Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
edited January 2016
I don't understand why artifacts are on the table now just because they maintain their effect as warrior counters. To me it just feels like a case of warriors wanting their cake and to eat it to. A change to RoA disproportionately affects non warriors who have a lower health ceiling and lower physical resistances from armor WHILE warriors retain the highest health pools without any of the previous existing maluses.
Gained survivability, lost weaknesses, now we want to reduce artifacts that primarily impact caster v warrior. I guess I'm not understanding where the "balance" is.
It also poses the question if damage kills should be a viable option for warriors. By nature of warriors being the most survivable against damage kills and no weaknesses to exploit as they previously had (mana drains), I don't believe it makes sense to give them access to that avenue.
I also think it's premature to look at RoA. If warriors aren't able to stack wounds then we should be looking at that, if the instakills are not viable then that's what should be addressed. Since sipping health is now irrelevant to wounds it shouldn't make a difference unless we're going for warriors with damage kills which has the problems that @Rivius mentioned.
I would rather the instakills be reworked to be more viable once everyone is up and running. In particular I don't think beast maul is gonna work now that damaged limbs always cure instantly for example.
I may have missed it, but are leather vests the only pieces of armor needed for monks to take advantage of the enhancement system? And are leggings, skullcaps, and bracers all completely extraneous now? Finally, can unenchanted suits serve the same purpose, or do all suits now have some innate armor rating that makes them incompatible with tattoo armor?
Yeah, only vests are needed, (and only vests can be enhanced) is my understanding too. Now that I can wear leather armour without disabling tattoos, though, I might consider that as a fashion statement instead.
Avoiding the fuss about RoA, I don't mind if we move armour into the resistance tiers as well - damage adjustments would need to be made, but it might well be a good idea.
I've been playing around mainly with bruising numbers, rather than sparring so all the following is contingent on wound building being viable (which I can't say either way for now), but there are one or two things that I'm somewhat wary of. Will hopefully get some spars in over the next couple of days against someone with working curing to see how we go.
But an impact enhancement + bludgeoner combatstyle + smashleg modifier hitting a heavy+ wounded leg was looking at >200 bruising a round (both armbalances using the same combo). While the straight up bruising damage after that combo when the target attacks or moves is pretty negligible, clearing that bruising I think puts them into the 1,500 mana cost territory.
If they don't clear the bruising, another successful round of the combo puts them into pulp territory which was looking to be ~3k damage on Mnemosyne. Didn't check if paralysis counted as the prone requirement (frozen didn't), but if paralysis does, a beast spit mantakaya + double pulp combo would be tipping close to 6k damage, being quite readily achievable once legs get to heavy+ wounding.
Further, any bleeding on the target seemed to be halving the bruising cured with each clot, so the bruising/clot mana cost may end up quickly spiraling well out of control with a partner (Bonecrusher + Harbinger etc).
I'm not sure what the best solution to this scenario is, as bruising would quickly become a useless/negligible mechanic if it can be straight up clotted away, but on the flip side, the high mana cost to clear bruising is also a potential issue.
Anyhoo, that was my initial impression/theorycrafting and just thought I'd flag the issue, but more testing is obviously needed to see how it might work out in practise once more people have their curing set up.
Been playing with various things with forging. All four weapon types seem to now have the same damage/bleeding/balance speed from my testing, so no need to be stuck with katanas/rapiers/hammers/klangaxes any longer. All three of those values are entirely consistent (other than balance time, which seems to scatter a bit, but I'm almost sure that's my internet connection, but I did multiple tests to get a fairly solid baseline for balance.) Also tested a few enhancements, and plan to test the rest shortly.
Damage enhancement changed my damage from 1012 => 1082. (70, ~5-6%). Razor increased bleeding from 228 => 250 (22, ~10%). Speed seems to be bugged and I have an open bug on it, but my minimums, maximums, and averages on speed match up close enough to exactly that I don't think there's any effect whatsoever at the moment.
