In thinking on it, it would be best to have beasts be nice additions, but not required for combat. My main concern was that beast spit mantakaya is a big part of warrior parry bypass. However, seeing monks get a skill to just parry bypass for X seconds, puts hope in the fact that maybe warriors can get similar.
I don't actually use mantakaya spit as a Warrior as I don't like the unreliability, nor do I think it's necessary. Institute relies on a beast for Shatterplex->Timequake, but that'll hopefully be changing. Not sure what other guilds might use it for a key setup, but it can probably be removed without too much issue. Though sometimes I use it to apply paranoia on a mage in groups or other minor benefits like that.
Just re-scale the hemorrhaging bonus: 1 aff = +10 hemorrhaging 2 affs = +70 hemorrhaging 3 affs = +150 hemorrhaging all 4 affs = +250 hemorrhaging
All monks will be able to do at least 1 aff using beast spit - that gives them little more than a consolation prize with the re-scaled numbers (edit to add: even if this happens every form, it'll actually be lower hemorrhaging than the formula in Wobou's spreadsheet,or rather, it will be the "50" column in Wobou's spreadsheet - the idea is that if you're just triggering 1 aff every form, you're not going to make much progress). 2 affs will scale up significantly, and is still well within the possibility of any monk with a beast... but the number is lower than 1 aff of the current numbers. I think this will work to pull down the hemorrhaging building speed, as the logs show is needed. 3 affs and 4 affs are extremely difficult to achieve, and I believe should be rewarded with significant burst.
I think scaling on affs like this is nearly always lead to problems. I agree with everything you're saying in a solo context, however in groups it's going to be like succumb where we take a skill that was designed around the idea of "it'd take a really clever setup to stick x affs on someone, and that should be rewarded" and then you throw it in a group context where you can fairly organically stack affs and really crazy numbers happen.
One thing to keep in mind is that in my log with Ciaran I hit two doubles in that 30s span, and this is with ur'life sharing two affs with my hemorrhaging pool. Once every ~15s is not a rare event, but if we assume that on every full stance rotation that you get one double and the rest our singles your proposal works out to 480 hemorrhaging a minute which is a tiny bit low for my taste but workable. My fear is that the only reason I was getting doubles at all was due to how advantaged I was with my hemorrhaging pool and ur'life so I'd like to see how monks in general are doing with hemorrhaging bleeding in terms of how many singles/doubles/triples people are able to get on targets.
I think it's cleaner to have critical stances where hemorrhaging builds rather than changing nekotai spit, changing the requirements for ur'life and changing the requirements for poison spit. All of those things would do the job of limiting what a person can bring to the fight solo but when you bring it into a group context I think it changes little and I think scaling the numbers up for more affs will just serve to partially counter the diminishing returns in place for hemorrhaging.
Beast spit does seem a bit problematic for a lot of balancing stuff now I think on it. Could be worth just trashing the skill all together and giving buffs to compensate for the classes and set ups that relied upon it heavily.
While were at it I guess could look at nerfing the ascendant death beast power/hypnogaze
So, I made a comment on one of the special reports about this, but it's something I've been occasionally thinking for a while now. Maybe we should just adjust the dust balance down to 1s base. There's a lot of strong afflictions on there, and 'dust stacking' has been really strong for more than just monks. On the other hand, we could continue adjusting things like the paralysis report, access to blindness, beast spit, etc which wouldn't be as radical.
My opinion is that we shouldn't make any changes to dust until we see what happens with the paralysis report.
I'm not averse to the idea as a whole but I don't want to swing things the other way either. One thing to keep in mind is that lucidity being 1s was a reason used to grant temp insanity a balance slow. So you could see other guilds attempt to make the same argument with dust.
I agree with Wobou. I commented to him the other night that my concern is a bunch of kneejerk reaction changes, and then some of the reports sitting in the pipeline go through and suddenly we are fighting an uphill battle to 'buff' things back that maybe didn't need changing in the first place.
Just re-scale the hemorrhaging bonus: 1 aff = +10 hemorrhaging 2 affs = +70 hemorrhaging 3 affs = +150 hemorrhaging all 4 affs = +250 hemorrhaging
All monks will be able to do at least 1 aff using beast spit - that gives them little more than a consolation prize with the re-scaled numbers (edit to add: even if this happens every form, it'll actually be lower hemorrhaging than the formula in Wobou's spreadsheet,or rather, it will be the "50" column in Wobou's spreadsheet - the idea is that if you're just triggering 1 aff every form, you're not going to make much progress). 2 affs will scale up significantly, and is still well within the possibility of any monk with a beast... but the number is lower than 1 aff of the current numbers. I think this will work to pull down the hemorrhaging building speed, as the logs show is needed. 3 affs and 4 affs are extremely difficult to achieve, and I believe should be rewarded with significant burst.
