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Comments
Another thing I've noticed, being that I find myself in 4v1 situations here and there, is that it's tough to fight 1 or 2 people in your room while also taking obnoxious Telepathy attacks at range. I would typically even the melee odds with retardation at that point but with an enemy monk in the area that's not an option.
But with the previously mentioned vibe changes in mind, I'd appreciate a strategic vibration (or other skill) that creates a barrier against outside telepathy, allowing them to mind paralyse/stupidity/etc while IN the room with the Magi in his retardation but not from range. It would be like that Grove skill I think.
Option: 33-75% chance of failure on external kai/tele skills.
Option: 10% chance of a failed kai/tele attack destroying the vibe
Option: Kai/tele attacks reduce the vibration's lifespan by 100 seconds
Some of these scenarios are an issue with Magi's approach, which is killrooming. So they either need to have more chasing potential, or be more killroomy, meaning the fight is brought to them. You would see more use of the Grounding vibe, which is currently really situational and probably more annoying to the caster 75% of the time.
When you're embedded in a room and a monk decides 'okay, Radiance!', you have to dampen Grounding and then run away.
Either way, the arrows are only delayed, they'll still come through at the same rate after the first one hits. It just gives the victim time to save themselves, whether it's the Magi or the opponent. So it's actually nerfing Magi against using this tactic as efficiently, because I believe Magi are in-room combatants, not ranged.
While a lot of 2v1 things have been nerfed, virtually all of them have been instant 2v1 deaths, not walking into a trap and then being targeted by two people. There's a big difference between enfeeble+absolve and a magi laying a retardation trap while two serpents snipe in.
You will also note that I agreed it should be visible (or LoS should be delayed). Repeatedly. So I'm not really sure what that last parenthetical is on about. I was saying that three people (though I think two is also reasonable) should be a guaranteed kill if you're being careless. Obviously right now, just being able to walk into retardation with absolutely no means of detecting it beforehand and die immediately isn't desirable.
The point was that I don't think it's healthy for the game to focus on making all situations escapable. Being punished for failing to use caution is almost always better for the game than being punished for failing to react. If you can bash with relative impunity despite knowing people might be hunting you because you know you don't need to actually be on the lookout for retardation, you just need to react to it quickly enough when it does happen, I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. That's the cause of my hesitation about the LoS delay.
I was (obviously?) equating "snipe" with "shoot" for the purpose of discussion.
Ret/snipe, or ret/shoot, requires a single person (the magi) to use. For the two person method (which honestly isn't really even necessary) both people can use an artefact bow, or any throwable, edged weapon (no specific class or artefacts actually required, for either player).
At one point I was walking around, for days, with my own mount ordered to kill me, solely to give me a chance to escape ret/delph ganks. It's either that, or metawake - because once you're asleep, nothing is going to save you. You can't even ask for help or deliver, earring, raido, etc.
There is no two person method in the game that comes anywhere close to being as effective or unstoppable as ret/delph, and the only difference between a magi doing it alone and using two people is about 1.5 seconds of balance (2.5 for SHOOT -1 second because you're in retardation).
Then again, some people argued that enfeeble/absolve was "fair" too, so I suppose it's kindof pointless to beat my head against a wall trying to argue for nerfing ret/delph.
Edit:
Another thing to keep in mind is that people do trigger shoot/snipe to alertness, for ret/snipe ganks. I just shared a log a week or two ago of getting shot with delph twice within 50ms of walking into retardation. In this case, your only chance of survival is pure RNG luck on dodging arrows.
Point is, delph/delph (two arrows) hit you (and sleep you) before a single command can be processed through retardation, even if it's queued in the previous room.
If you don't have metawake up, you're totally f'ked (a fact that is frequently applied).
Also, triggering shield is suicidal.
2v1? Sure. But such is the nature of 2v1. And it still requires you walk into the trap, which is a bit different from enfeeble/absolve.
Sounds exactly like "enfeeble/absolve is totally preventable, just always be at exactly 100% mana and you're fine." to me.
So funny that people still argue that snipe/ret is balanced. The line is pretty obvious between people on the good and bad end of use of the "tactic".
"Look, sometimes arrows miss, so it's only a guaranteed death 65% of the time." is probably the worry argument against a nerf I've ever heard.*
* see explanation (or lack of) of why puppet travel/pathfinder/raido need to be instant and global to be balanced.
It doesn't require 3 people to delph someone twice. Your math confuses me.
