Idea for a devotion skill to replace damnation/absolution/bloodsworn:

RITE OF SOLITUDE

Syntax: perform rite of solitude

Duration: same as Cleansing (relatively short)

Devotion cost: 500

* This rite takes 5s to enter into effect. The priest/paladin MUST be alone in the room for the full 5s, however, after PERFORM RITE OF SOLITUDE they can perform actions, heal, etc. while it is going into effect.

* After the rite is active other people may enter the room and the rite remains active.

* While the rite is active, if the priest/paladin leaves the room, the rite becomes inactive or drops entirely.

* While the rite is active it stops all incoming and outgoing ranged abilities to the room where the rite of solitude is active: telepathy, kai choke, thurisaz, meteor arrows, cataclysm, doppelgangers, healing, etc. Nobody in the room may be targeted by these abilities nor may they target anyone outside of the room with them.

* Ranged abilities DO work on people in the same room. So, if the rite is active and an enemy enters the room where the Rite of Solitude is active, they can used ranged abilities as normal on anyone in the room.

WHY:

* This would be a way to incrementally and fairly require a bit more melee in raids. Everyone complains about how paramount ranged has become in most raids; with this ability, a raid could slowly be forced to melee as the defending/raiding group makes an approach using rites of solitude.

* The 5s "buffer" is so that the ranged group has time to counteract the approach by range attacking the priest who is providing the rites of solitude.

* The "same room can still use ranged abilities" is there so that no class is gimped when the fight goes to melee -- everything will function as normal. This is also to prevent the rite from shutting down a class who relies upon those abilities in 1v1 combat.

(this idea was brought to you by Ovid)

This would just create just more stand-offs.

Because choking/meteoring/radiance/whateverrangedattacking across an area isn't almost a standoff?

I think this could be be good, I assume that line-of-sight ranged attacks would still work?

As it isn't my idea, I'm not quite sure what Ovid's view on the line-of-sight ranged attacks is, but I would say yes, they still work. This only stops ranged attacks that are area-wide and do NOT need line of sight.

I'll ask him later about puppetry/vodun attacks, but stopping (some of) those could be considered quite OP.

Yes, if line-of-sight attacks are still allowed. Boomerang, bows, etc.

Ovid's Response:

Line of Sight would work as normal.



also, in response to Darroth:

It wouldn't create more standoffs... if there's going to be a standoff, then it's going to happen in opposite areas. I.e. if Shallam wants to avoid conflict, they'd just leave the city; they wouldn't set up a rite of solitude just to stand there and wait for the enemy to leave, they'd just go to Eleusis or Cyrene and wait, where it's obviously safer.

This just gives people a way to make an approach on groups using doppie hangedman/choke/choke/dead. In the current game, approaching via a traditional charge leads to 10-25% of your group dying before even getting to the raid party if the raid party is a number of rooms away.

With solitude, you could make a slow, deliberate approach, and by the time you got there the enemies would know you were coming and have prepared for melee or left entirely, either way, better than 3 hours of not being able to move 3 rooms into the city because you get choked/thurisaz/doppie/crushed to death before being able to mount or prepare any kind of proper defense.

EDIT: lol, I didn't actually open the message.

I'm not really sold on this. First off, there are situations in which ranged attacks are the only feasible way to begin to attack a group; perhaps you need to eliminate a totem propper or some such before being able to attack, but the room the enemy is in cannot be attacked via LoS. Imagine, for a moment, the EA Master Crystal raid; give the group raiding the Crystal this, and the -only- way to even begin attacking them is to charge into a fully prepped room with a totem, ents, etc. (yes, I know this idea is for devotion; this is simply using an existing situation to showcase what could happen). Second, indiscriminately stopping -all- non-LoS ranged attacks is a bad idea. Radiance, for example, becomes useless. There are other problems with it that are simply too annoying to work around to make this an ability for an aligned class.

I'd rather see a re-working of ranged combat in general. Leave LoS the same, and either make most of the current area-wide attacks made LoS (I say most because of the situation template given above, re: MC raids, etc.) or find a way to reduce their effectiveness across an area. For example, kai choke does full damage if the target is within 5 rooms of a target, and less the further away the target is (though this has its own set of computational problems: one-way exits, special exits (passwords and such), potential to piss off the processor, etc.).

