Serpent, that STD

Okay, I've fought a few serpents. I won't lie most of them are Lolalts and it's easy to tell. Why you ask? They have the same illusions as the other lolalts. It's really really easy to go onto google and search for serpent combat. I know people don't mean to, but there are logs all over pastebin. I don't want to steal your shit, but look how easy it is. Serpent quite litereally is that STD that roams achaea, because you can catch it so damn easily, then use it however you want. But guess what, some other lolalt just got your illusions.

Thing is, does serpent really seem fair these days?
I understand in most forms of combat, there is a give and take sort of relatiosnship, between what you cure and what you don't. The thing is, serpent seems too slow to take advantage of any of these things.

i remember in the very very old days, serpent used to have asterisks in the paralysis line. Why was this? was it to give serpents a bit of an advantage over curing systems that slowly came out and nullified an affliction class that afflicts slower than herb balance?

I am a druid, so I play a limbbreak class. Even though freezepound is reaaaly tough, I still manage it. Thing is, my abilities synchronize well enough to allow me for my instakill. Serpent is one of the only classes I look at and see that a specific pattern of curing can actually stop it from working. That's why I call it an STD. It's simply a way for serpents to use other serpents illusions until they are fixed via ooc methods. This is why I find lolalts that are 10% my might, that can kill me like they are an iocun or something (also, I suck, that doesn't help things.)

With the declawing of serpents in almost every way, can we perhaps give them a buff? I dunno, the way they were supposed to stick paralysis seems like a good start. I'm seriously tired of seeing the best serpents be lolalts that only win because they can abuse my system with illusions. there is a masochistic side to me that actually enjoys loosing... when I die to a really good and creative prep/kill. Serpents.. well hell. You found one, you found them all. just like herpes

Replies the scorpion: "It's my nature..."
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Comments

  • edited December 2012
    Lol! This is funny.
    Personally, -I- wouldn't consider serpents the STD of Achaea, but I definitely agree that they could use a buff. >_> I say they aren't because, if you think about it, all of the classes have their "STD-like tendencies."

    I know that sometimes illusions can get a little extensive but... they are part of the main strategy that the serpent uses. A serpent that uses less, or no illusions, makes no sense at all. They need the illusions to actually be able to make things stick, to throw off your curing balance. It isn't "perhaps the trickiest class" for nothing. Just like any of the other classes, if you REALLY think about it, you have to make the right move at the precise moment it needs to be done.

    And the only way you can really get around a lock from a serpent is if you have a DARN GOOD SYSTEM. It has to be legitimately flawless. Although... I've noticed, especially lately, that more and more people are improving their systems. You remember Firey... yeah, well his system was so epic that he could sit there all day and not get a lock put on him. Not one.
  • Terra been abusing systems again.
  • Illusions in general have been violated roughly.
    I just received a bug report notice that says paralysis is supposed to stop the jump emote, providing that infallible check for paralysis illusions.
    I like my steak like I like my Magic cards: mythic rare.
  • edited December 2012
    Right now I get totally shutdown by people that keep fitness up (as in the defense, not just fitness on asthma) and leave weariness/impatience on a really high priority. I'm not nearly good enough to talk about serpent at really high tiers, but it does bug the hell out of me that my L2 dirk is such a huge factor when I fight. I have no idea what I'd do against fitness users (assuming I don't get something like a paralysis illusion to work) if I was unartied.

    My problem might be that I'm not breaking systems though, which is apparently the way to go. I'm trying to lock people within game mechanics and only using illusions that are really hard to test for (like clumsiness), and those are all low priority.

    (should add that I can always come up with a way to lock someone eventually, it's just that the sequence of events required sometimes seems totally impractical, either because of a) my skill level, b) my latency or c) it's really impractical)
  • edited December 2012

    Define "breaking systems." And "within game mechanics."

    There isn't a magic illusion of dots, dashes, and numbers that'll cause a system to crash. You illusion things from within the game to trick the system into curing improperly.