I'll be testing weighted shortly, and honed whenever I find somebody to beat on for an hour.
Clot halving bruises cured when the clotter has bleed as well is intended - without specifying only bruise or only bleed, clotting will spread the cure equally on both bleed and bruise.
For the problem of bruise and mana costs and how quickly BCs build them into pulping, one possibility is to perhaps halve the mana cost when clotting bruising, but double the damage incurred when attacking/moving with bruising.So that it won't wipe out a person's mana pool in 2 rounds, but gives a huge incentive/motivator to keep investing the mana over the long term rather than just ignoring it outright.
This might mean needing to separate clotting bleed and clotting bruising into two separate commands, if clot can't be coded to smartly differentiate mana costs based on bleeding/bruising cleared and I'm not sure if that will be in-line with the overhaul goal of simplifying things.
Theoretically, we can just make the mana costs of the three possible clot commands to reflect the mana costs needed. Ie. CLOT BLEED will cost 60 mana as usual, and CLOT BRUISE will cost 30 mana instead, whereas normal CLOT will cost 45 mana when doing the half bleed/bruise curing thing. But I'm not sure if that's codable.
Or we can just lower pulp damage.
The above is also all theorycrafting, of course. Need more testing to see how bruise/bleed balance is like.
Speaking of which, @ieptix, AB DISCIPLINE CLOTTING needs to be updated with the new syntaxes.
How do greatrobe/splendour hats work now? Are they now redundant? Is the gown still protective enough without the hat or are both needed for the full benefit? (I'm sorry if it's obvious, I'm dumb.) Plz explain?
For all armour types, there's only one piece of armour that counts for defense, generally whatever would cover the midsection. So vests for leather, shirts for chain (or scale, I forget which one is which), etc. Hats, leggings, etc. should all be purely decorative. This is a bit awkward, but the reason for it is that when I was looking at our list of item types to figure out what all we had for armour, what I'd found first and assumed we'd used were the original one-piece armour items that Achaea used when Lusternia was split, so every armour had just one single item type. Then I realized after we went live that everything but plate was split between multiple parts (and even plate had greathelms but those I knew about), so this is what I had to settle with given the short time I had to get everything back working again. At some point I want to go back and figure out a more reasonable solution, but since everything should be functional now modulo possible bugs, it's not a priority.
Why
were the bashing attacks of SWING/JAB changed so that we can no longer
see mob health? Having the unique messages that showed mob health was a
big deal, and really special to warriors.
I was unaware this was a thing. However, I don't think it's anything particularly critical, since every other class does just fine without it, and I have vague recollections of adding a common ability that allows you to gauge a mob's health, though I don't remember details. If my memory is failing me, I'll add that in somewhere.
As for the raw numbers for the enhancements, I will include those in the enhancements help file when I get that up.
So, Old armor would give you half a percentage of resistance per stat. So 1/1 c/b is .5%/.5% resistance, 50/50 is 25%/25%
This is not how old armour worked. The actual reduction from armour would depend on the exact ability being used, because of how armour and damage were originally designed back in Achaea. Damage is split between "absolute" and "proportional" damage for every hit, in proportions that vary based on ability. Armour originally was a straight stat-based reduction of absolute armour, so a cutting stat of 50 on your armour would reduce the absolute cutting-typed damage by 50%. At some point, I don't know when, armour was modified to also provide resistance to proportional damage, though at a lower amount. This is a pretty annoying system in general, because there's no way to know a prioiri what effect armour will have on any attack, and so we've changed. For an example, kata damage is split 20% absolute, 80% proportional damage. As such, part of the goal of the armour adjustments was to avoid this issue entirely by removing the distinction between adamage and pdamage so it's possible to actually reason about it generally and easily.
Looking into this, however, I realized that I forgot to remove the reduction of armour's effect on pdamage, which will be updated soon, so armour should end up being a bit more effective overall, independent of the changes to raw armour values I've made.
