Endurance/Willpower Suggestion

Shedrin

Currently, endurance/willpower has a few problems: One, it's a long-term resource, intended to drain slowly, and recover slowly. But then demigods can get Refresh to entirely negate that, and Avatars get another Refresh even. Two, there are a significant number of afflictions that affect willpower/endurance drain. Afflictions are a temporary thing, and in order to affect the long-term resource that is endurance/willpower, they require very very high amounts of drain or modifiers on endurance that are pretty ridiculous, and then even if you survive, requires the same long time to recover (barring Refresh as above). Three, there is at least one skillset balanced around high willpower/endurance drains (Astrology), that suffers from the same issues as those afflictions, and are compounded even more ridiculously with those afflictions.

Basically, the interaction between endurance/willpower being a long-term resource, and the short-term needs of those afflictions create awkward and unfun situations.

I remember a thread a while back where Estarra proposed removing endurance and willpower altogether. I do support that solution, and I think it would improve the game, but I thought of this change to the mechanics of endurance/willpower that I think would lead to a more interesting mechanic.

• Change endurance/willpower to entirely short-term resources. Lower the endurance/willpower levels to 100 per con/int. So at 20 int, a character would have 2000 willpower, regardless of level.
  
• Make endurance/willpower regenerate at a rate of 50 per second.
• Attacks and influences will take 50 endurance/willpower per attack, 25 for 1handed warrior attacks, 16 for monk attacks, etc. Basically, bashing/influencing will not cause any drain on endurance/willpower.
• Certain skills will require significantly more willpower or endurance. For example, tumble and equivalents might require 500 endurance, astrology spheres might take 200 endurance and willpower, etc. This allows another avenue of limiting abilities that isn't power or balance/equilibrium.
• Afflictions that drain endurance can drain 50-100 per second.
• Afflictions that increase endurance costs can increase by 2x-3x.
• The above afflictions can then lead to 'endurance locks' while they are uncured, but allow escape a few seconds after they're cured, without requiring an hour of rest or being a Demigod with Refresh.

As usual, the specific numbers can be tweaked until a satisfactory balance is achieved. The primary thing is to turn endurance and willpower into an entirely short-term resource, allowing for more interesting strategies and interactions to revolve around that.

Karlach

How would you get around clot spam either fighting Monks/Warriors or bashing in most high level areas that do rather large amounts of bleeding, as they'll drain 2k WP in a matter of minutes.

Shedrin

Morkarion said:

How would you get around clot spam either fighting Monks/Warriors or bashing in most high level areas that do rather large amounts of bleeding, as they'll drain 2k WP in a matter of minutes.

Clot willpower drain can and should be adjusted to the new willpower level.

For example, 5 willpower per CLOT command. Aka 500 willpower to clot 2k bleeding. Higher amounts if people feel clotting should be willpower-pressuring, or lower if not.

Karlach

Considering the frequency clot can and needs to be spammed at times, you'd need to adjust those multipliers, bearing in mind you're going off 20 int. That's going to be crap for a lot of Monks and Warriors who have a WP pool of 1.2-1.4k

I like the concept, but it needs a few tweaks to your suggestion before it'd be feasible. 200 per int/con would be a far more balanced amount.

Personally I think the whole issue can be fixed by making Kirigami work on a 15 minute timer like wetfold, and restore 15-20% of your total amount. A single hour 50% refresh really isn't enough, and such a change would give people a stable source of WP regen that isn't infinite as to make the Refresh power irrelevant.

Lothringen

I'd rather them just be deleted, personally. I feel like this runs into the same problem as the proposed affliction change, in that it's needlessly complicated and adds another factor that must be balanced around.

At least now, they're mostly ignored and not consequential.

Shedrin

Morkarion said:

Considering the frequency clot can and needs to be spammed at times, you'd need to adjust those multipliers, bearing in mind you're going off 20 int. That's going to be crap for a lot of Monks and Warriors who have a WP pool of 1.2-1.4k

I like the concept, but it needs a few tweaks to your suggestion before it'd be feasible. 200 per int/con would be a far more balanced amount.

