Oh, hmm, I didn't realize that since I was just using stratagems. Yeah, bug it.
Constructively, what other other balancing measures for bedevil? I personally really like the idea of giving your affs to the target, but if it cures you of those affs, it makes you basically invincible 1v1.
Either you can give bedevil a power cost, a cooldown timer, or change how it works. I'm in favor of nerfing the curing, but keeping it offensively strong, but I'm biased.
Thoughts?
I kinda like the idea of it building in balance and cost to unusable levels. Like after about three uses in a row your hitting yourself with a 6+second balance loss and a hefty mana/ego drain or something like that. That way it kinda still keeps the flavour without being too powerful.
Oh, hmm, I didn't realize that since I was just using stratagems. Yeah, bug it.
Constructively, what other other balancing measures for bedevil? I personally really like the idea of giving your affs to the target, but if it cures you of those affs, it makes you basically invincible 1v1.
Either you can give bedevil a power cost, a cooldown timer, or change how it works. I'm in favor of nerfing the curing, but keeping it offensively strong, but I'm biased.
Thoughts?
Not stackable (if that's a bug, then that's fine then. Bugs get fixed), Not able to give the listed afflictions, not only for 1v1 but also because of the group implications with giving a stack of aurics/vessels/insanity/timewarp to people right off the bat, Maybe a power cost that increases with consecutive uses in a certain duration, or an increasing mana/ego cost.
I think it curing the affs off the user is fine, that's how similar skills work in other games that have them, and it's largely fine. Will think more after I sleep-- #2, at least, would be a good start to balancing an otherwise exceptionally strong ability.
Bedevil should only transfer a partial amount of vessels/timewarp/insanity/whatever per Bedevil. But you can just spam the Bedevil since you can use it off eq. If you couldn't use it off eq, a lot of issues would be solved. After that, give it more cost to limit the spammability as well.
I'm wary to give it a power cost since flay/bendaura ends up being fairly power intensive. Personally I'd like to see it get toned down, perhaps simply make it cure 1 aff and give one aff + some aurawarp.
I like the proposal to limit curing based on empathy on bedevil. Or possibly get rid of the curing entirely and make bedevil a purely offensive skill. One other interesting thing to note is that when bendaura rolls something like timewarp/temp insanity it doesn't do the lowest level of those afflictions. I don't know if that's necessarily a problem but it does mean that a one sip aff can roll into an aff that takes two sips to cure (in the case of insanity).
Bedevil needs to be stopped by prone/anything that puts a p in your prompt. As it is you can keep up constant aurawarp pressure with bedevil any time you're hindered and the opponent basically can't do anything whatsoever to stop you.
As the skillset stands, it takes a little while to build to the kill, which is nice, but there's no counterplay whatsoever, which is a problem.
o Healers should no longer be able to use Bedevil without having balance and equilibrium.
o Bedevil will no longer transfer more burst vessels than it cures.
o The amount of timewarp and temporary insanity cured and transferred by bedevil is now equal. >-----------------------------------------------------------------------------<
He didn't fight back, but at the end he spammed shield which is a good effective hinder. I could still build aurawarp. BendAura seems key to keeping the build going.
I... don't understand. Where are all those aurawarp ticks coming from? Are the messages just informative, telling you when the aurawarp changes, be it up or down? But that can't be the case, or it should show up on every prompt that wobou smokes steam. And it doesn't, it shows up randomly, after a lucidity, after smokes etc. Bedevil still looks very strong. Also, is the empathy prompt broken? It doesn't seem to change at all.
First of all, the empathy prompt is broken. It always says 0em, but it's actually at 100em at the start, and goes down to 0em as you use offensive abilities. You can see that at some point it turns yellow. That's probably the 75 mark. Then it went red as well, which was probably the 25 mark or something. Aurawarp damage goes higher the lower your empathy.
Secondly, it looks like the numbers in the old healing thread have been tweaked a little. Just based off this log, I'm guessing that a single steam smoke cures 1 aurawarp damage, and a Bedevil gives 3 aurawarp damage at 100em. Not sure what's the higher/lower limit. I'll try messaging Verioth and see if he can post the specific numbers here - with aurawarp also being on a 0-100 scale, it's going to be a headache to try and figure out all the skill aurawarp damage etc without admin input.