Ranged combat needs a fix, but I don't think this ability is it. It kind of lays some of the groundwork (insofar as generating ideas) for a possible revamp of the system, but doesn't actually fix it, IMO.

EDIT: Typo.

lol

^

Short timer on the rite is to fix most of the problems listed by Gorlasintan.

However I still think this is not the right way to fix area combat.

...the short timer doesn't fix a single thing I brought up.

I am against the OP's idea because it seems like an attempt at a band aid fix that wouldn't actually fix anything. It'd just be tedious and make things even more complicated and stand-offish in group fights.

I think that if you really want to see more intense combat with less stand offs, just remove/nerf guards and totems.

Guards and totems(or cities in general) are the reason for stand offs. The winning team wants to advance but can't. The losing team can't advance and can hide in safety. This is why there are stand offs.

Santar pretty much has it.

That said, I don't feel like it's totems so much. Totems are actually pretty decent the way they are: you are at a disadvantage when you walk into them, but you can overcome it in a couple of seconds and there are a few classes that can go through them easily and a skill that makes it less bad for everyone else. The only thing, I think, that would improve the totem situation is perhaps a skill to temporarily disable them with a much lower time cost than actual uprooting. That would eliminate a lot of the boring sitting around in ranged combat waiting to uproot and it would also eliminate a lot of the considerably longer, more boring time spent reimplanting.

As for the guards, the stacks of guards are just ridiculous now. The vast majority of people simply CANNOT go through a full guard stack. Aside from a few people who can tank some hits and get lucky, the only ones who can reliably get through are people with astralform, phase, or blackwind. Then everyone has to prism to those people. That's a fine way to do things, but the fact that it's the ONLY way even when the attackers have a vastly superior force is more than a little bit ridiculous. The way guards are being used, they're not guards, they're walls.

Delete monks, delete anything ranged that does not require line of sight? >_>

I actually never thought about it but I completely agree. Deleting guards and leaving totems would be extremely neat and would provide a lot of opportunities.

The only problem I see is what will happen to tiny cities with no one to defend them. In other words, while it will be fun to get continuously attacked by Santar for a while, how will you stop it when Santar just never stops and continuously griefs everyone?

This already exists, in two forms.

Honestly, just deleting guards from the game and leaving totems would stop all the stand offs. Here's how every single raid turns out:

Raid team Alpha raids city Bravo.

Alpha infiltrates the city.

If Bravo is strong enough to kill Alpha, Bravo kills Alpha.

If Alpha is stronger, Bravo moves to standard position behind a chokepoint of guards and remains there(gatehouse, clocktower, etc)

Alpha tries to kill Bravo with range with minimal success. Bravo tries to kill Alpha with range with minimal success.

Alpha wants to assault Bravo's position but it is not feasible due to guard placement.

Bravo eventually becomes strong enough to attack Alpha, and decides to attack.

Alpha leaves the city.


Totems are enough of an advantage to deter raiders, but to not prevent it. You only need a slightly more skilled raid force than the opposition and you will be able to cope with totems. This is not the case for guards.

Shamans and runewardens, which every side can have, just have to smudge one rune (usually) and the entire totem is useless until the runes are replaced. Sylvans and druids (again, every side has them) can use overgrowth to prevent a totem from working until someone uses firelash on it.

Perhaps the number of guards each city receives could be lowered and a maximum of 3 allowed in a single room. Totems within cities could take twice as long to smudge.. blah blah. The elimination of or weakening of guards just sounds wonderful. The renewed excitement and interaction of this might actually cause some people to play the game again!

Seconded.

The only problem I see with the above idea is that 3 guards is nothing. If a group of raiders can kill fifty guards, one raider could easily kill 3 guards given the right circumstances.

Exactly. It would be better to just remove guards completely, but this will basically just prevent cities from purchasing more guards, as pretty much anyone can take out a group of three guards, even Otha at level 78 or so, Rajamala.

