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Comments
It does seem a little illogical that a class with super-fast paralysis, impale, and some of the best damage reduction out there also has access to easily stackable peace. Lots of damage reduction is fine (see:magi), and lots of offensive hindrance is fine too (see: blademaster, jester), but lots of both is kinda tough to contend with.
I'm not saying it's OP or anything, but I have definitely noticed over the years that apostates are one of the hardest classes to kill, and even if you do, then you have soulcage to deal with.
This is somewhat rhetorical.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
Fairly true, considering that Apostate is the evil clone of the Priest class.
I will say that, without a doubt, Apostate's damage mitigation is somewhat higher than priest's. I don't think anyone would suggest that it's impossible to BBT a priest to death, for example, but it's a well known fact that it's impossible in most cases against apostate. One could also argue that it's a bit "easier" to stick peace (without momentum loss) for apostates (although only slightly).
I mean, without using a single active ability, I've seen apostates GAIN health while taking consecutive level 2 BBTs. They also have Numb, just to spite the guy who figures out a way around this - and even if you Chuck Norris your way to victory, they just Soulcage, and you're right back to where ya started.
Disclaimer: While I'm of the opinion that necromancy damage mitigation (both infernals and apostates, for different reasons) is heavily OP, there are ways around this (basically, using non-damage strategies), and in Apostate's case, it is kindof balanced by the fact that their offense is relatively weak, particularly against damage classes (who all have fitness or equivalent lock avoidance).
Infernal's a bit silly in that fullplate + putrefaction + soulcage may as well just turn the health portion of your prompt into "∞h, " against physical damage classes, considering that they also have amazing offensive potential, and have the best counter in the game to the primary alternative to damage kills (venom/riftlocks): Fitness.
BTW why didn't fitness get a cooldown? Every other active cure did, and they are all (IMO) less powerful than Fitness.
Glad I'm not crazy. Not sure where the necromancy stuff came from. Honestly don't fight them enough to comment (which is odd).
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
I thought we were talking about shaman.
Apostate doesn't have peace (true peace), and hasn't for a very long time.
We're talking about shamans.
Move along.
Report #30
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
Something -everyone- can see, which would help handle group fights better as well.
Should note, in Imperian this also gets displayed to the person getting hit. (On the edge about keeping this, since it can simplify things too much, but might be nice in helping newer people) 'Your right arm trembles slightly under the blow.' etc.
This is a really cool idea, and despite running Manda, I'd love to see something like this implemented.
However, some constructive criticism, if you don't mind.
I think the playerbase would really benefit from getting away from the practice of counting hits. This has never been an accurate method for any class other than those who use single-weapon, stanceless prep abilities, such as thornrend, staffstrike, smite, etc. These abilities typically require either 4 or 5 hits, which makes it far easier to predict hits required to break, far easier to simply break a single limb to test this, and none of these abilities change or vary in any way during a fight.
However, for all classes that are limb-break centric, this method was (and is) highly unreliable, for several reasons.
While detailing the problem may not help solve it, I think it would be pretty strange to implement an in-game system that is inherently inaccurate. Showing general damage level on each hit is a pretty cool idea though, as might also be several tweaks to limbprobe (make it a passive, or make it balance-free if you have the Ability and the Trait, etc).
I personally don't understand why they can't just show straight %. Knight combat should be balanced around actual combat, not your OOC math skills, connections, or paypal account. I was so excited when I first saw the post for sawbones, which immediately ended when I saw how it worked. I mean, you can get 4 slices in a single "bracket" of limbprobe.
One could even see it make business sense to Achaea to just give up the limb damage numbers. If I can prep faster with the secondary weapon in my spec, I am more likely to buy myself a pair of them. But mixing an matching weapons based on guesses is pointless.
Honestly I just don't see the point of all the secrecy. If we were to test for ages and stumble upon the formula, no one would complain. The world would not end. In fact we are encouraged to share knowledge on the Wiki (apart from quests) so why keep this secret? Why make us run around doing thousands upon thousands of limb break tests for something that does not need to be secret.