Thirdly, I agree that we need to increase the amount of aurawarp cured, based off my previous paragraph (assuming my guesses are correct) and observing the logs. Basically, at 0em (or nearly there), healers should be doing upwards of 10 to 20 aurawarp damage per such ability like bedevil, or bentaura, or flay. That's up to 10 or 20 steam smokes to clear. The "long drawn out fight" ideal here is taken to too much of an extreme. Too long, too drawn out. If you get to twisted aura, you'll have to run away and stand somewhere and burn 100 steam smokes to cure up. That's... just frustrating. Can we rebalance it a little so that it's more like, 30 or 40 steam smokes to go from fully unraveled to no aurawarp at the most? 100 is just going to take forever and a day, and is patently unfun. The big jump in aurawarp afflicting when at low empathy, plus the cure-balance penalties of aurawarp (your cure balances recover slower when you have high aurawarp damage) should be calibrated so that it's viable for a healer to kill, without their opponent having to smoke for two full minutes non-stop to cure up. No matter what we do, fighting a healer means you're going to be smoking steam on loop non-stop already. The least we can do is to ensure that when the fight ends, you don't have to spend forever smoking back to a healthy aura.
Fourthly, I am spying a potentially big problem with how empathy and aurawarp (and as a result, bedevil) currently react with each other. Unless I am wrong, there are no penalties associated with being low on empathy except the lessened ability to cure yourself via your healing auras etc. Furthermore, healers have the ability to manipulate their own empathy (the Apathy ability). That means a healer can just spend some time dropping themselves down to 0em, and staying there forever. They'll have the full ability to cure others and also deal huge amounts of aurawarp damage right from the get go, and will never risk raising their empathy. As for curing themselves... they have bedevil. Two afflictions gone, and giving a huge burst of aurawarp AND aff pressure to the enemy. The "weakened self healing" weakness is pretty much non-existent as a weakness.
That's definitely design oversight. Apathy should go the way of the dodo, and there should be penalties for curing other people associated with low empathy. This way, a healer actually needs to take time to cast spells over and over to lower (or raise) their empathy, and they can't just ignore the stat entirely, because if they force themselves to stay at low empathy, they should face the prospect of not being able to cure others (or themselves) very well at all. Which means bedevil needs to either have its healing ability only work at high empathy, or simply not cure the user.
Fiftly, I've figured out what was causing all the random aurawarp ticks that was driving me crazy. It's the new diminishing returns system they described in the previous thread: if a target gets hit by two aurawarp damages within 3s of each other, the second aurawarp damage will apply itself over a 10s period instead of immediately, but will still apply the full aurawarp damage. So what's happening is that Shedrin bedevils Wobou (giving a bunch of aurawarp), and Wobou tries to cure one of the afflictions, bentaura then ticks and tries to apply aurawarp. But because it's within the 3s window, the diminishing returns system kicks in, and therefore splits the aurawarp from bentaura firing into multiple small parts that Shedrin sees as those random looking ticks.
In otherwords, no need for alarm, it's working as intended.
What we need to do/find-out: 1) Bug the empathy prompt 2) Get the new numbers on aurawarp damage, aurawarp healing etc from Verioth 3) Seriously consider re-calibrating the aurawarp range to be something less monstrously frustrating 4) Seriously consider removing Apathy 5) Seriously consider tying the bedevil heal to not work unless you're at high empathy, or simply remove the heal.
Correction: My first point about empathy prompt being broken stands, but I just realised that the empathy colour changing is because of power - the colour scheme is exactly the same as power - it goes yellow when Shedrin's power goes yellow goes red when Shedrin's power goes red etc. So no, we don't know how much empathy Shedrin is getting or losing, because the value is at 0 the entire time. =(
Ah. Okay, so that changes things. At 0 empathy, bedevil only does enough aurawarp for 3 steam smokes? That means steam smokes heal at least 3-4 aurawarp damage, or something like that. Hrm hrm.
That's much more reasonable, yes, and that also means it doesn't take 100 smokes to get rid of all the aurawarp. Okay, good, so a lot of my concerns are not actually concerns.
Well, then, we can strike off #1, #2, and #3 from that to-do list, and just look closer at apathy and bedevil's healing. Well, actually, we can revisit #3, actually, because if it takes so long to build aurawarp even at 0 empathy... well, it's going to take forever and a day to get someone to kill range without apathy. Maybe we can just double all the aurawarp values and all the steam curing values as well. That keeps it at around the same relative curing/afflicting speeds, but halves the time it needs to progress through each level (and return between each level).
Also, we may not need to remove apathy, then, depending on how much empathy is actually lost and gained by the abilities. Shedrin, could you shed some light on that? Bedevil... well, we could probably wait and see.
I think smart using of cauterize and flay is going to be instrumental to speeding up aurawarp building. Instead of using paralysis/anorexia for bedevil, doing proper stacks will be important too. As a healer, you'll want to avoid steam based cures, because anyone fighting a healer will be spamming steam for aurawarp, which means all the hiding done by flay will be useless. That really leaves mental affs and dust affs, and the trick then is to find whether there is a flay-group that has all mental or all dust affs, and concentrate on building through that. More actual fights will be good, I think.