I think scaling on affs like this is nearly always lead to problems. I agree with everything you're saying in a solo context, however in groups it's going to be like succumb where we take a skill that was designed around the idea of "it'd take a really clever setup to stick x affs on someone, and that should be rewarded" and then you throw it in a group context where you can fairly organically stack affs and really crazy numbers happen.
One thing to keep in mind is that in my log with Ciaran I hit two doubles in that 30s span, and this is with ur'life sharing two affs with my hemorrhaging pool. Once every ~15s is not a rare event, but if we assume that on every full stance rotation that you get one double and the rest our singles your proposal works out to 480 hemorrhaging a minute which is a tiny bit low for my taste but workable. My fear is that the only reason I was getting doubles at all was due to how advantaged I was with my hemorrhaging pool and ur'life so I'd like to see how monks in general are doing with hemorrhaging bleeding in terms of how many singles/doubles/triples people are able to get on targets.
I think it's cleaner to have critical stances where hemorrhaging builds rather than changing nekotai spit, changing the requirements for ur'life and changing the requirements for poison spit. All of those things would do the job of limiting what a person can bring to the fight solo but when you bring it into a group context I think it changes little and I think scaling the numbers up for more affs will just serve to partially counter the diminishing returns in place for hemorrhaging.
Group in this case is moderated by diminishing returns. That's the whole point of the group diminishing returns.
My concern with capping the amount of affs that give a bonus at 1 of the 4 is that it stifles strategy. There is no reward for working hard, for trying different ways to build multiple affs. The progression becomes easily reached, and you max out your benefit by reaching it just twice out if your five forms. There's a very low skill and strategizing ceiling, and a very high floor. The progress becomes exceedingly linear. There is nothing the monk can do to speed it up against a suboptimal curing target. Even if you have good, optimal curing, you'll not notice much difference in getting hemorrhaging from someone with suboptimal curing. That should not be the case.
If there is a monk class that has 2 of their 4 affs on the same cure, it should be changed, regardless of any other change. That, or the other monks should get the same cure balance setup for their affs.
I strongly feel that sticking affs on multiple cure balances should give multiple returns. In fact, if we go with the route of eliminating all pre-form poison/afflicts, then I believe there is no need for other changes. As mentioned before, it was the lack of effort from those pre-form afflicts (essentially incurable bonuses), that was unintended. If the bonuses are limited to only be triggered by actually building affs and having them leftover to the next form, as was originally intended, then I think we should re-evaluate based on that instead of changing the bonuses further at this point.
That's because 'different ways to build multiple affs' simply boils down to 'let me use poison x over poison y'.
In order for that vision to work I'd expect to see several of the punches across monks change to give slush or steam afflictions. As it stands, monks are still able to give 4-6 afflictions within certain forms, including the dreaded paralysis, haemophilia, and blindness.
There are many classes which don't reward working hard and, to be honest, if you want reward for working hard it's far better to gate rewards behind consecutive or predictable limb taps as to enable SOME logical parry counter-play on the side of the person being hit. As it currently stands there is very little incentive to spread monk attacks in any real fashion, making parrying a stab in the dark.
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That's because 'different ways to build multiple affs' simply boils down to 'let me use poison x over poison y'.
Making that decision, or planning ahead, strategising, trying to guess a target's likely response, reviewing logs to make choices etc... all of those are strategies. Asking that question, "should I use poison x over poison y?" can be a fairly complicated process, and targets certainly can react as well, upon reviewing logs, changing their priorities or their own offensive/hinder strategies etc. Taking away the need for this choice makes it a simple thing for any monk to always hit the max speed they can get while removing the possibility of innovation to change things up.
As a participant of this overhaul/re-design, I would like to make this kind of choice and dimension available to this class.
In order for that vision to work I'd expect to see several of the punches across monks change to give slush or steam afflictions. As it stands, monks are still able to give 4-6 afflictions within certain forms, including the dreaded paralysis, haemophilia, and blindness.
This is already partly the case for Nekotai. Our arm action repertoire right now has 3 lucidity affs, 3 dust affs, 1 steam aff and 7 ice affs. There is no paralysis in that list. Haemophilia, with the hemorrhaging changes, is now locked behind Surge stance. I have a report aimed at moving blindness up to Surge stance, or removing it entirely. I have another report aimed at swapping out a lucidity for a steam. A report made by Demartel is aimed at changing relapsing from a dust to a steam cure, which will turn one of our dust affs to steam as well. Assuming all of those reports pass, we'll become 2 dust, 2 steam, 2 slush, 7 ice. The only kick aff we have is haemophilia, so if we put that in, it'd become 3/2/2/7. I think our cure balance spread is probably the most balanced.