    And fitness keepup is impossible to beat. Though, it destroys their offense as well. The best you can really do is spam asthma endlessly until they just turn it off because they realize they want to attack, or go for ginseng stack/scytherus/camus, or go for sleeplock.

  • Illusions as a combat mechanic seem really bad for a game like Achaea, in my opinion. They leave serpents in a place where they have to try to break the other person's system rather than beat them with the tools at their disposal. As time goes on, systems will only get better and better at catching or testing for illusions. In my opinion, remove illusions from Syssin combat and give them some other mechanic to help stacking afflictions.
  • edited December 2012
    Terra said:

    Define "breaking systems." And "within game mechanics."

    There isn't a magic illusion of dots, dashes, and numbers that'll cause a system to crash. You illusion things from within the game to trick the system into curing improperly.

    And fitness keepup is impossible to beat. Though, it destroys their offense as well. The best you can really do is spam asthma endlessly until they just turn it off because they realize they want to attack, or go for ginseng stack/scytherus/camus, or go for sleeplock.

    I'd define breaking a system as illusioning a set of afflictions or whatnot that cause a system to flip out. Not in a logical way like 'If I illusion darkshade it has a high priority than clumsiness'. More like 'If I illusion darkshade right now SVO is going to flip out because of an oversight in the code'. The difference (to me) is that if I illusion darkshade and they cure it, I'm doing it so they think they have an affliction and cure it and a person would conceivably make the same mistake.

     When I see someone illusion a bunch of things that aren't actually going to lead to a lock but they make someone just stop curing (saw something to this effect with hypochondria yesterday, and it made 0 sense to me), that's what bugs me. Maybe it makes more sense if you can understand the coding behind systems, but I certainly don't.

    I can't think of a less awkward way to phrase it, but I'd rather be fighting a person and the priorities they chose than finding something wrong coding-wise with their system. A large part of this is that while it might work fantastically on SVO and Omni, I'm never going to have a copy of Sage or Oregano to dissect, so I genuinely feel like it's a crutch.

    I'd also much rather be sparring and taking curing priorities at face value than looking through Omnipave's scripts to see what is going to make it implode.

    And, at the fitness thing, that's what I had figured. I'm just finding it irritating because it looks like a lot of people have fitness keepup on as a default, so it's hard to jump knights with any degree of efficiency (and I have no silver fangs/artie bow).

    EDIT: Cue Terra calling me a noob.
  • I've always found system breaking illusions to be very annoying, but then again my system is so bad it doesn't really matter. For instance, if I get aeon, I just start trying to heartstop, even if the perosn killing me leaves the room and gives me ample time to recover. Shit just goes bonkers. /hates aeon.

    With the introduction of blademasters and alchemists, soon followed by the sylvan's vine attack (Afflictions or hinderances that last a specific time have no place in achaea) I would like to see a bit more of an actual mechanic behind a serpent's fighting. I want to see dualcretion. Secreting two venoms at once, biting at a much longer balance cost! Would help with that pesty rebounding I'm sure. I don't know honestly, but serpents need a buff that puts them in line with more mechanical based combat and less system oriented combat.

    As far as the fitness upkeep goes, I know I can upkeep fitness and never die to a serpent, while just hitting legs when I get the tiny sliver of balance back. After yawning for 15 minutes, and slowly biting limbs.. BAM! all four limbs gone, eat your face, freezepound, whatever. I don't loose preps. You loose all your steam as soon as I shield.

    Hate serpents, make them better then delete them plz
    Replies the scorpion: "It's my nature..."
  • Oh right.

    I should add that I actually enjoy serpent combat. I'd die of boredom as a knight.
  • I would personally just like to see something introduced to biting. Currently biting with Venom is considered useless compared to Doublstab. I really do wish something could be introduced there.
  • Give fitness a longer balance time and a mana upkeep and cost, might stop people keeping it up constantly.
  • @Asmodron It isn't useless.

