Raiding Mechanics

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  • edited November 2017
    You’re wrong. An alchemist in safety spamming displace while their team melees is a massive threat. 

    Edit: Radiance falls into the same category. Anything that can be done offensively, shouldn’t be so easy to do from safety. I don’t consider these things in the same realm as brazier or defensive things like empress/deliver etc.




    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • Sure if they have a dude dedicated to mushrooming monoliths in the middle of a group fight, it might be an issue. At that point you trigger queue prepend drop monolith.

    Still, I agree that it's 0 risk and annoying, I just find radiance a whole lot more of an issue. Displace could probably do fine with just some tweaks--radiance would need pretty huge nerfs.
  • Think you’re over simplifying monolith destruction/upkeep, but okay.

    Telepathy as a whole is an issue.




    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • Telepathy and Radiance have their place as a counter to extreme entrenchment. If you pick a location to raid behind doors with adjacent Ret and Piety with vibes and rites, then telepathy annoyance and Radiance are really the only tools that the defenders have to interact with you at all. If your ability to entrench is reduced, then perhaps a commensurate downgrade to Radiance would be appropriate, but I don't think the other Telepathy abilities are really a problem. Sapience, Isolate, Throw, Strip, Glance, etc. can all be played around.
  • Yeah, you can't nerf either telepathy or displace without first addressing the entrenchment mechanics in some way.
  • edited November 2017
    If there was going to be an anti-earring or even anti-teleport ability for the city, I wouldn't suggest it be something that's up constantly, or up for free during sanction. That sort of thing would make a good Font power with appropriate telegraph and duration, or repurposing Ether Disrupt in Alchemy. That ability already has appropriate limitations, a channel to use, a set duration, an area-wide message and a cooldown when it ends, but the current effect of blocking comms into or out of the city is simply not enough of a hindrance to swing fights (and probably hurts the defenders more, since they're not staged as quickly.)
  • Really? You state how well Hashan dealt with it with DW's, yet you still got 4 or 5 kills with it. Including me in the middle of a group melee. Not only did the spam not let me see the radiance start, I didn't even realise you'd killed me until I checked death sight afterwards. Radiance is very strong when you can sit in a safe house and spam it on targets until something happens. 



    (Party): Mezghar says, "Stop."
  • I'm very much in the 'fuck radiance' camp.

    But I would like to see more ideas on how to incentivise defence which is kinda the point of this thread (sorry for being an off topic nazi)
         He is a coward who has to bring two friends as backup to jump people hunting.

  • Daeir said:
    Radiance isn't a threat to any coordinated group even if they are entrenched, especially with DW rift existing as it does.

    Hashan demonstrated this very keenly last night.

    It's annoying, but no less or more annoying than anything else telepathy can do at a distance. Specced telemonk can amnesia someone to the point where they drop a third of their actions (on average), or they can permanently occupy herb balance, or stun, blackout, hallucinated, reduced to 60% mana with no hope of ever recovering higher than it, etc.


    Radiance will actually kill you so you can't choose to ignore it, that's the difference. With minimal preparation (i.e. making sure you're on a monolith sigil), you can just sit through literally everything else.
  • Kiet said:
    Yeah, you can't nerf either telepathy or displace without first addressing the entrenchment mechanics in some way.
    Outside of possible font upgrades the entrenchment issue is a classlead issue, and potentially a revamp issue depending on how far you take it, because it is purely a problem of class mechanics, and as such the entrenchment issue shows up in pretty much every group fight. 

    It isn't a problem with raiding, it's a problem with vibes and totems and rites and runes and such.
  • I don't really think you're going to solve raid problems by making changes to combat balance.  They may help a little bit, but I think the core of the problem is one of participation and rewards more than it is of combat balancing.  I don't think if earrings were changed, if prop or ret didn't exist, if tanks had additional mechanics to charge up, or if raiding was actually an elaborate game of parcheesi, would the end result be any different.  Only people who enjoy it for its own sake currently have much interest in it, because it takes time away from the other things people enjoy in Achaea without giving any rewards back for participating in it (and indeed, sometimes taking even more away).
  • edited November 2017
    I kinda like the mechanics of entrenchment vs font/radiance/etc. When you remove those things, you're taking something unique away from raiding that makes it require different strategy than other fights.