The high priority affs like haemophilia are basically locked behind higher stances, and removed from over half of the time a Nekotai will hit. Paralysis doesn't exist in our repertoire as a native affliction, and blindness is slated for change. Together with the pending paralysis nerf in the normal report cycle, I don't think this is unreasonable.
There are many classes which don't reward working hard and, to be honest, if you want reward for working hard it's far better to gate rewards behind consecutive or predictable limb taps as to enable SOME logical parry counter-play on the side of the person being hit. As it currently stands there is very little incentive to spread monk attacks in any real fashion, making parrying a stab in the dark.
As for creating bodypart connections between cure types, that is certainly possible to do. In fact, one of my guild members had been expressing to me that he didn't like the hemorrhaging changes, and would have preferred a system of "pain points" that connected actions together in order to trigger afflictions etc. Unfortunately, that boat has sailed, but I did find his idea interesting. Frankly, once the dust has settled on the initial stage, I might explore if linking actions together can be a route for Nekotai in the future, to differentiate ourselves from other monks, if nothing else.
In the meantime, I'm certainly not opposed to doing something like making all our head actions across all our punches and kicks be the same cure type - which makes it easier for a target to decide what cure type to priortize their parrying on. At the moment, the philosophy behind my allocation of the Nekotai afflictions-to-bodyparts are mostly thematic, and based on how strong the afflictions are: angknek has the afflictions that were the least synergistic with our main goal: lucidity affs. Dust affs were all angkai upwards. Having more than 2 dust affs in angkai was deemed too strong, especially with our access to relapsing, so the rest of the slots were filled with 2 other ice affs and a steam aff. Angkhai, the strongest, has all of our ice afflictions. From there, the affs were allocated to a bodypart based on theme - confusion to head, clumsiness to arms etc. Disloyalty was a sore point for me, because legs didn't make sense for it, but the other affs fit too much in the other bodyparts on angkai.
Changing that to take into account cure balance first is definitely possible. I could make all the head lucidity affs, all the chest/gut dust/steam affs, all the arms/legs ice affs, or other variations. No doubt there will be some thematic disconnect, but it would suit the direction, and make parrying (and noticing other people's parries) more strategical. I will certainly ask the admin to see if a re-arranging is something they'll consider.
Before oldwounds were removed during the warrior overhaul, monks had to acquire light or medium wounds on their own (monk wounding being much more minimal than old warrior wounding) to start actually afflicting rather than just having the afflictions always available to them. I think that was a pretty integral part of their balance, no?
Before oldwounds were removed during the warrior overhaul, monks had to acquire light or medium wounds on their own (monk wounding being much more minimal than old warrior wounding) to start actually afflicting rather than just having the afflictions always available to them. I think that was a pretty integral part of their balance, no?
Wounds still affect weapon transfer rate just like they did pre-overhaul. The lack of wounding actually puts monks at a disadvantage in that regard. Some monks have alternate methods of bypassing that, but in general they won't poison as well as a warrior that's built a few wounds.
Actually, the only wounds-gated afflictions in monks back then was Tahtetso starkick, and that was a prone, not an aff. I think Ninja also had one, but I can't remember which. But that was the exception. Most monk afflictions were based on action-on-bodypart. Wounds gated exponential damage multipliers that stacked with the prone damage multiplier, not affs.
Edit: Forgot about wound level and poisons. I always forget about that because Nekotai mostly depended on our modifiers for poison.
I don't mean for just poisons, though. For example, a Tahtetso's regular tahto strike modified by rakto and rakti'ini would still just be a regular tahto strike if the targeted bodypart didn't have sufficient wounds.
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Syntax: KATA DEVELOP <form> MODIFIERS DHATOGH Kata: Modifier Ka Weight: 75 If
applied to an attack on the legs, this modifier for the basic Jakari
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increases with the wounds on the struck body part.
Ah, Tahtetso had more of that than starkick, huh. Yeah. It's like the old pinchednerve modifier (that's gone now, of course) in basic kata. It was the exception rather than the rule even in Ninja/Tahtetso, most afflictions by actions were also direct afflict based on actions-on-bodypart.
Some general comments from a domoth fight thirty minutes ago:
Hemorrhaging in its current state seems pretty weak. Looking through the entire fight (which was like over an hour long) -- I never got above 100 hemorrhaging, even with 2 monks (sometimes 3) hitting me (granted, I was doing the trademark meld and hide behind friends as much as possible).
I did get Ugathalogg'd out of nowhere once, but that already has a special report pending, so w/e.
I'm not sure if it was user error re: sticking the 4 prerequisite afflictions, but we might've pushed it a little too far into wimpzone.
