rapiers, weapons, et al.

Cooper

It makes Tirac's comment better when you look at his forum avatar after reading that (especially the pink-ness and hearts for eyes part).

Arador

@Kalvon has it right. Damage is a pain but it is the speed that makes it overpowered. The speed allows you to hold the person still while you wail on him with the damage. The speed allows you to get more hits in with sensitivity.

Speed is what takes the bump in damage from the stat packs and makes it overrun the bump in tankiness that came from said stat packs. But you only really notice it on very fast rapiers. Sadly, these have become quite common.

Weaponry does need an overhaul, I just hope it is not at the cost of nerfing Knights into the ground.

Kalvon

Idea: untargeted dsls do same damage as targeted ones, give knights a way not to be royally screwed by parrying, orb, guarding

A little off topic but just to show that knights can be addressed separately from weaponry.

Mizik

Yes, my argument is obviously valid, since my post only highlights changes that are live and the solutions to the problems created by these changes.

You talk about speed (and no, you weren't) where the problem is actually damage at these speeds. No one's getting getting locked by knights' amazing affliction speed, they're being blown away by the huge damage that comes with it. With the loss of Rajamala speed - and yes, most knights were Rajamala - knights are slower than ever. So no, that's not it.

Let's not kid ourselves. Higher health and sip penalty did not 'largely counteract' the 5-6 strength knights received, hence the current situation (and this thread).

Arador

While I agree that the damage has gone up more than tankiness did, especially with the way DSL damage scales to max health, the speed does make a difference. Remember, while we do not have Raja speed, herb balance was also slowed down quite a bit.

Mizik

Targeted DSLs receive a 25% damage cut, yeah?

So your recommendation is to cut damage by 25%.

Quite a leap.

Arador

Would that not screw over other weapons and make them even more useless than they are now? What about re-looking at physical damage cause by high speed weapons like rapiers. Make damage scale down faster when lower than 90 damage (chosen because it is the SP stat)

Tanris

I'm pretty sure herb bal was just set to old raja herb bal (with a level 1 herb penalty). Its not really that significant, and most people were fighting at that herb balance already. Most knights are slower now, you just have (for all practical purposes), old troll damage output at mhun speed across the board.

Kalvon

I have to say I agree with you. With the loss of raja speed, knights are slower than before. Rebounding was adjusted to tackle this and so were herb balances. Salve balance remained and infernals were given frenzy because vivisect relies on beating salve balance at the fundamental level.

Damage is high also partly because thurisaz or hugalaz was changed. I cannot remember what the exact change was save that it does more damage now. Loldamage became more viable for all the reasons you stated but limb break setups less so. Therein is my beef. Biased because that's primarily how I fight.

We can tweak numbers forever but personally I think its a bandaid. Ask yourselves how many tweaks were implemented over the years for dsl and compare that with other classes. It seems more intuitive for me to find an alternative. When the forest is burned down we can replant it with genetically modified trees that provide an easy exit route for lost kittens. We can scatter shorter trees interspersed amongst the others so there will be paths leading to ground. Or we can keep sending firemen in to rescue them.

Kalvon

Re: 25% and other numbers. Stop being pedantic. Numbers can always be adjusted.

Arador

Aye, but considering all these boost, other weapons were not made more viable at all. If you think about it, axes, swords scimitars, they all got the damage+speed boost that rapiers got, but rapiers are still considered the only option for damage. This is because once you start DSL'ing faster than herb balance speeds the effect of the increased damage is amplified.

I am not saying we should simply slow down rapiers, that would make limb break setups useless and Knights would not be able to stack afflictions. The whole Knight combat system favours speed. the problem is that we are seeing a spike in damage on the high end of the speed curve as well now. Previously you could afflict faster with Raja balance but your damage was not this insane at those speeds.

Salik

Knights got nerfed damage earlier, then they upped it to a normal level again. I would gladly give away 4 str for my old Raja balance. So down the strength for knights and give us the old raja balance

Mizik

Edit: @Arador You ninja'd your response.

Although, at this point, it sounds like you get the point.

Antonius

Arador said:

Previously you could afflict faster with Raja balance but your damage was not this insane at those speeds.

They would do less damage per doubleslash, but also doubleslash faster, meaning the loss in raw damage from the lower strength would be offset to some degree (possibly enough to result in an increase, rather than loss, of DPS). A pre-traits Rajamalan Knight with the rapiers that Salik currently has may have been slightly less insane (or may have been even worse). Either way suggesting that it wouldn't have still been grossly unbalanced is rather absurd.

The problem with the entire system is that we balance around assumptions of stats, often higher than most people actually have. In trying to bring the extremes under control you hurt people that were in a reasonably good position beforehand, requiring another set of changes (often much further down the line) to account for that. This isn't new, of course, it's the same thing that happened years and years ago as well, but at some point people need to look at it and realise that the system doesn't work.

Less variance really isn't a bad thing. Forging isn't interesting, weapon stats aren't an interesting mechanic, and a whole number of people being unable to realistically compete at a certain standard due to not having the really exceptional forged items doesn't improve the game at all. I'm not really fussed -how- we achieve it, but if we continue to balance around classes having certain standards of weaponry then they need to be just that: the standard.