Earrings

Amranu

Giving everyone access in any class to the most potent escape in the game for a measly 800 credits was a terrible decision by the administration that I am rather shocked has not been reversed. As earrings become more and more accessible by a larger percentage of the population it is significantly destroying the ability for people to face consequences through the mark system or bounties should they not wish to. This is the kind of thing that the admin has been working to avoid through the introduction of tools such as talon and the moving away of safe rooms, and yet earrings remain untouched despite them preventing any ganks 1v1 from working outside of perhaps one or two classes in the game with easy access to prone that does not disrupt their offense.

There are three reasons why I believe that earrings in their current state are simply too strong and not good for the game.

1) The counters in general require one to be very lucky on timing, and disrupt ones offense, meaning repeated uses of earrings alone even if they do not escape prevents any kill attempt by a given assassin.

2) Most of the time, earrings will return someone to their home city, meaning there is no way to chase, unlike most other escapes.

For point 1, the counters for earrings are either well-timed paralysis, or prone. There is no other ability as far as I am currently aware that prevents earrings from succeeding. Preventing earrings with paralysis requires that the person already be behind on herb balance, which isn't relevant when it is used whenever a would be killer enters the room. This leaves prone as the primary way to stop earring. But here, there are very few options for some classes that do not disrupt their offense. The fact that a class agnostic escape available to anyone isn't counterable in a class agnostic manner is perhaps the strongest rargument for why earrings need to be changed from their current state.

Now, one might argue that prone is available in a class agnostic manner. As far as I am aware, there are a few class agnostic ways to prone. These are:

i) tremor spark, which has twice the balance of earrings and a one minute cooldown, and is therefore not viable to stop earrings.

ii) shaman rattle, which also has a longer balance time than earrings and only randomly decides whether to prone the other person or yourself, and is therefore not a viable counter to earrings.

iii) hourglass tattoo, which is fully countered by a basic defence everyone keeps up.

If there are any others let me know, but otherwise as one can see the available counters to this artefact for any given class is not sufficient.

This leads me onto point 2. Often, it is argued that earrings are fine because there are several other escapes with similar mechanics. Now, earrings behave closest to pierce the veil which I would suggest is probably slightly stronger than earrings due to the ability to dragonheal prior to completion. While ptv does have these same issues, because it is only available to one class it is less of a problem than earrings, which are available at all times so long as the partner is in the realm. One can easily jump someone if they are out hunting in lesserform and not have to deal with pierce the veil, while it is not nearly as obvious if someone is out and about without an earring partner online. That being said, I think allowing an escape as potent as pierce the veil to anyone so long as someone else is online is not healthy for the game in general.

As for other escapes, in almost all cases there are class agnostic counters. Urn for instance cannot return one to a city and the urn mount can be killed leaving an urn owner without that escape for a full 24 hours. Furthermore, urn respects room hinder. As room hinder is available to virtually every class bar a few, this is in a much better place balance wise than earrings.

Wings is the most available escape, but is countered by jumping someone indoors or sticking vertigo, or by room hinder. Again, there are multiple class agnostic ways around wings and once again wings does not return you to a safe room, you can be chased.

Earrings as an artefact is intended to facilitate conflict, which it does well when someone is jumped and the partner(s) of that person use the earring to join the fight. Unfortunately in its current state it also allows people safety without having to escalate conflict which makes the game significantly worse off, and is something that is not beneficial for the game. The ability to avoid consequences for actions in almost all cases is something that needs to be avoided as the more players have this ability the less conflict we will see and the more stagnant the game will become. Let's get this changed, pleased.

Taryius

Make shyness prevent the use of earrings. Boom, irrelevant affliction is relevant again.

Gallida

Between earrings and urns, there's very little point in jumping anyone worth jumping on Sapience proper.

There's no reason that these things can't have effective counters that retain the utility of travel while stopping them as "get out of gank free" cards.

Gurklukke

...he didn't :(

Caelan

Delete earrings.. unless I finally get around to buying one. Then they are fine as is.

Shirszae

I will admit, on reading the title of the thread, I truly expected it to have been written by @Shecks as well

I kind of like the idea of shyness stopping them,but anyone who really wants to escape you is not going to wait for you to get around to sticking shyness, assuming your class actually can.

Which gets into the argument of how accessible and strong such a nerf would or should be.

Saonji

Just make it so you can't earring if you've attacked/been attacked in the past ~30 seconds.

