Is There a Point to Melding?

Maligorn

ANNOUNCE NEWS #2724
Date: 4/11/2017 at 3:41
From: Ianir the Anomaly
To  : Everyone
Subj: Envoy reports Jan 2017


o DISSOLVE now consumes equilibrium even if target does not have protection up.

o Protection scroll now uses scroll balance.

o Unleash staff now does reduced damage to those with protection up.

o You can now DISSOLVE ENEMIES for 5 power to strip protection from allenemies in the room.


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But seriously. Some guilds are going to be affected by this worse than others. Aeromancers are going to lose all semblance of stopping power (Thunderclouds blocked) (Guess you could include RainbowClouds/windwalls but that's pretty flimsy). Geomancers and Pyromancers still have their stun outside of protection, Treelife unblocked by protection, Aquas will no longer strip valuable defences passively (i.e. waterwalking via Needlerain).

I'm just...never going to spend 5p to strip protection on everyone when they can immediately use scroll balance to re-up it, even offbal and offeq (in 5 seconds!!!). There's zero point in even using the Dissolve syntax anymore, practically. Why does Music Blankchord only cost 2p for the same exact effect? Doesn't it give earache for 6-8 seconds too? If a person has scroll balance, they can put protection back up in 5. Bards can't be that far off from melders in terms of roomwide pressure.

What's the point of using unleash now? I could head to the room, unleash, get out, refresh power, walk back in to dissolve all enemies...for one single Cyclone.

Why are there only two melder guild envoys posting in report 1574? Why was this allowed to happen?


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I realize this is very kneejerk. It might not be as bad as it sounds. I just feel very alone? I don't know. I ask my city's envoys to report on Aeromancy, and nothing ever comes of it. As I mentioned to them, I don't necessarily want to paint them in a negative light, but...hey, let's rework Aerochemantics here. Let's nerf Aeon and look to the future with some special reports for Institute. Let's use our reports to slowly tweak Loralaria. I've been asking for months. I just feel very let down by the game and the people I talk to. I also feel very let down by the admin for allowing a report created by the Minstrels, and had minimal feedback from melders, to introduce yet another nerf. This is so heavyhanded. It's like, Falaeron had to fight tooth and nail for a small but significant buff to the Aeromancy Thunderclouds, but...hey, new report's in, now Thunderclouds is virtually never going to hit any of my enemies. Oh, and we envoyed Aeromancy Staff's disgustingly lame twirl staff (for literally the third time)...and it got a power cost attached to it. So no one's going to ever use it. So it's even worse than double digit electrical retribution damage.

I'm just totally at a loss. Feel free to dismiss this as a vent post.

Breandryn

Well, this means you can buff the effects now - it looks like, design-wise, they are going for an AoE active burst vs constant passive.

But I'm newb at combat so I may be misinterpreting!

Arix

This does seem like a bit of a middle finger

Shuyin

I think I'd like for a way to check for everyone's protection status in the room now if the idea is to make the mages have to keep track of everyone's protection status.

I don't want to overly pad discern, but I'd be down for a syntax similar to PERCEIVE that will inform the mage of everyone's protection status. Bonus points if you can just PERCEIVE ENEMIES/ALLIES.

Lehki

Yeah, maybe I'm missing something because I'm way rusty on stuff and out of the envoy loop, but that this seems rather harsh? If protection's on scroll balance, and dissolve is on EQ, I think the only time I could justify even bothering to dissolve somebody is if they are the main group target and it might force them to choose between protection scroll or healing scroll. And even then just staff blasting them is probably better pressure?

Dissolve Enemies sounds like I would never use it in any situation.

Edit: Actually I guess you could use it to strip protection just before somebody else's unleash hits, so there's that. But man 10p unleasher and 5p from somebody else to get max unleash damage seems rough.

Danquik

Don't worry while you are off balance from dissolving everyone, love potion/pheromones will tic so you can follow up with 6 seconds of rejecting too!

Shedrin

So, I was looking at what is and isn't blocked by protection. I think we should go over what sorts of effects we want blocked and what we don't. I've decided to do the special report for Warriors (more on that in the relevant thread), so that frees up my slot for this month, so I can envoy this.

Here's what's blocked:
Thunderclouds, firestorm, heatstroke, ashfall, spores, pollen, treelife, poison, duststorm, sickening, needlerain, currents.

• For every meld but Aeromancers, the main hinder effect isn't blocked (firerain, swarm, etc).
• The movement-screwing effects aren't blocked, with one exception and one pseudo-exception. Ashfall is blocked, and needlerain to strip waterwalk isn't blocked. Currents and treelife I consider a slightly different type of effect, as it's not on movement but a force move on tic.
• The main instakill contribution effects aren't blocked (icefloe, northwind, burns), with the pseudo exception of pollen and needlerain again.
• The main direct damage effect isn't blocked, excepting Thunderclouds.
  

My question to everyone is, what types of effects do you think should be blocked and what shouldn't. Personally, I think the movement effects shouldn't be blocked to preserve the area control aspect of melds. I think the hinder effects shouldn't be blocked, but I'm a bit ambivalent. If not the hinder effects, then the damage should probably be blocked.

Deichtine

Shedrin said:

• 
  

My question to everyone is, what types of effects do you think should be blocked and what shouldn't. Personally, I think the movement effects shouldn't be blocked to preserve the area control aspect of melds. I think the hinder effects shouldn't be blocked, but I'm a bit ambivalent. If not the hinder effects, then the damage should probably be blocked.

