Auto-following target calls is bad, somehow, I guess

Vender

all i think is that when i do my limb prep, i still have to deal with the rng from active + passive curing and so I'm fine with pure limb prep classes having to deal with the rng with (bard) balancing.

Armali

I've definitely fixed stuff like an alias not being queued when I thought it would be, or removing a condition to something or other. Usually it involves a little extra effort in running away, but it's doable. 

Sena

Now that I think about it, I actually wrote my own chat capture script from scratch during the climax of the Bal'met event, while also keeping up with the event and reading through the ungodly spam (the reason I urgently needed channels moved to a separate window).

Vender

i do that too armali but in 1v1 where other people are not relying on me. in a raid, when things go south, it is better to ween yourself off auto target so you can make better judgements. replying with how you could adapt your system to tricks and scenarios as they come is irrelevant. someone will find a new trick each time they find the old one doesn't work.

Atalkez

Hamstring stops balancing 100%, and pretty sure the shield prone strike for SnB is also 100% prone.

Armali

Atalkez said:

Hamstring stops balancing 100%, and pretty sure the shield prone strike for SnB is also 100% prone.

OH REALLY. *sings praises*

Vender

time to buy 500 cr vault artefact x.x

Calira

Farrah said:

I would say Occultist, shaman, or priest is the hardest to manual due to swiftcurse speed and uncertainty issues for occie/priest.

I'm not sure where the idea that Occultist is a difficult-to-play class comes from. Most of the affliction tools are wholly capable of smart-afflicting, while Instill is pretty much always used to give lethargy or clumsiness. Seems way easier to manage instill/tarot and a secondary smart class balance while simply tracking volume than to play a class where you must choose every affliction and your kill condition requires you to actually know what they have, on top of dealing with clumsiness, missing, counting limbs and parrying.

Aesgar

Melodie said:

Because automation takes out the human element, and humans are imperfect and make mistakes. That's part of the game for a lot of people - catching people off-guard, taking advantage of particular mistakes they made and pushing forward your own attacks to win.

When you take that out, it all becomes numbers and very, very boring for a vast majority of the playerbase. That is why Achaea does not want to become Aetolia.

I like Melodies points and they sort of tie into mine.

But yeah, I have never been a fan of auto-targeting but it seems to be pretty popular in Hashan. I suppose it just comes down to personal preference in the end.

For me, if I flawlessly call targets leading a raid then I give myself a pat on the back and it gives me a good feeling towards my execution. But every now and then, I call "Target Jhuui" and have to scramble to get the party back on track, but I enjoy that aspect - like Melodie pointed out it's a human mistake which is perfectly normal.

Overall, I quickly decided it wasn't worth arguing against auto-targeting with the vast majority of Hashan's non-com defenders using it, but it took some convincing for me to even change the way I call targets so people could auto-target off me. I feel it takes a little bit of the sport out of it. Just think of how you feel walking into Eleusis LoS but now in every melee! I'd also prefer the group behind me to be thinking on their feet, instead of leaning on their system. It just helps overall with situational awareness and bettering yourself as a group combatant when you are thinking for yourself. I had this issue with a former Hashani, who didn't like the way I announced enemies to PT because he wasn't setup to auto-enemy off it, and I told him to do it manually like I have done for my entire combat career and he ragequit the party and had an outburst later on. It wasn't pretty. That whole experience turned me off further to automation, but I doubt you're that stubborn so I'm not terribly worried!

Anedhel

Isn't Sentinel a class that's generally agreed to need some kind of scripting help to be able to use properly? A few Sentinels have told me so in conversations, but I have no idea if they're actually any good, so I'm not sure, but it's come up!

Also, about this whole thing... I personally think there's not much fun in a fire-and-forget offence and others don't, but that's okay. It's much, much worse to get an impression of someone being un-fun to hang out with/fight against, and that's definitely something I've picked up from this thread, s'sad. Forums are dangerous

Cynlael

You don't really need scripting for Sentinel, so much as 'efficient' aliases to resummon/enrage certain animals. But honestly it's not that hard to do. Just have 3 different wildcard captures; 1 for the venom, 1 for the resummon, 1 for the enrage.

Rangor

Cynlael said:

You don't really need scripting for Sentinel, so much as 'efficient' aliases to resummon/enrage certain animals. But honestly it's not that hard to do. Just have 3 different wildcard captures; 1 for the venom, 1 for the resummon, 1 for the enrage.

And 1 for the limb and 1 for the attack type.

Sentinel with only aliases is doable. But a nightmare to get right. Some tactics only require two animals, so those are alright. Petrify is a bit trickier, but can probably be done with like 6-7 aliases if the target cure sub-optimally.