Commenting on the above, I do agree. Monks have gone from one extreme to the other, and it's sort of depressing. Half of the time I was hoping that you cured off Hemo entirely because the current requirements make it feel x3 more difficult to pull off that Ughathalogg which Involved me praying for those four affs to stick(Fain answered my prayers). Do hope things can finally be tweaked to find the happy medium for monks, but I personally feel like these changes are being overdone at this point.
The way hemo is designed right now its basically a massive reduction to the monks instant kill. While also lowering their base bleed at the same time.
You spend about 3-5 mins to build up on a passive target. Burst it away, they clot it all off before you get balance back.
May not be the intention but the way its implemented is to make the monk instant kill essentially harder to do. Near impossible to do solo right now outside of exceptional luck for some monks.
Assuming we adjust and fix hemo to be functional hemo brings up a problem we had tried to address previously in fixed bleeding numbers.
We talked a bit about the issues of fixed bleeding before and how it can be ignored by higher vital folks and how it murders lower vital folks. Hemo as a concept reinforces this disparity instead of fixing it. 1k uncureable bleeding isn't anything too big for me to worry about damage wise but it's a huge percentage of a non max persons health.
I think group monks need to switch focus from just rolling over their target to coordinating affs to pull off their instakill.
I'll be curious to see how a top tier monk can build hemo 1v1.
They sort of can build if you dont hinder them much. Testing with Wobou and he was able to build to 800+ after a few mins of me standing there. Fighting back basically means they don't really build much one on one.
I think the big unexpected nerf in this update is that hemo counts against the bleed/bruise requirements for monk instakills. I really don't think this is necessary. We can balance around 1500 hemorrhaging meaning you're instakillable. The target time to build up to 1500 hemo would be somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes.
That is how I was understanding the mechanic would be balanced.
I think the big unexpected nerf in this update is that hemo counts against the bleed/bruise requirements. I really don't think this is necessary. We can balance around 1500 hemorrhaging meaning you're instakillable. The target time to build up to 1500 hemo would be somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes.
That is how I was understanding the mechanic would be balanced.
I think the hemo reduction was a bit much, on top of the hemo counting against the bleed. Should've been one or the other, honestly.
Needing to explode hemo in order to get bleed requirement was good, I think, rather than just letting hemo build to the point where you could insta for free. The hinder is still kind of irritating to try and cope with, though.
Pretty much agree with Ciaran - the new "more hemo hurts you" mechanic just feels very jarring/counter intuitive, and adds another degree of variability based on spec that needs to be balanced around (i.e. how do you shut down clotting for 2.6-3s, and how is this balanced). Adjusting hemo delivery rates up/down as appropriate just seems like a far better all round solution, to me.
Currently I'm fairly sure its optimal for nekotai at least to burst on every form and take the chances with focus haemophilia, since there's not actually a transition from hemo burst-> finalsting. I imagine other monks are probably in that position too, but don't feel qualified to comment on them.
These first six were basically just Yarith letting me test with him. I was making incremental changes to my scripts and forms after every of these spars. Not much can be gleaned from my sub-optimal offense in here (one log was me not using any surge forms or higher because I had forgotten to close an elseif check) beyond the fact that any form of hindering or defensive option obliterates any hemorrhaging from normal forms. There's no real need to have passive hemorrhaging at the start of all stances - that 30 hemorr every stance is quite literally pointless in anything remotely resembling a real combat scenario. Just take the 30 from every form, and put it into the bonus afflictions. The burst is far more useful than a little bit every form that gets removed against anyone that isn't just rolling over.
Finding the above to not really be good at haemophilia hemorrhaging building, I took Tarken's advice and went static poisons, giving paralysis/blind/haemophilia every form that I could:
I haven't looked through the last four in much detail yet - but that's where the meat should be. That's pretty much the strongest a Nekotai can dust stack, I believe. Even then, and using beast spit liberally to get free hemorrhaging bonuses from disloyalty when it doesn't get shrugged, the hemorrhaging rate is, in my opinion, dismal.
Secondly, I largely overestimated the ability to stack affs and succesfully trigger hemorrhaging bonuses from my previous theoretical post. If we go the route of removing beast spitting entirely, then 1 aff is pretty much the max any monk can do. In that scenario, Wobou's suggestion to "cap" the affliction bonus probably doesn't even need to be put in - it's already capped. With beast spit, I can do 2 whenever I get beast balance (assuming I've managed to build dysentery beforehand already).
I'm using Nekotai spit to put on paralysis every form that it can be used in that way - if I used it to cheese, I have no guarantee of getting dysentery to stick. With beast spit cheese, 2 is the Nekotai limit, probably.
There might be an untapped strategy with lucidity and ice affs, but I sincerely doubt the latter, though the former has some potential. After the very first log, I concentrated solely on dust, to try to even build hemorrhaging to instakillable levels. Unfortunately, even that is an uphill battle on a non-hindering target.