    @Panpardus Yeah, that'd be cool.

    Coincidentally, @HighTierCombatants, would there be major repercussions to removing fitness as a defense and simply make it an active cure for asthma?
  • Tvistor said:
    @Asmodron It isn't useless.

    @Panpardus Yeah, that'd be cool.

    Coincidentally, @HighTierCombatants, would there be major repercussions to removing fitness as a defense and simply make it an active cure for asthma?
    @Tvistor only use is 3 venoms that are not secrete-able. Honestly i've been considering maybe attempting to find a fighting style focus around Biting since it has  less defenses against it, goes through shield, and people arent really using sileris these days.
  • What. I'm going to Skype you.
  • Bite is not useless. It could use perhaps a .1 second bal increase to keep it as viable against those rare few with the sub 10 ms ping, but even against those it has its uses.

    Serpent could use some minor tweaks, does not need a major rework.

    Certain AI checks should be changed to be unworkable, because they're too reliable (and just plain silly, like jump. I don't want to see this badass knight all in his black armour jumping up and down like an idiot while fighting the incompitent serpent novice dstabbing aconite aconite illusioning mind paralyse, but each to his own).

    Illusion argument is a complicated one. On one hand its incredibly hard to balance because systems are constantly advancing, but on the other hand its such a cool and diverse mechanic it would be a shame to replace it.

    Fitness solution is pretty simple. Fitness should not be a defence--it should retain its asthma cure functionality. Weariness also does not need to be focusable. (Yes, this is a minor buff to other class kelp stacks, but also makes riftlocking fitness users viable.)

  • edited December 2012
    If weariness was not focusable I would be the happiest person in the world.

    That does sound like a major debuff to knights and the like, though.
  • Its a buff to certain things knights can do, debuff to certain other things.

    Simply put though, knights aren't exactly struggling.

  • Go fight Jarrel when he gets serpent back and then say it's bad D-:

    Unartied it's certainly difficult and defeated easily. I just hope that in the future it gets fixed so that it's not so reliant on having a thoth's fang as it's already being handicapped by the evolution of systems.


  • I would gladly see fitness nerfed a bit so it is only a cure and weariness us not focusable. What I lose in defense, I would gain in offense since riftlocks would be possible on fitness classes.

    In turn though, Shrugging needs to be deleted.

  • Oh god. Shrugging.

    You're right... but it was so nice just... not having to care.

    And yeah, Jarrel is really good, but while Jarrel had to work for ages to be at his level, you can improve hugely defensively every time Vadi releases a new update. At least as a knight the fundamentals of prep stay the same (to my knowledge) and the only thing that changes is the actual execution of your vivisect/DSB based off however your victim is curing his limbs.

    The difference between killing someone on Vadi-M (lol RIP Vadi-M) and SVO is huuuuge as a serpent. At least Omni 3 doesn't come with much AI.
  • - Serpents do not afflict slower than herb balance. Even with a non-artie dirk you stab faster than every three seconds, which is the time it takes to eat two herbs. Granted, due to rebounding, hindering, shielding etc. the serpent can easily get slowed below herb balance again, but serpents aren't apostates and don't need to function the same way, leading to...

    - Illusions. They are great. They are the defining feature of serpent combat, which sets them apart from other affliction classes. Yes, there are certain issues with them. Many of them are ignored by modern systems, lifevision is annoying, some of them are borderline OOC or even obviously OOC. Many of them being ignored is an aspect of modern systems, but is no fundamental flaw that make illusions pointless or stupid. Some small tweaks here and there make a great difference, and there are still many illusions that are extremely useful, as long as you know how and when to use them. Like Terra I'm not quite sure what people say when they're talking about "breaking systems". The only systems I've truly seen "break" were ones that were obviously buggy, for which you can hardly blame the serpent. Clever illusions will of course hinder and confuse systems, but as long as they don't do so in a blatantly OOC fashion, that's no different than things many other classes do in order to mislead systems and their users. Combat in Achaea is always a curious mixture between an IC battle of characters and an OOC battle of players. If we only wanted the former, we'd duel in emotes alone.