Ezpz next.

Shecks

I suggest nerfing it as a combat artefact. Lots of ways to do this. I think 30s aggro is ok, but would also like to see it respect orb of confinement as earrings basically just replaced wings after confinement was added, basically making confinement ignorable for anyone willing to cash out on tons of earrings.

One suggestion I'd like to offer is to fix it but allow a free swap for an earring to wand of portals. IMO if you want to portal in and out of cities mid-combat, that's the way to do it in a balanced way, which encourages stragetic play and consequences for bad judgement instead. That's on top of all the class-based abilities and all of the other fast-travel arties that also work into/out of cities (multiple legend cards, knocker, urn, etc).

And before people get all defensive about losing their ability to essentially ignore the threat of involuntary 1v1 combat, orb of confinement, monolith sigils, and every form of movement hindrance in the game for $80, let's not forget that your enemies will lose that too. It really would be a win for everyone.

At the same time, one could easily argue that if hypothetically, earrings were actually good for the game (they're not), that gating it behind thousands of credits is horrible as it's a massive paywall for midbies to know that the singular best travel ability in the game is going to cost them a few paychecks, and until they buy them they will always be crippled by having to use all of the other methods which are all dramatically weaker.

Shecks

My personal favorite fix would be to make it work differently between global vs. area, as almost all of the problems are with global travel (even more specifically global travel into / out of cities).

For instance make it respect monolith for global travel but not within local area (like DW portal) - or better yet require full health / no affs for global travel only while leaving it the same for local area.

This solves all the major issues with it without impacting the people who use it out of combat almost at all, while still keeping it highly useful and valuable in-area which prevents people from feeling like their 10 earrings are better off being bound credits.

A different approach would be respecting movement hindrance but the above solution would be better for many reasons I think - as being able to ignore hindrance and such isn't such a big deal if you're still able to chase or respond with ranged/ LoS attacks.

The biggest problem by far is using earrings to reset yourself in the middle of raids (if you get targeted you just earring out and return 5 seconds later fully healed, while your allies do the same thing if they get targeted next), but the best solution fixes this as well as the 1v1 issue at the same time without making them useless compared to other artefacts.

Andraste

A major issue i see them as creating is using them as a surprise engagement tool. While some people may see this as a positive, being able to have an entire group of people enter on you if you get jumped by yourself trivializes a lot of smaller engagements and makes it too easy to turn the tides of a battle in seconds by just sending out a call to your earring friends. No one likes getting ganked by 5 people, but if you take less than that who knows how many earring friends will show up.

I don't know if there's an equivalent exchange artie for earrings because earrings are one of the few arties that are worth buying numbers of. There is no scaleable version of a wand of portals. All you need is one. I anticipate one reason why

I have a lot of earrings myself, but yea I agree they should be removed or made a non-combat tool. 30s seems too long though, maybe more like 10-15s if either party is attacked. However that makes them very difficult to predict when you may be able to use them, and so may trivialize their use altogether without prior planning.

I think having earrings respect room hinder -or- monolith might be a start. But that only addresses the 'escapee' side of the problem.

Shecks

@Andraste Your point is 100% valid here but at the same time, in that scenario, earrings counter earrings. If 5 people teleport onto you, you can just have 5 of your own friends teleport to you. It sucks and is horrible game design IMO but at least it's balanced in that capacity.

The issue with using them as escape is that there is nothing you can do to stop or counter someone instantly teleporting to a guard stack (or anywhere else really) as you can't chase them or prevent them from leaving - they're just gone and that's the end of the story. Pretty much the only counter to earrings is to not fight anyone that isn't in Annwyn or otherwise off continent, or to bring 2-3 friends with you to spam prone for you.

As far as the scaleability of having multiple earrings - IMO that again is just bad game design as it serves only as a paywall. In 2021 you can't "balance" something by making it cost RL money like you could 10-20 years ago. One of my main beefs with this is that the way earrings are balanced basically doesn't apply to the half of the playerbase that has grown up and have plenty of disposable income, while younger/newer players or just newbies are the only ones who actually have to face the balance implication of having earring being restricted to a single person.

@Adrik here (not to name and shame just as an example) is a perfect example because he, according to him, started his character with what, 12 earrings with vicarious sigils on them? How is a new player going to feel when he learns that he can essentially avoid all PVP death as long as he shills out $5000 on day 1 but he's 16 and works 10 hours a week at burger king so doesn't get to play on the same level as the 30-something year old with no qualms with dropping thousands of dollars on god-mode arties.

