Paladin Classleads + Addiction Change

Jarrod

We're pleased to announce the release of the Paladin classleads! Please find the details of the changes as follows:

* BLOODSWORN (Devotion) now grants additional healing on your activated Bloodsworn ally.
* BLOODSWORN confers an experience bonus when hunting together.
* BLOODSWORN no longer kills your partner should one member of the pair perish. Instead it will reduce his or her health to a low level.
* ENLIGHTENMENT (Devotion) no longer has a devotion cost.
* Various rites (Devotion), harmonics, and GRAVEHANDS (Necromancy) will now decay faster when outside the presence of their summoner.

* ADDICTION affliction now causes the victim to consume all outrifted herbs/minerals of the specified type rather than just one. For example, if you have five bloodroot outrifted, the affliction would cause you to consume all five plants when you EAT BLOODROOT.
* VARDRAX (Venom) has been repurposed to give the addiction affliction.

Penned by My hand on the 11th of Sarapin, in the year 634 AF.


Hooray Rite duration nerf! Also, new Vardrax seems really fun, I might actually figure things out, but I'm not holding my breath for myself.

Mishgul

Huge buff for druid. Time to class change.

Aepas

maybe it happened more than I saw, but it was pretty rare to see a bloodsworn double kill. I'd imagine the lack of double-kill is a good thing, but I will still miss the potency that threat had.

Now everybody can be a bloodsworn!

Carmell

Aepas said:

maybe it happened more than I saw, but it was pretty rare to see a bloodsworn double kill. I'd imagine the lack of double-kill is a good thing, but I will still miss the potency that threat had.

Now everybody can be a bloodsworn!

Most people don't hunt with their bloodsworn anymore and it wasn't something that was used often in combat because of the risk of both of you dying if one got into trouble.

Achilles

Is that all the Paladin class leads?  Rite nerf and bswear actually being semi-useful?

Excluding addiction/vardrax since its useful to half a dozen other classes.

Mishgul

I do like the new ginseng stack though, nice buff to serps and apos too.

Mishgul

Achilles said:

Is that all the Paladin class leads?  Rite nerf and bswear actually being semi-useful?

Excluding addiction/vardrax since its useful to half a dozen other classes.

All knight classes are already ridiculously powerful, not much to change, besides the weaponry overhaul in general.

Makarios

That's paladin, yes. There's very little room to buff knights, since they're really the jack of all trades. The mindset we went in with was trying to make damnation a viable kill strategy, which necessitated we make it possible to reliably shut down smoking in today's combat. Since we already have inquisition for stopping hellsight from being cured, we went with making it possible to riftlock again instead (which yes, does have far reaching consequences and should serve to address problems with various other classes as well).

You can expect far more mechanical class-specific changes when we do priests, as they're far less well designed in general when compared to knights.

Achilles

Makarios said:

That's paladin, yes. There's very little room to buff knights, since they're really the jack of all trades. The mindset we went in with was trying to make damnation a viable kill strategy, which necessitated we make it possible to reliably shut down smoking in today's combat. Since we already have inquisition for stopping hellsight from being cured, we went with making it possible to riftlock again instead (which yes, does have far reaching consequences and should serve to address problems with various other classes as well).

You can expect far more mechanical class-specific changes when we do priests, as they're far less well designed in general when compared to knights.

Wait does this means Paladin gets inquisition then?

Melodie

I'm not sure I'm digging the rite decay.

A lot of it makes sense, but it reduces cleansing to lasting under -two- minutes -with- a fork. That is a pretty huge knock down from the previous 10 (with fork), and makes using the rite to get out astral/blackwinded people (usually Targossas and Cyrene's only means of revealing these people) nearly impossible.

I think it's warranted to take a second look at cleansing. I don't know on the rest yet, haven't tested, but I imagine those are fine.

Edit: Ah, one other one - convocation. Both it and cleansing more or less often are placed away from the Devotionist for a purpose, and convocation is now down to -around- five minutes -with- a fork, which makes it a hell of a lot less viable for raid scenarios.

Mannimar

hmm... with this addiction change what is going to happen in the arenas? An endless eating loop?

Achimrst

So....keep my herbs rifted. Got it.

Rangor

*Feeling a bit peckish, you chew down 546 bloodroots in one mouthful*

Jarrod

1. Why -should- you get an astral-blackwind reveal that lasts 10 minutes with you somewhere else? Stay in the room with it if you want it to last that long.

2. In arenas, as of our one test, addiction had zero effect in arena.

Melodie

10 minutes goes by a lot quicker than you think, especially with you guys earring-ing in and out, or pathfinder, or hermit, or portal the serpent, or whatever else.

I can deal with less than 10, but -2- is just a waste.

Makarios

Addiction won't do anything in the arena.

Re: convocation/cleansing, we'll keep an eye on this. Worth noting not all rites do decay at the increased speed (allsight/pilgrimage to note the most important ones). We can quite easily modify that list as and if problems become apparent.

Paladins don't get inquisition. I should've been more specific, we didn't just want to copy that mechanic for paladin, hence the riftlock enabling instead.

Aedin

Only thing I can see though, if your trying to enable us Paladins to be able to make Damnation more of a viable kill tactic, is the speed of being able to apply the afflictions in order to obtain the riftlock or to postpone hellsight long enough to get a damnation off. Trouble is the speed to apply them. 