    As for people "stealing illusions" or similar... I never understood what's the issue with that. I don't see it as any different from copying a monk's break setup or the method with which a sylvan tries to stick a heartseed. I've never tried to hide my illusions from anyone. They are nothing special by themselves, no utterly powerful killing codes, no secret lines to make Svo loop itself into oblivion - they are rather straightforward illusions that only become useful if they are used at the right time in the right fashion.

    - Fitness keepup. It's a huge annoyance, but not any more so than other forms of turtling up. If a dragon dragonheals every time he has more than two affliction and enmeshes otherwise, or a blademaster alternates between evading away, alleviating, and phoenixing, or a monk uses his entire kai to cripple and banish repeatedly, or an occultist spams hangedman, or a sentinel might, or a magi reflections... well, yes, they'll stay quite safe and cosy. Yes, fitness is a particular issue here since it's such a widespread ability and in contrast to some of those others moves it's more often implemented in curing systems, but in the end, it's all the same issue of extremely defensive fighting. This, however, is not only a serpent issue, but an issue that concerns all classes that need some level of momentum, and to a slightly lesser degree the non-momentum classes as well.
  • edited December 2012
    Arador said:
    I would gladly see fitness nerfed a bit so it is only a cure and weariness us not focusable. What I lose in defense, I would gain in offense since riftlocks would be possible on fitness classes. In turn though, Shrugging needs to be deleted.
    I'm all for shrugging to be deleted. To be fair though... if shrugging was totally deleted with nothing else for it, we'd have to completely delete fitness and all other curing/turtling/instant-hindering abilities to make things completely even. Not saying things have to be completely even, mind you (I'd be fine with serpents being an affliction glass cannon and more vulnerable to afflictions than almost anybody else) just that you can't quite compare a minor nerf to fitness to the deletion of shrugging :P
  • Tvistor said:
    I'd define breaking a system as illusioning a set of afflictions or whatnot that cause a system to flip out. Not in a logical way like 'If I illusion darkshade it has a high priority than clumsiness'. More like 'If I illusion darkshade right now SVO is going to flip out because of an oversight in the code'. The difference (to me) is that if I illusion darkshade and they cure it, I'm doing it so they think they have an affliction and cure it and a person would conceivably make the same mistake.

     When I see someone illusion a bunch of things that aren't actually going to lead to a lock but they make someone just stop curing (saw something to this effect with hypochondria yesterday, and it made 0 sense to me), that's what bugs me. Maybe it makes more sense if you can understand the coding behind systems, but I certainly don't.

    I can't think of a less awkward way to phrase it, but I'd rather be fighting a person and the priorities they chose than finding something wrong coding-wise with their system. A large part of this is that while it might work fantastically on SVO and Omni, I'm never going to have a copy of Sage or Oregano to dissect, so I genuinely feel like it's a crutch.

    I'd also much rather be sparring and taking curing priorities at face value than looking through Omnipave's scripts to see what is going to make it implode.

    And, at the fitness thing, that's what I had figured. I'm just finding it irritating because it looks like a lot of people have fitness keepup on as a default, so it's hard to jump knights with any degree of efficiency (and I have no silver fangs/artie bow).

    EDIT: Cue Terra calling me a noob.

    I think you should look at whatever illusions you see that "break" systems and ask why they break the system, honestly. I have -never- taken a widespread system, looked at the code itself, and somehow determined what to illusion based on the code. I found illusions by thinking logically about how someone would respond to the particular illusion. In some cases, this involves thinking about how the system will cure, yes, but that's true to some extent for every class, and it is really pretty much the same thing as thinking about how a person would cure, except you assume the person has time to do more complicated things (like jump to check for paralysis. Lol. Wat.).

  • That's how I'm working with my illusions at the moment and I'm progressing pretty quickly offensively.