Also, it's not hard to get ranged venom speed under 2 seconds (making what you said impossible). Can even be done without a single artefact or bows of any type, with better accuracy (just less damage, which doesn't matter, at all).
You're also assuming an "instant" reaction to walking into ret traps, which is a terrible assumption, since about half the time you're completely out of combat when you find yourself in one (aka bashing, walking, fishing, shopping, getting yanked while afk, etc).
Fact is, if a Magi + any other player (two people) both delph you on alertness, and both hit (which is very likely if they're using axes, lupine, or Snipe), then you're asleep before you can get a single command through retardation. You have to send WAKE first, which takes one second, and even assuming that actually works and you wake before you die from taking tons of damage/bleeding without being able to sip, you still have to STAND and SHIELD which requires 2 seconds of retardation, which would be INSANELY lucky to pull off between two players delph LoSing you. In fact, it's almost impossible (since their attacks are staggered, and they'd have to occur simultaneously AND you have to wake directly after they both use balance. Even then, if they're using weapons/abilities/nimble and have attacks under 2 second balance, then you're 100% unable to use two commands.)
Tumble doesn't work because sleep cancels it. Walking rarely works because of frozen ground. Fly works, but only if you can miraculously get standing before you die.
The fact that 99% of the time you starburst then immediately get shot/slept from another arrow just makes it even more stupid. It doesn't just bypass starburst, it's TWO deaths that you can't escape. The only exception to this is if you can GTFO or metawake up after burst and are EXTREMELY lucky and are able to sneak a 1 second delayed command through retardation after starburst which, even if you triggered it, would rarely actually work before you get shot again.
There's also the fact that all it takes is a SINGLE second of human error, and the exact same method becomes identically viable for a single player with axes or a bow. Should also be mentioned that it only takes a few arrows before you're dead from pure damage output of SHOOT/bleeding, even from a single player. If there's a serpent involved, you're looking at about 4-5 seconds, which means MAYBE being able to wake in time to use a SINGLE command, which has a very low chance of being able to landing before you're asleep again, or dead.
Also, like most magi RNG gimmicks, if it doesn't work, you can always just turtle/run and repeat endlessly until the RNG works. Even if you manage to escape, the magi is completely unaffected by retardation, and has absolutely no requirement to stick around and actually engage in "real" combat.
It's hard to compare to enfeeble/absolve because it's a completely different ability. One of the big things that's worth noting, however, is unlike enfeeble/absolve, it's available to all factions, and the (optional) second person can be any class in the game. Also requires no pre-kai or recharge time, and can be very easily triggered and executed without even touching your keyboard.
Would bet $100 that I could kill 80% of the playerbase with retardation + a single line trigger to expandAlias("dor shoot "..matches[2].." "..matches[3]) -- or whatever. This is absolutely stupid. This kind of gimmick was exactly what people were doing with web/axk or other triggered AXK crap, back before it was nerfed. Only with this, you don't even have to be in the room to do it, and you have a 1 second delay on every single thing you try to do to stop it.
All in all, retardation traps require ZERO prep work, zero skill, zero afflictions (unless you count sleep), work from full health/mana, on targets that aren't even aware they're in combat. Yet this insanely easy tactic is so effective that without a specific, complicated script to prevent it, (which won't even work most of the time), you're 100% going to die, unless you decide to turn metawake on when you log in, start meditating, and leave it up until you log out. If you're using serverside curing without a COMPLETELY different, and automated, def/aff priority list, you're 100% guaranteed to die. How many people even have this? Like... 10? Total? Even if you do, you'd have to completely disable your curing system off a single line (retardation proc) which would have to always be active, and would be insanely easy to punish via illusions (which magi have, for free).
I'm not endlessly arguing based on the initial assumption that I am correct. I'm responding, with very specific numbers and logic, to your comment. I hope that's clear.
I don't know why anyone is arguing about multi-person ganks but in a 1v1 situation, I've seen Magi set their vibes with retardation and then just leave the room to shoot the target. You only need one delph arrow and lullaby really.
In retardation itself people can still survive if they shield fast enough, since curare arrows don't stop it if I remember right.
For the purposes of the above argument, I was referring to only using ret and waiting in an adjacent room.
Full vibes + ret + torc/bow is pretty much a death sentence, and with the right RNG is pretty much a guaranteed win, without any skill or prep whatsoever.
Like I said above, this method is also a simple matter of "try it, see if RNG gives you a free kill, and rinse/repeat until it works".
