Not sure why it's the case, but dream forms are rather limited at present. Being that they are insubstantial, I can understand how they can't effectively -climb- trees, but that said, they should be able to float to other elevations when needed. If you're poking at someone via dream form, all they need to do is fly/climb up and you can just sit there and angrily shake your fist in response. It's rather amusing. Yes, I know I should probably be giving this to a druid envoy, but it's never bad to bounce an idea here and see how it's received before wasting envoy time.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
You mean like the archways? And sure. Far better than the current alternative being an indestructible gate into and out of protected territory only enemies can use.
Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Here's an idea: Make using the archways out of Etherglom/Etherseren count as magical movement so distort stops people from using them. Would make them closer to the Elemental planes.
Not sure why it's the case, but dream forms are rather limited at present. Being that they are insubstantial, I can understand how they can't effectively -climb- trees, but that said, they should be able to float to other elevations when needed. If you're poking at someone via dream form, all they need to do is fly/climb up and you can just sit there and angrily shake your fist in response. It's rather amusing. Yes, I know I should probably be giving this to a druid envoy, but it's never bad to bounce an idea here and see how it's received before wasting envoy time.
Do not want.
It's bad enough to have to deal with weavers being pests on the ground. Having no where to find some peace and quiet is a terribad idea. Most everything happens at ground level anyway so you can freely grief the vast majority of players.
While crying over Tinkering and my own inability to enchant figurines or statues, @Morshothsuggested something that I rather liked: a little siren/horn/alarm piece to be attached to existing statues.
The object would be TINKERed at a pentagram, as with charge regulators. They could then be attached to a statue, allowing a maximum of three in any given area (the thought behind it being that any more would cause 'interference' with their wee little bits). When one enemied to the organization defined by the statue's tuning walks into the room, the siren would set off an alarm through the area denoting their entrance.
It could have limited uses (as with similar things, such as AncestralWatch), and furthermore have a cooldown between its calls (ten minutes, maybe) to prevent spamming -and- keep them from outshining the Spectacles of Clairvoyance.
Might need some polishing, but I think it would be nifty.
Crumkane, Lord of Epicurean Delights says, "WAS IT INDEED ON FIRE, ERITHEYL."
-
With a deep reverb, Contemptible Sutekh says, "CEASE YOUR INFERNAL ENERGY, ERITHEYL."
Envoy Miniatures in Arts to be lowered in the skillset. It was placed where it is now back when Figurines were merely a luxury or fancy toy. Now it's important for esteem, and sculpting them should be around... let's say, Expert.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
Envoy Miniatures in Arts to be lowered in the skillset. It was placed where it is now back when Figurines were merely a luxury or fancy toy. Now it's important for esteem, and sculpting them should be around... let's say, Expert.
Because the most valuable skills are usually the easiest to acquire...? Hmm!
Well, sculpting them isn't really important unless they're to be enchanted afterwards. I for one only have them sculpted for flavor, since battling is a PITA that I don't concern myself with. So it can go either way!
Crumkane, Lord of Epicurean Delights says, "WAS IT INDEED ON FIRE, ERITHEYL."
-
With a deep reverb, Contemptible Sutekh says, "CEASE YOUR INFERNAL ENERGY, ERITHEYL."
Well, sculpting them isn't really important unless they're to be enchanted afterwards. I for one only have them sculpted for flavor, since battling is a PITA that I don't concern myself with. So it can go either way!
Sculpting actually does repair some wear and tear. I usually keep a blank figurine around until it gets low on months then sculpt it and tada... can keep using it longer.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
My personal pet peeve are afflictions that I feel don't punish enough.
Here's a list of afflictions that I feel should be buffed/reworked:
Broken Jaw
Hypochondria
Justice
Mangled Tongue (I'm bugging Tandrin about this already)
Omniphobia
Broken Jaw is bad because it's conditional to do anything at all, and when it does do that thing it's 70 damage. I haven't had shattered jaw afflicted on me in a while but I remember that being similarly underwhelming. Both should see either a damage increase or a percent health buff which is what I believe happened to healthleech.
