Deathsights For Soulcage/Transmogrification

Exelethril

• Retains use as extra starburst minus the exp loss
• Gives credit to killer

Y/N?

Ernam

I see no reason for either of them to exist at all, particularly after praying experience loss got deleted.

That said, if there is no death, I don't think their should be a deathsight.

Contracts, for example, wouldn't make any sense.  You're generating experience for the hirer without actually costing any from the target, or actually killing them, etc.  I can't see how an order would consider a Writ completed for a non-death either.

Perhaps changing these abilities so that you actually die, but get an "extra" starburst (reduced experience loss could be implemented), would be more in tune with what you (and every non-occultist/necromancer) would like to see.

This actually makes sense since the normal justification for these abilities' existence is "Good has Rezz, and Forestals have grove rezz".  However, both of these actually requiring dying before they can be used.

Melodie

Will trade soulcage for self-ress.

Any day of the week.

Ernam

Melodie said:

Will trade soulcage for self-ress.

Any day of the week.

I would honestly prefer this, simply because it credits people for kills.  Pretty much the same thing as the "extra starburst" suggestion, except that you get to walk around and choose when to use it.

I think as long as you had to "self rezz" in the room with your body, it'd be a good idea, and would be in line with the actual concept of a "soul cage".  Having a "free" gem of reincarnation would be a little much, I think.

Aerek

I think Soulcage and Transmogrify are two of the coolest factional abilities around, so I wouldn't want to get rid of them. I do think they should credit kills, though, even if there is no XP loss.

Cooper

The entire point of soulcage is for a 'free' (minus defenses) death.

Herenicus

Free from shaaaame!

Exelethril

Apostate/Infernal/Occultist are pretty strong classes with escape mechanisms. I don't see how granting deathsight credit will hinder their function as classes or why its a necessary perk in the first place.

Mishgul

Soulcage and Mog are cool as they are. They would not be worth using otherwise. I don't see why it would be fun for me to have 2 starbursts instead of 1 when that would just mean i would lose more xp when I get ganked. They aren't gamebreaking but I get the feeling someone is just mad at not having their ego stroked over getting someone killed.

I would definitely trade soulcage for another form of group sustain, like a rezz ability. But not starburst. I would never use that.

Ernam

Saying making cage work like starburst would never be useful is equivalent to saying that starburst is never useful, which is categorically untrue.

Shirszae

Things are fine as they are.

Tael

Mishgul said:

I would definitely trade soulcage for another form of group sustain, like a rezz ability. But not starburst. I would never use that.

The suggestion in the OP was to keep the lack of XP loss (i.e., not just a starburst) and just to give credit to the killer.

So it would still be very much worth using - it would just give kill credit without having to kill someone twice as many times as usual.

Jovolo

I don't see the issue with having some kind of unique transmogify/soulcage deathsight if it continues to function as it does currently.

Mishgul

From an outside point of view, what is the point of deathsight? I use it to know to grab soulspears or help people get rezzed, also to know when to join a fight (if multiple people on my team die, then no). 

I dont know what the benefit of seeing a soulcage would be.

Jovolo

It strokes the ego of people that want it known they got a kill. It wouldn't be mechanically different and would retain all of its current benefits. one could argue the lack of deathsight is a mechanical advantage itself due to not alerting the world they died and no longer have soulcage. I think the former point is already redundant, as the killer can just notify people in their org, and the latter can be avoided by making the deathsight generic rather than unique.

Other than that, I see no point.

Seftin

Purely ego-stroking and I want it. So annoying when you duel an Occie or necro and not get the deathsight as reward.

Mishgul

You could always ask them not to use it, and hope they don't. I don't consider soulcage to be the end of a fight personally (if i am fighting to the death), for some reason people do, I've always treated at as a mega vitality that they can only use once per 4 hours. 

I feel like this is more of a peoples perspective/mindset issue rather than a mechanical one.

Herenicus

Not giving a deathsight is a feature, not a bug. If denying a deathsight puts an enemy's teeth on edge, so much the better. One benefit of soulcage is that you can play a little bit more fast and loose with that soulcage up, because losing soulcage doesn't count as a death. Making the loss of soulcage count as a death in every way save for experience loss negates the value of the skill in that way.