Warriors also do very high damage, not the same level, but opencavity was doing 3300 damage to me from axelord. 1000 damage every hit with no work or pre-reqs.
I think damage in general wasn't lowered to meet with armor is all.
As mentioned above, armour is still handling some damage incorrectly, which affects knighthood, so when I get that change in knight damage will get toned down some. I'll look into modifier-based damage in more depth when I have a chance, it's plenty possible there are things stacking too heavily.
Can runed weapons get two of the same enhancement? Can two-handed weapons with a single rune get two of the same enhancement?
The announce post says kata weapons haven't been re-worked, but when I probe my chain I get this:
It is a two-handed weapon. It has no enhancements. It can hold up to 1 enhancement(s) in total. There are no poisons or magical effects on a jakari of iron spikes and skulls.
So what's up? Can I get an enhancement on it or not? Also is it supposed to only have one slot, or is that a temporary the-monk-changes-are-not-in-yet thing?
This is a side effect of it being a weapon. It might or might not be able to actually have an enhancement placed on it, I don't remember for sure, but the enhancement would have absolutely no effect, because kata weapons are completely separate from everything else.
Why don't we bring armor to inside the resist system and adjust damage accordingly
Everyone's happy
This was something I'd considered at first, but the problem is there isn't really room in the 10-level system to fit in armour meaningfully. I'm not super happy with armour being outside the resistances system, but including it in the system would make it pretty useless.
I don't mind armour/robes being brought into the resist system as long as damage across the board is where it was before the gear overhaul dropped.
With respect to RoA and warrior damage, I think what's more important is to fix the various insta-kills so that they're viable, rather than try to make damage kills a viable route for warrior. Damage kills are honestly boring and fraught with issues. I'd rather we stick to the old status-quo where we kill strictly with wounds, afflictions and insta-kills with requirements.
That's not to say I'd be opposed to attacks that do dedicated damage in a spec that's properly designed around it (e.g. if hypothetically it made sense for BM, making haymaker do damage based on total body wounds). But our regular hit-to-hit attacks shouldn't be able to wear someone down in a 1v1 imo without significant work (e.g. the target is completely locked down).
I am completely amenable to adjusting instakill reqs to ensure viability.
I may have missed it, but are leather vests the only pieces of armor needed for monks to take advantage of the enhancement system? And are leggings, skullcaps, and bracers all completely extraneous now? Finally, can unenchanted suits serve the same purpose, or do all suits now have some innate armor rating that makes them incompatible with tattoo armor?
Suits are probably being considered armour at the moment. I'll go back and re-add the ability to enchant greatrobes stuff to turn it into armour, and make sure they aren't counted as armour before that, if that's the case.
4 tattoo preparations gives a weak armour amount, less than robes iirc.
Unless I misunderstand you the point as I recall of the skill was to give them the equivalent of greatrobes protection. This is because of the hardship of new monks getting tattoos. If the amour value is too subpar it just becomes an push to not use the skill at all and just wear robes until you can get tattoos.
Ah, right, so it is good for non-trans tattooist, but it's not needed if you go straight to trans? When I have some time I shall test the prep thing then on my noobmonk, and see what value it gives.
Preparation used to give 40/40. Greatrobes was 55/55 (average).
Preparation is for a newbie monk to tattoo himself for little cost. Greatrobes usually cost quite a bit, anywhere from a few thousands to twenty plus thousands.
That said, 4% seems far too low, though. If possible, @Ieptix, could it be something like 10% instead? Current full tattoos is like 16%, right? I know tattoo master is 18%, not too sure about normal tattoos. So, preparation being 8% or 10% sounds reasonable to me.
Edit: okay, normal tattoos are 14%, so preparation being 8% or so seems reasonable to me.
It also told me that I was 0% armour and wearing something blocking my tattoos until I did the fourth preparation, so something a bit odd is going on during 1-3 preps.