Yeah the empathy on my prompt is using my quick-fix trigger, so it's colour is adopting the colour of the power.
Bedevil drains 8 empathy per use, and each cure me and aura tic on yourself drains 1 empathy. Each aura tic on someone else, and I think cure on someone else gains 1 empathy. Sacrifice gives 75 empathy, and Draw should give a lot as well, but not sure how much exactly. Empathy also very slowly regens over time, roughly 2 every 2 minutes.
Maybe we can just double all the aurawarp values and all the steam curing values as well. That keeps it at around the same relative curing/afflicting speeds, but halves the time it needs to progress through each level (and return between each level).
I was thinking something similar. For reference, timewarp takes ~6 smokes to cure from massive.
If Flay didn't work off of insomnia, the strategy would be more difficult. But I'm feeling that Cauterize is going to be relegated primarily to an arena strategy due to it's slowness. Even multiple Healers have limits to how much it can speed up the build with Flay and BendAura being non-stackable. The actual affliction pressure I think is stronger for groups and aiding the primary kill method.
edit: The extra seemingly random aurawarp tics are from, I think, a Bedevil bug.
Looking back over my logs the effect of the aura warp affliction itself is a lot stronger than I realized. At twisted my steam smokes were just shy of twice the balance that they normally have. Which explains what I've seen in fights where getting to moderate warp takes some amount of time and then aurawarp begins to build more rapidly because it's diminishing your ability to cure it as it builds. What this currently incentivizes is to run early and often to clear the aurawarp before it builds which I personally find frustrating.
This slowing effect from aurawarp also appears to stack with temporary insanity (which can roll from bentaura):
You take a drink of lucidity slush from a wooden vial.
You aren't such a complete idiot anymore.
You have cured stupidity.
You are afflicted with temporaryinsanity.
You no longer have any temporary insanity.
You have cured temporaryinsanity.
10800h, 7300m, 8800e, 10p sSilrx<>-|208.761| |AuraWarpMassive| |Stupidity|TemporaryInsanitySlight|
You have recovered equilibrium.
10800h, 7300m, 8800e, 10p esSilrx<>-|209.467| |AuraWarpMassive|
Shedrin takes a drink from a bloodstone vial.
10800h, 7300m, 8800e, 10p esSilrx<>-|209.538| |AuraWarpMassive|
You may take another puff of soothing steam.
10800h, 7300m, 8800e, 10p esSilrx<>-|209.714| |AuraWarpMassive| -> smoke soothingsteam
You take a long drag off a painted bone pipe.
The aura stabilizes somewhat, but it still remains massively warped.
10800h, 7300m, 8800e, 10p esSilrx<>-|209.803| |AuraWarpMassive|
You may drink more lucidity slush potion.
10800h, 7300m, 8800e, 10p esSilrx<>-|210.526| |AuraWarpMassive|
It appears that that lucidity balance was 1.8s (1.5 for temp insanity and a 20% increase for massive aurawarp?) which is a pretty significant (80%) increase from base balance.
I think at minimum that the slowing effect of its own cure should be toned down, for example you could make it so that at twisted your balance is still almost 100% longer but you also cure almost 100% more aurawarp.
My concern currently is that the timeline build to lethal levels (twisted) currently matches the timeline where a warrior can build me to lethal wounds except there is no parry mechanic for this skill and a warriors wounds do not slow all balances (with the exception of damaged organs). That said I do understand that warriors stack better offensively in groups.
Two recommended adjustments based on further sparring:
Make hindering the healer's aurawarp build more possible somehow. (Powerfocus cures double aurawarp?)
Make aurawarp cure faster when not in the same room with the healer, via either: Double curing rate OR Passive fade when away from the healer. We could tie this into bent aura. With the following setup:
Aurawarp cure rate is doubled OR A natural regen is implemented. AND Bent aura is assigned to which healer gave it to you, and it functions only in their presence. In addition to its current effects, bent aura slows your curing or disables your aura's natural regeneration.
My concern currently is that the timeline build to lethal levels (twisted) currently matches the timeline where a warrior can build me to lethal wounds except there is no parry mechanic for this skill and a warriors wounds do not slow all balances (with the exception of damaged organs). That said I do understand that warriors stack better offensively in groups.
No parry mechanic and no real way to hinder the build either. It builds faster than a warrior instant kill even if the warrior doesn't hit parry, only does wounding strikes or isn't hindered by a single second at all.
21:45:01.313 You are afflicted with warpedaura.
21:45:18.886 Moderatly
21:45:37.575 Massivly
21:45:56.370 Twisted.
So it takes less than a minute to build up, it can be built while the healer hinders the target. In general terms it can be built fairly passively as well but much quicker with flay or bedevil.