Issue I'm bringing up is the fact the number of low quality rapiers in speed versus actual ones to be decent in combat.  I'm sitting on 223's which are fine and dandy but it seems this is about the middle ground for getting rapiers. I've forged probably close to mmm I'd say in one sitting borrowing a hammer of forging, close to 300-400 total forging and smelting and redoing until basically nothing left and not once got a rapier to get past 220. Unless forging of higher speed rapiers gets raised, or you get some how lucky to get a great rapier and not have to pay 100+cr to buy it. This is still limiting the usage of actually pulling off a damnation.

I could be wrong though but this is my experience trying to attempt damnation in fights...

tl;dr: Theres not enough 223+ rapiers on the market due to low forging rates thus creating problems with trying to achieve a damnation.

Achilles

Makarios said:

Addiction won't do anything in the arena.

Re: convocation/cleansing, we'll keep an eye on this. Worth noting not all rites do decay at the increased speed (allsight/pilgrimage to note the most important ones). We can quite easily modify that list as and if problems become apparent.

Paladins don't get inquisition. I should've been more specific, we didn't just want to copy that mechanic for paladin, hence the riftlock enabling instead.

I fail to see how Paladins, the slowest of the knight classes without runeblades or frenzy (much less other classes that can riftlock or ginseng stack) benefit as much as other classes with this change.  All this to improve one of the most unreliable setup in the game? Kind of pointless to make damnation setup require a riftlock, then its purely a flavor skill.

Mishgul

I want to try and explain how it would work but it involves maths and i feel like it would end up being futile.

Achilles

Mishgul said:

I want to try and explain how it would work but it involves maths and i feel like it would end up being futile.

Go for it.  

These class leads didn't address any of the issues with Paladins/Devotionists.  Still no infiltration (if anything it lost  its counter infiltration) or the redundant nature of the class (unless you count the incentive of each devotionist standing in separate rooms to preserve their rites).

We did get better bashing though so yay? 

Aedin

Achilles said

We did get better bashing though so yay? 

Only if you have a bloodsworn! QQ

Santar

Addiction should cause all herbs of the type eaten to be rifted instead of eaten.

The change should be aimed at allowing riftlocks/etc to happen with the application of addiction, not uselessly wasting everyone's herbs.

As is, someone could effectively spam addiction/curare to make someone waste approximately 300 bloodroot per minute, assuming standard 5 outr. The current change creates a very inconvenient situation for players. It could easily be changed to rift all herbs instead of eating all herbs and still achieve the desired effect for combat.

Santar

Rites got over-nerfed by the way. The nerf on rites is far greater than the nerf on gravehands because there's tons of rites with a wide variety of purposes.

Should have only nerfed the timer on stuff like piety. Things like allsight should have retained their full timer.

Mishgul

You are defensive powerhouses. If you want more offensive utility it would have to be at the cost of your defensive utility. I will give you the honour of deciding which abilities to balance

Strata

Mannimar said:

hmm... with this addiction change what is going to happen in the arenas? An endless eating loop?

Nothing will happen in the arena aside from you eating more ginseng.

Aside from that, I have been waiting for classleads because I wanted to try to get scytherus lowered in venom.

But this change negates that in so many ways! I like it.

Melodie

Okay, tested all of the rites and such, and I stand by my original assessment that I'd just like cleansing and convocation to get looked at. Thank you @Makarios for commenting, it's good to know it's being watched!

I'm a -little- worried how things'll go for raids with this decay, but I'll reserve any lasting judgment until priests are released, at least. Any kind of time frame on that, by the way? I've got ants in the pants from waiting!

Makarios

No concrete time, no. We've been working on it at the same time as paladins, but decided to get these out now since they were finished. It shouldn't be too much longer.

Carmell

Having tested all the rites with Melodie at first we were not too worried ok these would be fine except for the cleansing but then we both realized we were testing with a fork.  That means that you cut that time in half for anyone else.  Cleansing would be 1 minute without a fork and the other rites would all be at 2.5 minutes.  That makes raid defense a little bit of a problem. 

Xli

The "nerf" on rites seems to be part of the ongoing move away from "fire and forget" passive attacks a la the change to occie ents and I for one am all for it. Concentrate on your combat, don't set up a load of stuff and sit back lolling

Aedin

Carmell said:

Having tested all the rites with Melodie at first we were not too worried ok these would be fine except for the cleansing but then we both realized we were testing with a fork.  That means that you cut that time in half for anyone else.  Cleansing would be 1 minute without a fork and the other rites would all be at 2.5 minutes.  That makes raid defense a little bit of a problem. 

Aye it hurts us without a fork pretty badly... I mean raid defense is near pointless, and combat where I gotta move from room to room to stay alive, where I'll need multiple rites spread out a bit, it'll end up just killing my devotion faster than not sadly.

Halos

Santar said:

Rites got over-nerfed by the way. The nerf on rites is far greater than the nerf on gravehands because there's tons of rites with a wide variety of purposes.

Should have only nerfed the timer on stuff like piety. Things like allsight should have retained their full timer.

Allsight is unaffected. but I generally agree. Also agree with Melodie about Convocation. The purpose of convocation is to bring your enemies from the rite to you. It is not a rite which has purpose if you are actually in room with it. Please remove this from the list of rites with increased decay time.

Carmell said:

Cleansing would be 1 minute without a fork and the other rites would all be at 2.5 minutes.  That makes raid defense a little bit of a problem. 

50 seconds out of room, yes. In the prolonged engagements that raids invariably are, this is relatively instantaneous.