Even using Tarken's recommendations with static poison choices designed to abuse the current paralysis/blindness priority, the hemorrhaging rate is pretty much completely tanked. This is about as optimal as it gets, and this is the absolute best hindering a monk can do as well. Once the paralysis nerf goes in and people are free to focus dysentery instead of paralysis, it's going to be pretty much impossible to build hemorrhaging to any 1v1 viable level.
Of course, there's a problem with the instakills in general at the moment. The changes in Changelog 726 made it impossible to instakill, pretty much. You can see this in action with the Veyils log and the Ciaran log. Even assuming that is fixed, though, the current hemorrhaging rate is far too low. I'm... not sure what was wrong with the previous numbers now, really. I would almost venture to say those numbers might even be too low, but since I wasn't around to spar back then, that would be unfounded. But the logs above certainly prove that the current bonus rates needs to be, at least, reverted.
In addition, I think loosening the bonus hemorrhaging triggers might also be a way forward. Though I'm of mixed mind about that. The ability to focus cures make a single aff from each cure balance to be the only one able to trigger the bonus far too easy to avoid. Of course, this would be the case after the paralysis nerf currently, paralysis still takes top priority, so it is acting as a focus "block", because by virtue of its strength it is just more important than everything else. Once that is no longer the case, it'll be simple to just focus dysentery, and never need to worry about the monk triggering his hemorrhaging by building afflictions, because he never will. The only bonus he'll get will be via beast spit cheese.
Loosening the requirements to, say, 3 affs per cure balance (eg. pox, scabies, dysentery for dust), but capping it at 1 per cure balance would be better. So if you have all three affs when the monk recovers balance and hits you again, you'll still only get 1 hemorrhaging bonus proc. If you have only 1 of them when the monk recovers balance and hits you again, you'll also still only get 1 hemorrhaging bonus proc.
Another idea, just came to me, so I don't know if it's actually a good one... Assuming admin want to make monks pop hemorrhaging -> instakill.
Hemorrhaging counts towards bleeding/bruise requirements. (Revert change) Cap hemorrhaging at 1000. Any hemorraging caused at the cap is converted into bonus bleed/bruising depending on class.
This will allow monks to have a buffer period when they're not really rocking your world, but are instead building hemorrhaging. After this build period you are at risk of getting hemo-popped -> instakill, bleed stacked -> instakill, or aff stacked -> instakill.
Edit: If that turns out to be too weak, the hemo cap could be 1250, requiring only (one aff OR 250 more bleeding) + full hemorrhaging to instakill.
Edit2: Can also make bursting hemorrhaging do 2x bleed/bruise to make risking your hemorrhage buildup more enticing.
When I first saw that -- let me just bring it up here so there's no ambiguity --
o Hemorrhaging will count against a monks kill skill. If you have 1500 bleeding and 1500 hemorrhaging, it will act as if you have 0 bleeding.
I was like, hey, nice, you're adding some more strategic element here, as far as the monk needs to burst their hemorrhaging intelligently to achieve their instakill.
But seeing how difficult it is to build hemorrhage at this point, I can definitely see why this is pretty lame. Similarly, as far as my situation in the domoth, there's also this caveat that I dunno if anyone's put down yet
o Hemorrhaging is subject to diminishing returns in groups. The first monk will do 100%, second will do 50%, third 33% etc.
I get the idea here, but it's too harsh for the minimal hemorrhaging I am seeing currently.
That being said, I want to see if optimal hemorrhaging is possible and how long it'll take to build. What I mean by this is successfully sticking 3 or 4 of the prerequisite afflictions needed for each monk's hemorr.
Comments
I think scaling on affs like this is nearly always lead to problems. I agree with everything you're saying in a solo context, however in groups it's going to be like succumb where we take a skill that was designed around the idea of "it'd take a really clever setup to stick x affs on someone, and that should be rewarded" and then you throw it in a group context where you can fairly organically stack affs and really crazy numbers happen.
One thing to keep in mind is that in my log with Ciaran I hit two doubles in that 30s span, and this is with ur'life sharing two affs with my hemorrhaging pool. Once every ~15s is not a rare event, but if we assume that on every full stance rotation that you get one double and the rest our singles your proposal works out to 480 hemorrhaging a minute which is a tiny bit low for my taste but workable. My fear is that the only reason I was getting doubles at all was due to how advantaged I was with my hemorrhaging pool and ur'life so I'd like to see how monks in general are doing with hemorrhaging bleeding in terms of how many singles/doubles/triples people are able to get on targets.
I think it's cleaner to have critical stances where hemorrhaging builds rather than changing nekotai spit, changing the requirements for ur'life and changing the requirements for poison spit. All of those things would do the job of limiting what a person can bring to the fight solo but when you bring it into a group context I think it changes little and I think scaling the numbers up for more affs will just serve to partially counter the diminishing returns in place for hemorrhaging.