It also has no real penalty for failure on attempt for group combat, if a warrior or most other classes attempts their kill and fails they waste the power and do a normal hit or nothing at all. If a healer attempts their kill and fails they do a huge massive damage burst eg (-8670h, 70.5%) hit to me. This could be looked at as most instant kill attempts don't reward for failure either.
EDIT: The hindrance heals can put out as well twisting into aeon/transfix/paralysis/physical etc is pretty good as well. Especially it builds towards this instant kill.
Also it seems to be able to give hidden aeon, among other things passively which is fairly powerful as a pasive hinderance in itself: http://pastebin.com/bGhwEamU
One thing I have noticed while trying to fix my scripts is there a lot of things that healers could heal with their skills that they can no longer do. I'm not sure if it is just a matter of they are now not explicit in the help files so you need to work out what does what or if they have truly gone.
I don't think I ever personally used most of the ones that went but I don't visit the more dangerous places where perhaps they would be used. Phobias and regenerate being the two obvious ones.
Its offensive abilities are too good. Takes too long to cure off aurawarp, aurawarp builds too easily. There's no penalty for attempting an aurawarp instant kill.
You can build to an unavoidable instant kill while basically spamming passive and active hinder. It really needs toned down in a couple of different ways for balance but well lots of people have gone into that in more detail already.
Anesthesia seems like a bit of an odd skill to put in considering the consensus from most of the envoys was they were against it in this form? Is there a reason why it went in?
Scary tertiary to stay in the same room with for a while, in addition to that you can get some strong afflictions as a RNG result. The instant kill however, builds slower than most other methods out there. So they can get outpaced perfectly (Edited to clarify this bit: I don't indicate that you can outcure warps by steam[Because you can't.], just that your class can probably pull an instant kill before cauterize works its magic.), and things will even out more once people figure out how to deal with aurawarp curing as a whole. Yet, they will still remain perfectly viable in combat.
I'm generally enjoying fighting against/beside a healer. But I'm especially curious about their supportive capacity, i think everyone pushed for the Cauterize-kills first. (Naturally, too). As a final note, I feel as though there will be more adjustments to afflictions/bedevil mechanics in future.
"Oh the year was 453CE, how I wish I was in Serenwilde now... aletter of marque come from the regent to the scummiest aethership I ever seen, gods damn them all...I was told we'd cruise the void for auronidion and dust, we'd fire no turrets, shed no tears.. now I'm a broken man on a Hallifax tier, the last of Saz's privateers."
@Veyils, just as a side note, cauterize isn't the only 'insta you can attempt, furthering towards your kill if it fails. The others am aware still have the same power cost if they only further the kill. But cauterize is supposed to cure of off most afflictions as I understand it, so... that's actually a decent drawback, as a botched cauterize could very well set your enemy free and reset your allies kill setups ( albeit giving the foe aurawarp ).
Aside of that, in groups, I have not seen many cauterize kills so far unless there's a group of healers and then almost any kill becomes viable. I think bedevil may or may not need another poke, as just hauling your own afflictions at the enemy is very powerful.
Not saying it'll not require tweaking, I think the following months will show that. Anesthesize seems to be a little nuts still ( I don't really use it yet ) and I think it's something that may need to be reconsidered, but overall I like the skillset. flay and co make decent support and I think that's mostly what you'll find a healer doing, unless they are a class that can create affliction spam that makes flay really dangerous.
long story short: stay tuned, the ideas are interesting and healing is actually interesting. As saz said, I'm kind of curious how actually healing others will pan out, though I have a certain feeling we'll not really see it too much.
I haven't fought against it myself personally, but one thing I think we might want to consider which could help is to double the aurawarp damage each ability does, and also double the amount of aurawarp cured per steam smoke. This has the benefit of allowing the target to get out of slow-curing hell faster - less smokes to go from, say, massively, down to slightly. It makes the healer's mistakes more punishable - if they fail to keep the pressure on for a short while, their progress gets cancelled faster. It makes them more susceptible to hinders for that same reason.
It does have the drawback, though, of pushing the mechanic to a more bursty direction, and also limiting the window of time before a target needs to be careful of aurawarp. At the earlier levels of aurawarp, it can be ignored in favour of more offensive actions, and shortening that window means opponents of healers will be pushed onto the backfoot and be forced to go defensive earlier. But it does mean that even if they get hit by a burst of aurawarp, if they can disrupt the healer for a short period, they can get out of danger faster.
Speeding things up also seem like a good idea based off Shedrin's logs - the fights seem to take overly long to me - but reading a log is very different from the actual fighting. Maybe Wobou and Shedrin can comment more on that.