Hypochondria can almost be entirely ignored with the right curing. The only message that I've seen have any impact is the falling asleep line in sap (where you are likely to be prone). This is the only case I can think of where a hypochondria line can't be ignored and can't be instantly checked against. Also I believe there are lines in hypochondria that don't exist as actual affliction lines anywhere else which serves to tell you that you have hypochondria and doesn't confuse the player's system at all. Hypochondria should get an update to the set of lines it uses. I also think it would be interesting if Illuminati had some sort of affliction arc with insanity -> hypochondria -> psychosomatic afflictions, but that's just a random idea. The alternative would be to just remove hypochondria and replace it with something else as I'm unsure if it interacts with autocuring at all.
Justice is very underwhelming as well. Even people who deal significant (read: 3k+) damage will usually be able to ignore this affliction entirely. What if it was changed to be like peace that only prevented you from attacking if your opponent is more hurt than you are?
Omniphobia is not bad as a whole but it's not great in the context of telepathy. It's fairly difficult to stick and even you do it requires you to feed more phobias in to it to actually do anything at all. To my mind if through illusions/afflictions someone manages to stick omniphobia on you it should start generating phobias after about 3 seconds. It would also be great if psyvamp ticks were boosted greatly by mental afflictions. Due to how psyvamp was nerfed (both the group combat and the amount of drain total) it's much more effective for telepaths to debate and mindburst than to actually use their skills to set up their instakill which is sad. If omniphobia is buffed then we may want to look into removing it from the afflists of the aero demesne and illuminati.
Envoy Miniatures in Arts to be lowered in the skillset. It was placed where it is now back when Figurines were merely a luxury or fancy toy. Now it's important for esteem, and sculpting them should be around... let's say, Expert.
Because the most valuable skills are usually the easiest to acquire...? Hmm!
If you don't start agreeing with me, I'm going to start offering naked figurines of Shaddus to you. GRAPHICALLY naked figurines.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
Bask for Dracnari should allow you to emote while you do it, not require standing up, and perhaps instead of randomly healing afflictions (useless), let it give you a small h/m/e boost, perhaps like Psymet's trans skill does. Probably only 5-10%, but enough to make it a buff.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
I was thinking about this the other day as well, and was really hoping to rally support to get it changed to willpower regen (I forget kirigami a lot, okay?). But with recent discussions, might not be a thing worth investing in! I think a vital boost would be nifty.
Crumkane, Lord of Epicurean Delights says, "WAS IT INDEED ON FIRE, ERITHEYL."
-
With a deep reverb, Contemptible Sutekh says, "CEASE YOUR INFERNAL ENERGY, ERITHEYL."
What I personally don't get is the infestation skill in druidry for Crow. There probably is a pretty good reason, but overall it adds a layer on top of Blacktalon vs Hartstone combat only for Blacktalon that is completely unnecessary.
To explain a bit better:
Any mage class has two skills to change terrain (going to use pyro skill as an example): PYROCAST COMBUST and PYROCAST FORCECOMBUST. Both abilities cost 1 power to use and the only difference between the two is that one works only on unmelded terrain, while the other looks at breaking an enemy's meld. There is no chance involved, really, so pretty much everyone would probably be using FORCECOMBUST as opposed to COMBUST on the off-chance that they need to break the room they're in.
The same applies for both druid classes with FORESTCAST FOREST and FORESTCAST FORCEFOREST. The only exception being that crow druids have the added ability to FORESTCAST INFEST which only works in unmelded natural/hartstone forest terrain to convert the forest to wyrded land. FORESTCAST FOREST and FORESTCAST FORCEFOREST already does this, but... the problem being that when trying to use FOREST/FORCEFOREST in a non-wyrded forest, one gets the error message: "Look around, this is already a forest location" while still being a spot a crow druid cannot meld.
So during any kind of interaction where a stag and crow druid are fighting over the meld, the stag druid only needs to use FORESTCAST FORCEFOREST while a crow druid would be forced to try and do the same, and when that fails, fall back to FORESTCAST INFEST. I'm assuming the issue comes from the fact that it is a shared skillset and the way it was made to work for crow was different when it comes to the actual meld skill as opposed to the actual terrain skill. With that in mind, I think crow druids simply need to have the infestation ability removed altogether and the FOREST/FORCEFOREST possibly replaced with WYRD/FORCEWYRD or a variation that allows casting FOREST/FORCEFOREST to work in forestal non-wyrded locations.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Ooooh man. Let's get FORESTCAST WYRD and FORESTCAST FORCEWYRD and delete infest. Yes, please.