Also as far as being a "surprise" engagement tool, it really isn't. I've pretty much accepted that any time I touch Eryl, Mezghar, Farrah, etc - there are going to be 3 more Hashani arriving within a few seconds, so these people are basically off-limits from combat unless I am prepared to bring 5 people with me to attack a single Hashani every single time. Similarly if any of them attack me, I 100% always run (ironically, with my own earrings) because I can bet that it won't be a 1v1 for about as much time as it takes for someone to type "pt Shecks at me".

I'm not even bashing on them, because they have to worry about the same thing (as I rightly pointed out, I always earring away because I know they will use earrings to gank me). It's a stupid cycle all around, and needs to die.

Shecks

How is this OK? I had literally 10 people attacking me (exactly 10) with curing disabled and fast-traveled out by simply standing, and starting earring.

Eryl

Hey, hi. Let me clear something up for you, @Shecks, since you've decided to bring my name into this.

I've never ganked you with earrings, pal. When I gank you (and I've posted the logs to prove it), you die spectacularly by yourself. I have never once in my life typed"pt Shecks at me." I just kill you and move on, just like I do when I get jumped by someone. I die, they die, or one of us escapes. Do not sit here and try to exacerbate this claim that we do nothing but team. I do like to throw your decapitated head at newbies, though. That's fun.

Farrah has a rule that you don't earring to her and start attacking unless you ask, and there have been a couple nights where I've logged out for the day because of how upset it can make her. It makes perfect sense, too. No one wants to fight her 1v1 regardless of earrings, so if I start earringing to her, she'll get even fewer 1v1s.

Mezghar doesn't really seem to care, because he kills people he doesn't like regardless of who is or isn't attacking (but he does get yelled at a lot for it, and he's stopped doing it in the past few months).

You can totally have this conversation without throwing shade and literally lying about people to make a point. I suggest you start.

Shecks

Every single time I've seen a Hashani in Targossas, everyone shouts to NOT attack them because it will mean 2 free deaths towards a sanction the second that person walks into the room with the Hashani as we all know there is a crowd of people with their earring aliases typed in ready to hit enter. To suggest otherwise is the real lie, as this is how almost every Hashani raid I've seen since December has been initiated.

I only mentioned you as an example, and it certainly is not exclusive to you or your buddies. You're playing the game the way it is, and that's ostensibly fine whether or not you decide to own up to it in the forum arena. I'm suggesting that an artefact be tweaked, not that people develop a sense of sportsmanship, as one of those is realistically possible.

I will also continue to do what I consider "abuse" of earrings (defensively) as it's essentially required because of earrings. If my opponents are immune from death, then I'm not going to handicap myself by staying in a room with opponents who can kill me out of a one-sided sense of disgust for how easy it would be to leave. I own them and sincerely want them nerfed. In fact the only reason I don't buy 5 more is because I am hopeful they will be.

Accipiter

For the longest time I thought earrings were a summon like deliver. Would it working like that make any difference? It wouldn't really stop the escaping part but would negate the teaming aspect at least.

Shecks

@Accipter triggers exist, so no. It would take about 15 seconds to completely render that change unnoticeable.

Kresslack

Earrings and Urns are incredibly annoying. I offer this purely from the perspective of city enemies sneaking in to try to kill someone, people running to defend and smack them around a bit, only for them to Earring or Urn out to safety and try again a couple of minutes later.

Gurklukke

Just have city orb negate earrings like it does flight....

Outside of that, function as usual.

Reyson

What team of ten locks someone and forgets paralysis?

Sobriquet

FYI, city orb doesn't stop flying or wings anymore 100% of the time, its a chance like room hinder is.

Amranu

I think the teaming part can be alleviated somewhat by adding a room message when the earring partner of someone begins to travel them. Maybe tweak the delay a bit, but give people notice so they can start running or playing defensively. I think that part of the artefact is not so bad - unlike the escape part, it requires agency on the partner to implement and takes time to grab a team for that, meaning if you're jumping someone it's not always going to turn into a team gank as it requires additional coordination. That's just my 2 cents on that particular aspect though.

Shecks

It's definitely not exclusive to raids. In the CTF for example I can honestly say I virtually never walked. I just blinked between our 3-4 groups instantly for 2 hours straight, even during fights if I needed to cure up or sip a few times before coming right back fully healed.