@Veyils, just as a side note, cauterize isn't the only 'insta you can attempt, furthering towards your kill if it fails. The others am aware still have the same power cost if they only further the kill. But cauterize is supposed to cure of off most afflictions as I understand it, so... that's actually a decent drawback, as a botched cauterize could very well set your enemy free and reset your allies kill setups ( albeit giving the foe aurawarp ).
Aside of that, in groups, I have not seen many cauterize kills so far unless there's a group of healers and then almost any kill becomes viable. I think bedevil may or may not need another poke, as just hauling your own afflictions at the enemy is very powerful.
Not saying it'll not require tweaking, I think the following months will show that. Anesthesize seems to be a little nuts still ( I don't really use it yet ) and I think it's something that may need to be reconsidered, but overall I like the skillset. flay and co make decent support and I think that's mostly what you'll find a healer doing, unless they are a class that can create affliction spam that makes flay really dangerous.
long story short: stay tuned, the ideas are interesting and healing is actually interesting. As saz said, I'm kind of curious how actually healing others will pan out, though I have a certain feeling we'll not really see it too much.
Cauterize is one of the few instant kills that does unleash level damage on failure. So in groups there's no lost opportunity. Its exceptionally easy for a single healer to build aurawarp levels to instant kill level it can be done in under 60 seconds. The catch is that while building to this kill level the healer is doing very good hinder such as trasnfix/aeon/paralysis.
Cauterise is a bit nuts in how easy and quickly the levels build the reason you've not seen many cauterise kills in groups is simply there isnt really many good healers playing that often in groups. Give it a bit of time for people to practice it and start using it properly and you'll be seeing cauterize kills a lot.
I haven't fought against it myself personally, but one thing I think we might want to consider which could help is to double the aurawarp damage each ability does, and also double the amount of aurawarp cured per steam smoke. This has the benefit of allowing the target to get out of slow-curing hell faster - less smokes to go from, say, massively, down to slightly. It makes the healer's mistakes more punishable - if they fail to keep the pressure on for a short while, their progress gets cancelled faster. It makes them more susceptible to hinders for that same reason.
It does have the drawback, though, of pushing the mechanic to a more bursty direction, and also limiting the window of time before a target needs to be careful of aurawarp. At the earlier levels of aurawarp, it can be ignored in favour of more offensive actions, and shortening that window means opponents of healers will be pushed onto the backfoot and be forced to go defensive earlier. But it does mean that even if they get hit by a burst of aurawarp, if they can disrupt the healer for a short period, they can get out of danger faster.
Speeding things up also seem like a good idea based off Shedrin's logs - the fights seem to take overly long to me - but reading a log is very different from the actual fighting. Maybe Wobou and Shedrin can comment more on that.
Hmm that sounds like an insane buff to cauterize. Your talking about lettting a healer get an unavoidable unhinderable instant kill on a target every 30 seconds unless the target runs off then. Them doing it in 60> seconds is super powerful as it is already solo or in groups but at least it gives the target a few seconds of attacking before they have to run off.
If you buffed it to that you'd have to have the target running away as soon as a healer started on them to be safe.
Now that healing has been out awhile, what are the overall, general impressions?
I really like the new active abilities. It makes the skillset as a whole more fun and interesting. The defensive abilities used on allies feel impactful, and the offensive abitilies provide good affliction pressure. I think there could be more forced separation between offensive and defensive modes. Numbers on some things will need to be tweaked, but I think there's enough leeway to get it to a good balance level without fundamentally altering the skillset.
I think aurawarp should cure faster, and be slightly harder to build. Just doubling both numbers probably wouldn't achieve the desired effect, though. ex: If aurawarp dealt per second is 10, and aurawarp cured per second is 5, that's 5 net per second. Doubling both would get you 20 and 10, for 10 net per second. So if we want to keep it at 5 net per second, but also not take as long to cure from max aurawarp, we need to increase the aurawarp dealt by a less than double. Numbers made up, obviously. Report 1587 if it's implemented should help deduce the specifics.
That said, I think Cauterize is slow enough that I probably won't be going for it much in combats greater than 2v2, maybe 3v3. A target should be dead or escaped by the time you'd get them high enough, and using more focused afflicting or damage would be superior.
That's a good point. Just doubling the values will not be a good idea. A slight rebalance, where the amount of aurawarp cured is increased more than the amount of aurawarp given, might be a better idea - it'll speed curing out of dangerous aurawarp levels faster.
At the moment, staying at high aurawarp levels should theoretically hinder your healing so much that you'll start losing ground on affs from all of the four cures. If we make it possible to get out of aurawarp faster, it should allow afflictions to be cleared faster.
I think cauterize as an instakill is a good concept, but perhaps it should cure the target of aurawarp instead of giving them more aurawarp. This way, a healer can use it as a damage route, but if he wants to go for an aurawarp kill, he can't just spam it - if he misjudges, he'll set his own progress back.
