... Regarding pressuring vitals, anything that can stack a lot of bleeding will do the trick (I'm looking at you Nekotai).
...
This is a little off topic, but just so it's out there, it's been shown in quite a few logs that Ninja and Shofangi both outdo Nekotai in the bleeding department nowadays. Granted, the Neko probably still outdo Nihilists in that respect, thank gods.
Heh, I don't doubt it. I just know that Malarious would drop my mana to zero much faster than any shadow dancer. Although I guess they wouldn't really need to take it to zero.... Anyway, Mal pwned me that one timne and it stood out in my mind. :P
Back on topic, just want to throw out that being a 'bleeding class' complicates balance efforts since bleeding has such good synergy with just about everything. Not impossible but it can be a head scratcher.
Their vessels giving kick uses the same formula as TK burst. That is, the same function. They were doing TK burst every monk balance, plus their two arm attacks and poisons and whatever. When tk vessels were nerfed, so was that kick.
Nihilists actually do have a pretty good bleeding strategy, but to focus on bleeding means you have to deeppact Nifilhema, meaning it's really the only strategy you can maximum on (most deeppact Luciphage for on demand dominate which helps with all sorts of strategies, like getting someone too drunk to cure).
Nifilhema has the pact of Bleeding, which gives about 200 bleeding. With a scourged demon, you are giving 400 passive bleeding every 8 seconds. If you use quickening and are a mugwump, your symbol evokes are an awesome 1.6 seconds. That let's you use symbol evoke 5 times, for 1000 bleed damage actively before quickening fades. That, plus demon, plus spawn, is near 2000 bleeding damage in 10 seconds.
2014/04/19 01:38:01 - Leolamins drained 2000000 power to raise Silvanus as a Vernal Ascendant.
2014/07/23 05:01:29 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Munsia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:07 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Arimisia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:58 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Lavinya as a Vernal Ascendant.
You'd need manabarbs to be in there somehow to burn down their mana so you can wrack, does Nifil's deeppact make it conducive to omen them somewhere in there? Non mugwumps will have slightly less bleed, but those are pretty decent numbers, yes.
Doesn't scourging/quickening take power? I can't remember. If so, you'll have problems once you run out. Wrack costs power too, right?
Quickening costs 3 power. Scourge costs 10 power but can be done in advance; it lasts for the next 10 demon attacks regardless of how long you wait to use them. Wrack costs 5 power on success but no power on a failure.
I think you have what manabarbs does reversed. It makes it so that you lose health whenever you spend mana, not lose mana whenever you lose health. It also gives a message every time the enemy spends mana, so you can tell how much the enemy is clotting for if they're afflicted with it.
Yes, the idea is to make them pay extra health so they have to sip health instead of mana. Maybe I used the wrong choice of words when I said to "burn down their mana", but the idea is there. When you clot, you burn mana to prevent health damage. Manabarbs punishes that decision, making it much more likely to force a healthsip.
Quicken being at 3p means you could pull off a set of two quickens in a row. You'd regen 2? power in that meantime, so you'd still have enough for a wrack at the end. The iffy part would be casting omen and hoping they send the clot commands before they cure it. Whether that 2k per 10s bleed under manabarbs will be enough to force a healthsip... will probably need logs to determine. You could get a bard and do some testing, I guess. You could make crucifix prevent manabarbs curing instead of deny commands, so that non mugwumps can go evoke/evoke/omen/crucifix without quickening, opening the manabarbs strategy to neutral eq races, maybe? Nifil also does passive entangle, iirc? That'll help a wrack kill, since someone mentioned that was a wrack requirement, right?
I was looking into them because I was told they have an html5 client. They have a very simple curing system. (almost everything gets cured by focus mind, focus body or focus spirit) I was curious to know how much complexity their fighting has and if its fun enough.
MKO fighting also relies heavily on dodging attacks. Specifically, you need to know what the attack type is and choose the correct parry/dodge ability to counter it. Otherwise chances are you'll simply get overwhelmed. Their curing also relies on a resource that normally is at 50% and regenerates toward that level - adrenaline. When you hit something, your adrenaline goes up. When you use focus body/mind/spirit/overdrive, you use up some of your adrenaline. A fair amount of insta-kill abilities rely on getting your opponent's adrenaline down + sticking some affliction on them.
