Classlead Discussion Q2 2016

Eguzki

Dairon said:

Armali said:

It's everything, and it's quite a bit faster than 10s. Have seen it bite at 4s.

Damnnit. Quote bug.

Afaik its random between a certain time range (something like 4 -15 secs?). Don't quote me on that though

From what I've tested, it seems like every 4s the snake has a chance to bite. Not sure what the % chance is though. 

Aerek

Bleak said:

It used to be that unartied was the basis for class balance. Is that gone now?

It's not gone, I spend a lot of my time advocating for the little guy, but with a higher proportion of the population becoming highly artefacted via Iron Elite, promotions, retirement, or just playing for years, you definitely have to focus around what's possible and imbalanced at the top.

Trey

Jinsun said:

Farrah said:

Jinsun said:

They're comparable in that they are mostly factional. They just give you a different advantage which is part of the Flavor of group combat in Achaea. If every factional ability had the -same- advantage, it wouldn't really be an advantage.

Yes, but we still care about balancing the factional advantages. Bloodsworn is balanced by the fact that most attacks do %-based damage, as well as affliction kills. It provides a fairly minimal advantage, all things considered, most of the time.

Soulspear is gravehands + damage for ~6-7 second balance. What is truename balance? For double Aeon Tarot + two kai choke's worth of damage. With my solution 1, TN would still be a single Aeon tarot + a single kai choke (ish) of damage. That's still strong, in addition to all of the other factional advantages of Occultist (doppleganger chief among them, for tons of uses).

As I pointed out soulspear is any corpse, at all, ever. You can have like a million soulspears. You can just chuck them ad nauseum. Truename still requires a  specific corpse, was changed so you can't combo with others' truenames, and is capped at 3 a person. It's a lot of damned work to get 3 truenames on one person when everyone wants their corpse for random shit, and to be honest, it's not something I really even factor in to group fighting. Sure it's cool after we have a few, but it's not normally a game changer. If you could still do like 10 occies with unlimited truenames, sure, I'd agree. I just don't think it's as OP as you think it is. Agree to disagree.

Bolded is not factual.

Achimrst

Jinsun said:

I swear he AFK killed me so much with Gojirra. /s 

@Achimrst
@Achimrst
@Achimrst

http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/2469/godzilla
http://pastebin.com/6cuhZ0xK

POOF I HAVE APPEARED! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY LATE TO SAY!

(Project 9):Ernam says, "Btw jinsun can't hear me, and I don't want to talk shit if he's not even gonna here it."

(╯° _°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Leviticus

Aerek said:

Bleak said:

It used to be that unartied was the basis for class balance. Is that gone now?

It's not gone, I spend a lot of my time advocating for the little guy, but with a higher proportion of the population becoming highly artefacted via Iron Elite, promotions, retirement, or just playing for years, you definitely have to focus around what's possible and imbalanced at the top.

@Bleak , I feel the same way. It started well before Iron Elite, promotions, retirement, etc. I believe it really started when SVO was introduced. SVO is the greatest thing since slice bread it had/has a lot of positive effects on Achaea. But that being said it's downside is that a lot of people cried when someone killed them. Instead of figuring out why and how to prevent it, they called for nerfs to that class (myself included). 

That combined with the top tier combatants who understand the in's and out's of the game, curing systems and how to use that knowledge. They started to kill people faster and more efficiently. Which just added to the rage. I have 40,000 credits worth of artefacts in game. And people still say to me..."you do too much damage", "how can you prep so fast", "I can't believe I didn't kill you with x,z,y". Yeah I dished out some serious cash to have a better advantage in combat. Don't nerf my class into the ground (like how monk was before this last huge buff).  Let's look at some of these artefacts since they are becoming more prevalent in Achaea and start changing those!




(I am well aware that changing Artefacts and how they scale with certain class abilities is something that probably will never happen)

Antonius

If you think Monk has ever been "nerfed into the ground" I have no idea what game you're playing, but it's not the same one as everybody else.