I auto venoms and animals and manual attack type and limb.

Cynlael

Rangor said:

Cynlael said:

You don't really need scripting for Sentinel, so much as 'efficient' aliases to resummon/enrage certain animals. But honestly it's not that hard to do. Just have 3 different wildcard captures; 1 for the venom, 1 for the resummon, 1 for the enrage.

1 for the attack type.

Only if you're including all of the attacks into a single alias, which is just gonna make a nightmare of your window... Outside of handaxes (even then it still is, if you're a quick typer) it's easy enough to just change a limb variable in between balances (I usually just to trl/tll/tla etc). Three wildcards, prepended with say... D for doublestrike, H for handaxe etc.

Melodie

Aesgar said:

Melodie said:

Because automation takes out the human element, and humans are imperfect and make mistakes. That's part of the game for a lot of people - catching people off-guard, taking advantage of particular mistakes they made and pushing forward your own attacks to win.

When you take that out, it all becomes numbers and very, very boring for a vast majority of the playerbase. That is why Achaea does not want to become Aetolia.

I like Melodies points and they sort of tie into mine.

But yeah, I have never been a fan of auto-targeting but it seems to be pretty popular in Hashan. I suppose it just comes down to personal preference in the end.

For me, if I flawlessly call targets leading a raid then I give myself a pat on the back and it gives me a good feeling towards my execution. But every now and then, I call "Target Jhuui" and have to scramble to get the party back on track, but I enjoy that aspect - like Melodie pointed out it's a human mistake which is perfectly normal.

Overall, I quickly decided it wasn't worth arguing against auto-targeting with the vast majority of Hashan's non-com defenders using it, but it took some convincing for me to even change the way I call targets so people could auto-target off me. I feel it takes a little bit of the sport out of it. Just think of how you feel walking into Eleusis LoS but now in every melee! I'd also prefer the group behind me to be thinking on their feet, instead of leaning on their system. It just helps overall with situational awareness and bettering yourself as a group combatant when you are thinking for yourself. I had this issue with a former Hashani, who didn't like the way I announced enemies to PT because he wasn't setup to auto-enemy off it, and I told him to do it manually like I have done for my entire combat career and he ragequit the party and had an outburst later on. It wasn't pretty. That whole experience turned me off further to automation, but I doubt you're that stubborn so I'm not terribly worried!

I actually wasn't even aware this was such a prevalent a thing in Hashan too, and I was apart of their group fighting for a small while! That sucks.  I'm starting to see where the "everyone auto targets, we should too" thing is coming from - Eleusis and Hashan have the biggest pops right now, aside from the generally non-raidy Cyrene.

You guys don't need to do it! I understand Hashan just found its feet and you all wouldn't want to jeopardize that for much of anything, but I absolutely believe in you guys being able to do it without auto target. You just gotta want it. If the majority don't, then I guess that's their decision. It's just not one I can personally support (which I suppose at the end of the day doesn't mean shit, but there you go).

Mishgul

took a week or so of coding and trial and error to make an apostate offense that automated itself including switching from affs to mana to damage depending on situation. You can become pretty unbeatable but it was very boring. Made it very hard to appreciate combat afterwards. the only thing that equalised it iirc was hasar doing weird things (with stupidity because you cannot account for randomness) in ret, outside of people who killed me through overwhelming damage.

 Apostate offence is probably the most versatile thus easiest to do well with if you scripted the whole thing. Achaean combat has less unpredictability and than other things that have had machines play them so it was very easy to code for.

If you knew you were fighting a machine unpredictability would stall it. Like eating slower than usual. Or illusioning cures. A bog standard fight like the majority i have been in are easy to program. The only people on Achaea that would have been able to fight well against an AI without knowing they were fighting AI would be clueless high tier midbies who make erratic mistakes, super artied damage dealers, and Hasar (I guess people who can utilise randomness to win)

Yes programming to attack when i would predict someone would cure was easier than expected, by comparing my balances with my opponents. Checking anti illusion on people who illusioned eating stuff was tough but manageable after trial and error. Coding an offence was way easier than coding omnipave ever was. I tried playing auto offence and semi-manual defense for a while, using a manual input for curing queue with overrides (i won my second combat rankings with this style) and that was fun. Achaean combat has evolved a lot since then though and I havent caught up to tell anyone how things would play out today.

Achaean combat is not that complex. There is depth there but outside of loki/asp/etc and stupidity, everything else can easily be accounted for. Most of my fights might aswell be against shitty AI already anyway since everyone has one or two algorithms they tend to follow when fighting, with slight variations. Fights that required something other than persistence were few and far between and usually involved ret or some uber defensive person like Tirac or Xer.