I like the part of their fighting that doesn't require you to have a bunch of curatives on you, but not that big a fan of the way 1:1 is handled in where certain classes take the cake and eat it too. There are also certain classes where you either have 3 skills that require a constant upkeep with endurance or you just get killed without a way to do anything, end of story, takes all of 3 seconds.
Anyway, going off on a tangent there.... what I do like the most about the MKO system is that you can't just throw 10 people at the same target and expect a great result, being that chance to miss both with attack/affliction increases with each extra person targeting the same opponent up to where it's usually counter-productive to have more than 2 people on the same target, even if you have more than 2 people per enemy available.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
From what I understand of MKO combat, it'd involve an even deeper restructuring of Lusternia combat than what we were looking at for the original overhaul.
I can definitely say that sparring with a Harbinger, willfully in Octave
and thus with manabarbs up and being constantly CrowCaw'd at -- he
never got my health into dangerous levels to kill me outright...but he
definitely got me below half mana more than enough times. Of course,
that's also with NightshadeBlues.
I quite like Lusternia's existing system, to be honest!
The hard coded limitations to group combat will ultimately be detrimental to any game wishing to expand their conflict system. Handicapping successful orgs and groups is a strange stance to take, IMO.
I quite like Lusternia's existing system, to be honest!
The hard coded limitations to group combat will ultimately be detrimental to any game wishing to expand their conflict system. Handicapping successful orgs and groups is a strange stance to take, IMO.
It works well in a low population environment. You can have 3 people that know what they're doing take on a much bigger group without too many issues. Granted, they also have the whole pyromeld thing going there... and every org has access to pretty much every class (With some minor exceptions), so there really isn't a case where balancing one class would be detrimental to the success of just one org. It has its pros and its cons. For instance, you won't see a group of 10 people just rush a single target and try to nuke them with straight up damage. Combat actually requires some level of skill and figuring out what the 2 (usually max) people that will be hitting each target would be doing. At this point, Lusternia has very much gone toward the... "Who has the biggest nukes and can focus them on the same target best?" Perhaps with a slight requirement on the target to shield quick and hope the enemy doesn't have a warrior cleave-spamming. There's other issues in the picture, like say the damage typing and damage resistance on races... like practically nobody has high level of poison resists, but you have Glom and Mag hitting with poison damage. A whole bunch of races are resistant to cold, but you either go with cold or forget about it as an aqua, and don't even get me started on fire damage and racial weaknesses to fire. It's just that's possibly the easiest way to kill people. Throw the big bombs at them and watch them die.
Now if 10 people hitting the same target had a 90% chance to miss, they wouldn't be blowing nukes on them but would instead split apart and try to work toward an insta-kill together, which is a fair bit more interesting of a concept to me than pushing the 'hit for big damages' button. Instead, though, we end up nerfing instakills to the point where most of them are nigh impossible to pull off in a 1:1 scenario, then complain that everything revolves around group combat.
Just my 2 cents. I'm pretty sure there will be plenty of replies that disagree, but this is an opinion, it is my opinion and I am not asking you to change your mind, just posting how my train of thought is going.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
I'm going to write a post explaining exactly why I agree, but the short of it is:
Lusternian large group combat is typified by two periods. The first tends to be long, wherein two big groups sit in different rooms squinting at each other and trying (usually unsuccessfully) to snipe each other. These long, uneventful periods are punctuated by relatively very short bursts during which both groups occupy the same room, a period defined by its lightning fast killing of single targets one after the other by sheer overwhelming force of an entire group targeting a single target.
In both portions of these fights, the majority of archetypes will use a very tiny portion of their full skillsets. The rest of their abilities will either be unsuited to the period in which they are occupying or will have little effect on their target during the interval that target is valid. One way or another, that interval tends to be measured in seconds, on two hands or fewer. After that time, the target has either removed themselves as a target by escaping somehow (like behind a prismatic) or has died. The number of skills is on the order of 3-ish, out of potentially 50+ player-targeting skills.
(Is there anyone who disputes any of that?)
I believe that the game would be more fun(/interesting/engaging) with players using more of their abilities as opposed to players using fewer of their abilities. Big group target focusing promotes players using fewer of their skills to win. Therefore I think that the game would be be more fun(/interesting/engaging) if big group target focusing was nerfed somehow. I have plenty of suggestions on how this could be achieved with (hopefully) a minimum of snags, but unless the basic premise is understood, why bother?