Anything to up that Wyrd business and draw @Celina's ire.
Also -- I really never thought about that, even though it's annoying to me. I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I thought 'oh HS must have this issue too, oh well'. Time to bug @Vadi.
Unless, of course, BT are meant to have it harder.
I actually can explain this Infest thing, I think!
It probably has to do with the silly way that druids are coded so that the 'default' mode for a druid is Hartstone, regardless of being in that guild. This means that if a Crow Druid were to... forget Crow temporarily, they would become fully able to meld Hartstone forest types, and would be casting sylvan forests with their forestcasts, even with Ravenwood power (iirc). The different type of 'forestcast' may be due to some kind of backstage issue involved with making the two easier to tell apart, or may have at one time been due to this sort of problem, even if it isn't now.
Alternately, it could just be yet another place where the demesne mechanics haven't been updated to keep up with the changes to themselves, a call back to a bygone age. Similarly, Geomancers have defoliate, but it isn't a separate skill, it's just another syntax in their Taint ability.
I actually can explain this Infest thing, I think!
It probably has to do with the silly way that druids are coded so that the 'default' mode for a druid is Hartstone, regardless of being in that guild. This means that if a Crow Druid were to... forget Crow temporarily, they would become fully able to meld Hartstone forest types, and would be casting sylvan forests with their forestcasts, even with Ravenwood power (iirc). The different type of 'forestcast' may be due to some kind of backstage issue involved with making the two easier to tell apart, or may have at one time been due to this sort of problem, even if it isn't now.
Alternately, it could just be yet another place where the demesne mechanics haven't been updated to keep up with the changes to themselves, a call back to a bygone age. Similarly, Geomancers have defoliate, but it isn't a separate skill, it's just another syntax in their Taint ability.
I'm more thinking an update that didn't go all the way. I still FORESTCAST MELD to meld wyrded land... and can't meld sylvan if I have Crow active. Yes, I can theoretically meld sylvan if I forget crow... but again, there really is no reason for infest to be there in the first place. Probably one of the reasons I've had issues with fighting vs Hartstone was that I keep trying to FORCEFOREST and if it's not a melded location, the skill flops, which gives me another second of reaction time to switch to infest, during which the HS can sapling up and then I have to switch to mulch, and it just keeps getting worse along the way. I think if Geos have that same issues, theirs would need updating as well.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
My guess is more that it was intended "for roleplay"; you actually have a command to infest the forests! Given that the game can already check your spec to determine whether or not to make Wyrd, it should be able to check your spec on the force command as well (which, well, it does; just not when the room is already a forest).
I would like to think that would be a relatively easy Quality-of-Life adjustment, unlike the whole "Blacktalon can demesne EthSeren by flexing out Crow" thing (which will apparently be a monster to fix).
You might want to be a bit more specific. I, for one, have no idea how LoralAria works, so I can't exactly go around making proposals for improving it.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
0
Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
Syphonium could use some tweaks, but their last envoy went a little crazy with his reports then quit. So, good luck!
Well, and you didn't hear this from me, but if I were going to re-hash a spec I would forget about trying to copy what other people have and silly gimmicks. I would make it a lean mean discordanchord steamroller.
After spiritsingers got their carinlargo rocket launcher everyone was all like ooooh, my spec needs an alternate kill method too. When they would be much better off getting synergy with the one they have......
Geomancers have a command to remove the forest from the Wyrd. (Defoliation)
I'm just going to go out on a limb and second what Enyalida said, + RP.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
Geomancers have a command to remove the forest from the Wyrd. (Defoliation)
I'm just going to go out on a limb and second what Enyalida said, + RP.
While true, I don't see the need for either of those particular abilities. It just smells of an upgrade from something that never got around to Blacktalon or Geos.
Still, if FORCEFOREST on a melded forest produces wyrd rather than simply breaking... and FOREST produces wyrd on any terrain except for forest... I'd say Infestation simply needs to go... either that or change it to work on any terrain plus have the ability to FORCEINFEST to break enemy melds. I'd say the same applies to defoliation.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
What expense is there to the user if they have to infest instead of forest? At the very least the dichotomy enforces the underlying nature of the Wyrd and how it functions (same with Geos). It doesn't actually add an "additional step", only forcing you to use infest unmelded, non-wyrden forest environs.
