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Comments
Album of Bluef during her time in Achaea
EDIT: Example, "You see how the Light allows me the strength to stand and fight while you run at the slightest sign of a negative outcome?" Tada, posturing!
Edit: Good decision.
Sorry for taking the bait, but you just kill me. I asked you to stop posting in this thread, unless you have something that actually has to do with fast-travel.
Everybody knows you don't like me, we don't need to be reminded by flagging/loling every post I make, or responding to it with personal garbage.
Please. Go. Away.
This is typically when the puppet bleeding starts. Hooray for Hands.
Also, trying having this mindset when you have a contract on someone with one of these abilities.
#you'refucked
While there's something to be said for considering someone leaving to be a victory, I think this is pretty reductive. It's hard to feel like you "won" because the enemy came into the city looking to fight at range, decided there weren't enough targets, got bored, and left - or went in looking to fight at range, saw that a melee group was organizing, and then just left. And that's how a lot of raids end. It's also frustrating because it incentivizes these obnoxious multi-part raids where a group shows up, gets scared off (or just gets bored), disappears instantly, then is back ten minutes later to try again, having lost essentially nothing. The ease with which an entire raid group can instantly disappear from the city means that the decision to invade a city has almost no commitment attached to it. When instigating a raid, the only bad decision that can be made is a decision to stay, there's essentially no such thing as a bad decision when it comes to starting a raid because if things go south, you can just pull out. When planning a raid and discussing raid strategy, there is one universal contingency plan: if things look bad, leave. It's boring.
To offer an analogy to another game which I guess I don't know whether you play, but a lot of other people in the forums seem to play, the current situation is like a game of League of Legends where every single player had an instant return-to-base button with no cooldown: without that, the game is largely about making good decisions about when to commit to a fight, with that instant-return ability, committing to a fight doesn't matter and the only kills that can ever happen are when someone foolishly stays in a fight longer than is safe. Even if the ability were stopped by crowd-control, it would still allow ranged characters to poke away at a distance before just disappearing as soon as the enemy might hit them with some CC. And that's boring. League of Legends has things that function sort of like that, and they've been universally removed or drastically limited for the very reasons I've tried to bring up. I grasp that this is not a perfect parallel and that Achaea isn't League of Legends, but the underlying principal that the aggressor should have to commit in a way that is punishable if the commitment was foolish is, I think, moderately clear.
City conflict would be more interesting if the decision to commit to a raid had some actual weight to it the way, say, committing to a melee during a raid typically does.
@Tael I completely agree with the raid implications here, which is the reason for suggesting changing fast-travel to have delays and/or respect hindrance.
That said, it's exactly the same for 1v1 combat as well. Someone running away from you isn't a "win", it's a draw, unless you're in some kind of "duel" where you agree to not use such abilities. It's also worth noting that even in duels/arena you can use many of these to fast-travel within areas/arenas, which is still essentially a reset, particularly since you can just repeat it endlessly if your opponent manages to chase you down.
In general, I just disagree that someone fast-traveling == victory. There's a very simple, straight-forward mechanism for deciding who wins. Death. You would consider it ludicrous if contracts were completed purely because someone puppet traveled out of a 1v1 fight, would you not? - but by your logic, they should.
Just to keep things in perspective, I am in no way suggesting that we delete them, I'm just asking that these abilities which provide instant, world-wide movement, respect movement hindering effects, since combat is balanced heavily around them.
Album of Bluef during her time in Achaea
Edited since you completely rewrote your post.
All movement abilities do not respect hindrance. See: Everything I listed.
I have gone out of my way to explain in great detail how most classes cannot prevent fast travel.
Why you refuse to actually respond to any of that information with anything other than blanket denial and intentional is blatantly beyond me (he said, sarcastically).
As far as 1v1 goes, there's typically a way to stop them whether it's done via hindering affs, mangled limbs, forcing an action, or what ever, you just need to find a way around it. That's half the fun, finding a way to best your opponent.