A simple sheet saying how max health relates to limb health and then listing the attack names and weapons and the amount of limb damage they do. If something is changed, simply update the sheet. if something is currently changed it is a ton of retesting so just a lot of meaningless effort.
I for one would rather enjoy playing the game than walking around for days finding people who's legs I can break to test. That is not combat testing, that is meaningless busywork. Testing break strats, affliction stacks, that is combat testing.
What doesn't need to be visible so easily: how damaged the person's limbs currently are.
Keeping limb break formulas secret is just silly and annoying. Keeping current limb status of targets hidden is a meaningful element of combat.
I'm really not fond of dumbing down combat indefinitely. Illusions already took a severe hit - I wouldn't also want to lose all forms of trickery with false salve applications etc. I'd hate losing all forms of combat finesse in the name of accessibility.
→My Mudlet Scripts
"Balancing" around secrecy is silly. It is inherently doomed to eventual failure.
Illusions are a good example. Illusions weren't taken out to "dumb down" the game - they were barely "taken out" at all. Serverside curing may have been the nail in the coffin of a lot of illusions, but SVO and the like made the overwhelming majority of straightforward illusions completely unworkable. Learning to fight as a serpent was an extreme exercise in frustration - I tried to learn how to fight as a serpent right when widespread anti-illusion started getting good - even when people tried to teach you, you would try the illusion they were using last week only to discover that system-builders had since found a way to anti-illusion that away too. For a while, the only advice you could get from top-tier combatants was that you probably needed a Thoth's to fight anyone reliably. Even if they did know illusions that worked, they jealously guarded them to stave off their eventual loss to anti-illusion. It was nearly impossible to learn to fight. It may have been an interesting dynamic for top-tier people in an illusion/anti-illusion arms race, but it was absolutely not a healthy mechanic for the overwhelming majority of serpents who wanted to be involved with fighting in any way.
And the same thing is eventually going to happen to limb damage. There are already a number of people who know the formula (I know of at least four people). Your salve illusions already aren't going to work on them. The only reason secrecy is kinda-sorta working still is that Vadi et al haven't incorporated the formulas yet.
Maybe it's worth maintaining the current imbalance between people in the know and those out of the know as long as we can, but I don't think revealing the formula can reasonably be condemned as a "dumbing down" of the game.
I think the dynamism was probably worth the frustration when everyone had to estimate and could be mislead. I think it's less worthwhile when you can decide that you don't want to be frustrated for a few credits and suddenly have a huge advantage.
But I'm interested in hearing the other side to that too.
Most people who play limb breaking classes have a limb counter that can rather accurately tell them how many hits it takes to break a person's limbs. Whether this counter is based on a formula or simply on a database of collected values is irrelevant. If limbdamage trickery simply worked on those who didn't have a decent limbcounter, it would work on extremely few people.
The whole trickery isn't too dependent on knowledge of break points, but rather on other uncertain factors: pre-damage, limbs resetting mid-combat, or even things like max health values changing mid-combat. Elements such as these ensure that there's always a level of uncertainty left that is mostly independent of break points.
This is why I argued in favour of making the formulas public knowledge, yet retaining the other uncertainties, because I agree that obfuscation of mechanics isn't the way to go - but making some info hard to obtain mid-combat can very well be a quality.
Regarding illusions: I find it difficult to say what constitutes a "healthy mechanic", as you called it. Some enjoy that kind of challenge, some don't. Not everything that's potentially frustrating to a newcomer in combat is necessarily an "unhealthy mechanic". It may simply be an "advanced mechanic". The crucial point, to me, is that it was (and to a more limited degree still is) a way to be creative in combat slightly outside the boundaries of "intended mechanics". Sort of like giving you the ability to invent a spoon in a game of rock-paper-scissors and thus breaking up a predictable, stalematey situation.