-Firey-

Agreed, this is the point. 3 guards in and of themselves should be easy to take out. However, three guards with someone actually defending and fighting with them might provide that small defensive bonus that is needed.

By the way, 3 was just a number I picked off the top of my head. Don't write it in stone!

The you get the lolraiders who phase/fly/BW/AF in. Kill a single guard and run. Rinse-repeat. Doing a serious damage to the city and its economy.

Instead of Guards, each city should have a room wide defences that attack enemies completely % based damage that ignores every single defence. Number of these defences in a single room should be capped at certain level.

Basically lets say these defences do 2% damage. And cap is 5 defences in a room. There are 5 defences at Stygian crossroads. Enemies standing at the stygian crossroad would be getting attacked 10% of their max health every 5 seconds. This will let defending side have an upper hand in melee fightig, while not gimping the attacking side to the point that it gets pointless.

No, that's ridiculous. Just take out guards and leave it at that. My above posts were just a compromise if I had too.

If the city wants percentage damage, just worldburn the -ers.

Either way, I think removing guards completely would be a better fix. Either that, or letting a city have a maximum of 10 guards, with a maximum of 2 in each room, though giving those two guards about 50k health with 0% chance of criticals.

Edit: This way, the guards would be helpful, not overpowered... And they could be taken out, but three people who raid a city because there are no citizens there to defend, would be so bored when killing the guards, that they probably wouldn't do it.

Hrm, I always forget that you can smudge totems, which is sad since I've played both runewarden and shaman.

Either way, the big problem I see is that there are currently two options for guards: put them into unstoppable groups or spread them out and let them die. Whoever (sorry, too lazy to quote) said that a few guards with defenders might make a difference has the right idea. Guards should provide a bit of defensive advantage, helping players to turn the tide. The problem is that when there ISN'T a player in the room, three guards is laughable. If there were some way to keep guards the same offensive strength they are now, put a cap on the amount allowed per room, and not make them so stupidly easy to kill when players aren't present, things would be a lot better. However, all of the solutions I can think of along those lines just seem ridiculous. It would work fine to just give guards enough health to make killing them boring, but then why does this little guard have so much health? It would work fine if they were cheaper to replace, but that eliminates one of the extremely few ways left to do actual damage during a raid. It would work fine to put guards "in the background" rather than in rooms and they only appear when a citizen calls, but that would be dumb from an RP standpoint too.

So in short, I'm just going to agree: delete guards.

They used to be 'in the background', like forest defs, if I remember right.

"A guard mysteriously appears out of the corner, slashes you with his halberd, then melts into the urban landscape before you can react."

Like that?

They used to be Archers/Monks, same as current Caer Witrin defenses (I believe, haven't been enemies to Caer in awhile).

Archers didn't hit in indoor rooms.

More like gatehouses.

"A monk comes flying in with a jump kick, slamming his foot into you, before he continues to sail away, out of your reach."

Bleak is a guard?

guards are useless now. Even having them in stacks of 50, they get smashed in under 2 minutes. The last time Mhaldor was bored and decided to kill cyrenian guards. 41 of them died in under 1.8 minutes. There was not even a time for the city to realize someone was raiding (due to the nice avaialble of people to AF and BW in and then just portal over friends) before all of the guards were dead.

Hrm, I've been playing for a long time and don't remember that, but I also spent an embarrassing amoung of time as an annoying noncom in Cyrene, so I wouldn't have had any reason to notice it. I'm too lazy to pick through them, but is there a news post explaining why they were changed to be the way they are now? A move back to the old system seems like a nice option, though it would make sneaking around unphased virtually impossible as I assume the guards would auto-attack. If any such system were ever reimplemented, it should respect hiding, cloaking, and shrouds until an attack is made or a citizen alerts the guards (otherwise phase just becomes even more essential for moving around in cities and theft in cities, which is the funnest kind, becomes completely impossible).

It was changed 7-8 years ago, and the reason is that the current system of denizen guards was the intended implementation all along, the old system was meant to only be temporary.

Talk to the priest/paladin classlead. Or ACC. I'm not going to comment on this.