While were at it I guess could look at nerfing the ascendant death beast power/hypnogaze
Thoughts?
I'm not averse to the idea as a whole but I don't want to swing things the other way either. One thing to keep in mind is that lucidity being 1s was a reason used to grant temp insanity a balance slow. So you could see other guilds attempt to make the same argument with dust.
Group in this case is moderated by diminishing returns. That's the whole point of the group diminishing returns.
My concern with capping the amount of affs that give a bonus at 1 of the 4 is that it stifles strategy. There is no reward for working hard, for trying different ways to build multiple affs. The progression becomes easily reached, and you max out your benefit by reaching it just twice out if your five forms. There's a very low skill and strategizing ceiling, and a very high floor. The progress becomes exceedingly linear. There is nothing the monk can do to speed it up against a suboptimal curing target. Even if you have good, optimal curing, you'll not notice much difference in getting hemorrhaging from someone with suboptimal curing. That should not be the case.
If there is a monk class that has 2 of their 4 affs on the same cure, it should be changed, regardless of any other change. That, or the other monks should get the same cure balance setup for their affs.
I strongly feel that sticking affs on multiple cure balances should give multiple returns. In fact, if we go with the route of eliminating all pre-form poison/afflicts, then I believe there is no need for other changes. As mentioned before, it was the lack of effort from those pre-form afflicts (essentially incurable bonuses), that was unintended. If the bonuses are limited to only be triggered by actually building affs and having them leftover to the next form, as was originally intended, then I think we should re-evaluate based on that instead of changing the bonuses further at this point.
In order for that vision to work I'd expect to see several of the punches across monks change to give slush or steam afflictions. As it stands, monks are still able to give 4-6 afflictions within certain forms, including the dreaded paralysis, haemophilia, and blindness.
There are many classes which don't reward working hard and, to be honest, if you want reward for working hard it's far better to gate rewards behind consecutive or predictable limb taps as to enable SOME logical parry counter-play on the side of the person being hit. As it currently stands there is very little incentive to spread monk attacks in any real fashion, making parrying a stab in the dark.
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As a participant of this overhaul/re-design, I would like to make this kind of choice and dimension available to this class.
This is already partly the case for Nekotai. Our arm action repertoire right now has 3 lucidity affs, 3 dust affs, 1 steam aff and 7 ice affs. There is no paralysis in that list. Haemophilia, with the hemorrhaging changes, is now locked behind Surge stance. I have a report aimed at moving blindness up to Surge stance, or removing it entirely. I have another report aimed at swapping out a lucidity for a steam. A report made by Demartel is aimed at changing relapsing from a dust to a steam cure, which will turn one of our dust affs to steam as well. Assuming all of those reports pass, we'll become 2 dust, 2 steam, 2 slush, 7 ice. The only kick aff we have is haemophilia, so if we put that in, it'd become 3/2/2/7. I think our cure balance spread is probably the most balanced.
The high priority affs like haemophilia are basically locked behind higher stances, and removed from over half of the time a Nekotai will hit. Paralysis doesn't exist in our repertoire as a native affliction, and blindness is slated for change. Together with the pending paralysis nerf in the normal report cycle, I don't think this is unreasonable.
As for creating bodypart connections between cure types, that is certainly possible to do. In fact, one of my guild members had been expressing to me that he didn't like the hemorrhaging changes, and would have preferred a system of "pain points" that connected actions together in order to trigger afflictions etc. Unfortunately, that boat has sailed, but I did find his idea interesting. Frankly, once the dust has settled on the initial stage, I might explore if linking actions together can be a route for Nekotai in the future, to differentiate ourselves from other monks, if nothing else.
In the meantime, I'm certainly not opposed to doing something like making all our head actions across all our punches and kicks be the same cure type - which makes it easier for a target to decide what cure type to priortize their parrying on. At the moment, the philosophy behind my allocation of the Nekotai afflictions-to-bodyparts are mostly thematic, and based on how strong the afflictions are: angknek has the afflictions that were the least synergistic with our main goal: lucidity affs. Dust affs were all angkai upwards. Having more than 2 dust affs in angkai was deemed too strong, especially with our access to relapsing, so the rest of the slots were filled with 2 other ice affs and a steam aff. Angkhai, the strongest, has all of our ice afflictions. From there, the affs were allocated to a bodypart based on theme - confusion to head, clumsiness to arms etc. Disloyalty was a sore point for me, because legs didn't make sense for it, but the other affs fit too much in the other bodyparts on angkai.