Alternatively, instead of nerfing what cauterize does when it fails, we could nerf the afflictions given by bentaura a bit. Randomly giving aeon/transfix might not be a good idea. Perhaps the big hindering affs should be removed from the bentaura pool. That'll help to address Veyils' concern that building aurawarp is the same act as hindering a target for a healer.
Comments
Not able to give the listed afflictions, not only for 1v1 but also because of the group implications with giving a stack of aurics/vessels/insanity/timewarp to people right off the bat,
Maybe a power cost that increases with consecutive uses in a certain duration, or an increasing mana/ego cost.
I think it curing the affs off the user is fine, that's how similar skills work in other games that have them, and it's largely fine. Will think more after I sleep-- #2, at least, would be a good start to balancing an otherwise exceptionally strong ability.
Discord: Rey#1460
As the skillset stands, it takes a little while to build to the kill, which is nice, but there's no counterplay whatsoever, which is a problem.
Entered by: Verioth Date: 2016-12-28 21:39:48
o Healers should no longer be able to use Bedevil without having balance
and equilibrium.
o Bedevil will no longer transfer more burst vessels than it cures.
o The amount of timewarp and temporary insanity cured and transferred by
bedevil is now equal.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------<
Thanks admin team.
Woohoo. What are the costs looking like?
Discord: Rey#1460
"Since people are already asking, the new costs for bedevil are: 1,000 mana, 3 second eq loss, 1 power, and -8 empathy."
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/87A0w2H1
He didn't fight back, but at the end he spammed shield which is a good effective hinder. I could still build aurawarp. BendAura seems key to keeping the build going.
First of all, the empathy prompt is broken. It always says 0em, but it's actually at 100em at the start, and goes down to 0em as you use offensive abilities. You can see that at some point it turns yellow. That's probably the 75 mark. Then it went red as well, which was probably the 25 mark or something. Aurawarp damage goes higher the lower your empathy.
Secondly, it looks like the numbers in the old healing thread have been tweaked a little. Just based off this log, I'm guessing that a single steam smoke cures 1 aurawarp damage, and a Bedevil gives 3 aurawarp damage at 100em. Not sure what's the higher/lower limit. I'll try messaging Verioth and see if he can post the specific numbers here - with aurawarp also being on a 0-100 scale, it's going to be a headache to try and figure out all the skill aurawarp damage etc without admin input.
Thirdly, I agree that we need to increase the amount of aurawarp cured, based off my previous paragraph (assuming my guesses are correct) and observing the logs. Basically, at 0em (or nearly there), healers should be doing upwards of 10 to 20 aurawarp damage per such ability like bedevil, or bentaura, or flay. That's up to 10 or 20 steam smokes to clear. The "long drawn out fight" ideal here is taken to too much of an extreme. Too long, too drawn out. If you get to twisted aura, you'll have to run away and stand somewhere and burn 100 steam smokes to cure up. That's... just frustrating. Can we rebalance it a little so that it's more like, 30 or 40 steam smokes to go from fully unraveled to no aurawarp at the most? 100 is just going to take forever and a day, and is patently unfun. The big jump in aurawarp afflicting when at low empathy, plus the cure-balance penalties of aurawarp (your cure balances recover slower when you have high aurawarp damage) should be calibrated so that it's viable for a healer to kill, without their opponent having to smoke for two full minutes non-stop to cure up. No matter what we do, fighting a healer means you're going to be smoking steam on loop non-stop already. The least we can do is to ensure that when the fight ends, you don't have to spend forever smoking back to a healthy aura.
Fourthly, I am spying a potentially big problem with how empathy and aurawarp (and as a result, bedevil) currently react with each other. Unless I am wrong, there are no penalties associated with being low on empathy except the lessened ability to cure yourself via your healing auras etc. Furthermore, healers have the ability to manipulate their own empathy (the Apathy ability). That means a healer can just spend some time dropping themselves down to 0em, and staying there forever. They'll have the full ability to cure others and also deal huge amounts of aurawarp damage right from the get go, and will never risk raising their empathy. As for curing themselves... they have bedevil. Two afflictions gone, and giving a huge burst of aurawarp AND aff pressure to the enemy. The "weakened self healing" weakness is pretty much non-existent as a weakness.
That's definitely design oversight. Apathy should go the way of the dodo, and there should be penalties for curing other people associated with low empathy. This way, a healer actually needs to take time to cast spells over and over to lower (or raise) their empathy, and they can't just ignore the stat entirely, because if they force themselves to stay at low empathy, they should face the prospect of not being able to cure others (or themselves) very well at all. Which means bedevil needs to either have its healing ability only work at high empathy, or simply not cure the user.