Exelethril

Mishgul said:

From an outside point of view, what is the point of deathsight? I use it to know to grab soulspears or help people get rezzed, also to know when to join a fight (if multiple people on my team die, then no). 

I dont know what the benefit of seeing a soulcage would be.

The idea was to make things slightly fairer for someone involved in 1 vs 1 conflict(re: getting jumped in the UW/Annwyn) with a skilled/artied person of either of those three classes, spends a lot of time/resources fighting, only to have them get a free "reset" without any penalty besides the loss of defenses if they were to lose.

Personally, I don't care much about text-ego and I'm not interested in combat lately, it's just annoying to fight through hands/apathy/frenzy/occie affliction speed then later potentially die trying to kill them a second time while receiving nothing for the first kill.

Ernam

Exelethril said:
Personally, I don't care much about text-ego and I'm not interested in combat lately, it's just annoying to fight through hands/apathy/frenzy/occie affliction speed then later potentially die trying to kill them a second time while receiving nothing for the first kill.

I frequently find myself just not bothering to fight infernals/apostates because of soulcage, because unless I've seen them on deathsight in the last few hours, it's pretty much a guarantee that I'm about to invest a significant amount of time, willpower, devotion into a fight that's going to result in Soulcage/Blackwind/Guard stack, and an opponent that isn't going to be willing to participate in 1v1 combat or another 10 hours.

Occies, historically, are easier to kill (particularly if in UW/Annwyn where they can't fast-travel as easily), and tend to contain a much less skilled (generalization) list of players, so never really had an issue with Mog.  Not to sound dick-ish, but that's an honest assessment.
 

Arador

I have never treated a cage as a death. If I duel, it is to death, not to cage.

It is a unique class perk and an awesome ability just the way it is. Blackwind's escape ability in groups has been severely reduced, Soulspear is a lot more reasonable now and I agree on both those changes, but Soulcage is awesome the way it is and can not be paired with BW anymore in any case.

That being said I would trade it any day for the ability to rez allies.

Ernam

Arador said:

I have never treated a cage as a death. If I duel, it is to death, not to cage.

It is a unique class perk and an awesome ability just the way it is. Blackwind's escape ability in groups has been severely reduced, Soulspear is a lot more reasonable now and I agree on both those changes, but Soulcage is awesome the way it is and can not be paired with BW anymore in any case.

That being said I would trade it any day for the ability to rez allies.

Perhaps make it function like starburst with the tradeoff of being able to optionally cast it on third parties (respecting the cooldown).

As I mentioned before, it's of course expected that every apostate/infernal is going to cry bloody murder every time soulcage comes up on forums, because why wouldn't they.  It's an ability that can virtually guarantee that your character never dies, by simply refusing to fight unless you have soulcage up.   Having played Infernal for a particularly long time, I can definitely say that in my opinion, it's overly good in 1v1 PVP, because it can make contracts/bounties 100% impossible to complete by simply running to guards if your soulcage pops, and QQing/hiding until the cooldown elapses (unless you make some kind of honor-bound agreement to duel til actual death - a practice that continues to grow more and more rare).


Totally different idea:  Show soulcage/mog on Assess, so I can see at the beginning of a fight if it's worthless to bother continuing.

Tael

I don't really have any skin in the game here, but I don't think I understand most of the replies here either, even after everyone stopped arguing about something that wasn't in the proposal (for soulcage to gain xp loss).

Yes, soulcage is an awesome ability. It's super useful. Of course it is. If anything, that's exactly why I thought OP was proposing a deathsight for it. I don't really understand why so many people are responding with "soulcage is awesome".

It's not like the classes that have soulcage are defective - like they're not good in combat, but soulcage makes up for it a little bit. They're perfectly functional classes that, on top of being perfectly functional, get twice as many lives in a 1v1 as everyone else.

The flavour of it is pretty neat though and it's an interesting thing to have in the game, so Exelethril didn't even propose getting rid of it or getting rid of the huge perk of no-xp-loss deaths.

And it's all well and good that some people "don't consider a soulcaged death a victory", but that's sort of exactly the point - some people do want to consider it a victory and that doesn't seem totally unreasonable. Right now, it is sort of weird from a balance perspective that a few classes that are fairly well-balanced against all of their other classes in terms of offence and defence - that are more or less just as able to kill people and to avoid being killed as anyone else - regularly require 200% more killing to "win" against.