    I'm all for more font powers though. I just don't like the idea of flat removing all the various tactics and advantages: radiance, displace, totem, vibes, etc. Some counters are already there and underused.

    The whole "ha, you thought we had 5 people but now we have 10!" is definitely my least favorite thing about any defense, whether in city, shrines, whatever. The offensive team generally just assumes every available defender will defend and plans accordingly. We don't want the defense to have to plan the same though because there will be far less opportunity for combat if two cities' CWHOs have to match up perfectly.

    Part of this is a player attitude problem. It wouldn't be a problem if people just didn't add fighters mid-raid. But I actually really like the idea of a long-lasting font-power that seals the city from having any member of the sanctioning city enter it other than those who have, say, been inside within the last ten minutes (to prevent abuse when someone leaves due to radiance, dies, etc.).

    I don't like the idea of stopping travel in and out entirely since I like area-wide telepathy, etc. and think people should be able to counter that. Not to mention things like having to grab a tank to begin with.
  • Building off of @alrena 'a ideas... 

    what if you mostly eliminated the control over advancement in the army and made it more based off of participation in organized raids? I.E.: You participate in a battlements raid, you gain advancement xp for the army. You could hold someone back for advancement if you needed to but not necessarily auto promote?

    Along with that, make it so that each raid requires certain ranks participating in the raid to initialize it. Need a general to commence, lieutenant to plan the siege tower, two sergeants to organize the grunts and 3 grunts (corporal private or recruit) to be fully prepared to begin. Three per sergeant. Could also make it so that higher ranks are worth more points to kill but also gain more points when they kill or are involved in the kill.

    Raiders would need to " opt in" for raid points to count as a way to prevent a bait and switch. 
  • While I agree that better incentives are probably the more important part, entrenchment can definitely be part of the problem. Certain tactics can make fighting feel a lot less fun for a less experienced groups especially, and while a lot of that's just inherent to having a less experienced group or leader, it can lead to not being able to -try- to fight back effectively, which isn't exactly fun for someone who's not a serious fighter.

    Often these mechanics just seem unnecessarily gated, at least to me. Don't have a bard, and in a group where not everyone can fly? Time to lose half of your group trying to get through three rooms of gravehands. Don't have an earring pair? You get to struggle through several rooms of ret against cata/los. Rewarding participation would definitely help a lot, but making that participation a bit more fun and accessible could also help the occasional raid suck a lot less for some people.
  • I agree with disarm tanking being a general city-wide ability!
     <3 
  • I'm not very active in raiding/defense, but here's an idea. 

    Once a sanction happens, randomly assign two types of rooms.

    The first type of room is where the sanction occurred. Let's call this room the HQ room. This room must be claimed and kept by the attackers in order to maintain the sanction. If this room is lost, the sanction ends after -- minutes. 

    In addition to the HQ room, have the system randomly assign 3-5 rooms in the city. The attackers must choose between one of the these rooms to blow the tank. It makes blowing tanks harder, but also introduces some strategy and movement. For example, the attackers could feint an attack at one room and actually have a tank going somewhere else. The number of rooms that are assigned can be flexible based on the number of defenders or attackers. 

    This opens up a couple strategies.
    1. They can attack the HQ room and get rid of the sanction
    2. They can burrow into some of the tank rooms to prevent tanks
    3. Lets smaller folks be involved by keeping watch and roaming around, keeping an eye out for movement.

    Also some additional benefits - # of rooms can be flexible based on # of attackers or defenders (dunno how you would count that.. maybe just citizens online?) With a larger scale than just fighting over ONE room, this encourages people of all sizes to get involved. 