Fiftly, I've figured out what was causing all the random aurawarp ticks that was driving me crazy. It's the new diminishing returns system they described in the previous thread: if a target gets hit by two aurawarp damages within 3s of each other, the second aurawarp damage will apply itself over a 10s period instead of immediately, but will still apply the full aurawarp damage. So what's happening is that Shedrin bedevils Wobou (giving a bunch of aurawarp), and Wobou tries to cure one of the afflictions, bentaura then ticks and tries to apply aurawarp. But because it's within the 3s window, the diminishing returns system kicks in, and therefore splits the aurawarp from bentaura firing into multiple small parts that Shedrin sees as those random looking ticks.
In otherwords, no need for alarm, it's working as intended.
What we need to do/find-out:
1) Bug the empathy prompt
2) Get the new numbers on aurawarp damage, aurawarp healing etc from Verioth
3) Seriously consider re-calibrating the aurawarp range to be something less monstrously frustrating
4) Seriously consider removing Apathy
5) Seriously consider tying the bedevil heal to not work unless you're at high empathy, or simply remove the heal.
That's much more reasonable, yes, and that also means it doesn't take 100 smokes to get rid of all the aurawarp. Okay, good, so a lot of my concerns are not actually concerns.
Well, then, we can strike off #1, #2, and #3 from that to-do list, and just look closer at apathy and bedevil's healing. Well, actually, we can revisit #3, actually, because if it takes so long to build aurawarp even at 0 empathy... well, it's going to take forever and a day to get someone to kill range without apathy. Maybe we can just double all the aurawarp values and all the steam curing values as well. That keeps it at around the same relative curing/afflicting speeds, but halves the time it needs to progress through each level (and return between each level).
Also, we may not need to remove apathy, then, depending on how much empathy is actually lost and gained by the abilities. Shedrin, could you shed some light on that? Bedevil... well, we could probably wait and see.
I think smart using of cauterize and flay is going to be instrumental to speeding up aurawarp building. Instead of using paralysis/anorexia for bedevil, doing proper stacks will be important too. As a healer, you'll want to avoid steam based cures, because anyone fighting a healer will be spamming steam for aurawarp, which means all the hiding done by flay will be useless. That really leaves mental affs and dust affs, and the trick then is to find whether there is a flay-group that has all mental or all dust affs, and concentrate on building through that. More actual fights will be good, I think.
Bedevil drains 8 empathy per use, and each cure me and aura tic on yourself drains 1 empathy. Each aura tic on someone else, and I think cure on someone else gains 1 empathy. Sacrifice gives 75 empathy, and Draw should give a lot as well, but not sure how much exactly. Empathy also very slowly regens over time, roughly 2 every 2 minutes.
I was thinking something similar. For reference, timewarp takes ~6 smokes to cure from massive.
If Flay didn't work off of insomnia, the strategy would be more difficult. But I'm feeling that Cauterize is going to be relegated primarily to an arena strategy due to it's slowness. Even multiple Healers have limits to how much it can speed up the build with Flay and BendAura being non-stackable. The actual affliction pressure I think is stronger for groups and aiding the primary kill method.
edit: The extra seemingly random aurawarp tics are from, I think, a Bedevil bug.
This slowing effect from aurawarp also appears to stack with temporary insanity (which can roll from bentaura):
It appears that that lucidity balance was 1.8s (1.5 for temp insanity and a 20% increase for massive aurawarp?) which is a pretty significant (80%) increase from base balance.
I think at minimum that the slowing effect of its own cure should be toned down, for example you could make it so that at twisted your balance is still almost 100% longer but you also cure almost 100% more aurawarp.
My concern currently is that the timeline build to lethal levels (twisted) currently matches the timeline where a warrior can build me to lethal wounds except there is no parry mechanic for this skill and a warriors wounds do not slow all balances (with the exception of damaged organs). That said I do understand that warriors stack better offensively in groups.
Make hindering the healer's aurawarp build more possible somehow. (Powerfocus cures double aurawarp?)
Make aurawarp cure faster when not in the same room with the healer, via either: Double curing rate OR Passive fade when away from the healer. We could tie this into bent aura. With the following setup:
Aurawarp cure rate is doubled OR A natural regen is implemented.
AND
Bent aura is assigned to which healer gave it to you, and it functions only in their presence. In addition to its current effects, bent aura slows your curing or disables your aura's natural regeneration.
No parry mechanic and no real way to hinder the build either. It builds faster than a warrior instant kill even if the warrior doesn't hit parry, only does wounding strikes or isn't hindered by a single second at all.
So it takes less than a minute to build up, it can be built while the healer hinders the target. In general terms it can be built fairly passively as well but much quicker with flay or bedevil.