(Is this the source of disagreement?)
That's leaving aside the entire topic of balancing, in a game where (protest all you will) combat is and always has been balanced primarily around single combat, even though the dominant mode of combat is large-group. Skillsets that would be equivalently powerful in the scenario they are balanced for are wildly imbalanced for the scenarios they regularly encounter, which is frustrating for all involved.
I know, but the first concern is "How will this work with the other skills this player can bring to bear". If a skill that has a group application can be nerfed without interfering unduly with 1v1 capabilities, it will be... but if it severely hampers 1v1 power, some alternative must reached to preserve 1v1 potential. That equation hasn't ever run the other way, in my experience. If suggesting a change to a Spiritsinger's skill, I would have to make a case for balance on the basis of skills/effects available to a Spiritsinger player: Unless it represented an unusual and excessive extreme (like Aerochems multiplying damage massivelywhen in an allied Aeromancer demense), I would at most be considering one or possibly two allies from the same org, never 7-8 from who knows where.
This makes a lot of sense, consistently balancing around a group situation would be incredibly hard, nigh impossible. There isn't any way to predict how large either side of the group will be, or what the composition of each group will be. While some combinations are unlikely, the only limit on skillset matchings is the number of skillsets in the game, and there are bound to be edge cases there somewhere. It's just too much to consider, except in egregious cases (Like Crucify/Trample-esque combos, played out in the other IREs as well) which are often patched by exceptions instead of skill changes (like the trample change). That's not to say that some classes aren't more well suited to group play than others, but even they tend to be focused around small groups, losing their distinctiveness in that respect once groups hit certain thresholds.
Do you think that a class that was only effective with a group would be any fun, for either party involved? Is the scenario I described (the 10v10-esque scenario) fun to anyone, when you use 1-3 attacks and burst down enemies one after another?
Random aside: Locks, too stronk? Paralysis and Slickness are now to be cured by smoking. Asthma and CollapsedLung are both apply cure. So Senso + Mantakaya + Chansu or Senso + Mantakaya + CollapsedLung = you no fight no more. While I can obviously see Asthma/CollapsedLung getting switched to drink/internals cures during the update, we should make sure to switch them over before Slickness is.
I find group fighting a lot of fun, because there are a lot of different strategies that can go into effect. Since the numbers, composition, skill level changes quite regularly, it always makes it a little bit different from the rest.
My favorite fights are the underhanded wins when we should have lost, and I've been part of every kind of fight, losing fights we should have easily won, winning fights we shouldn't have, squeaking out a close, fairly even fight with a victory and barely losing the same.
Yes, some skills are used primarily, but we try all sorts of different things and different skills depending on composition, group members etc. I've also been part of Lithmeria's group combat (it's been awhile, things have probably changed) and the fights are simliar, instead of a group focusing a single person, two people focusing a single person running the same chain of abilities to get the kill, time and time again. each and every time. There's no change from the 1v1 fights to group fighting, so I'm hesitant to really say making any kind of group fighting changes would really make things anymore interesting.
I don't find group combat to be boring. It pushes the envelope on timing, strategy and speed. If the fight is over in seconds then just about anything can happen. One team could lose because you misspelled a target's name or haven't updated your enemies and allies to reflect recent org hoppers. It can turn at any moment it's very exciting
Group combat greatly raises the odds of you doing something good by accident and reduces the chance people will notice how useless I am, I mean you are. Win win!
Your premise that skills aren't balanced on the group level is simply wrong. There is a long history of skills being adjusted based on how the skill interacts in group situations (nightshadeblues, choke, stun, blackout, inquisition, sacrifice, melds, momentum and target changes, psyvamp, etc.) In fact many skills were designed from the ground up with mechanics in place that balance on the group level, such as sap. Furthermore, a lot of these skills have significant impacts on how these skills work when we zoom in to 1v1. While I acknowledge that the possible scenarios are edging on infinite, that doesn't mean that group implications are not very heavily weighted in the decision making and provably so. Group considerations may have to be painted with broader brushes than 1v1 balance because of the number of combinations, but I feel a reasonable job is done here and there is a successful record on the books.
