Couple Ideas from my Brief Time in Combat

Kenway

I've been in and out of Achaea for about two years now. I think the oldest one of my characters got before I dropped them was 23 so effectively, I'd consider myself fairly new still. On top of that, I'd never even considered touching anything PvP until Kenway and even then I had no interest until the Wardens showed me the light.

So that said you all have no reason to pay any mind to what I say in this post. These are just a couple of additions I think would be interesting and I'm curious as to the opinions of those with more experience and hell, even those with less. Here goes:

Veils

People talk and talk and talk about veils and hoods and how they're overpowered or annoying versus how they spent their money on them so deal with it. I think that if we leave them completely cloaking as is but make aggressive actions towards other adventurers make you in-area detectable for a time, that would be fine. Say... thirty seconds and it resets after every attack you make. In addition when you get a kill, your area becomes detectable to everyone and your exact room to those in the same area for the same thirty seconds (trying to tie it into deathsight). This would mean that veiled raiders would have to either lock down a location and fortify, in which case they don't care if you know they're there really. Or stay on the move and strike periodically to avoid being easily tracked. There might be something wrong with this that I'm not seeing, if so, point it out.

Sabers

I feel like I might get some hate from knights for this but please know that I'm a Runewarden with two 249 speed rapiers who loves the fact that I can truelock people if I get their mana down. Which I can because I can run a focus stack with two 249s.

I think rapiers should be taken off the table for knights. I love the image of an Achaean knight in my eyes as it stands, a gleaming steel tower (or bunker for you dwarves!) with two rapiers. I think that's awesome. But with a maximum forged speed of 247 which is 257 with runes, they're just too damn fast for knights to be remotely reasonable to face. As an alternative, I suggest sabers. Which would on average remove ten from rapier speed and add five to damage. 237 or 247 with runes at maximum speed. And slightly higher damage, as knights are limb prep classes. This also makes sense because in general, knights aim to learn the skill of Riding to maximize their combat potential, sabers being cavalry weapons. (also 'slashing' with a rapier hardly seems effective as compared to a saber!) 

This would also make the current rapier artefacts seem more reasonable if they were converted to sabers and new rapiers made for the now sole users of rapiers, bards.

Runelore and Water

I think I may have mentioned my love of the potential RP that comes with Runelore as earth magic in some other thread once upon a time, but I say it again, I think it's awesome and under-done. Because of that, I am perfectly okay with completely losing all Runelore ability save what is sketched on my equipment should my opponent decide we're fighting on water. That said, I think it would be great to add a rune, functioning similarly to Gular (SKETCH GULAR ON GROUND <direction>) that will freeze a water room, similar to the various freeze ground skills. It would only work on water rooms and would obey the rule of all other runes that it could only be sketched on the earth. So you'd have to be standing on the shore and it could perhaps be used by novices in crossing rivers. This would allow for totems to be propped on the ice. I would also consider the idea that this would allow for Thurisaz or Othala to be used, but it would only work once as it would melt the ice. While obviously I personally wouldn't mind having this ability, I feel like it might be a Shaman specific thing. Runies do some damage and I don't think making it harder to leave the room while using one of your best defenses against some of their abilities would be reasonable.

Thurisaz

However, -FOR- Runies, and this is definitely one of theses ideas I'm really not sure of so it may seem foolish or overpowered or something, I'd like to see Thurisaz made sketchable on runeblades. This would be similar to the Nairat runeblade only it would light the enemy on fire rather than freeze them. Similar to Blademaster infuse fire and red dragon breath, activation while the enemy was already ablaze would do increased damage, though hopefully this would be less than a Hugalaz activation. This would give a middle ground, some use two Nairats for as much salve balance as possible, some use two Hugalaz for maximum damage, this would give less of both, but, y'know, potentially both.

Druids

I like Druids. I think they're a cool class. That said, I think they could use a bit of a buff combat wise (am I crazy?)

My idea for this is seeds. Allow Druids to say, IMPLANT SEED. This would do no damage, no affliction, but just give a message letting the target know it has happened. At a minimal sunlight cost, is 10 minimal? Let's say 10. The Druid can, at any time, GERMINATE SEED, causing the seed to sprout from the victim. This would do nothing normally, but if the victim had their shield up, it would shatter the shield and stun them briefly. An infinite number of seeds could be implanted on a person, but once one seed was germinated, the rest would die. Being ablaze would also clear all seeds.