Personally I think it's massively OP considering that vibes only affect enemies, and how high the % chance is that vibes will cancel tumble. The only argument I ever hear as to why it's fair is that with this method, the magi has to drop retardation on himself - which leaves them open to attacks, but this is pretty ridiculous, as magi have the massive benefit of choosing when to drop the retardation itself, have the massive advantage of having full vibes AND necklace of purity, and can typically torc/reflect/bloodboil/purity to prevent or mitigate any attack an opponent manages to pull off.
People just think Retardation needs to be so ridiculously OP because magi has no other real ways to kill people who know how to avoid damage spikes. I think this is exactly why it should be deleted. Get rid of this idiotic mechanic, and make room for bigger, better abilities/concepts for the Magi class. As long as Ret exists, anything you add to the class is going to be stupidly overpowered.
Suggesting that it should just be wholesale deleted is insane.
You are not going to make any friends that way Ernam.
I love magi - and I loved playing it. My beef with the class is the same as almost everyone else who has played it to its actual potential. I left Magi because I got extremely tired of sigil wars, RNG, and repeatedly using incredibly boring, but equally incredibly powerful full vibe/ret gimmicks to win fights. It simply isn't fun, for either person involved, in 1v1 combat.
Maybe retardation is "unique and interesting" to someone getting into mid-level or dipping their toes into high-level combat (theory?), but (at risk of sounding like a prick) when you actually do it, a few hundred times, it starts to look the the linear, simple, boring tactic that it truly is.
The other thing is that retardation would be a lot more interesting/balanced if it was always used in the manner it was more or less designed to be used for, but most "good" magi base their entire strategy around avoiding this (by either turtling on full vibes waiting to drop ret, or by using various methods to get their opponent in retardation without being in it themselves).
Then all you have is a prepless uncurable Aeon, that with the right RNG (which isn't uncommon) is inescapable and typically leads to killing an opponent who doesn't even have the opportunity to fight back. This isn't "combat", to me. It gets old hearing people talk about this theoretical, fantasy-world where magi actually fight in their retardation, but the fact is, very few people actually do this - and even when they do, there are only a few classes that actually have a chance of survival/victory (bard, priest, jester, serpent, BM).
Instead of making combat balance discussion based on what you think should be, or what you imagine exists, you should get a ton of experience, then actually base your opinion/statements on what actually occurs in the Achaean combat world. Thinks like Web tat and AXK were "fine" as they were, as well, but when used in a certain way, were insanely overpowered (to the point that for some time, people were being one-shot to death by AXK with zero prior setup/damage). As soon as people realized this, this became the standard way of using the ability, even though "normal" use of AXK was fine. Thus, changes were needed. Retardation is no different.
The difference is that you pretty emphatically didn't suggest fixing it as you are now implying. You didn't suggest making it so magi had to actually fight in their retardation and so retardation fights weren't so one-sided or RNG dependent.
What you said was, literally, that it fundamentally could not be fixed and should be deleted. Which is ironic in that you were arguing, at length, about ways to fix it a couple of days ago. If you read my post - you'll see that that's what I was addressing: the issue of "solving" the problem by simply deleting it.
And what exactly is this about not having discussions about how it should be? That is exactly the point of suggestions - hell, that's the definition of "suggestion". The point of discussing retardation is to make the ability function as it should.
TL;DR: Baby, bathwater, etc.
But yes, you can go back to spewing in peace, as usual.
My above post, higher up, described, in depth, the challenges of "fixing" retardation, since there are several aspects of it that would need to be addressed for it to continue existing while allowing embellishment/upgrades to Magi. I listed potential fixes for all of them, as well.
My goal, like yours, is to see magi come to something more than lol-damage, ret/snipe, flip-coins-until-you-win class, which is exactly what I see it as, right now.
Regardless of how "cool" you think retardation is, I simply believe that it'd be much better, and easier, to just get rid of it and give magi a lot more new, balanced, and far more interesting/dynamic abilities/concepts. Problem is, as I hope to have described very fully, is that adding these while retardation exists is out of the question - unless it is significantly altered/nerfed.
As I said, it's pretty obvious that the magi who solely use ret/snipe to win fights are "fine" with it as it is... probably because it almost always works, and has no drawbacks whatsoever.
Drop ret.
sit in adjacent room, with alertness up.
They walk in.
delph axe/arrow
If it works, they die (twice).
If it doesn't, rinse and repeat, until it does.
Refuse to actually fight, in room, with your opponent.
Never die, always win, or stalemate. #combat
@Aegoth
Please respect the fact that you've been banned from speaking to/about me or my posts - calling them nonsense / bitching, and repeatedly inserting your useless, unwarranted insults into our discussions is welcomed by nobody.
