighbour when they get beast balance back. The possible counters (rejecting everyone, using a tea, stacking passives) have been in turn countered (spending a few seconds to hit with lust and an aff, goldenbox, etc) enough that they aren't reliable and it ultimately falls down to RNG on however they apply their affs before and between the climaxes. That isn't a good situation.

I can't comment as much on the practical experience of the stun, because a 6s stun normally means that you're about to die from the chained climax anyway. I also don't think that getting the stun right should delay changing the chaining handling. But I went ahead and did some self-testing.

Climax has a ~3s balance, which will matter less with chaining removed. With self-testing and tear removed, a 1-aff climax stunned for ~2.3-2.5s. 2 affs was ~4.7s, 3 affs was ~7.1-7.7s. Those are very big numbers, and awkwardly don't actually benefit the bard much beyond the 3s chaining breakpoint.

I also agree that dramaturgy needs to be looked at after this, but that's a longstanding weakness in the skillset. People aren't even using dramaturgy to build affs outside of lust, they're just flinging beast attacks and maybe timing it to a song effect. I'll hold off on discussing that for now, because I do feel that fixing the chaining is the biggest issue and don't want to bog things down.

I think only counting lust towards the caster makes more sense for this- not being able to have any allies lusted for empress is really frustrating as a tarot user. 

I think the stun on climax may also be worth looking at. 

Hi,

 A message was sent to me today about Dramaturgy Climax and how it is too powerful, and they gave a couple of suggestions. I happen to think these suggestions are likely good ideas but I also don't want to make changes without being transparent about why they are being made, especially because we're out of the reporting cycle at the moment.

 The suggestions are as follows

 1) Change Lust to either only count if the target is lusted to the caster specifically OR remove lust as a potential climax affliction altogether.
 2) Climax afflictions will end up being cured by the climax - preventing stacking climax hits from working.


 The player said that these changes may not be enough, but they would at least be a start.

 I'd like to hear comments for or against these changes before we go ahead and implement them.

Thanks,

 Orael