I'd also like to make grove golems somewhat similar to falcons in that they're summonable/orderable their attacks wouldn't do damage but perhaps act as the Isaz rune does, silently stripping levitation and taking off balance/knocking down, with a small chance of implanting a seed on the person they attack. Golems can't go in water? Gotta have something to cancel it out right?

Alright, that's all I got. Hate 'em? Love 'em? Which ones and why.

Aepas

We actually have hydra shatter to break shields as a druid. And it's technically a free balance cost. usually more efficient than I see the seed thing being.
Our golems are pretty tough buggers if I remember right (Very rarely set foot in my grove) but we don't need a golem and bees, and pets, and maul damage. That's ridiculous!

Not to just sit here and shoot down ideas, but those changes specifically I do not personally find beneficial to the class. I still want freezepound made into an insta before we get anything else, and see a higher mitigation on damage for mauls v armor. Druid is already a pretty powerful class, just lacks a proper execution.

Edit: Didn't comment on the other ones because while I know the abilities, I have never used them enough to make proper tweak suggestions on them.

Cahin

I don't think you know what truelock means.

Katzchen

Or how about you leave the rest of us with our reasonable rapiers alone, and just cap rapier speed before 'ridiculous'? With my latency, I would really struggle to be able to vivisect anyone if my piercers lost ten speed.

Mishgul

the only thing broken in combat is anything that kills me, and veils.

Druids are v. powerful in melee, and with artie bows have the best LoS DPS too. An artied out druid puts out a lot of damage, i think second only to magi, and a smart druid can do pretty well, though will struggle a lot more/has to use the environments to his advantage.

The whole Runelore vs Water comes down to fighting your enemy on his terms instead of yours. Nothing you can do about it if someone really wants to be a jack-. The sceptre of aqueous mastery is ridiculous though in it's ability to carry a Runewarden thurisaz neutraliser around, though a sort of weak replacement which works almost as well is a Lupine bow + meteors.

If you are serious though, these are ideas for in game CLASSLEADS, not the dais.

Shirszae

I like the idea for the veils. Can't say much about anything else

Antonius

As Katzchen already stated, the problem isn't rapiers in general, it's the ridiculously fast rapiers (made worse by runes) that a few people have. There are plans to do something with Weaponry, but I'm not particularly optimistic that we'll see them any time soon or that they'll accomplish anything positive. The current forging model of spending a (potentially) absurd amount of time to get something slightly game breaking doesn't work, and I'd prefer to see considerably more normalised stats and artefacts actually being better than what's available without purchasing them.

@Cahin: Not sure what your point is. Knights can't give Impatience to prevent Focus, but that's not necessary if you can drain your opponent of mana to the point they can't use it anyway (which is doable with fast rapiers if they're not careful about it).

Nyboe

Yeah Runewardens kill me so fast with speed rapiers. They do high damage, 2 afflictions per attack(every 2 seconds) with with envenom and duality. And on top of that they got a falcon.

For a class that has two utility skill sets that is ridiculously impressive how they can fight on par with classes that have 3 class skill sets devoted entirely to combat.

Looking at the Runewarden skill sets by themselves their fine but when you mix speed rapiers, with runes with chivalry its a very powerful combination.

Kenway

@Aepas and @Mishgul, did not know that. Now I don't feel so bad for getting my ass handed to me by Guhem. Aepas I was thinking the seed thing would be useful for people who are hiding from lightning (forgot to mention in OP) but as Mishgul brought up, artie bows.

@Katzchen, if by piercers you mean SPs, I suggested that the current rapier artefacts be converted into saber ones with the same stats, while new rapier ones, aligned more with speed and less with damage, were made. Still think it'd be a problem?

@Antonius I agree that stats should be a little more consistent but I don't think that making artefacts -better- than what could ever be forged is fair to people who don't want to spend money to amass 1600cr or 3200cr for LV3s. I don't think forged weapons should surpass the artefacts but I don't think artefacts should surpass the forged weapons.

@Nyboe Yes.

Also thanks to everyone so far for not rending me limb from limb for these.

Antonius

@Kenway: Artefacts are intended to give you an advantage over what's available without buying them, and there's no reason weapons for Knights should be any different in that regard (yet they currently are). I don't want to get into a lengthy discussion (because it seems ultimately pointless) but my ideal solution would be to do away with the randomness on forging entirely, and then balance classes around a set of assumed stats; forged weapons would be sufficient for combat, but you'd be able to get an additional edge if you were willing to pay the credits for artefacts. Which is precisely how it is for Blademasters.