Your argument seems to be that because a large group can kill a single target in a handful of second, then the skills are inherently unbalanced/OP in large group scenarios and the system is incapable of accounting for balance at this scale. I think it is more correct to say that if you die in a handful of seconds to a large group, it is because you were attacked by a large group. You are, for lack of a more colorful way to say it, supposed to die. I don't see a change on this level in the cards, especially any mechanic like this that would ultimately handicap larger orgs/groups against smaller orgs/groups. Certainly not, as Shuyin said, with the overhaul.
From what I see, most all those changes to how skills interact in groups have been envoy reports and have nothing to do with skills being designed with focus on group level in mind. Things like aeon (which is a curable choke) have the exact same effect, and while we fixed some issues in envoys, many others were ignored. I am hoping we will go back and fix some problem children when things are done, and I know this will be a long process. I can give 0 credit to the idea of things being adjusted for groups, because it has always had to be done by players after it has posed a problem, not during the design or implementation phases. I will acknowledge that we do not notice a problem if it IS accounted for ahead of time, so some bullets may have been dodged, but most of them go a long time without change or acceptance.
To group combat I would say that the real issue we suffer is not being mobbed by a group but because of group versus group AMOUNTING to being mobbed. A 10 v 10 is more often a 10 v 1 and a 10 v 1, where each side aims for a target, or alternatively (if the other group was blessed with stupidly high group damage) they use room damage a few times and hope it kills several people off. The desire, from what I have seen, is to make combat more of a matter of smaller groups and to try to discourage 10 people attacking anything at all. A group where you get killed, then someone else gets killed, then someone else, every few seconds is boring. Mechanics that give penalties for large attacks against one target help support smaller group combat. A 10 v 10 where you start missing is more likely to become a 4v4 + 3v3 + 3v3. This small scale combat also allows people to demonstrate more skills if no cheese tactics or unstoppable methods are used.
I think the manabarbs change could be interesting if Nihilists can easily stack it (and agree it sounds more like a tactic to use with torture than wrack), but it does absolutely nothing for the loss of ectoplasm. Sacrifice was hit hard by that change, and manabarbs does not fill that gap.
I'm not really concerned with who gives or gets credit for any given change, only that the system to bring about change in a positive manner is working!
edit: You could always use that system to propose changes for Nihilists. I hear a very knowledgeable Nihilist envoy was just appointed.
We haven't made it to beast curing yet. I imagine they will stay as is but we haven't made a concrete decision yet.
The focuses will remain until all the afflictions have been transitioned to the new system, and then will be removed. This means a few things. Paralysis will be moved to an actual cure in the new system, but the delayed cure will remain (unless we see the need to change it). Some specific afflictions that are balanced around focus spirit will be addressed on a case by case basis.
Would it be in the realm of possibility for those skills to instead reduce drain. body reduces bleeding, mind reduces mana drain and spirit reduces ego drain for X amount of time?
Real quick thought about upcoming anorexia changes
I understand that why things are being put in the way they are, but I think as long as anorexia is changed to be cured on lucidity slush, with no way to stop that, people aren't going to be sticking anorexia for awhile, which is important to lots of classes (like hexes/researchers for aeon, etc). Yes you can stack cures to try and thwart it, but that's not going to be reliable. If we're ok with making things tough on those classes then that's cool, we can roll with it, but I just want to make sure that it's understood things are going to be rough for anorexia dealing folks.
Full disclosure, I totally just learned hexes and want to keep anorexia viable
If that's what the envoys would like to bring up, we're certainly open to relooking at pretty much anything that is affected by the overhaul, though I would prefer that go through the envoys where it can be thoroughly discussed. I'm erring on the side of caution when it comes to rewriting how any skill functions on our side of things unless absolutely necessary (i.e. a guild that is fundamentally changed by the overhaul). The best skill specific changes tend to go through the players rather than handed down from the havens. It's easier for a handful of admin to accidentallty overlook something of significance than our large group of envoys particpating in day to day pk. My gut feeling is that sort of change would impact the mana drain classes unfairly, but again, that's something I'd prefer the envoys to take up.
Ok, the main question I was asking was if skills that become obsolete would be able to be turned into something completely different, before being deleted. That sounds to me like yes, it can?