What I took from this is, you feel that all "fast-travel" abilities need nerfed because it's allowing people to easily escape your setup. I can't say I feel any of these are any more OP than wings or earrings(even with the recent change) since all of the same things stop travel.
Just try harder and try adding in new things to counter them.
The issue is that in the 1v1 discussion, there can be (and has been) substantial argument over whether the current hindrance options are good enough.
In the raid discussion, that's largely inconsequential. Yes, if you sleep someone, they can't raido their entire group home. But that doesn't do a whole lot of good when you're talking about whole groups sitting at range who can just immediately pull out at the first sign of danger. If your group were preternaturally coordinated, you might theoretically be able to keep most of the people from escaping once you got into melee, but that's not the issue - they can just leave before the melee even starts. And during ranged fights, you can't realistically hope to keep even a significant majority of their group so thoroughly and consistently hindered from range that they can't just decide they'd rather leave.
If we want to discourage ranged fights, the availability of fast travel to move entire raid groups is a huge problem. If invaders go into melee, things get interesting and there's a pretty decent potential for the fight to go badly for them (it should also be pointed out that the fight frequently ends if it goes into melee whereas ranged shit can last forever). So why do it? Why go into melee when if you stay at range, you can just immediately go back to your city with no harm done and be back to try again, having lost absolutely nothing?
Having a large quantity of experience with every class in the game (-alch) I am stating, clearly, and opening to feedback, that there are not things that counter them for most classes. I await your specific examples of things that do, that do not actively disrupt/prevent meaningful 1v1 strategies, other than the ones I already mentioned (monk, BM, Knight quad breaks).
Blanket statements of "you're wrong, you're just not doing it right" aren't helping anyone.
Regarding text following the bolded: I won't defend @Ernam's strange internet disease that apparently makes him exceptionally good at making people hate him, I've been in those shoes too an awful lot when I was younger, and sometimes I think I'm still that way and I've just gotten good at hiding it, but even (especially?) I would still agree it's not very good behavior.
However, poking him with the same general thing ("your posts are bad, all you do with them is insult people, so you should feel bad") over and over again is just silly. He's not that non-deterministic that his response to something like that would be hard to guess, so I'm having trouble finding a reason you're doing this unless you're just trying to push his buttons until he gets banned for overreacting.
More on-topic: I agree fundamentally with @Ernam's issues with the game that movement is just incredibly OP and should be hard nerfed. In the past, it was noted that it's hard to nerf movement without making travel times excessively slow, but that's just an excuse.
For example, in some strategy games (and even some versions of D&D!), there's an idea of Zone of Control around each unit (or character) that limits or penalizes opposing units if they move too much (in some Civ games, this involves making movement more expensive, in other games it involves granting the controller a free shot).
That's not really a solution to any of these problems - just a basic fundamental argument that you can have cheap movement in general and still require commitment or make near-combat movement far more tactical and positional.
Coincidentally, within this topic, the idea that cities or alchemists could temporarily restrict fast travel within the area is definitely an implementation of a zone of control, so I like it.
This thread too easily devolves into "this ability is fine and this is not" as well as differences between 1v1 capability vs raid capability, both in terms of effectiveness and potentially additional counters via raid effects.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
I agree with that, @Jarrod, however they are kindof all the same thing, and I'd be the first to suggest doing the same thing to them that was done with earrings retroactively, and was done with the new Spiritlore fast-travel ability.
Give them delays, to make them 100% just as awesome for getting around while still being preventable in 1v1 combat, or have them be affected by hindrance (like Duanathar changed to respect hindrance, back when people had the exact same problem with it).
Totally fine with focusing on raid impact as a separate issue, however I think that these changes made on an individual basis would actually solve the group combat problem, just fine. Notice how effective a single second delay was at "fixing" earrings (good enough to prompt a wave of class changes).