Rom

People see all the possible attack combinations for sentinels and think it needs to be automated but nah. Use weaponry targeting (TARGET LEFT LEG) aliases instead of inline. Use individual envenom macros for basically anything that isn't curare, they slowed down sentinel offense so much that you pretty much only envenom curare like 90% of the time. Besides that just create genuinely good aliases that you will remember, like any class.

Cynlael's example was good, 'db' would be doublestrike enrage butterfly summon butterfly, 'dbw' doublestrike enrage butterfly summon wolf, etc.
Also Bard is much easier to manual now with queueing, at least in my experience.

Rangor

I am getting old. Cannot keep up without putting my knowledge into code. Handaxe speed so faaaast I can't keep up with animal/venom variety.

Aylek

I have been known to create aliases/triggers etc mid fight, not leaving but just touch shield and see what state I'm in when I come back, but then I find it easy enough to do and don't really care about dying if I got a new alias/trigger out of it.

Antonius

Rom said:

Also Bard is much easier to manual now with queueing, at least in my experience.

Yeah, Bard really isn't that bad to manual if you make use of both EQBAL and CLASS queues. If you're used to another dual affliction class like Serpent then it might take a bit to get used to the separate balances, and the way jab and voicecraft line up with your opponent's herb balance, but once you have that down there's not much to it if you create good, easy to use aliases which take advantage of queueing.

Jarrel

Arguing with someone who thinks using (basically) a nested if to govern your decisions is a good idea, is definitely pretty stupid. You'll end up with a very inflexible way of PvP that's never going to be very successful that is also going to be very open to abuse once people see what you're doing. Doing it and then advertising it, is a fail of epic proportions.

Ironically, locking people as serp as an example is all about setting people down a rigid path after assessing their decisions and capitalising on them, and when they get to the end of it, they find all the doors are closed. If you're going to limit yourself like that and help the rest of us out... more power to you.

Vender

achaea's combat being more simple rather than complex is the reason why manual can stand up to full auto (save for a few outliers, i.e. alchemist and apostate) but like how jester should be protected and preserved, so should those outliers in my opinion. if someone is fighting with full auto alchemist (like I do) i consider that person playing dirty and will resort to my own dirty (bring a friend).

Nazihk

Jester should be fired out of a cannon into the sun, not protected and preserved. The flavor is terrible and it absolutely doesn't fit. 

Antonius

Not really sure what's so complex about alchemist that you can't do it all manually...

Dunn

Pretty sure @Makarios feels the same way about jester. Probably killed him to put in my leads about it a couple of rounds ago... sorry bro 

Aegoth

I think Makarios is going to be gutting jester sometime in 2017, because it's a toxic class

Mishgul

now i am suddenly super interested in setting up a system to machine learn how to exploit the mechanics of achaea.

Farrah

Calira said:

Farrah said:

I would say Occultist, shaman, or priest is the hardest to manual due to swiftcurse speed and uncertainty issues for occie/priest.

I'm not sure where the idea that Occultist is a difficult-to-play class comes from. Most of the affliction tools are wholly capable of smart-afflicting, while Instill is pretty much always used to give lethargy or clumsiness. Seems way easier to manage instill/tarot and a secondary smart class balance while simply tracking volume than to play a class where you must choose every affliction and your kill condition requires you to actually know what they have, on top of dealing with clumsiness, missing, counting limbs and parrying.

Have never tried occie personally but I thought using it most efficiently required adjusting based on what the ent gives, which you don't know beforehand, so requires more reaction. I find the other classes easy because you can know their prios and plan ahead.

I'm not talking about 100% no scripting though. I took for granted that the person would use a limb tracker to count limbs. That is pretty standard.

As Mak said though, all of the classes are intended to be usable manual so which is easiest may vary from person to person based on what you're used to.

Farrah

Vender said:

time to buy 500 cr vault artefact x.x

Hamstring stops vault too.

Aegoth

Farrah said:

Vender said:

time to buy 500 cr vault artefact x.x

Hamstring stops vault too.

But it doesn't stop WoR. Eyyyyyy

Anedhel

A bit late, but... do you mean 'Achaean combat is simple' the same way chess is simple?

If you're fighting someone clever, it can be pretty fun, seeing the way they test you defensively and offensively.

I should disclaim: playing chess against a computer, even if it might be able to compute more outcomes and make better tactical decisions than another person (thus making it harder to beat), has never been as fun to me as playing chess with a human being, even if said human being kicks my ass a ton.

I can safely say that I can tuck away probably 9/10 fights vs. automated offences away in the 'super boring' folder, even if I do lose sometimes (and a lot against auto-alchemist).