Personally I think the whole issue can be fixed by making Kirigami work on a 15 minute timer like wetfold, and restore 15-20% of your total amount. A single hour 50% refresh really isn't enough, and such a change would give people a stable source of WP regen that isn't infinite as to make the Refresh power irrelevant.

Yeah, the numbers are just ones I threw out there, I didn't sit down and calculate everything yet.

Lothringen said:

I'd rather them just be deleted, personally. I feel like this runs into the same problem as the proposed affliction change, in that it's needlessly complicated and adds another factor that must be balanced around.

At least now, they're mostly ignored and not consequential.

Well deleting them is certainly a good solution. It would require reworking or deleting some afflictions (which is probably a good thing as well). Complexity is always an issue. Mostly I'm offering a "Solution 2" and spurring some more conversation on the issue.

I do disagree that willpower/endurance are currently inconsequential at the moment. Certainly as an Astrologer, and someone who raises shrines a lot, they have a significant impact. Fighting certain classes (ex. Bonecrushers), even without using Astrology, can lead to 0 endurance pretty quickly as well. 

Lothringen

If bonecrushers are going for endurance drain outside of the arena, they're doing it wrong and should seek help immediately!

Lerad

I agree with Loth about this being entirely unneeded. We don't need another short-term, general vital to keep track of in combat. With ego AND power, Lusternia is already one-up on all other IREs in that aspect. Even assuming that it gets "balanced", you're taking the annoyance (and newbie-griefing aspect) of current end/will mechanics and making it a possible lock and killing strategy. (Though the good thing is that newbies no longer get griefed, yay.)

It's basically mana for warrior/monks and yet another layer of mana for casters. I have no idea why you'd want to have to keep track of two layers of mana, as a caster.

End/Will currently have inconsequential impact - those affected by it are pretty much just being griefed for no reason (lol astrology, tarot, dreamweaving). Those who can make it have an impact (warrior/monks with access to the appropriate affs) don't use it much, if at all. I don't see why we want to encourage them to start. What we want to be doing is to remove end/will from affecting (griefing) those skills mentioned - tradeskills, tarot/dreamweaving/runes, astrology. Because as it stands, they serve no purpose but to annoy players.

Daedalion

Astrology isn't griefed by will/end, you don't need the ability to spam meteors all day every day.

Rathan

I think he was talking about requests Astrologers get over GT / CT to put spheres up on hunters before they go out bashing. When the numbers are in bad places, even a small hunting party can drop an astrologer into yellow.

Turnus

For some reason I remember Estarra bringing up this very idea a couple months ago. I'm not going crazy am I?

Ssaliss

Turnus said:

For some reason I remember Estarra bringing up this very idea a couple months ago. I'm not going crazy am I?

Not this idea specifically, I think. She did say she wanted to get rid of endurance/willpower entirely though.

Xenthos

Turnus said:

For some reason I remember Estarra bringing up this very idea a couple months ago. I'm not going crazy am I?

Since the original post mentions Estarra's bringing up their removal, no.  You are not going crazy.

Turnus

Xenthos said:

Turnus said:

For some reason I remember Estarra bringing up this very idea a couple months ago. I'm not going crazy am I?

Since the original post mentions Estarra's bringing up their removal, no.  You are not going crazy.

Only my reading ability since I completely missed that in the original post, heh.

Shedrin

Here's Estarra's earlier thread:

http://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/435/endurance-and-willpower/p1

Caerulo

I'm going to echo Lerad's post:

If currently only non-demigod dreamweavers and astrologers (and tarot-users?) are negatively affected by willpower, why would you want to introduce a system that shares that hassle for everyone else as well?

Edit: Just re-read your post and saw the part about spurring discussion. I think Solution 1 would be to entirely remove endurance and willpower, while Solution 2 would be to lower the costs for dreamweaving and astrology (and any other skills that are greatly affected by willpower/endurance).

Malayn

Not needed.

Remove both stats instead.  If the stats are left just change the affs targetting them. As I believe things like phantomsphere, weaving, etc have high costs to prevent them from being maintained indefinitely/spammed repeatedly.