Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 6.2K All Categories
- 3.1K Everything Achaea
- 1.5K North of Thera
- 26 Archives of the Terraformer
- 257 The Matsuhama Arena
- 885 The Golden Dais of Creation
- 299 The Scarlattan Theatre
- 149 The Blank Canvas
- 2K Getting Help
- 412 General Questions
- 258 Quick Class Questions
- 1.3K Tech Support
- 313 Client Help
- 486 Curing Systems and Scripts
- 841 Off-Topic
- 255 The Wander Inn
- 586 The Universal Membrane
- 298 Class Discussions
- 298 Individual Class Sections
- 20 Alchemist
- 9 Apostate
- 30 Blademaster
- 9 Depthswalker
- 14 Druid
- 4 Infernal
- 20 Jester
- 19 Magi
- 34 Monk
- 11 Occultist
- 8 Paladin
- 7 Priest
- 29 Runewarden
- 18 Sentinel
- 26 Serpent
- 20 Shaman
- 9 Sylvan
Comments
While constant innovation and evolution is one of Achaea's major draws for me, it also means that if you take even a month or two off, you're suddenly way behind the curve. Technically, I never even "quit", but just skipping a few classlead Announce posts quickly removed any claim I had to being a relevant combatant. It can be demotivating to have to play catch-up every time your attention is pulled away from a game for a while.
On top of that, the amount of work required to be competitive is also climbing. The Law of Diminishing Returns is in play, and sometimes the time and effort required to excel exceeds the satisfaction of excelling. To use an easy example, affliction tracking wasn't a common thing until a year or two ago, but now classes are essentially designed assuming people have this capability, which means you now have to code or download these complex systems in order to be effective, which can be more work than most (especially old returnees) want to invest. There are some exceptions, Depthswalker in particular is designed with "server-side aff tracking" built in that lessens its technical dependencies, but it's much more common that classes require sophisticated suites of scripting to really achieve their potential and compete in a meaningful sense. There are a lot of things I know I "need" to implement to stay competitive, but just don't want to spend the hours of work for comparatively few hours of play.
Basically, the same things that make Achaea awesome also make competitive combat daunting when you can't devote large amounts of time to it, especially when you used to be good at it in the past and your pride resents being a newb again.
I mean, I completely understand not wanting to use AK, but I don't think it's super time consuming to do so if you do.
Not exactly plug and play for most.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
@Makarios can we grab this for serpent?
edit: I honestly only came back because I got a msg that @Aegis had returned. When I left, the combat had already gone STUPIDLY to the group mentality. Shallam was a shithole so I had moved to Eleusis finally, and gotten back into the Sentinels. Came back, Shallam is gone. Sentinels are gone. Combat is "gone (to group almost completely)" .. So literally the only reason I was here was for Aegis. I just wish I didn't take so long to catch up. Then smack in the middle, I got a new job (posting from it now HAH) and my time got cut again, but I still MAKE time which tells me I want to play. That is something I couldn't say a year ago.
On the same note, I've fight Jhui lately and it still equates to a meaningless fight for me. I enter it with nothing to lose. He kills me? So what, it's freaking Jhui. I entered expecting to lose and despite my best attempts, if I do, I'm not hurt or bothered. There are just so few in the relevance bracket for me that win or lose, most fights are meaningless. (Atalkez is another good fight for me. Never know how it will turn out)
It's why I tend to worry about what's reasonable for the "average" player in a lot of balance discussions, as opposed to focusing first on what the most skilled guys are doing/can do.
As I've said before, talismans became the decided factor for me in finally giving up playing with any great interest as I see them as extremely unbalanced, maybe not in isolation, but in the overall context of the game and it's player base.
If if I was a new player now and saw the likes of Cooper, Aegoth, Jhui etc fighting I wouldn't look up to them as something my character could be, I'd see a whole amount of time investment that I just wouldn't be able to comprehend doing, and quit. I guess this is also the downside of constant development and keeping currently players happy though, and it's not an easy thing for the admin to deal with.
got gud
I think the frequency you need to do anything that specific is exaggerated, to be honest. If you can get a good offense going, you can fight most people without much thought to defense. And most people even at the top tier aren't really doing those prio things.
-
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
I -really- don't want to come across too negative as I've really enjoyed combat in the past in Achaea, I just feel that while SS curing was a great way for people to get into the game without any coding, it leveled the playing field so much that these tiny little nuances are becoming more of a requirement just to fight at any decent level. In essence, SS curing has actually had the opposite effect and widened the gap between newbie and top tier, imho of course. I'll caveat that by also stating I've been out of the game for a while, so I could well be wrong.