Seems kind of like a really infinitismal cost for the two guilds that have it mechanically (Geos and Wyrdos), as they also have the benefit in that they are able to naturally meld more than just 'wasteland' and 'wyrden forest', but anything tainted or wyrden.
What expense is there to the user if they have to infest instead of forest? At the very least the dichotomy enforces the underlying nature of the Wyrd and how it functions (same with Geos). It doesn't actually add an "additional step", only forcing you to use infest unmelded, non-wyrden forest environs.
Seems kind of like a really infinitismal cost for the two guilds that have it mechanically (Geos and Wyrdos), as they also have the benefit in that they are able to naturally meld more than just 'wasteland' and 'wyrden forest', but anything tainted or wyrden.
The expense comes in combat when a Hartstone is breaking a Blacktalon meld. I walk into a forest and I have to know whether to use forceforest or infest before using either of them. Sure, I can make a trigger that automatically infests if forest fails with the wrong message, but that means I lose time in the process still. If I'm working on repairing a meld in the process of being broken by several melders, time is the last thing I have. Any other guild (Except for Geos trying to break Blacktalon - not really applicable presently) can just use a single command and not have to waste anything in the process, they just walk in, force-whatever and produce the desired effect. Never mind if I try to infest a melded location and end up without balance because I didn't forceforest.
Unless there's a major balance difference between the speed of forceforest and infest (Haven't actually looked, though I will test that later tonight when I'm home), there is no actual benefit to having the skill work in that manner, creating an imbalance issue in guilds with the same mechanic. It's like saying that there's nothing lost if say... Tahtetso needed to do perform kata instead of kata perform on a target that's illithoid. It simply doubles the amount of work one has to do... and mid-combat, when there's five people wailing on you and two others yelling at you to swap targets between an illithoid and a faeling, you can easily end up in a situation where you're wasting time and missing a message saying "But that's an Illithoid!" then wondering why your kata form didn't go through.
And it's not like you can infest a non-forestal location to produce wyrd, so every time, you have to look at the line that implies unnatural terrain... or at the map for the color of the square you're about to enter to figure out whether you're entering a forest without changed environment, and then you might be entering a valley and trying to infest something that cannot be infested, again losing time in the process, whereas an aquamancer can just waltz in, do aquacast forceflood and be done with it.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
From what I've seen, the failure message doesn't steal EQ, so you'd at most lose a fraction of a second. However, you can avoid even that by using triggers on room entry ("Superimposed over this location, an ethereal forest reaches up to the sky.") or the active terrain lines and keep those in a client-side variable. That's what some melders I know do, at least.
0
Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
My break macro used both. Simple solution. It doesn't actually impact game balance at all.
I'm a little curious of what would happen if Jojobo or Ackleberry came out now. Would Ackleberry be able to meld Seren-forest? Would Jojobo jungle-ify things? Does this mean there could be wyrden jungle if a Blacktalon infests a jojobo location? etc, etc.
Comments
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
-
-
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Here's a list of afflictions that I feel should be buffed/reworked:
Broken Jaw is bad because it's conditional to do anything at all, and when it does do that thing it's 70 damage. I haven't had shattered jaw afflicted on me in a while but I remember that being similarly underwhelming. Both should see either a damage increase or a percent health buff which is what I believe happened to healthleech.
Hypochondria can almost be entirely ignored with the right curing. The only message that I've seen have any impact is the falling asleep line in sap (where you are likely to be prone). This is the only case I can think of where a hypochondria line can't be ignored and can't be instantly checked against. Also I believe there are lines in hypochondria that don't exist as actual affliction lines anywhere else which serves to tell you that you have hypochondria and doesn't confuse the player's system at all. Hypochondria should get an update to the set of lines it uses. I also think it would be interesting if Illuminati had some sort of affliction arc with insanity -> hypochondria -> psychosomatic afflictions, but that's just a random idea. The alternative would be to just remove hypochondria and replace it with something else as I'm unsure if it interacts with autocuring at all.
Justice is very underwhelming as well. Even people who deal significant (read: 3k+) damage will usually be able to ignore this affliction entirely. What if it was changed to be like peace that only prevented you from attacking if your opponent is more hurt than you are?