→My Mudlet Scripts
The one thing that does come to mind is of for what're reason you wanted an intermediate limb damage value, or of course, if you were to lose one of your scs midcombat (pickpocket etc). just throwing those out there because I resolved to think of something, not because it's a realistic situation. Ironically, using multiple weapon damage to even out previous use of uneven damage weapons is a valid use, even if circular.
if you missed a slash, you could conceivably even out limb damage (preventing having to single slash) by using a combination of weapons that resulted in a good prep (can shave 2 seconds of prep time). It might sound like that's a fringe tactic, but Manda actually does do recursive "most efficient path" determination (after every hit, change in health, etc).
Seriosily though, just spinning my wheels, I realize that some of these are silly.
Also, travel has many useful things to it that are positive, such as getting back to a group in a raid. Getting back to a group when hunting, we shaman get lost a lot for no reason, and popping in unannounced to a party we weren't invited to while listening to our favorite allies.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
Say the count should be 5, and you illusion a salve after 4. Anyone can track resetting damage from their own attacks, so we'll ignore that. Likewise, if it's pre-damaged, then we actually don't want to change the estimated count - our count of 5 was still accurate. If they changed their health, the count actually was off, but they'd need to either be able to manipulate their max health quite and/or be sitting at a pretty unlikely point in max health (which will vary depending on the limb attacks being used) to actually create a difference in hits to break. The two remaining possibilities (probably the most likely) are that it was an illusion or that your limb counter was just off. And the latter becomes more and more likely depending on how complex your prep is (again, blademaster being the poster-boy with four different kinds of limb attacks, and the fastest prep achieved via use of an attack that deals two different amounts of limb damage). If you know that your count can't actually be off, that's a pretty large advantage and you can be significantly more sure it was an illusion.
Obviously those things should still be left in though. No need to make it too easy. I agree with you that it would be sad to see a system that removed all uncertainty completely and, as you point out, simply revealing the formula wouldn't do that. But knowing it definitely does hamper the effectiveness of the illusions - it certainly isn't totally irrelevant.
I don't find it particularly difficult to say that it was an unhealthy mechanic. Yes, some enjoy that kind of challenge. But it's not so much that "some don't" as it was that "most people can't participate at all". Having a very high skill ceiling is great. Having a very high skill floor is unhealthy. You shouldn't need to deal with an "advanced mechanic" to do basic fighting. And you had to - trying to fight a clueless newbie with svo without using illusions with a normal dirk was completely pointless. Even if you think requiring players to learn "advanced mechanics" to do basic combat is worthwhile, there was no one to learn from - maybe one or two people in the entire game were willing to risk their own secret illusions getting out by teaching one or two other people, but that's about it. And even those illusions eventually became pointless.
I absolutely miss the dynamism illusions added to combat too. Before a large subset of players had really sophisticated anti-illusion, they were great. They were one of the neatest things in the combat system. But IRE didn't get rid of them. They didn't dumb down combat. That happened naturally - anti-illusion killed them, not any change to the game. There's no clear way they could have been saved - maybe some of them could have, but a lot of the techniques used to perform anti-illusion are pretty essential to the game and couldn't really be removed.
Offence may be less creative than it was with illusions, but the point I was trying to make is that no one "dumbed down" anything by design - that happened on its own. Likewise, unless it gets constantly changed (and rapidly and seriously enough to continue to stymie people), the limb damage equation is going to get out there eventually. Regardless of whether giving it out is seen as "dumbing things down", it's going to happen whether IRE releases it themselves or not.
It would be absurd to suggest adding that ability in any other context than as a replacement for puppet travel. I had like 5 different goals in mind, so I was pretty proud of that particular idea, though. It is supposed to: be fun/interesting/etc, a valid transport ability, and address shaman/jesters lack of mobility (obviously that bit aimed more at Shaman. Core concept: get rid of Travel, but replace it with something that actually accomplishes what it is supposed to do without being griefs/abusable, while simultaneously helping to address some of the other weak/problem areas of the class.