@Nim Appreciate the objectivity, here's my take on your comment. I don't (personally) think that there's a problem with movement in general. Since everyone can move at (more or less) the same speed, there's really no issue aside from the ease of which it is to speedwalk/fast travel to cities. However, good combat is generally that which is mutually participated in, so the ability to "bail" is pretty much fine as it is, I think.
To briefly recap what I mentioned earlier on, combat is balanced (in part) around movement, and hindrance to slow it, based on each classes need for hindrance, and each classes need to be able to avoid it. The reason I'm making such a big stink about fast travel (particularly abilities that are instant and ignore hindrance) is that they completely break down this balance, as they essentially complete ignore abilities designed solely to prevent things like hit-and-run prepping and repeatedly running every few seconds to neutralize various forms of momentum (be it health, mana, afflictions, bleeding, resetting limbs, etc).
Also, since most of these abilities are generally used to instantly travel to guard stacks and/or totems, the opponent generally does not have the ability to "chase" which is a major part of 1v1 combat. Being able to vanish to guards, fashion up your doll on your buddy a few times, and dive back into combat whenever you choose to, is not "fair" or "balanced" but is currently standard practice for several classes (primarily occultist, jester, shaman, and potentially, runewarden).
The zone of control idea is really cool though, however I think it'd pretty much turn combat upside down, and would require some pretty significant changes to the game's code at fundamental levels. I've also considered simply limiting player movement to 1-room per second within 30 seconds or something, after any aggressive action, but I never fielded the idea because honestly, it isn't needed, and would benefit/hurt certain classes far more than others. (ie. I think it was a bad idea)
Knights already have it with lunge and engage, for example, though there are counters to it. Monks can jumpkick and blademasters can engage, so that's some control too. Then there're the movement hindering abilities, such as gravehands or tentacles. The importance of zone of control on that level is obvious from just how powerful evade is by allowing its user to bypass most (albeit not all) of its implementations.
I'm the kind of person who hates specific examples, and would much rather abstract everything as much as possible, so in my mind, this entire topic is just asking for a strategy-level zone of control. In Achaea, this means an organization having control over an area rather than individual players.
To that end, although it's entirely true that it's possible to hinder people and prevent their escape through active, tactical-level control, that doesn't address that it's completely possible that someone can waltz into a city, snipe at a bunch of people, and then suddenly be gone before anyone can react.
Is that a problem? I doubt everyone thinks it is, and I think it's really hard to discuss that level of game mechanic as being necessary or not, since we wouldn't be debating the comparatively objective argument of "what would be balanced" but the much more subjective argument of "what would be more fun."
I think that it might not be more fun overall, but rather that it would probably shift the advantage of control in the hands of the defenders. I think that this is a good thing, because raiders already have complete control over when they raid - to give them complete control over when they stop makes it incredibly obvious to me why so many people cry victim after repeated raiding. They have no real agency over the situation.
This might be a good direction overall, though, because a raider still has the choice of when to raid, so the loss of control is something they can easily calculate and consider. That said, it's not some grand loss of control - it's not like they're forced to stay in the city for a half hour of combat. At worst, if they want out, they can walk into a guard stack somewhere and turn curing off. So I think the effect would be subtle, and not being a raider myself, it's next to impossible for me to accurately judge if it would be enough or even desirable to begin with.
Of course, I'm not actually a raider, so basically everything I said comes with plenty of salt. I'm mostly just posting this in hopes of bringing this topic back on track before it gets closed~
Well if anything, a discussion purely related on prospective changes to ideas like this would merit its own separate discussion (ie. thread) but I wouldn't expect a lot of support, particularly on the forums (which is, demographically speaking, heavily dominated by the "raider" type player, and not the the roleplay-centric, begrudging defender type).
I personally wouldn't agree that it's necessary, and I think that "balanced" == "fun", in my book. Or at least, combat == fun, and imbalances ruin combat, which means no fun, etc.
This is the RPS element to Achaea, and it makes Achaea diverse. Also remember that jumping someone or skirmishing someone doesn't make it a duel. Such abilities are open and fair game in the former situations.