Bleak

Take serpent then. I am an artied serp with lvl 3 dirk and way too much dex+health arties. I can lock people quite fast. After this classlead snakes will be nerfed because it adds too much pressure to my offense. 

At the moment an unartied serpent has almost no way of locking people. Illusions got nerfed, curing got better and now they lose the snake that afflicts with loki.  Unartied serpent is becoming pretty useless, while artied serpent is considered too strong. It's a shame cause serpent used to be the class that you could be good with if you did not had the cash to tritrans. Now you need a few hundred dollars to make it viable. 

Cynlael

You can still lock perfectly fine without an arti dirk, so long as you got 16 dex. Santar proved that much far too many times. Stop relying on automation to carry you, bruh.

Dunn

Yeah was gonna say. Unartied can lock fine. Maybe you can't do some of the cheesy locks that require a super fast transition on an herb eat, but totally doable. Also, lightwall. Dstab speed doesn't affect dark shade tick rate and they can still bury it just fine. 

Mizik

All artiest dirk affords is less stabs to outpace herb balance.

Which is great! 

Cooper

Cynlael said:

You can still lock perfectly fine without an arti dirk, so long as you got 16 dex. Santar proved that much far too many times. Stop relying on automation to carry you, bruh.

Santar had a Thoth's fang for 90% of the time he was serpent a handful of others (Wings, soa, veil, sip ring, and a few more).

Unartied is definitely possible but Santar isn't a good poster boy for unartied serpent.

Dunn

Krian wrecked for a good bit with non Artie to prove a point. 

Jovolo

That would've been a really long time ago, though. I remember he played when illusions like 'You may eat another plant or mineral again.' worked too, which made Serpent pretty easy. Not sure there's been any real significant unartied Serpent that has proved the class works well with Level 0 dirk in recent memory. Although the standard for combat now is artefacts so it's possibly a moot point.

Eguzki

Unartied can still provide some aff pressure even without the snake. Not sure what "altering function" means but if it leads to less RNG I'm all for it.

Cynlael

Cooper said:

Cynlael said:

You can still lock perfectly fine without an arti dirk, so long as you got 16 dex. Santar proved that much far too many times. Stop relying on automation to carry you, bruh.

Santar had a Thoth's fang for 90% of the time he was serpent a handful of others (Wings, soa, veil, sip ring, and a few more).

Unartied is definitely possible but Santar isn't a good poster boy for unartied serpent.

I'm saying there were numerous times he went without his arti dirk, to prove that fact. Which he did do. Many times, when people tried claiming it wasn't possible.

Farrah

"Possible" is going to depend on who you're fighting, though. I mean, if anyone thinks you can't kill -anyone- as unartied serpent, of course they're wrong. But if you're going to try killing someone who has fitness -and- passive curing and is maybe also moderately slow prepping, you're going to want all the speed you can get.

Dunn

We can test this. We have the technology. 

Bleak

The point is that a snake nerf makes sense for a lvl 3 dirk wielder, but not for an unartied serpent. I'm sure you can agree on that. 

Dunn

Right, but you packaged your point so shittily that I'm wondering if the post man had a bad day. 

I'm gonna try unartied serp this week and get some numbers regardless. 

Atalkez

From my experience with it, it's do-able on non-passive people that don't auto-active.

Any kind of smart prio/shield/active/passive management and you're just outclassed completely. This was 15 dex/forge, so hardly 'capped' but realistic for unartied serpents.

Exelethril

Dunn said:

Right, but you packaged your point so shittily that I'm wondering if the post man had a bad day. 

I'm gonna try unartied serp this week and get some numbers regardless. 

You're gonna get a 4th class?

Jovolo

With 16 dexterity, doublestab speed is ~2.2 seconds. Tree tattoo 15 seconds, herb balance 1.6, most passive cures are every 10 seconds, rebounding 8.5 seconds and flay is ~1.8. The numbers themselves are actually good for Serpents without an artie dirk, it's just that the problem is a relative one compared to how quick other classes have become and the only buff I can think of that benefited unartied Serpent is weariness becoming non-focusable. 