Changing that to take into account cure balance first is definitely possible. I could make all the head lucidity affs, all the chest/gut dust/steam affs, all the arms/legs ice affs, or other variations. No doubt there will be some thematic disconnect, but it would suit the direction, and make parrying (and noticing other people's parries) more strategical. I will certainly ask the admin to see if a re-arranging is something they'll consider.
Actually, the only wounds-gated afflictions in monks back then was Tahtetso starkick, and that was a prone, not an aff. I think Ninja also had one, but I can't remember which. But that was the exception. Most monk afflictions were based on action-on-bodypart. Wounds gated exponential damage multipliers that stacked with the prone damage multiplier, not affs.
Edit: Forgot about wound level and poisons. I always forget about that because Nekotai mostly depended on our modifiers for poison.
- Gifted 50%
- Syntax: KATA DEVELOP <form> MODIFIERS DHATOGH
This kind of mechanic is what I'm talking about.Kata: Modifier
Ka Weight: 75
If applied to an attack on the legs, this modifier for the basic Jakari attack will trip your foe and possibly stun. The chance to stun increases with the wounds on the struck body part.
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
Hemorrhaging in its current state seems pretty weak. Looking through the entire fight (which was like over an hour long) -- I never got above 100 hemorrhaging, even with 2 monks (sometimes 3) hitting me (granted, I was doing the trademark meld and hide behind friends as much as possible).
I did get Ugathalogg'd out of nowhere once, but that already has a special report pending, so w/e.
I'm not sure if it was user error re: sticking the 4 prerequisite afflictions, but we might've pushed it a little too far into wimpzone.
I'll be curious to see how a top tier monk can build hemo 1v1.
You spend about 3-5 mins to build up on a passive target. Burst it away, they clot it all off before you get balance back.
May not be the intention but the way its implemented is to make the monk instant kill essentially harder to do. Near impossible to do solo right now outside of exceptional luck for some monks.
Assuming we adjust and fix hemo to be functional hemo brings up a problem we had tried to address previously in fixed bleeding numbers.
We talked a bit about the issues of fixed bleeding before and how it can be ignored by higher vital folks and how it murders lower vital folks. Hemo as a concept reinforces this disparity instead of fixing it. 1k uncureable bleeding isn't anything too big for me to worry about damage wise but it's a huge percentage of a non max persons health.
They sort of can build if you dont hinder them much. Testing with Wobou and he was able to build to 800+ after a few mins of me standing there. Fighting back basically means they don't really build much one on one.
That is how I was understanding the mechanic would be balanced.
That part made no sense to me either.
Needing to explode hemo in order to get bleed requirement was good, I think, rather than just letting hemo build to the point where you could insta for free. The hinder is still kind of irritating to try and cope with, though.
Discord: Rey#1460
Pretty much agree with Ciaran - the new "more hemo hurts you" mechanic just feels very jarring/counter intuitive, and adds another degree of variability based on spec that needs to be balanced around (i.e. how do you shut down clotting for 2.6-3s, and how is this balanced). Adjusting hemo delivery rates up/down as appropriate just seems like a far better all round solution, to me.
Currently I'm fairly sure its optimal for nekotai at least to burst on every form and take the chances with focus haemophilia, since there's not actually a transition from hemo burst-> finalsting. I imagine other monks are probably in that position too, but don't feel qualified to comment on them.
These first six were basically just Yarith letting me test with him. I was making incremental changes to my scripts and forms after every of these spars. Not much can be gleaned from my sub-optimal offense in here (one log was me not using any surge forms or higher because I had forgotten to close an elseif check) beyond the fact that any form of hindering or defensive option obliterates any hemorrhaging from normal forms. There's no real need to have passive hemorrhaging at the start of all stances - that 30 hemorr every stance is quite literally pointless in anything remotely resembling a real combat scenario. Just take the 30 from every form, and put it into the bonus afflictions. The burst is far more useful than a little bit every form that gets removed against anyone that isn't just rolling over.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/xIFMDupS (a try at doing a lucidity stack. Didn't work.)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/JXxuTX0K (turned to dust stack)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/6Z1ty-Z9 (also dust stack)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/88uwkHVS (the one with my major coding error)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/wltj4UEU (also dust stack)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/E_nqoDcc (also dust stack)
This one is after I had sort of improved my forms based on the previous increments:
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/_s0R5nLM (veyils standing there to be a test dummy)
Finding the above to not really be good at haemophilia hemorrhaging building, I took Tarken's advice and went static poisons, giving paralysis/blind/haemophilia every form that I could:
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/gei-5eAl (Ciaran spar, he let me continue hitting repeatedly, and didn't use his meld)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/cZzN5bal (Yarith, for comparison. Not quite as good because of the more defensive nature of the class, but a marked improvement from my previous logs above)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/AbUyJCgc (Yarith again, after I put in a couple more power boosting to try and overcome the researcher defenses)
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/FQhRhOMY (Enadonella, using a fairly power heavy set up, using boost fairly often)
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I haven't looked through the last four in much detail yet - but that's where the meat should be. That's pretty much the strongest a Nekotai can dust stack, I believe. Even then, and using beast spit liberally to get free hemorrhaging bonuses from disloyalty when it doesn't get shrugged, the hemorrhaging rate is, in my opinion, dismal.