Achilles

I disagree with normalizing forged weapons.  If anything, I would increase the rate of forging a good rapier but heavily increase the commodity cost (people would spend less time forging and make it difficult to hoard commodities).  Make it so you can't combine commodities (so you can't stockroom them) and are limited to the space you have in your rift (or you can risk leaving it all in a house).  

Why not normalize?  Well look at serpents with artie dirks and the effect it has on serpent 1v1.

Iocun

Cahin said:

I don't think you know what truelock means.

"Truelock" means something slightly different depending on whom you ask though.

Santar

What Kenway is referring to is called a manalock. The condition in which someone has anorexia, slickness, asthma, paralysis and is unable to focus due to lack of mana. I coined the term mana-lock several years back to describe this sequence.

Kenway

^ That.

Nellaundra

Okay I have nothing productive to say, but I will say this.

You and your 249 speed rapiers can go eat a bag of dicks.

The entire bag of dicks.

Kenway

Nellaundra said:

Okay I have nothing productive to say, but I will say this.

You and your 249 speed rapiers can go eat a bag of dicks.

The entire bag of dicks.

Kind of my point.

Iocun

Achilles said:

Why not normalize?  Well look at serpents with artie dirks and the effect it has on serpent 1v1.

The problem with dirks is not the normilisation of normal dirks. The problem is merely the great difference between the low-end (normal dirks) and high-end (Thoth's) and the fact that the low-end is really too low an end and any upgrade from it is relatively expensive.

Naisar

Your veil idea intrigues me as it opens up at least a little counterplay, but don't hold your breath on that one.

The issue of weapons is complicated by forging being a huge gold sink.  Anything pushing for normalization is going to have to at least think about the economic impact, whatever that may be.  Aside from the balancing issue, I've always thought that a knight's interaction with weapons is just another instance of poor design.  Afflicting scales solely on weapon speed, which both indirectly and directly increases DPS.  Indirectly because of better hindering, and directly through sensitivity and stopping parry.  Of course everyone uses rapiers!  The only cases not to are for massive burst on the other side of the spectrum (battleaxes) and the occasional godly scimitar that pops up.  There are a whole mess of ways to deal with this, but unfortunately the best ones require removing tradeskills from being bound to a single class- which is huge enough to never go through.

Edit: ...or maybe it just might, given Tecton's recent reply.  Because Knights are already fairly powerful, if Forging ever does end up being removed from their skillsets I'd use the opportunity to encourage other weapon choices - blunt, two handers, and sword & board.

Achilles

Iocun said:

Achilles said:

Why not normalize?  Well look at serpents with artie dirks and the effect it has on serpent 1v1.

The problem with dirks is not the normilisation of normal dirks. The problem is merely the great difference between the low-end (normal dirks) and high-end (Thoth's) and the fact that the low-end is really too low an end and any upgrade from it is relatively expensive.

Right but if we were to normalize and forged rapiers now had 80 174 200 then being a unartied knight would be brutal.

Tarkanian

Nellaundra said:

Okay I have nothing productive to say, but I will say this.

You and your 249 speed rapiers can go eat a bag of dicks.

The entire bag of dicks.

Loved that special haha

Antonius

The problem with doublestab is really the implementation, not the fundamental idea of normalisation, as Iocun says. Making forged rapiers 200 speed would be ridiculous with the current doubleslash balance recovery formula, but there's also the potential to modify that so that 200 speed is actually useful to Knights. If everybody is working with the same stats things become considerably easier to balance in that regard, which I've always viewed as a positive.

Xli

Antonius said:

... If everybody is working with the same stats things become considerably easier to balance ...

But one of the many great things about Achaea is that not everything is exactly the same. Weapons with different stats add an element of variation and stop things sliding towards a slog fest where PvP becomes almost as dull as PvE

Sylvance

Xli said:

Antonius said:

... If everybody is working with the same stats things become considerably easier to balance ...

But one of the many great things about Achaea is that not everything is exactly the same. Weapons with different stats add an element of variation and stop things sliding towards a slog fest where PvP becomes almost as dull as PvE

QFT. 

Honestly, I think we could do with more variability in stats, not less (as an aside, racial specialisations were a huge step in the right direction for this very reason). As for weapon stats, the same applies, which is why 'faster is better' sticks in my throat, although I do get that doing anything about that would require a fairly fundamental rework of Achaean combat.

Best thing that Tecton could do about combat would be to go back in time and give a clean double-tap to the person who invented systems, but once again, I'm living in cloud-cuckoo-land.

Antonius

Weapons with different stats can be achieved by actually using different weapons (a ridiculous notion, I know). The variation between the rapiers people actually use isn't large enough to justify keeping the current system or to make claims that it would be less interesting true. You still have different strategies for venoms, breaking limbs, racial specialisations, trait choices, and weapon choices to provide variation between individual Knights, and those are all considerably more interesting than weapon stats.