The issue stands out more in cities because very reasonably people feel it shouldn't be so easy to blink in and out of enemy cities especially while being targeted and focused by a group of people, but the way it is now you're one smudged totem away from any room in a city that doesn't have guards in it being completely safe to travel out and travel back in freely, even with orb, piety, pinshot, on a monolith, while venomlocked. Proning isn't enough either, you have to repeatedly prone until they die. That's a dedicated extra person just proning you on top of whatever else is needed to secure the actual kill. Ya just spam earring until it works, and if you're ever not prone or truelocked for 1.5s you're out.

I'm saying this as a person who abuses this constantly in solo raids as well as teamfights. Between earring and knocker it's pretty much impossible to kill me without a dedicated person (or two) stopping earring (usually with impale). There's just no risk at all and it's silly, especially in a group where I can just come back 4 seconds later, or 10s later with a new starburst.

Archaeon

1v1 me irl @Eryl

Eryl

Tldr pls

Amranu

Tl;dr: Earrings are too powerful an escape to allow it to remain in their current state - they greatly reduce the ability for marks and bounties to be carried out against unwilling targets because they have no reasonable counters. This is going to continue to be a problem going forward and it will only get worse as they become more widespread.

Eryl

That was specifically for Archaeon. I appreciate your well thought out opinion, even though I don't think I agree!

Cooper

What do you guys think is going to happen when you jump someone 1v1 and earrings have been nerfed/balanced to not be as powerful as an escape?

You still have the following to deal with:

Wings

Walking out of the room (they are going to nerf scripted auto following eventually if it hasn't already been done)

Agith'maal

Yuthka

Urn

Raido/Refuge/Universe/Puppets

Worm warp

Trixy

Chenubis

Flagon

Hermit

Gare

Wand/walk out

And probably like 20 other things I forgot or don't know about. Not all of the listed methods are applicable in every situation and some are definitely more useful than others.

Once someone is out of your room and more than a couple rooms away the fight is essentially over. Removing earrings isn't going to change that reality.

I agree that earrings need changes - probably a longer wind-up time and an announcement on the other end when someone is starting their earring.

p.s. Pazuzu counters earrings

Amranu

I believe I discussed the "There's other escapes" argument in the original post. Since you either didn't read it or missed that part: Every single one of the escapes you just listed (barring gare) are easier to counter by more classes than earrings. In particular, at least half of them are countered by monolith, the rest respect room hinder. Many of them respect both, or have other conditions that prevent them working in addition to respecting monolith or room hinder. Furthermore the vast majority of the escapes listed above don't instantly make you safe - you can chase them. Earrings respects neither room hinder nor monolith, and generally returns you to a city and so you cannot chase. This is the main problem with earrings in their current state.

On a related note, I really tire of hearing this argument because it's just not a valid argument - it's just whataboutism, and it's not even a very good whataboutism because earrings are superior to every other escape barring gare for reasons I mentioned in the previous paragraph and in the original post.

On the tangent provided by the P.s, Pazuzu counters using earrings to enter a room quite obviously. I don't believe it counters using earrings to escape. I could be wrong though.

Shecks

It doesn't counter earrings to escape, it just prevents people from traveling in, and only to THAT room, and only for a minute, and only if you can actually get a Pazuzu (I've been trying since December unsuccessfully).

(If it is blocking people from LEAVING a room it is a bug, but afaik it does not)

Adrik

Why the shit am I getting @'d in a thread. Piss off @Shecks .

I have 11 earrings, all with vicarious sigils. All that I have bought, over time. That's 8800cr and 88 mayan crowns.

I avoid getting ganked and PKing by not doing anything except sitting in city until PK happens. Or I get bored.

If you had 10 people attacking you and one of them A ) Proned you, B ) Paralyzed you. They did something wrong.

Moreover, if you were 'locked' as you said.. just.. tree out. you can't earring if you're para'd. So they just kind of sucked on killing you.

Shecks

I never said or implied you did anything wrong - because you didn't, and I tagged you because it's rude to mention someone by name without tagging them. If you think it's an insult just to passively mention something you did (and continuously remind us of) then maybe you're projecting a bit eh?

And obviously in that log they did paralyze me, I just cured it right right before that screen grab, right before anorexia completed the lock.

Your implication here is that a truelock is a fair counter to earring, which I think is more or less a ridiculous stance.