The bug that made fluid gain go crazy

Kandra

So this is a bug (or at least a thing that does the opposite of what AB says it does) that I'm going to describe and why I think it made fluid gain go nuts. The bug is still a thing, and I think it should be fixed, but you can't see it now because fluid bonuses don't happen until 7.

AB physiology humourism states: 

Each time you TEMPER a humour it raises the level by 1. If the target is

afflicted with afflictions related to that humour, this number may rise.

These are the humour-related afflictions:

Choleric: Nausea, sensitivity, slickness.

Melancholic: stupidity, anorexia, impatience.

Phlegmatic: clumsiness, weariness, asthma.

Sanguine: Haemophilia, recklessness, paralysis.

Going by the AB, when you temper someone's sanguine, if they have haemophilia, recklessness, and/or paralysis, you get extra fluid.

You actually don't get fluid bonus from stacking these three afflictions, though. You get it by stacking afflictions related to multiple humours.

Here's why that made fluid gain go crazy...

You can only truewrack multiple humours at one time. If it worked as intended, you would only ever gain one affliction that related to the humour you're tempering. Instead, both afflictions given by a truewrack are contributing to fluid bonus. It would be easy to give priority to sanguine afflictions and make yourself almost immune to sanguine inundation (or whichever fluid you particularly don't want to have bonuses on), but it's impossible for most people to keep up with two bonus-granting afflictions at a time.

For an example of the difference, let's assume you can cure one affliction every time you get two. I know you cure much faster than that, but let's not get complex.

The way the AB says, it looks like this:

Alchemist tempers 1 sanguine and gives you haemophilia and clumsiness.

You cure haemophilia. You have 1 sanguine and clumsiness.

Alchemist tempers 1 sanguine and gives you haemophilia and nausea.

You cure haemophilia. You have 2 sanguine, clumsiness, and nausea.

Alchemist tempers 1 sanguine and gives you haemophilia and stupidity.

You cure haemophilia. You have 3 sanguine, clumsiness, nausea, and stupidity.

The way it works(worked, it doesn't do it now at low levels, but high levels are harder to give examples of), it looks like this:

Alchemist tempers 1 sanguine and gives you haemophilia and clumsiness.

You cure haemophilia. You have 1 sanguine and clumsiness.

Alchemist tempers 2 sanguine and gives you haemophilia and nausea.

You cure haemophilia. You have 3 sanguine, clumsiness, and nausea.

Alchemist tempers 3 sanguine and gives you haemophilia and stupidity.

You cure haemophilia. You have 6 sanguine, clumsiness, nausea, and stupidity.

The only way you should be getting that much fluid under the directions given in the AB would be with completely backwards curing, but it's natural progression when the outside humours are contributing to fluid bonus.

Couple this with the fact that it's very hard to stack multiple afflictions from the same humour on someone (each humour has at least one focus affliction and/or afflictions using salve or smoke instead of herb balance) and fluid gain SHOULD be very tolerable. It's just that damned bug.

Cadarus

Just wanted to chime in regarding fluid generation.  You're absolutely right about the affliction:healing ratio though; truewrack is pretty slow compared to other attacks that deliver two afflictions.

The way it used to work is if you have any 1 of the 12 afflictions given by wrack/truewrack when a humour is tempered, that humour would have 2 tempers added instead of 1.  If you have 2 or more afflictions from that list of 12, the humour would have 2 or 3 added, random pick.

The way it works now is the same, except the bonus tempers don't kick in until after the humour has been tempered up to level 6.  So if you've got clumsiness and impatience, sanguine level 7, and get tempered sanguine, it will take you up to sanguine 9 or 10, but if you were at sanguine 5, it would only take you to 6.

Truewrack used to be able to give masked afflictions, and although they were always the same afflictions at level 0-1 humours, SVO did not reliably track those invisible afflictions without diagnosing, so most of the players in the game would miss clumsiness haemophilia and nausea until they got the random effect message (stupidity being the fourth, but that's caught by a blind focus or rather quickly through stupidity emoting).  It was the ability to stack these afflictions invisibly, and then temper, that made fluid gaining seem more powerful than it was - because nobody cured it correctly.  Server healing recognized and healed these afflictions, and made for a much better fight.

The spirit of this idea was that it would theoretically be possible to ignore some afflictions entirely and prioritize healing fluids above less dangerous afflictions, creating a deadlock where the alchemist was unable to make any progress with tempering.  They made it so that getting tempered while you had afflictions gave bonus tempers, so that you couldn't just eat ginger/antimony to completely nullify offense (since truewrack required humour levels, so it would be possible to reduce your humour levels to the point that the alchemist couldn't truewrack anymore, and also preventing any meaningful inundates).

The actuality of this idea was that generating fluids became ridiculously fast when you gave the 4 invisible afflictions, then just tempered while wracking paralysis over and over, to take advantage of wrack's balance being closer to temper balance and being able to nearly monopolize herb balance.

With the fluid restriction removed from truewrack, the bonus fluid generation can actually be removed completely.  It comes in too late to be worthwhile in its current incarnation anyway, and losing the fluids doesn't cripple the Alchemist's offense like it used to, only slows the progression to inundate.