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Should we delete buckawns?
So, this idea has been nagging at me recently. So I finally got myself a buckawns amulet and it got me thinking: "Wow, 800cr to defeat a 100gp tattoo". I think the fact that buckawns is so expensive is incredibly unbalancing. Any momentum class pretty much needs to have one or won't be able to compete at even low combat tiers.
I know that artifacts are meant to give an advantage to players, but when I have to pay almost $300 USD to avoid a tattoo that anyone can get for an incredibly cheap price, I think that's slightly unfair. Now I don't play Achaea as competitively as others, so I'd like to hear some arguments from both sides about whether you think Achaea needs a web tattoo/buckawns amulet. My proposal is this:
Delete web tattoo.
Delete buckawns amulet/boots or greatly reduce the cost of a buckawns amulet/boots.
Make web bombs Jester-only use. - even without buckawns, slipperiness would still give the Jester an edge on writhing.
I know that artifacts are meant to give an advantage to players, but when I have to pay almost $300 USD to avoid a tattoo that anyone can get for an incredibly cheap price, I think that's slightly unfair. Now I don't play Achaea as competitively as others, so I'd like to hear some arguments from both sides about whether you think Achaea needs a web tattoo/buckawns amulet. My proposal is this:
Delete web tattoo.
Delete buckawns amulet/boots or greatly reduce the cost of a buckawns amulet/boots.
Make web bombs Jester-only use. - even without buckawns, slipperiness would still give the Jester an edge on writhing.
1
Comments
I guarantee you that 95% of people that buy a buckawn's, do so because they don't like being web-whored in group fights. I bought mine because of Dannyl.
Like you said, buckawns are practically a must-have artefact, not just for duels but for being ganked as well (2v1 with someone spamming touch web at you). I've traded in a lot of artefacts, but never my buckawns. I also got them enchanted with waterwalking, so I have permanent waterwalking boots, which is a nice side-perk.
Since they're so highly useful, and pretty much part of the "PvP starter pack" collection of artefacts, I don't see them going away. They're probably one of the most useful artefacts. $300 vs a 100gp tattoo, yeah, but people here pay $300 for a dirk that increases your dstab speed by a couple milliseconds.
They used to let you avoid some rather cheap tactics also, such as when monks could touch web + axekick you. No longer the case, so irrelevant, but does anyone remember Bleak's web+axk? Ugh.
If web tattoos were deleted, people wouldn't have a way to slow down the momentum of people who don't own buckawns (which is a large population of combatants, many mid-tiers don't own buckawns). Webbing someone is sometimes better than touching shield.
A significant price reduction would make buckawns spring up everywhere, and web tattoo would become pretty useless as everyone 20yo mid-tier combatant would own one.
So yeah, I see what you're saying about them being expensive compared to what they defend against, but most artefacts in Achaea are expensive for the small bonuses they give (a couple milliseconds here, 100 more damage there, etc).
Be cool if they made you writhe a little faster though, not quite as fast as slipperiness but maybe .5 faster or something.
I was surprised to learn that the equivalent artifact is MUCH less of a "must have" in Imperian. It seems that up until a year or two it was a "must have" however (and not surprisingly it looks like there was also a lot of complaining about groups bringing people to fights to spam web). I'm having some trouble digging up details, but trying out web over there it does feel like a very short writhe so they might have just made it quick to get out of.
That said, there are some other fairly powerful ways to entangle people there, so maybe things are actually "worse" overall with hindering. People may be choosing the other options because they're more powerful and can't be directly countered by an artifact at all (unless it received some of the buffs a couple people mention here). In fact, the best artifact for escaping an enemy group intent on pinning you down and killing you is even more expensive than buckawns, and still not anything like a sure bet. It is, however, much more versatile than buckawns, which only provide a benefit against the web tattoo, and do it in a very binary fashion that seems to boil down to: Have buckawns, laugh at web. Don't have buckawns, cry.
But we all want to be able to hinder people to some degree... especially if you're a class that has more prep, right? As well, people do want to have a decent chance of running successfully, especially when faced with superior numbers. At the very least, they don't want to spend the entire "fight" writhing until their inevitable death, so hopefully that's a goal admin keeps in mind.
Also, I think this might be the only IRE forum that still has the horrible combined feature of "no autosave" + "backspace = back"
Achaea has changed a lot over the years, and now people can feel much more comfortable entering into combat because of free systems like server side or wundersys. If you were to look at the minimum artifacts necessary to fight seriously, buckawns would definitely top the list (can't gain momentum while being webbed constantly). Do any of you agree that it's unfair that they introduced a tattoo that anyone can get, and then an almost $300 artifact to counteract it?