Omniphobia is not bad as a whole but it's not great in the context of telepathy. It's fairly difficult to stick and even you do it requires you to feed more phobias in to it to actually do anything at all. To my mind if through illusions/afflictions someone manages to stick omniphobia on you it should start generating phobias after about 3 seconds. It would also be great if psyvamp ticks were boosted greatly by mental afflictions. Due to how psyvamp was nerfed (both the group combat and the amount of drain total) it's much more effective for telepaths to debate and mindburst than to actually use their skills to set up their instakill which is sad. If omniphobia is buffed then we may want to look into removing it from the afflists of the aero demesne and illuminati.
Bask for Dracnari should allow you to emote while you do it, not require standing up, and perhaps instead of randomly healing afflictions (useless), let it give you a small h/m/e boost, perhaps like Psymet's trans skill does. Probably only 5-10%, but enough to make it a buff.
-
To explain a bit better:
Any mage class has two skills to change terrain (going to use pyro skill as an example): PYROCAST COMBUST and PYROCAST FORCECOMBUST. Both abilities cost 1 power to use and the only difference between the two is that one works only on unmelded terrain, while the other looks at breaking an enemy's meld. There is no chance involved, really, so pretty much everyone would probably be using FORCECOMBUST as opposed to COMBUST on the off-chance that they need to break the room they're in.
The same applies for both druid classes with FORESTCAST FOREST and FORESTCAST FORCEFOREST. The only exception being that crow druids have the added ability to FORESTCAST INFEST which only works in unmelded natural/hartstone forest terrain to convert the forest to wyrded land. FORESTCAST FOREST and FORESTCAST FORCEFOREST already does this, but... the problem being that when trying to use FOREST/FORCEFOREST in a non-wyrded forest, one gets the error message: "Look around, this is already a forest location" while still being a spot a crow druid cannot meld.
So during any kind of interaction where a stag and crow druid are fighting over the meld, the stag druid only needs to use FORESTCAST FORCEFOREST while a crow druid would be forced to try and do the same, and when that fails, fall back to FORESTCAST INFEST. I'm assuming the issue comes from the fact that it is a shared skillset and the way it was made to work for crow was different when it comes to the actual meld skill as opposed to the actual terrain skill. With that in mind, I think crow druids simply need to have the infestation ability removed altogether and the FOREST/FORCEFOREST possibly replaced with WYRD/FORCEWYRD or a variation that allows casting FOREST/FORCEFOREST to work in forestal non-wyrded locations.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
I would like to think that would be a relatively easy Quality-of-Life adjustment, unlike the whole "Blacktalon can demesne EthSeren by flexing out Crow" thing (which will apparently be a monster to fix).
You might want to be a bit more specific. I, for one, have no idea how LoralAria works, so I can't exactly go around making proposals for improving it.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Geomancers have a command to remove the forest from the Wyrd. (Defoliation)
I'm just going to go out on a limb and second what Enyalida said, + RP.
Still, if FORCEFOREST on a melded forest produces wyrd rather than simply breaking... and FOREST produces wyrd on any terrain except for forest... I'd say Infestation simply needs to go... either that or change it to work on any terrain plus have the ability to FORCEINFEST to break enemy melds. I'd say the same applies to defoliation.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Unless there's a major balance difference between the speed of forceforest and infest (Haven't actually looked, though I will test that later tonight when I'm home), there is no actual benefit to having the skill work in that manner, creating an imbalance issue in guilds with the same mechanic. It's like saying that there's nothing lost if say... Tahtetso needed to do perform kata instead of kata perform on a target that's illithoid. It simply doubles the amount of work one has to do... and mid-combat, when there's five people wailing on you and two others yelling at you to swap targets between an illithoid and a faeling, you can easily end up in a situation where you're wasting time and missing a message saying "But that's an Illithoid!" then wondering why your kata form didn't go through.
And it's not like you can infest a non-forestal location to produce wyrd, so every time, you have to look at the line that implies unnatural terrain... or at the map for the color of the square you're about to enter to figure out whether you're entering a forest without changed environment, and then you might be entering a valley and trying to infest something that cannot be infested, again losing time in the process, whereas an aquamancer can just waltz in, do aquacast forceflood and be done with it.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.