  • Keorin said:
    While I agree that better incentives are probably the more important part, entrenchment can definitely be part of the problem. Certain tactics can make fighting feel a lot less fun for a less experienced groups especially, and while a lot of that's just inherent to having a less experienced group or leader, it can lead to not being able to -try- to fight back effectively, which isn't exactly fun for someone who's not a serious fighter.

    Often these mechanics just seem unnecessarily gated, at least to me. Don't have a bard, and in a group where not everyone can fly? Time to lose half of your group trying to get through three rooms of gravehands. Don't have an earring pair? You get to struggle through several rooms of ret against cata/los. Rewarding participation would definitely help a lot, but making that participation a bit more fun and accessible could also help the occasional raid suck a lot less for some people.
    In regards to this style of entrenching specifically, what's stopping you from using city font quake and prism tattoos to drop in on the raiders?  I've always wondered why that doesn't get used more.
  • Penwize said:
    Keorin said:
    While I agree that better incentives are probably the more important part, entrenchment can definitely be part of the problem. Certain tactics can make fighting feel a lot less fun for a less experienced groups especially, and while a lot of that's just inherent to having a less experienced group or leader, it can lead to not being able to -try- to fight back effectively, which isn't exactly fun for someone who's not a serious fighter.

    Often these mechanics just seem unnecessarily gated, at least to me. Don't have a bard, and in a group where not everyone can fly? Time to lose half of your group trying to get through three rooms of gravehands. Don't have an earring pair? You get to struggle through several rooms of ret against cata/los. Rewarding participation would definitely help a lot, but making that participation a bit more fun and accessible could also help the occasional raid suck a lot less for some people.
    In regards to this style of entrenching specifically, what's stopping you from using city font quake and prism tattoos to drop in on the raiders?  I've always wondered why that doesn't get used more.
    One of our go-to's is track/earring if no prop. Back-stab/earring if there is one. I think a lot of people tend not to look beyond Weaken when it comes to font powers, to be honest.
         He is a coward who has to bring two friends as backup to jump people hunting.

  • Can't always punish/prevent people from moving a single room for five seconds to deny a prism. And quake gets you what, one melee, at a three minute duration?
  • edited November 2017
    Xaden said:
    One of our go-to's is track/earring if no prop. Back-stab/earring if there is one. I think a lot of people tend not to look beyond Weaken when it comes to font powers, to be honest.
    Can attest to how good backstab+spam earring is. @Rangor loves using it regardless of if there's a totem person present :D

    You're basically eliminating one person from their team the second earring goes through.
  • So the answer is to give everybody earrings?
  • Armali said:
    So the answer is to give everybody earrings?

    The in class method (puppet/vodun travel) is actually better for the alpha strike off of a backstab in this case. Obviously, you can't buy that, so its rarer.

  • Makarios said:

    As for travel into cities and such, this is something we in fact had a fairly lengthy discussion on a few days ago. It is on the list of things to address to some degree when we make changes to raiding.
    While we're at it, if we could remove the ability to hide tanks, that'd be great. Would be easy to add in a radius around the tank, and have it only charge if there is someone unphased/astraled/etc within that radius or something like that. Hell, maybe even make veils disabled when within the vicinity of a tank, that way you can't just put a veiled serpent on the tank on the other side of the city and remove any possibility of spotting them, short of what we currently have to do - run through every single goddamn room in a city to make sure someone didn't decide to drop a tank there. /rant

  • New ability in vision, TANKSIGHT. Tells you if there is a tank and maybe it’s location.




    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • Didn't they add a city-wide emote for every tank placed? Obviously still has to be found but you know there will be one.
    image
    Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."

  • edited November 2017
    Unless I’ve missed every one from being dead, nope!




    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • Maybe that was just a suggested idea then, thought I'd seen a big 'CLANK' from a tank placed before, but it's been awhile.
    image
    Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."

  • Yeah as far as I know thats not a thing, but adding an emote to activating a tank sounds like a solid solution to me. Anything to keep me from having to look over the entire city every 5 minutes during a raid haha.

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