Most of the complex stuff that people write 50 lines of code for can be handled with a simple alias, or just aren't necessary in 99% of fights.
You also don't need artefacts at all for any class. Artefacts do open more choices for classes, but the really aren't any classes you have to have X artie to be able to kill someone.
Svof actually has that built in too, and I think it works with SS curing.
Yeah it will take you a while to make each list, but that is part of combat that is fun - figuring out how to counter strats that killed you.
I'll also say I don't do any of that, and I can't remember the last time I used my priority swap aliases. I don't fight 1v1 that much, but it's not necessary in groups.
Ok, so I've been following this and have some points to raise here.
Firstly, regarding design decisions.
I don't assume the presence of aff trackers - quite the opposite. There are definitely some classes that lean towards that playstyle over others and give an unfortunate edge in that respect. Depthswalker was the attempt to make an aff class that didn't require an aff tracker (I think this was mostly a success in that respect, though this comes with its own set of issues). Basically, there's not really a silver bullet for that scenario. The main thing is just to try to keep the playingfield as level as possible between the people who do and the people who don't.
On pre applying: I will never consider this the primary way to survive a class - if it is, you should feel free to classlead it and we'll fix that. Its a curing trick that while valid, I don't consider it a mainstay of the meta. I'd treat that more like something for the really die hard players who want to enhance their play a bit more. Mechanics like that are fine, but they are 100% not intended to be manditory to combat any class.
Secondly, on the increased ceiling.
Curing priority switches and such: Farrah basically covered this. The number of priority switches you need is massively overstated - I can think of maybe four-five that I feel I would absolutely need to play at top tier one v one. Considerably less just to play at a decent level. At the end of the day there are some strategies that you just have to see once and conceptualise what happened to avoid for next time. Jester is pretty much still the gold standard for that, and I'd not say updating curing is usually the answer (though it certainly is sometimes). I'll not claim there are not situations where you can have priority changes to avoid things better, but I think you'll find there are almost always alternatives that don't involve touching curing.
On keeping up with combat changes: still pondering this. I do like the idea of a separate news section for these going forward so its easier to pick out changes quickly if you take a break.
AT the end of the day though, if you want to consistently be one of the top pkers in Achaea, it is hard. I'd personally not have that any other way.
edit: oh, also auto-SnB DSB. Grr.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
You'd have to tell me what setup you're talking about there. Class is also a factor in that - sometimes agnostic answers are inferior to class specific ones. Though for the record, if someone tries to nerf an instakill in a classlead, if there's not a detailed explanation of the problematic setup it'll probably be rejected. They're the most important aspect of a class so I'm generally of a mind its better to have slightly too strong ones than too weak ones.
Some recent examples might illustrate this better. One of these got rejected previously, the others got approved the round after. They basically say the same thing but one fails to address the specific case where problems arise.
Pummel is too strong because you can throw handaxe/pummel for guaranteed sensitivity on the hit, adding a guaranteed 33% additional damage to the pummel damage value. That's good, isolates the specific issue with why pummel was too hard to avoid.
Pummel does too much damage and needs to do less so people with under 4000 health can survive: that'll be rejected - it doesn't state the root cause of the problem. If the person submitting the classlead doesn't know the root cause, they don't know how to reasonably resolve said problem.
The unmodified component of pummels damage is too high, overly punishing people with lower health compared to people with higher health: that's good. Its similar to the bad one, but it states a specific cause for some people being overly impacted by pummel compared to others.
Etc.
Realistically, if you set up a good default prio list but no prio swaps whatsoever, you could run around beating all but maybe 5 active fighters. Then you just decide whether you're ok with that or whether you want to beat those 5 too. If you want to beat them, you start looking at your losses and figure out ways to beat them specifically. And adjust what you need to to beat who you want to beat.
Don't aim for a theoretical perfection because it's not necessary and literally no one is there. Most situations can be addressed in simpler ways than prio swaps though, like run, fly, touch shield, class active, battlecry/kai cripple, etc.
Also, my only "automatic" prio swap usually is for darkshade, and I used to do that manually too. I guess I have something for paradox too, but I'm not sure if it even works. You can get by with just aliases. Never been in a situation where I had to swap something in a .3 second window.