Which skills need buffs?

Manjusri

I've been reading on the forums about the different skills and the state of combat in Lusternia.  There seems to be a general consensus that some skills in certain classes are relatively weak (eg Astrology) and are infrequently chosen for this reason (bards lacking tarot, etc).  What skills need to be massively buffed to be competitive and which ones need to to be tweaked to be more in balance (illusions)?  Is it possible to rank the classes and their skills in terms of combat effectiveness?  For example from what I have read for Researchers in terms of the tertiary skill tarot > healing > astrology (because it is too random).  Perhaps I am being a bit direct and may offend some people and that is not my intention, but since the combat overhaul is happening right now anyhow it would seem wise to fix problems with particular skills/classes right now rather than to sugarcoat things and leave some classes inherently seen as weak compared to others which would cause problems with retention down the road if people pour a lot of effort into something that doesn't pay off for them and get frustrated.

Shaddus

It's really hard to rank skills like that, because some people are better than others at using certain skillsets. For instance, I prefer tarot as a bard, as I don't know very many decent illusions, and colourmaelstrom/maze are too expensive to simply rely on all the time.

There's also the issue that some specs do better with certain terts when it comes to synergy. For instance, Nihilists do really well with hexes, while illuminati tend to mesh slightly better with tarot.

Xenthos

And astrology isn't really that badly off.  It can be quite powerful / effective when used well.  The problem with it is that it changes so much that it is not actually reliable and is a lot of additional work to figure out what effects your skills will have at any given moment.  You can't just do the same thing in every single fight and expect the same outcome.

Ushaara

First off, I would say that Researchers are a strong class, no matter what tertiary you pick. So if you're thinking you picked a weaker class because their guild population may be low, don't.

Healer researcher gives you great survivability, though does somewhat limit your methods of killing someone to landing a timequake or a damage kill, and so mileage may vary depending on your target.

Tarot researcher sacrifices some survivability for more utility skills, but also gives you the Soulless tarot timed instakill option. Empress is also a super ability, and if you have the awareness to save people who get picked off/separated, you will be a huge asset to your group.

Astrologist researcher as has been said has a bit more variability, but researcher astrologists are not particularly reliant on astrology's afflicting capability (having a lot of passive afflicting already), and its 'quasi-instakill' meteor can work very well with particular Researcher abilities, irrespective of whatever state the zodiac is. I did a lot of sparring with a previous Institute astrologer champion, and though he only had the three kill options of timequake, meteor, or damage, he made it seem like he had a lot more through creative use of his abilities, and was an absolute pain to fight against. It may not provide the same group utility or survivability of the other tertiaries, but it can still be a great choice for combatant researchers.

About the only place where Researchers do lack (Hallifax in general lacks) is in a 'beckon' type ability for group separation from a neighbouring room. Technically, they have the ability with convoke, but with its restrictions of requiring resonance with the target and summon restrictions, it is limited it to a single, pre-prepped target and a poor ability in practice.

Where things go with the overhaul for Researchers? Who knows, but I would imagine they'll still emerge as one of the stronger classes.

Belibi

I don't see many/any -woods aside from myself. And even fewer -chems. I don't think this is happenstance, but I also don't know enough about combat to say what's wrong with em.

Cyndarin

Astrology is generally bad (I say generally because it varies so much, and there are one off days where skull stelliums are amazing) unless you have a reliable way to stick someone in a room for 8ish seconds. The thing with Astrology is that the guilds that can use it effectively are almost universally better off picking a different tertiary. SDs are better with hexes, Celestines are better with Tarot, etc.For tarot users, soulless takes just as long as meteor and there are some people that can just outright tank a meteor.

 

Astrology also has an obscenely long and expensive kill set up. The willpower cost means you get 3 attempts max on the average day. If the spheres are off and you can only stack 4 negatives, you won't kill anyone.

 

The DMP buffs now scale so they mean a lot less than they did before. They can also get extremely expensive to stack on other people. There are many days when you get no spheres worth using. Magic dmp, extra dex, etc.

 

I could kill people with astrology, but it was more for the novelty than actual effeciency. I would say Astrology could use an overhaul. It's as old as Lusternia with ver few updates. Reports to update it have been widely rejected for questionable reasons (like the non existant astro nihilists crapping a brick over removing scabies), the previous nerfs (like double aeon) are now dubious considering the aeon abilities of Hallifax. Meteorswam is just bad and never used.

 

 

Beyond astrology, the skills that need some love that immediately come to mind are Moon, Crow, Ecology, both Wood skillsets, Wicca. Sentinels could use something, but I'm not sure what. I think the Chems are fine and we should just remove demesnes.

Kalnid

When does Astrology get access to more than four negatives? You get an opposite, two quincunx and one square. The other square is always in opposition to the first and can't be stacked. The only ways I could see a fifth would be either waiting for the sun to transition on the 15th or relying on a negative papaxi to hit sun for a semi or sextile, which has pretty terrible odds.