I was unaware this was a thing. However, I don't think it's anything particularly critical, since every other class does just fine without it, and I have vague recollections of adding a common ability that allows you to gauge a mob's health, though I don't remember details. If my memory is failing me, I'll add that in somewhere.
As for the raw numbers for the enhancements, I will include those in the enhancements help file when I get that up.
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It might not be super critical, but it's sort of bothersome. Warrior lines used to be packed with a lot of flavour and now they're fairly bland by comparison. And there really is no good reason for it. We could have kept a lot of the old lines and repurposed them just fine... For example, the new execute line is totally different to the old one, but the old one was great already vOv. I kind of wish we could make changes to the lines as they are right now...
Also, cleave used to look different in the old system too. It went something like:
You raze Wobou's aura of rebounding with an ancient loboshigaru bardiche of flowering
golden lotuses.
Cleaving through his defences, you make a slow, deadly strike at Wobou's gut with an
ancient loboshigaru bardiche of flowering golden lotuses. You strike deep into his gut,
ripping the flesh with a jagged wound that gushes blood.
Made it seem more like a different command. Right now, it looks like it really should just be a modifier.
Likewise, guard and farguard used to be:
Spotting an opening in his offence, you quickly jab Wobou's gut.
There's no way to assess mob health unless you use the IRE.target gmcp variable. Not that I really think we need it. It was just a nice flavour thing we used to have.
Also, on an unrelated note:
- Hack requires you to specify a body part, but it doesn't utilize that information for anything at all. Might as well make it a separate command like HACK <rivius> instead of a modifier. That said, I really don't think any skill should be able to break a prismatic barrier, but that's just me.
- Since wounds are now on gmcp, might as well make wounds and wounds simple free actions.
It is actually possible in the Nexus client to see %hp on a mob by using tab targeting. Probably works for other forms of in-client targeting for Nexus but I never used those.
I do not agree that that skills should never have any counters. The needs to wolf, charismatic aura, trans poisons, and more point to the years-long efforts to remove any absolute defenses. Giving an ability to break prismatic barriers is just the next step.
Comments
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
I've been playing around mainly with bruising numbers, rather than sparring so all the following is contingent on wound building being viable (which I can't say either way for now), but there are one or two things that I'm somewhat wary of. Will hopefully get some spars in over the next couple of days against someone with working curing to see how we go.
But an impact enhancement + bludgeoner combatstyle + smashleg modifier hitting a heavy+ wounded leg was looking at >200 bruising a round (both armbalances using the same combo). While the straight up bruising damage after that combo when the target attacks or moves is pretty negligible, clearing that bruising I think puts them into the 1,500 mana cost territory.
If they don't clear the bruising, another successful round of the combo puts them into pulp territory which was looking to be ~3k damage on Mnemosyne. Didn't check if paralysis counted as the prone requirement (frozen didn't), but if paralysis does, a beast spit mantakaya + double pulp combo would be tipping close to 6k damage, being quite readily achievable once legs get to heavy+ wounding.
Further, any bleeding on the target seemed to be halving the bruising cured with each clot, so the bruising/clot mana cost may end up quickly spiraling well out of control with a partner (Bonecrusher + Harbinger etc).
I'm not sure what the best solution to this scenario is, as bruising would quickly become a useless/negligible mechanic if it can be straight up clotted away, but on the flip side, the high mana cost to clear bruising is also a potential issue.
Anyhoo, that was my initial impression/theorycrafting and just thought I'd flag the issue, but more testing is obviously needed to see how it might work out in practise once more people have their curing set up.
Note that there are two types of suits and gowns, highfashion ones and greatrobes ones. They're two different skills/categories in tailoring.
IIRC highfashion couldn't be enchanted into armour. But I may be out of date on that.
In that case, the greatrobes suits count as armor, the others don't.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
It also told me that I was 0% armour and wearing something blocking my tattoos until I did the fourth preparation, so something a bit odd is going on during 1-3 preps.