Secondly, I largely overestimated the ability to stack affs and succesfully trigger hemorrhaging bonuses from my previous theoretical post. If we go the route of removing beast spitting entirely, then 1 aff is pretty much the max any monk can do. In that scenario, Wobou's suggestion to "cap" the affliction bonus probably doesn't even need to be put in - it's already capped. With beast spit, I can do 2 whenever I get beast balance (assuming I've managed to build dysentery beforehand already).
I'm using Nekotai spit to put on paralysis every form that it can be used in that way - if I used it to cheese, I have no guarantee of getting dysentery to stick. With beast spit cheese, 2 is the Nekotai limit, probably.
There might be an untapped strategy with lucidity and ice affs, but I sincerely doubt the latter, though the former has some potential. After the very first log, I concentrated solely on dust, to try to even build hemorrhaging to instakillable levels. Unfortunately, even that is an uphill battle on a non-hindering target.
Even using Tarken's recommendations with static poison choices designed to abuse the current paralysis/blindness priority, the hemorrhaging rate is pretty much completely tanked. This is about as optimal as it gets, and this is the absolute best hindering a monk can do as well. Once the paralysis nerf goes in and people are free to focus dysentery instead of paralysis, it's going to be pretty much impossible to build hemorrhaging to any 1v1 viable level.
Of course, there's a problem with the instakills in general at the moment. The changes in Changelog 726 made it impossible to instakill, pretty much. You can see this in action with the Veyils log and the Ciaran log. Even assuming that is fixed, though, the current hemorrhaging rate is far too low. I'm... not sure what was wrong with the previous numbers now, really. I would almost venture to say those numbers might even be too low, but since I wasn't around to spar back then, that would be unfounded. But the logs above certainly prove that the current bonus rates needs to be, at least, reverted.
In addition, I think loosening the bonus hemorrhaging triggers might also be a way forward. Though I'm of mixed mind about that. The ability to focus cures make a single aff from each cure balance to be the only one able to trigger the bonus far too easy to avoid. Of course, this would be the case after the paralysis nerf currently, paralysis still takes top priority, so it is acting as a focus "block", because by virtue of its strength it is just more important than everything else. Once that is no longer the case, it'll be simple to just focus dysentery, and never need to worry about the monk triggering his hemorrhaging by building afflictions, because he never will. The only bonus he'll get will be via beast spit cheese.
Loosening the requirements to, say, 3 affs per cure balance (eg. pox, scabies, dysentery for dust), but capping it at 1 per cure balance would be better. So if you have all three affs when the monk recovers balance and hits you again, you'll still only get 1 hemorrhaging bonus proc. If you have only 1 of them when the monk recovers balance and hits you again, you'll also still only get 1 hemorrhaging bonus proc.
Assuming admin want to make monks pop hemorrhaging -> instakill.
Hemorrhaging counts towards bleeding/bruise requirements. (Revert change)
Cap hemorrhaging at 1000.
Any hemorraging caused at the cap is converted into bonus bleed/bruising depending on class.
This will allow monks to have a buffer period when they're not really rocking your world, but are instead building hemorrhaging.
After this build period you are at risk of getting hemo-popped -> instakill, bleed stacked -> instakill, or aff stacked -> instakill.
Edit: If that turns out to be too weak, the hemo cap could be 1250, requiring only (one aff OR 250 more bleeding) + full hemorrhaging to instakill.
Edit2: Can also make bursting hemorrhaging do 2x bleed/bruise to make risking your hemorrhage buildup more enticing.
o Hemorrhaging will count against a monks kill skill. If you have 1500
bleeding and 1500 hemorrhaging, it will act as if you have 0 bleeding.
I was like, hey, nice, you're adding some more strategic element here, as far as the monk needs to burst their hemorrhaging intelligently to achieve their instakill.
But seeing how difficult it is to build hemorrhage at this point, I can definitely see why this is pretty lame. Similarly, as far as my situation in the domoth, there's also this caveat that I dunno if anyone's put down yet
o Hemorrhaging is subject to diminishing returns in groups. The first monk will do 100%, second will do 50%, third 33% etc.
I get the idea here, but it's too harsh for the minimal hemorrhaging I am seeing currently.
That being said, I want to see if optimal hemorrhaging is possible and how long it'll take to build. What I mean by this is successfully sticking 3 or 4 of the prerequisite afflictions needed for each monk's hemorr.