Cyndarin

What the hell did you just say to me?

Manjusri

Ushaara said:

First off, I would say that Researchers are a strong class, no matter what tertiary you pick. So if you're thinking you picked a weaker class because their guild population may be low, don't.

No this is definitely not the case at all.  I really love researchers.  The concept/rp the races that synergize with them and the type of combat they have (from the descriptions I have read/seen so far).  Researchers seem great!  However, I do think muds in general need to be more... user friendly(?) to attract more players and part of what would be disappointing (in any game) is if you start playing a character enjoy it but realize later that it is so imbalanced in the game world that it impacts your enjoyment of the game.  I don't think the classes in general seem to be thought of that way, but from the impressions I get as a new person to lusternia that maybe sees something that a person who has been playing for years might have gotten used to it would seem that there are 2-3 classes and maybe 2-3 skills that are (or nearly are) in that type of category.  I mean isn't that part of the reason the overhaul is happening in the first place?

edit: sorry about formatting

also @Celina makes some pretty straightforward points.  Does anyone flat out disagree with her?  I find that there are usually some people who are more point blank in terms of their opinions and often they can make points that may be a bit unpopular because someone loves a particular class, but really the goal overall is the improvement of the enjoyment of the combat experience and feeling you have a class that is able to hold it's own as well as having a challenging opponent are a part of that (at least to me) and people who are not interested in combat won't be affected by it.

Shaddus

Celina said:

What the hell did you just say to me?

I think he just said your mother smells like elderberries and your father was a hamster.

Kalnid

Let's try this again.

Celina said:

Astrology also has an obscenely long and expensive kill set up. The willpower cost means you get 3 attempts max on the average day. If the spheres are off and you can only stack 4 negatives, you won't kill anyone.

 

When can you stack more than four negatives?

Raeri

When the stars align IRL and your prayers to the RNG divinities finally pay off.

Maligorn

Praise be to RNG-sus

Enyalida

HE MIGHT BE RISEN (roll 1d20)

Moi

Kalnid said:

Let's try this again.

Celina said:

Astrology also has an obscenely long and expensive kill set up. The willpower cost means you get 3 attempts max on the average day. If the spheres are off and you can only stack 4 negatives, you won't kill anyone.

 

When can you stack more than four negatives?

For a serious answer:
It's only possible if Papaxi is Trine from the Sun. Example: If the Sun is in Dolphin and Papaxi is in Spider, the odds of each sphere strength are as follows:
Volcano: 83% chance of -2; 17% chance of -3
Antlers: 83% chance of +2; 17% chance of -1
Twin Crystals: 83% chance of +1; 17% chance of +0
Dolphin: 83% chance of +4; 17% chance of +7
Lion: 83% chance of +1; 17% chance of -1
Crocodile: 83% chance of +2; 17% chance of +4
Burning Censer: 83% chance of -2; 17% chance of +1
Spider: 83% chance of +3; 17% chance of +7
Dragon: 83% chance of -1; 17% chance of +0
Skull: 83% chance of -3; 17% chance of -1
Bumblebee: 83% chance of -1; 17% chance of -3
Glacier: 83% chance of +3; 17% chance of +6

Which means that if you pick Antlers, Burning Censer, Dragon, Skull and Bumblebee, you can get up to 5 bad spheres if you're willing to sit around and wait for Papaxi to give you what you want.

Hiriako

From personal experience: The likelyhood of getting 5 negative spheres is very, very rare. With that said, it is possible to kill using Astrology. It could definitely use some updating, despite the fact that it's one of my favorite skills.

I actually agree with Celina's list. Update Moon, Astrology, Wicca, adjust the two Woods (though I want to try out Wyrdenwood and see if I can make anything work with it. I've had a few thoughts that I may work through), Ecology... I don't think Sentinels need too terribly much. Warriors do NOT need their tertiary to kill, and Aeonics provides a disturbingly powerful amount of defense. Especially when you add in the speed bonus from alacrity, I say that they're in pretty good shape.

I'd like to see some minor updates to a few other skills. Runes could use AB file updates, and a little flashiness, I think. It's solid though. I wouldn't mind seeing a few adjustments to kata - perhaps even including removing speed/hard/soft/gouge modifiers. Harmony is a bit over the top right now (remove regeneration from it, in my opinion). But the ones Celina said are by and far the worst.

As note: The Wood skills are decent on their own, especially with changes to Wildewood. The flaw compared to Chemantics is that they do -not- have the illusions secondaries or psionic tertiaries. An update to Crow could help Wyrdenwood. An update to Stag that differs it slightly for Wildewood might help (or just change Wildewood a bit). Then there's the four Druid terts. Each one has flaws with the way it works with -Wood skills. They're better, but not as great.