The only exception is the ridiculous outlier rapiers where you combine both absurd damage and speed, and I can't accept any claims that they're good for the game in any way.

Katzchen

Xli said:

Antonius said:

... If everybody is working with the same stats things become considerably easier to balance ...

But one of the many great things about Achaea is that not everything is exactly the same. Weapons with different stats add an element of variation and stop things sliding towards a slog fest where PvP becomes almost as dull as PvE

Also if there isn't any/much variable, and you balance something around someone in the US using the weapon fine, those of us who live with a 0.3-0.5 second ping are kind of screwed. At least now we can save up and pay for better rapiers. They won't give us an advantage like expensive ones would for someone with a minimal ping, but we can still keep up that way.

Losing 0.3 seconds on every dsl kind of hurts! And I have had times where that is closer to 0.5 or even 0.8.

Nim

@Katzchen: I couldn't disagree more, and I would give one of my magical forum asterisk things to you if I could and if it would make you see why!

I like variability too, although personally I don't really like forging at all right now. If 1. the weapon stats were balanced to be equally useful, 2. forging didn't create good vs bad rapiers, but simply made different distributions of stats (eg 40/50/60 vs 42/54/54 vs 55/48/47), 3. forging was somehow more engaging, and 4. forging individual weapons was more significant than it is now (even if it was only in time and cost; it seems like people literally churn out hundreds of rapiers to make one half-decent one, and that's just weird to me), I might like forging, and I might not hate the very idea of Achaean knights.

However, variability in weapon quality is not actually a solution for latency. At best, it allows players disadvantaged by lag to find alternative advantages to try and cover up that disadvantage. More realistically, the alternative advantages can become commonplace or seen as necessities, leaving the original disadvantage mostly untouched, while simultaneously adding additional entry barriers to combat (which is already full of them, thank you very much).

The worst-case scenario actually worsens the problem. In the worst-case scenario, high-speed weapons become such a powerful standard that the developers are faced with the decision of slowing them down, or speeding up the rest of combat. In this worst-case scenario, since it is a worst-case scenario for the problem you're raising, they choose the latter option, and combat becomes faster paced, and latency becomes more significant as a result. ETA: I don't know my Achaean combat history, but I am at least somewhat certain that this very thing has actually already happened, and is part of why Achaean combat is as fast-paced as it presently is!

The actual problem is that, even though Achaea has complexity befitting a strategy game, its pacing is very much like an action game instead. While the strategy bit I mentioned isn't related to the problem (action games usually suffer from penalizing lag no matter how simple or complex they are!), the entire sentence previous to this one is one of my biggest problems with Achaea (probably third place), so I thought I'd share (even though I am certain plenty of hardcore combatants actually enjoy that aspect of the game).

Antonius

@Katzchen: While I sympathise that playing with high latency isn't enjoyable, the simple fact is it's not a major concern in regard to class balance. Adjusting things so they aren't ping wars when accounting for small (0.1, maybe 0.2, seconds) amounts of latency is perhaps possible, but when you get higher than that it's just not feasible.

@Nim: With regard to combat speeding up, the opposite actually seems to be true. Knights are currently slower than they (potentially) were pre-traits, since there's no level 2 balance recovery bonus for Rajamala's these days. I believe herb balance was also slowed down when traits went in to help account for that loss of top end speed, but since I wasn't playing at the time I can't say definitively that was the case.

Katzchen

Antonius said:

@Katzchen: While I sympathise that playing with high latency isn't enjoyable, the simple fact is it's not a major concern in regard to class balance. Adjusting things so they aren't ping wars when accounting for small (0.1, maybe 0.2, seconds) amounts of latency is perhaps possible, but when you get higher than that it's just not feasible.

@Nim: With regard to combat speeding up, the opposite actually seems to be true. Knights are currently slower than they (potentially) were pre-traits, since there's no level 2 balance recovery bonus for Rajamala's these days. I believe herb balance was also slowed down when traits went in to help account for that loss of top end speed, but since I wasn't playing at the time I can't say definitively that was the case.

I'm not saying they should balance around it... just make sure combat isn't next to impossible for those of us who deal with it. And that's pretty much everyone in my country, and several others, I would hazard most of the asia-pacific players at the least. That's not a small portion of their player base. It's not like it's because I have a crappy computer or dial-up or slow internet or something, it's just server distance, and to some degree the speed of internet available here.