It also has no real penalty for failure on attempt for group combat, if a warrior or most other classes attempts their kill and fails they waste the power and do a normal hit or nothing at all. If a healer attempts their kill and fails they do a huge massive damage burst eg (-8670h, 70.5%) hit to me. This could be looked at as most instant kill attempts don't reward for failure either.
EDIT:
The hindrance heals can put out as well twisting into aeon/transfix/paralysis/physical etc is pretty good as well. Especially it builds towards this instant kill.
Also it seems to be able to give hidden aeon, among other things passively which is fairly powerful as a pasive hinderance in itself:
http://pastebin.com/bGhwEamU
The log went a bit weird:
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/W4ZmttPJ
I don't think I ever personally used most of the ones that went but I don't visit the more dangerous places where perhaps they would be used. Phobias and regenerate being the two obvious ones.
You can build to an unavoidable instant kill while basically spamming passive and active hinder. It really needs toned down in a couple of different ways for balance but well lots of people have gone into that in more detail already.
Anesthesia seems like a bit of an odd skill to put in considering the consensus from most of the envoys was they were against it in this form? Is there a reason why it went in?
I'm generally enjoying fighting against/beside a healer. But I'm especially curious about their supportive capacity, i think everyone pushed for the Cauterize-kills first. (Naturally, too). As a final note, I feel as though there will be more adjustments to afflictions/bedevil mechanics in future.
-Kilian
Aside of that, in groups, I have not seen many cauterize kills so far unless there's a group of healers and then almost any kill becomes viable. I think bedevil may or may not need another poke, as just hauling your own afflictions at the enemy is very powerful.
Not saying it'll not require tweaking, I think the following months will show that. Anesthesize seems to be a little nuts still ( I don't really use it yet ) and I think it's something that may need to be reconsidered, but overall I like the skillset. flay and co make decent support and I think that's mostly what you'll find a healer doing, unless they are a class that can create affliction spam that makes flay really dangerous.
long story short: stay tuned, the ideas are interesting and healing is actually interesting. As saz said, I'm kind of curious how actually healing others will pan out, though I have a certain feeling we'll not really see it too much.
It does have the drawback, though, of pushing the mechanic to a more bursty direction, and also limiting the window of time before a target needs to be careful of aurawarp. At the earlier levels of aurawarp, it can be ignored in favour of more offensive actions, and shortening that window means opponents of healers will be pushed onto the backfoot and be forced to go defensive earlier. But it does mean that even if they get hit by a burst of aurawarp, if they can disrupt the healer for a short period, they can get out of danger faster.
Speeding things up also seem like a good idea based off Shedrin's logs - the fights seem to take overly long to me - but reading a log is very different from the actual fighting. Maybe Wobou and Shedrin can comment more on that.
Cauterize is one of the few instant kills that does unleash level damage on failure. So in groups there's no lost opportunity. Its exceptionally easy for a single healer to build aurawarp levels to instant kill level it can be done in under 60 seconds. The catch is that while building to this kill level the healer is doing very good hinder such as trasnfix/aeon/paralysis.
Cauterise is a bit nuts in how easy and quickly the levels build the reason you've not seen many cauterise kills in groups is simply there isnt really many good healers playing that often in groups. Give it a bit of time for people to practice it and start using it properly and you'll be seeing cauterize kills a lot.
Hmm that sounds like an insane buff to cauterize. Your talking about lettting a healer get an unavoidable unhinderable instant kill on a target every 30 seconds unless the target runs off then. Them doing it in 60> seconds is super powerful as it is already solo or in groups but at least it gives the target a few seconds of attacking before they have to run off.
If you buffed it to that you'd have to have the target running away as soon as a healer started on them to be safe.
That said, I think Cauterize is slow enough that I probably won't be going for it much in combats greater than 2v2, maybe 3v3. A target should be dead or escaped by the time you'd get them high enough, and using more focused afflicting or damage would be superior.
At the moment, staying at high aurawarp levels should theoretically hinder your healing so much that you'll start losing ground on affs from all of the four cures. If we make it possible to get out of aurawarp faster, it should allow afflictions to be cleared faster.
I think cauterize as an instakill is a good concept, but perhaps it should cure the target of aurawarp instead of giving them more aurawarp. This way, a healer can use it as a damage route, but if he wants to go for an aurawarp kill, he can't just spam it - if he misjudges, he'll set his own progress back.
Alternatively, instead of nerfing what cauterize does when it fails, we could nerf the afflictions given by bentaura a bit. Randomly giving aeon/transfix might not be a good idea. Perhaps the big hindering affs should be removed from the bentaura pool. That'll help to address Veyils' concern that building aurawarp is the same act as hindering a target for a healer.