Hiriako

Oh, and one last thing about MeteorStorm. It takes 10p and causes fires when it hits. But it has one -major- advantage over Meteor. Meteor consumes the spheres upon cast. MeteorStorm consumes the spheres when it hits, allowing for a recast for the cost of 10p instead of casting 4 spheres first, should it fail.

Additionally, Astrology provides a lot of assorted buffs that help in rather dramatic ways. Those are not to be underestimated. Though some are more useful than others, I always found some that were very worth using and aided survivability to a good degree, in any situation.

Cyndarin

I can't remember a single instance where I spent 10 power or more on setting up spheres. 

Hiriako

Nor can I. However, 10p - which will regen from your reserves, or massive willpower/endurance drain - which will require a refresh, origami, or time? The 10p is easier to drop in battle, I think. At least, for anything protracted.

Enyalida

Wildewood treehug. It's the only woodchem special attack that can't be done at range, and can't have motes or runes embedded in it (afaik).

Moi

Hiriako said:

From personal experience: The likelyhood of getting 5 negative spheres is very, very rare. With that said, it is possible to kill using Astrology. It could definitely use some updating, despite the fact that it's one of my favorite skills.

From math: On any given Lusternian date, there is a 1 in 6 chance that Papaxi will be in position to let you get five negative spheres and even then, there is only a 25 in 216 chance that you will actually get all five on your first try. Simulations by AnyDice helpfully inform me that there is a 30.12% chance of getting all five on your second attempt (assuming that you leave any negative spheres alone and only retry positive ones), a 42.07% chance of getting it on by your third round of attempts, an 83.85% chance by your 10th attempt and still only 98.95% likely to work by your 25th. It's not so much "rare" as "there is actually a pretty good chance that you will run out of reserves before you get this tactic to work."

Enyalida

What do you mean on your 'first try'?

EDIT: I may be missing something major here, shouldn't you already know which spheres are positive and which are negative? I was under the impression that there was no guesswork involved with that.

Moi

There's a chance for Papaxi to turn some negative spheres positive, or some positive spheres negative. It's one of the few random elements in Astrology.

Hiriako

Iytha, you're presuming that you need 5 spheres to kill. You do not. WIccans have banshee that they can time a meteor with, to do more damage. THey can also use their (very hard-hitting) damage attacks as the meteor hits. I rarely got a kill from the meteor alone, but from the overall configuration.

Moi

You're thinking of Celina. Just because I'm giving the math for how unlikely it is to get 5 spheres doesn't mean that I think you need 5 spheres to kill someone with meteor. The argument here is, "You're pretty much never going to get 5 spheres in a real fight, so any practical strategies that involve meteors should require at most 4 spheres." not "Getting 5 spheres is too hard, therefore meteor kills are impossible and astrology needs buffed."

Cyndarin

Plenty of people will straight up tank meteor+banshee+normal attack. Take someone like karlach out with a meteor. Not happening.

Kaiel

I would just like to note that Shofangi are probably the worst monk guild by a long shot. Nekotai can slip poisons with no affmessage, Ninjakari cause ruptures and have a decent instakill, Tahtetso spam broken limbs like there's no tomorrow, etc etc.

Meanwhile, Shofangi's viable kill methods include bleeding-based damagekills and crunch. Bleeding, and, in fact, damagekilling in general just isn't a viable method to kill at the high end when people have 15,000 health for the same reason that Celina stated above. If Karlach isn't going to go down to 9k burst damage or whatever from meteor, he's probably going to laugh at the bleeding from a Shofangi and carry on massacring. Then, there's crunch.

I don't mind crunch. It's pretty viable. For those who don't know, it's a grapple-ending skill that finishes a head grapple (choke is our only one) by slamming the target's head into the user's knee. It takes balance on all limbs. If the target's wounds are medium or higher and crunch has landed successfully at least 4 times in the past X period, there's a chance to instakill. This chance gets higher with wounding and subsequent crunch attempts. This is pretty much our only way to kill high-end people, which I'm not complaining about, crunch is fine. The problem is that some people are acrobats, and they contort, which means we have litte-no hope of getting crunch off by the time they're out of choke.

With this in mind, we then have to fall back on damagekilling, except we also can't get shred (our other grapple-ending move that causes heavy damage and bleeding, one of our best ways to kill) off because contort. This means our only hope in this situation is to spam slitlock and hope for the best, which more often than not amounts to us getting romped and stomped by some clearly much better offense (Illuminati, Geo, BARDS, etc.).

Furthermore, I was at 5 momentum earlier and choked a druid. The form had the speed mod. Said druid writhed out before I could finish choke every time, same with any other grapple. Huh?

I don't mean to complain, just trying to point out there's a big gap between us and the other monk guilds that I'd like to see addressed somewhat throughout the overhaul.