Final question: Do you really think it would hurt or imbalance anything to delete web tat and buckawns? What would those consequences be?
It obviously wouldn't imbalance anything, since if it would, buckawns would already be imbalanced. You're just asking that everyone essentially have buckawns for free.
I actually like the idea of buckawns speeding up writhe time for other types of entanglement or something, though (not impale obviously). The artifact seems silly to me, given how little it actually does.
Don't see a problem with web tattoo existing. It's not anymore hindering than any number of other things you can do to stop a momentum offense. The general way things are balanced is that if you're trying really hard to stay alive and not sacrificing any defense for offense, you'll live.
Honourable, knight eternal,
Darkly evil, cruel infernal.
Necromanctic to the core,Dance with death forever more.
Gg
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
If its only purpose is to generate revenue through the sale of buckawn's, that's a rather dubious justification to me.
→My Mudlet Scripts
Delete gem/veil along with Torc. :chuffed:
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
It will definitely remain that way as long as Achaean customers don't recognize when they're being squeezed too hard and push back. I won't say there haven't been glimmers of customers here putting their foot down when something is particularly out of hand (the talisman robes come to mind), but usually, with Achaea in particular, you don't see the sort of responses that say "we see that this is purely a mechanic to milk our wallets, and doesn't add anything to the game, and actually, we'd like you to change it". I think it might be happening in this thread though, which would be great. You'll be happier customers and you will probably still be providing plenty of revenue per capita.
This just isn't true, though. You don't need buckawns for high end combat. It was like the last artefact I bought and life is barely any different with it than it was without it. It's really just a "if you have extra money and want something else, buy this" artefact.
So when you get webbed either: (1) you can't be webbed/entagled again for x seconds or (2) each writhe out of web/entangle is significantly faster than the last, the diminishing returns disappearing after you haven't been webbed/entangled in x seconds.
That way (with either solution) it functions more like other things that stop momentum - like tree, it's a thing that someone can use to slow you down, but once they use it, you have a window of opportunity to exploit, they can't just keep you from ever building up enough momentum by spamming it whenever. And it would mean that they're still useful in raids because holding someone still with a single web is pretty huge, but that you need to actually execute on some strategy to do something to the webbed person rather than being able to keep them webbed/entangled ad infinitum.
Honestly, if either of those changes went in, I probably wouldn't even want my buckawns anymore. You could just delete the artefact - which would be good because, right now, I think I agree that it's one of the more silly artefacts and, while I think it's more of a legacy thing than an intentional price gouge, it certainly feels like one to the modern player. And it would be a nice buff to web tattoo too in a lot of cases - lowbies being able to participate in raids by webbing is a good thing and the situation right now where they can end up feeling useless because so many raiders have buckawns can be really frustrating.
Artefacts which just grant blanket immunity to a form of hindering are probably a bad thing to have in the game and hindering that necessitates said artefacts should probably be changed.
For 1v1 its not a huge deal, seems every class has some sort of transfix/entangle/curare loop attack these days anyways, so webbing people 1v1 isn't a huge thing anymore.
A lot of attacks that used to work on webbed people have been nerfed over the years to work on proned only (web/bite, web/axk, web/bbt, web/impale(?)). So IRE sort of made web tattoo even more useless and in turn, made buckawns feel more useless.
Anyway I did some googling to find Achaea moments where web or buckawns has been useful:
Santar gets 5v1 web-whored and daegger eliminated (2008 log):
Buckawns wouldn't actually have helped him too much in that log because of totem, but you can see how people will web the crap out of you in a gank, and halfway down the thread Santar says "I should buy buckawns".
That statement makes no sense in the current game.
But if you think about it in terms of that time period...if you died without a burst or gem of transmutation ready, you had to pray for salvation usually, unless you could somehow get a grove/soul rezz(usually not possible while raiding).
Praying meant massive loss of experience. Like maaaaasssssiive. So having burst/gem of transmutation ready at all times was basically mandatory for high-risk situations to cut down on the xp loss. I didn't even care about dying as long as I could either burst or self-rezz.
I mean, either this is the reason or this is just a bad game mechanic that happens to also generate revenue for IRE. But I feel like the latter answer is for sheep.
How could you possibly run into a wall as a shaman, based on web? You have vodun.
I can assure you that I have never run into someone who I couldn't kill because of web tattoo, and I didn't have a buckawn's amulet until recently. People who complain about not being able to kill due to web are the same people who complain about not being able to kill because of running, shield, etc. etc. Your particular class isn't stopped by shield, which probably makes web seem like a bigger deal, but it really isn't anymore than a number of other things people have to deal with. You have to somehow kill Jesters who can hangedman - do the same thing vs web!