I'm sure that it'd need some refinement, but I think it's a cool place to start. Could be fine as is too, hard to tell without some testing.
The classlead of mention:
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/aac3bb59
My god... @Makarios please let me edit that classlead, solely to fix the dozens of ridiculous grammar errors. I was typing furiously trying to get it in before leaving for work.
1. Regarding the various uncertainties of limb breaking: I won't go into discussing which "uncertainties" are relevant to which degree under which circumstances, as this would be beyond the scope of this discussion, but suffice to say that they exist, while often not being very reliable. People who are good at fighting as a limb combat class will pay attention to apply lines and similar, for a variety of reasons and whenever such attention is paid, there is (even if sometimes only limited) room for confusion.
2. I'd say that it entirely wrong that illusions were the cause of a "high skill floor". You didn't need illusions to do basic fighting. 90% of all serpent fighters had no effective illusions whatsoever, yet still got kills. Maybe not amazing amounts of kills, but that's simply due to the difference between affliction and damage classes: the ability to take damage scales with level, curing ability does not. A newbie can have as great a curing system as the most seasoned fighter. I'm sure newbies of other affliction classes weren't much more successful in 1v1 combat than serpent newbies.
Plus, well, serpents had always one of the easiest classes for group combat.
3. Did illusions phase out due to ever advancing curing systems or by design? Well, nobody is going to deny that battling the steady progress of curing systems was a stressful job. More and more clever illusions became impossible over time. At times this was an enjoyable challenge, at times it was a pure annoyance. But this wasn't only due to the curing systems getting cleverer, but also because changes in the game mechanics (long before server-side curing) gave them the means to do so: e.g. more and more info being made available through gmcp. Achaea could have taken measures to prevent certain anti-illusion tricks, but chose to "give in".
Mind you, I'm not blaming the admins for developing the game in such a way that lead to this. All these changes, from gmcp to server side curing, are very positive additions to Achaea. All I'm saying is that it was nontheless a conscious choice to allow illusions to become less meaningful in favour of adding more basic convenience to the game.
→My Mudlet Scripts
I still harbor some negative feelings about the simplification of the game both as a serpent and against them, as well as dragon, which people seem to easily forget got screwed harder than Serpent did, and got nothing for it.
Serpent, on the other hand, has received a string of consecutive buffs that are easily the biggest it has ever seen. Nobody with any knowledge of the class would argue that it is more powerful now than it has ever been.
I'd also like to remind people that illusions still exist, and there are still hundreds of useful, powerful illusions that can be used in and out of combat.
There used to be three main categories of illusions ( a simplification for discussion's sake ): Two still exist.
1) Illusions that are meant to mislead curing systems / defense tracking. (note: still actually works against client curing, which many people still use).
2) Illusions that take advantage of non-curing system triggers, or that trick client-side "oversight" systems that run serverside (SVO/wundersys), that can and do still work to disrupt active curing and other uses.
3) Afflictions that are purely meta/psychological, which are in no way even close to useless or nerfed in any way (and if anything are made even more believable by this misconception that illusions are somehow "gone").
examples:
You're getting beat down/jumped - illusion a portal incoming, or Achilles walking in and starting a cleave, or Osek walking in and spinning/embeding retardation (works every time). Illusioning tumble, illusioned snipes, illusioned meteors, illusioned cures, defenses, attacks (while paralyzed, for example), and so on. All of these things can easily fool opponents into doing things that they would never have done otherwise, and there is a limitless amount of better examples out there that I rarely if ever seen used.
I still get a warm fuzzy when [occultist I used to beef with] had me dead to rights, and was about to enlighten me, and a simple illusion of Aelios arriving from the aether (on clouds) caused him to pathfinder back to Ashtan. No 0.6 second ability that costs 50 mana and can be used twice after every attack is "useless", but that word seems to be thrown around casually these days.