Kaiel

Holy necro. Sorry, didn't notice this thread was from May. Just going to go back to writing help scrolls now.

Lerad

Actually, bleed is a very viable kill method at the high end. So is damage killing, but there's quite a bit of nuance to it. Let's get the easiest one out of the way: in group combat, damage is king. Any little damage you can contribute to the team is that much more chance your side will win. Monks actually have the best and fastest damage ballooning potential in the right teams. The only problem in group combat is that our targets usually die before we get to our high momentum (thus high damage) forms. But still, even a basic punch+punch+kick form with hard can rack up quite a respectable amount of damage if the targeted bodypart is wounded enough. You'll need a warrior to carry most of your weight for you, though, in those cases, since monks don't burst wounds very well, and you'll need the target to be prone before you punch/punch/kick.

Now, in a 1v1, however, damage killing falls into the discussion above - against certain min-maxed targets, it's simply impossible. That said, monks also have the potential to actually overcome that barrier because of the multiplying mechanics of monk damage. It's easier said than done (building wounds as a monk in a 1v1 takes work) but it's theoretically possible. Let's move on to more practical and less theoretical scenarios in a 1v1 - bleed comes in here. Bleed is actually very viable as a kill mechanic - it can easily overwhelm even min-maxed targets because of the way bleed works. With enough bleed, there will come a point when the target will run out of mana to clot and therefore die. I've mentioned it before, but it's also one of the ways to kill a healer when all else fails, because there's nothing in the healer kit that lifts bleeding and removes it directly. They still are subject to the same clot mechanics as everyone else. Shofangi and Ninjakari are the two premium bleeders amongst monks. Yes, I know, the Nekotai are supposed to be it, and vessels is still very potent, but the Nekotai vessel can be countered with good stancing and parrying, and the Nekotai have the biggest limits on bypassing those two mechanics (for good reason, of course). I usually bank on a power-razed greenlock to do my burst bleed rather than with vessels, because the greenlock comes with the added benefit of... well, the greenlock. The bleed becomes that much more potent when I stop them from drinking health. The Shofangi and Ninjakari, on the other hand, both do very good bleed damage that can stack up and overwhelm the target just straight up, if they are not hindered. Logs here:

http://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/542/wobou-vs-rivius
http://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/1456/naraj-vs-rastamutti

Now, the problem with bleed in a 1v1 is, most bleeding attacks don't contribute to holding down your opponent. If you're not holding them down, you're not going to get a kill. Of course, if your opponent doesn't have a good enough danger sense, they will put off running until it's too late, by which time the bleed can kill them even after they've gotten away and are trying their best to heal. Trust me, quite a few of my kills are of this nature, and I've fallen victim to it myself more than once. But well, if you're fighting someone tanky as well as with a good combat sense, you're unlikely to get your kill unless you know how to trip and tie them up. The Nekotai and Tahtetso are probably in the best position for this: in order to work toward their ultimate kill strategy (greenlock and gah-tirak-sho, respectively), regen-proning the opponent is a part of the ingredient. And they can't walk out if they're prone. If a Nekotai or Tahtetso is close to getting you killed, you're probably in no shape to run - green or gedulah is your best bet for survival.

The Shofangi do, however, have quite a respectful salve stack. At one point, they were the only class who could perma-prone. And it was a true perma-prone. Those days are (thankfully) gone now, but between kneecaps, leg-stomps and hooks, they can give the Tahtetso a run for their money for the title of best salve-stackers. As icing on the cake, kneecaps also disable stancing, which, let's say, is very important when you're fighting against a monk. God knows what I'd give for kneecaps in my repertoire. If there's any weakness in the Shofangi kit, it's in their reliance on shred for the biggest bleed (maybe the ninja can do more, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't by much) in the game. Shred is reliant on grapple-ending, which can be countered with acrobatics. Which goes on to my next point:

Amongst all four monk instantkills, Shofangi Crunch is probably the weakest. Even after the out-of-form kicking nerfs, the Ninja insta is probably still more viable. Even the normally useless Nekotai insta can be cheesed with blackout, so I guess it's a little better than Crunch... which all Acrobatics are literally immune to. It's the instantkill with the least viability out of all the monk guilds. If you're going to complain about anything, make it Crunch, please.

I have no idea how a druid can writhe out of your grapple every time, maybe the druids have a faster writhe ability that I don't know about? Is it the facepainting ability in Crow? Maybe? As a faeling with speed mod, though, your grapples are pretty much guarantee'd against most people, except for when your opponent is an acrobat, of course.

Enyalida

Shamanism Root, it works like spiderlegs from Harbs when past tranced, shaving a second off writhe times (or so).

Lerad

Aha. Well, I can't remember how trances work, exactly, but here's another skill that screws monk grappling, yay. I guess I'm lucky the Nekotai have lackluster grapple enders.