A deathsight honestly seems like a really reasonable solution for everyone. People who don't consider a caged death to be a victory can just ignore it. People who don't like having to kill someone twice can treat it as a victory condition.

I really don't understand why anyone is opposed to this.

Mishgul

If someone is gonna run on soulcage/mog, chances are they wouldn't bother fighting you at all if they didn't have those abilities.

Nim

If class X learned how to zap, the fact that some members are cool about not abusing it and the fact that some people would not fight you without it are not good defenses for class X being OP or not. I personally think it'd be cool if they were no-def-loss starbursts, where you lose some EXP but don't have to worry about being vulnerable immediately after, and can keep fighting as if you hadn't died if you want.

Tael

It's not about running, it's about having to fight someone twice if they don't run. Though the ability to run on cage brings up a good point...

And if you do fight them, get the kill, and then they run on soulcage, that's crappy. A deathsight would make it slightly less crappy. Sure, they wouldn't have fought you if they didn't have those abilities, but what does that have to do with it? You still managed to get what would be, in any other circumstance, a kill. The fact that they would have run away without the abilities is beside the point - no one is talking about taking away the abilities.

Though you bring up a good point: having the option to fight someone to what would normally be a loss and then just leave is even more questionable than having to kill someone twice as many times to win. Removing risk of XP loss is fine, and plenty powerful, but removing the risk of losing while still retaining the same ability to win a fight, is sort of silly.

Santar

Mishgul said:

If someone is gonna run on soulcage/mog, chances are they wouldn't bother fighting you at all if they didn't have those abilities.

So what you're saying is that because they have the ability, they get to engage in combat for free, and have a chance to kill you without putting theirself at any risk.

Kuy

I couldn't care less about a death sight.

However, should achieving a killing blow on a caged/mog'd person count as a kill in respect to contracts and bounties?

Thats the more prominent question, I'd reason.

Jhui

maybe things like bbt, behead (this already might), aurify, dsb, absolve, cath, and other finishers could just go through cage/mog and allow them to keep the defence, so it primarily becomes a group survival ability.

There's at least options to bypass it that way, even if finishers aren't the best method of killing

Ernam

Kuy said:

I couldn't care less about a death sight.

However, should achieving a killing blow on a caged/mog'd person count as a kill in respect to contracts and bounties?

Thats the more prominent question, I'd reason.

I find this to be a terrible concept.

Someone who soulcaged/mogged did not die.  Therefore, contracts should not be completed.

Targossas isn't paying a 15 credit bounty to strip a defense.

Orders are not hiring marks to see a deathsight.

Individuals hire for two reasons.  They want revenge or they want their experience back.  Neither are delivered through a hypothetical soulcage contract completion.

The entire point behind contracts, whether you like it or not, is actually killing someone, which means that they actually die (lose experience, etc).

Nim said:

If class X learned how to zap, the fact that some members are cool about not abusing it and the fact that some people would not fight you without it are not good defenses for class X being OP or not. I personally think it'd be cool if they were no-def-loss starbursts, where you lose some EXP but don't have to worry about being vulnerable immediately after, and can keep fighting as if you hadn't died if you want.

You just suggested making soulcage/mog into a much much much better version of angel sacrifice.  Essentially, it'd do exactly the same thing, but without requiring activation (and therefore making it completely unstoppable via sleep/truelock/etc).

Mishgul said:

If someone is gonna run on soulcage/mog, chances are they wouldn't bother fighting you at all if they didn't have those abilities.

You say this like 99% of people with access to these abilities don't do this.  Maybe in duels, this isn't the norm, but duels are a very marginal portion of combat that takes place in this game, and most people refuse to participate in them in general.

Tael

Jhui said:

maybe things like bbt, behead (this already might), aurify, dsb, absolve, cath, and other finishers could just go through cage/mog and allow them to keep the defence, so it primarily becomes a group survival ability.

There's at least options to bypass it that way, even if finishers aren't the best method of killing

I actually really, really like this idea.

Like you die so instantly that you don't have time to snatch your soul back or something. That would be a really nice way of balancing out the weird incentives the abilities create in 1v1.