Though if those skills were removed I could see all of discipline merged into another skillset also.
Comments
Nifilhema has the pact of Bleeding, which gives about 200 bleeding. With a scourged demon, you are giving 400 passive bleeding every 8 seconds. If you use quickening and are a mugwump, your symbol evokes are an awesome 1.6 seconds. That let's you use symbol evoke 5 times, for 1000 bleed damage actively before quickening fades. That, plus demon, plus spawn, is near 2000 bleeding damage in 10 seconds.
Doesn't scourging/quickening take power? I can't remember. If so, you'll have problems once you run out. Wrack costs power too, right?
I think you have what manabarbs does reversed. It makes it so that you lose health whenever you spend mana, not lose mana whenever you lose health. It also gives a message every time the enemy spends mana, so you can tell how much the enemy is clotting for if they're afflicted with it.
Quicken being at 3p means you could pull off a set of two quickens in a row. You'd regen 2? power in that meantime, so you'd still have enough for a wrack at the end. The iffy part would be casting omen and hoping they send the clot commands before they cure it. Whether that 2k per 10s bleed under manabarbs will be enough to force a healthsip... will probably need logs to determine. You could get a bard and do some testing, I guess. You could make crucifix prevent manabarbs curing instead of deny commands, so that non mugwumps can go evoke/evoke/omen/crucifix without quickening, opening the manabarbs strategy to neutral eq races, maybe? Nifil also does passive entangle, iirc? That'll help a wrack kill, since someone mentioned that was a wrack requirement, right?
I like the part of their fighting that doesn't require you to have a bunch of curatives on you, but not that big a fan of the way 1:1 is handled in where certain classes take the cake and eat it too. There are also certain classes where you either have 3 skills that require a constant upkeep with endurance or you just get killed without a way to do anything, end of story, takes all of 3 seconds.
Anyway, going off on a tangent there.... what I do like the most about the MKO system is that you can't just throw 10 people at the same target and expect a great result, being that chance to miss both with attack/affliction increases with each extra person targeting the same opponent up to where it's usually counter-productive to have more than 2 people on the same target, even if you have more than 2 people per enemy available.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
As well as chunking your mana.
I quite like Lusternia's existing system, to be honest!
The hard coded limitations to group combat will ultimately be detrimental to any game wishing to expand their conflict system. Handicapping successful orgs and groups is a strange stance to take, IMO.
Now if 10 people hitting the same target had a 90% chance to miss, they wouldn't be blowing nukes on them but would instead split apart and try to work toward an insta-kill together, which is a fair bit more interesting of a concept to me than pushing the 'hit for big damages' button. Instead, though, we end up nerfing instakills to the point where most of them are nigh impossible to pull off in a 1:1 scenario, then complain that everything revolves around group combat.
Just my 2 cents. I'm pretty sure there will be plenty of replies that disagree, but this is an opinion, it is my opinion and I am not asking you to change your mind, just posting how my train of thought is going.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
(Is this the source of disagreement?)
That's leaving aside the entire topic of balancing, in a game where (protest all you will) combat is and always has been balanced primarily around single combat, even though the dominant mode of combat is large-group. Skillsets that would be equivalently powerful in the scenario they are balanced for are wildly imbalanced for the scenarios they regularly encounter, which is frustrating for all involved.
We haven't made it to beast curing yet. I imagine they will stay as is but we haven't made a concrete decision yet.
The focuses will remain until all the afflictions have been transitioned to the new system, and then will be removed. This means a few things. Paralysis will be moved to an actual cure in the new system, but the delayed cure will remain (unless we see the need to change it). Some specific afflictions that are balanced around focus spirit will be addressed on a case by case basis.
If that's what the envoys would like to bring up, we're certainly open to relooking at pretty much anything that is affected by the overhaul, though I would prefer that go through the envoys where it can be thoroughly discussed. I'm erring on the side of caution when it comes to rewriting how any skill functions on our side of things unless absolutely necessary (i.e. a guild that is fundamentally changed by the overhaul). The best skill specific changes tend to go through the players rather than handed down from the havens. It's easier for a handful of admin to accidentallty overlook something of significance than our large group of envoys particpating in day to day pk. My gut feeling is that sort of change would impact the mana drain classes unfairly, but again, that's something I'd prefer the envoys to take up.