I think one of the big problems with balancing magi is that balancing vibes requires balancing a 1v1 mechanic and an area-control mechanic. This is an issue relevant to the retardation discussion for instance - retardation is a neat mechanic 1v1 in the same room, but becomes problematic in some circumstances when you can drop it in a room and then leave, but (virtually) no one wants to see magi stripped of their ability to lay vibes and exert influence over an area.
One of the big points of vibes has always been about area control, but it's a clunky way to actually achieve that. It would be neat to see vibes reworked slightly and the area control concept driven home by a new third skill (replacing enchantment) similar to Lusternia's demesnes such that vibes were a sort of in-room 1v1 thing, while the other skill provided some degree of multi-room control.
So vibes could be altered to be essentially only useful with the magi in the room. Maybe they move with the magi. They might even be turned into active effects a la the Occultist changes.
But Magi could keep their traditional area control via a demesne-like system in a third skill. This skill should probably have an emphasis on hindering and transporting people - it shouldn't be a ranged combat tool so much as a tool to detect people, pin people down, hinder people, move them around, and make it easier for melee combat to occur. Crucially, it would not be like telepathy, where the majority of effects are actually harmful themselves.
And if cataclysm is going to be retained (and it's thematic enough that it probably should be), make it a sort of capstone on both of these - it's the sort of culmination of the area effects and the in-room vibes and elementalism: letting you use a vibe (crystalism) to project a few elemental effects (elementalism) into the area (third skill).
This has the benefit of making vibes a lot easier to balance, since a vibe doesn't have to be balanced based on both its 1v1 utility and its ability to be left in rooms at the same time. Problems like magi fighting from outside their retardation could be ameliorated without eliminating the ability of magi to control areas in some capacity. It also has the benefit of providing a bit more distinction between vibes, rites, and harmonics and, unless I'm mistaken, a lot of the more recent reworks and changes seem to be trying to give classes more-distinct mechanical themes.
And if people want retardation traps to stay a part of raids (and I am among those people), they could be improved too - give the new skill a way to project retardation into a room. Maybe you embed a vibration, and can thereafter activate it from anywhere within your demesne-analogue - but the magi has to focus (a la propped totem) to keep it up or it automatically creates a retardation vibe in the magi's room too.
Give people an ability in vision to detect if they're in a magi's demesne-thing so they can be wary and can't just run into traps.
Let magi continue to function as area control units with a system that's actually geared toward doing that - thanks to Lusternia, we have actual mechanical technology for dealing with area control now. Don't just copy-paste it, but let's make use of that!
I suppose if everything I say is automatically a digression (even though it was exactly what the thread OP asked for) then there's no point in commenting at all. I mean hell, my suggestions do exactly what you're asking for. Should I make a forum alt so I can say things and have them heard without being automatically dismissed/insulted?
Single sentence: You cannot discuss anything about magi without factoring in Retardation (which is the point of everything that I've said so far).
Magi is definitely balanced 1v1, even without a sigil war. If you really can't fight inside of retardation, just leave when they embed. It's a long eq. Or just metawake tumble.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/bc5fb3e1
Above is a good fight between Jhui and I when he was monk. Goes back and forth, though yes, he does indulge me and not sigil war, making the fight more fun. And I don't have a torc at the time.
Sorry for not having the other Delos fights (the next 2?) where he pwns me, I usually don't save those
I meant that it would be nice to see them use the concept of demesnes to implement the area control that magi already have right now - the issue is that right now they have a more clunky, outdated implementation through managing a bunch of different vibes in separate rooms and the mechanic causes further problems with trying to balance abilities simultaneously for their area-control utility and their 1v1 utility.
I didn't mean (and was trying to specifically preclude) a situation like Lusternia's where the demesne is itself a fairly potent weapon. Being in a demesne should not be much more dangerous than simply being in a room where a melee could break out. Mostly, the demesne should allow for information gathering and movement. It shouldn't be necessary to have or to break demesnes - they should largely just make it easier to initiate melees (for instance by having a demesne ability that functions as a sort of unstoppable, more local prism/puppet travel/etc.).
The problem with Lusternia mages is that their demesnes are themselves extremely threatening. Being inside one doesn't just make a fair melee fight more likely, it's extremely dangerous itself. That's fixable.
It would be nice if the third skill set would open up alternate strategies for magi combat. Items like wands and crystal balls seem to be generally associated with magi yet have no real use as yet.