The deciding factor in my eyes, is how strong bite is right now. What speed is it sitting at, does anyone know? If it's a few milliseconds faster than herb balance, then I could see Serpent being strong enough without artefacts. Maybe 1.2 at 16 dex is a good sweet spot to be able to fit 2-3 bites inside of focus balance? 

Eguzki

Bite is roughly 1.6s with 16 dex

Dunn

Exelethril said:

Dunn said:

Right, but you packaged your point so shittily that I'm wondering if the post man had a bad day. 

I'm gonna try unartied serp this week and get some numbers regardless. 

You're gonna get a 4th class?

Lucrescent nuts, my friend.

Mizik

Bite is not competitive.

Farrah

1.2 second bites would be sweet. Probably OP though.

Alrena

Seragorn whispers something to a soulmaster.

A soulmaster seems to settle down.

You take a long drag of cinnabar off your pipe.

[AFF] AEON | Seragorn draws back with a knowing smirk and utters some alien word that vibrates deep within your bones. Your mind swirls and body convulses in excruciating pain as your very spirit cries out in agony.

1687h 3571m 23620e 25167wXX EE B D M [ae] (-3336h, 66.4%)

Welp, curing it is a bit hard there.  Not to mention enervate and some occie ent were draining my mana faster than I could sip, dervish knocking me down fast... not really sure how to counter that.

Armali

Turn off curing, wait 0.5s, send a smoke cinnabar. You'll have about 1-2s to think of something to do. I suggest sipping and using vigor -- that should tank the next one (hopefully), and the third one you can absorb with apathy.

I can't think of any occie ents that drain mana, though, that would be news to me.

Aylek

Alrena said:

Seragorn whispers something to a soulmaster.

A soulmaster seems to settle down.

You take a long drag of cinnabar off your pipe.

[AFF] AEON | Seragorn draws back with a knowing smirk and utters some alien word that vibrates deep within your bones. Your mind swirls and body convulses in excruciating pain as your very spirit cries out in agony.

1687h 3571m 23620e 25167wXX EE B D M [ae] (-3336h, 66.4%)

Welp, curing it is a bit hard there.  Not to mention enervate and some occie ent were draining my mana faster than I could sip, dervish knocking me down fast... not really sure how to counter that.

There's not really a counter to that from what I know. I think most Occies have responded with "Touch shield after" to avoid dying to follow up damage.

Testing enervate it seems to drain 30% (according to my target) mana a pop, at 2s balance which is crazy, need them below 40% mana to get the truename, so really 2-3 enervates depending on targets gives you a truename which is pretty crazy - 6s into cleanseaura/glaaki can give you a truename, if you spam enervate into cleanseaura/glaaki you can get 3 truenames pretty damn quick, then you could just throw some stars/warp+hound/truename most people.

Above may not be too accurate as I haven't had a chance to play around with it against variations of people but still.. seems a bit ridiculous. Add in hierophant/soulmaster you could probably do some nasty things with it.

Alrena

I don't know how much it was, but I dropped mana very fast. As a momentum class, it means I need to accept he gets truenames, or never gain any momentum at all (which is then nullified by RoF, it's own problem, and fool tarot/hangedman). It's far, far, FAR too easy to get for how strong it is. I know it's been classleaded, so I sincerely hope it's either a bit harder to get, or made to be less potent. With how strong Occie is defensively, this just seems over the top with how little pre-damage they need. You can't expect anyone to fight on mana prio against an (artied) occie who can warp and hound for 40% health (or something, idk but it's a lot) either.

I do see curing bugged out a bit, trying to sip speed and interrupting my commands because smoke balance was down, that sure didn't help. But I also don't think flying or shielding would have saved me. That said, Seragorn's not your average occie, and I made some mistakes, but it still seems far too strong for the effort required, considering how incredibly small the window of time to react is. Idk, maybe I need to fight occies more, but it just seems a bit too good.