    I recall someone (now dormant) informing me Deridius had quite a few ways to make Omni 2 stop working and a long time ago the person in this log assured me what happened there was reproducible.

    It looks like I mistakenly assumed that was the only way for serpents to fight at the high tier and wreck people very quickly. I'msuchanoob.
  • Via the system breakage:

    I use SVO for the most part, occasionally dabble in Omni or muck around with one I'm building myself.  I've fought Serpents who use blatant system messages that are meant to come from the game itself to utterly - up the former.  Not saying who they are or what the illusion was, but it happened.  They said they were gonna email Vadi about fixing it though, and I haven't really fought them sense.
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  • edited December 2012
    The popular clients ten or eleven years ago (zMUD, etc) could handle the asterisks in the paralysis line perfectly well, so it didn't provide much of an advantage. The only client that I used back then which was unable to handle them was the original Java client provided by IRE, and there were other, much larger issues - such as it not having variables, for a start - that prevented people building any form of automated curing system on it.

    In regards to illusions, I've never been convinced that they're worth keeping. We seem to end up in an endless cycle of systems developing ways to handle the current illusions in use and requests for changes to make illusions usable again, and at some point it's worth wondering if the time couldn't be better spent on doing away with them entirely and balancing classes around what they still have and, where necessary, giving them additional tools.

    Somebody (Tvistor perhaps?) mentioned fighting against the curing priorities of their opponent, and I suspect (though feel free to correct me if I'm totally wrong) that what they meant was finding an illusion for an affliction that will prevent their opponent from actually curing the afflictions they do have because it's a higher priority. I don't really see how that's particularly interesting, and there's a point where if you can do that on every doublestab or bite, serpent afflicting easily outpaces what somebody can reasonably be considered to be able to cure against.
  • Tvistor said:
    That's how I'm working with my illusions at the moment and I'm progressing pretty quickly offensively.

    I recall someone (now dormant) informing me Deridius had quite a few ways to make Omni 2 stop working and a long time ago the person in this log assured me what happened there was reproducible.

    It looks like I mistakenly assumed that was the only way for serpents to fight at the high tier and wreck people very quickly. I'msuchanoob.

    What happened in that log didn't seem to have anything to do with the illusions. The person was forced to apply restoration to their head, which the system didn't seem to acknowledge (probably because the command wasn't sent by the system), and that caused the system to spam mending over and over not recognizing that it was off salve balance (it probably also didn't have that failed apply line in it). It's a major bug in the system, but not really a special illusion trick. The head break illusion could have caused it, but if so that's probably just because the failed apply message for resto is different than the mending one maybe? And maybe that's the message that was missing from the system.
  • The thing is that high priority things (like asthma) are hard to illusion because they are so easily checked for (by smoking). That actually helps balance things out, or a serpent could just stack every non-kelp affliction under the stun and repeat the asthma illusion.

    That is to say, as things are right now, I could probably leave a ton of low priority (and thus low threat) afflictions on someone, but would have trouble keeping something like paralysis on someone. On the other hand, keeping lots of low priority afflictions like clumsiness can help me stick higher priority afflictions.

    There are also some other applications of course, like trying to mess with your enemy's sileris keepup, tricking them into applying salves or using their tree tattoo prematurely. I've found it to be the most interesting combat in the game. I haven't found SVO to be crippling me -- it just won't die in two doublestabs like the systems around when I first started playing. My biggest problem is smart curing (prioritizing weariness/impatience) plus intelligent shielding (because you can see the serpent snapping you) means at times I just read a log and have to spend ages working out how to get a lock, and the solutions I come to are usually a little bit contrived.
  • Naga please! Serp combat is easy. You prep people by truelocking them, then you finish your setup by biting with Sumac till they cry, then snap x40 and wait for the snake to hit with vouria.

    Alternatively, evade out, HT Naga follow me, gankstab while @Antidas snipes and steals your kill.

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