Personally I think the movement hinder effects(not the walls though) and the major aoe hinder should be stopped by protection for all melds. The area control aspect of melds I thought was the entire point of this nerf they were way way way way way way way too strong and this brings them down into a level that can potentially be dealt with(hopefully).

Melders could do with better actives but well again I thought the plan and the entire point of this was a nerf to bring down their passives to open up room for them to get good actives so that they were less of an almost entirely passive class and required more active participation.

Melds are still going to be super powerful for groups. The meld effects are fairly hindering even if you only look at them in a one on one aspect. One mage Unleashes and the second uses dissolve all to hit a big group. And well a well timed unleash can wipe entire groups. Not having a melder on your team is still going to be  a huge thing.

And unleash can still be used to hit a few targets by a single mage. Unleash enter and dissolve one or two  after getting mana back. 

Hopefully the lust/love potion reports go though properly though. Most people seem happy with removing lust and nerfing pheromones.

Shedrin

I think the area control aspect is the main point of melds and if we gate that too much we might as well delete melds entirely.

But I do think Unleash could potentially use some more nerfs. Damage and aoe damage is still very strong right now.

Shuyin

I would agree that with this change, we can probably look at standardizing the movement/hinder affs to no longer be blocked by protection. The movement-on-tick effects should remain blocked however.

I don't agree that it should be blocked because melds need to emphasize that aspect more if anything.

Lerad

Why would dissolve (the single target version) not be used anymore?

Dissolve hasn't been changed to require balance or eq, as far as I can tell, right? The change described means that dissolve should still be combo-able with balance abilities. What has changed is that a melder can no longer just stack-spam DISSOLVE <target> for every single enemy in the room (or even every single enemy, period) after every single balance ability. If you dissolve a target that is already dissolved, then the eq cost will now kick in, whereas in the past it doesn't take any eq, so the next stacked dissolve target will get dissolved.

This means that a melder can definitely still do the same amount of dissolving as previously. The rate that a melder today will take to dissolve 10 people is still the same as it used to be in the past, without losing the ability to do so concurrently with a balance-taking action. It's just that doing so is no longer a static alias to be spammed over and over, and the melder has to choose who he wants to dissolve. And with the follow up change below, they HAVE to choose, anyway:

Changing protection to scroll balance is the important big change. It means someone can give up their health scrolling to continually put protection up. It also means that protection actually does get put back up - and therefore, there's a need for the melder to re-dissolve a target that does so. Previously, once protection is down, it's down, period. It's never going to get put back up, period. Depending on scroll balance, it means that maintaining dissolve on a target that prioritises their protection over their vitals will limit how many other people in the team the melder can also dissolve. For example, if scroll balance is 5s, then to make sure a target is always dissolved, you have to dissolve him once every other attack. So you would do:

shieldstun targetC;dissolve targetA
shieldstun targetC;dissolve targetB
shieldstun targetC;dissolve targetA
shieldstun targetC;dissolve targetB

and be able to keep targetA and targetB permanently off scroll balance and always dissolved (or rather, as much as possible) - assuming everyone has changed their system to put up protection everytime it gets stripped as quickly as possible (which they probably should) - while continuing to shieldstun targetC. Substitute the shieldstun with whichever balance attack melders use in combo with dissolves, traditionally.

It drops the effective number of people that will always be hit by the full meld effects to a handful (increases if you have additional melders). At the same time, it also does remove health scrolling on those focused targets - unless they don't put protection up again. Targets that are always focused targets or group targets will actually see melds become more powerful - because it is now consuming their health scrolling on top of them being always dissolved. (If they refuse to automatically put up protection scroll, then the melder gets an extra person to dissolve). Targets that are always an after-thought for dissolving, will now see the impact of melds on them lowered - because chances are, the melder will not have the bandwidth to bother dissolving you, when there are bigger fish to dissolve, so to speak.

if there's any followup action, it'll be these:
- Evaluate the length of scroll balance, is it too short, is it too long etc? This will affect how many people a single melder can keep permanently dissolved.
- Ensure there are proper ways for a melder to track who has protection and who does not (see Shuyin's post) etc
- Ensure that the non-protection blocked meld effects are more or less similar across the meld guilds, assuming there are imbalances to address. These will be the effects that will affect enemies in range regardless of their protection status.

I abstained on the dissolving solutions, because I didn't know enough to say for sure if this was needed or not. But I think I'll trust the envoys who commented and agreed that it was an okay decision to at least try out and see. If there's any worry, it is whether or not the additional coding burden (on tracking and deciding who to dissolve) makes things too clunky and unfun - providing tools to simplify that either via serverside QoL improvements, or through providing easy to use messages for creating simple tracking triggers/scripts, will help alleviate that, I feel.

Lerad

As an additional note, it'd be good if someone could work out how many people a single melder CAN actually keep permanently dissolved, if they all continually invest all of their scroll balance into protection. This is important for melders to know, so they can coordinate how many people each of them should handle (you take personA, B and C, I'll take D, E and F... etc)

At the same time, it also allows non-melders to decide when they should disable protection. If it's a 3v3, and one melder can keep up to 3 targets permanently off protection, then you'll be better off just disabling protection entirely, and spend your scroll balances on health scrolling. You can then extrapolate based on how many melders the enemy has, with the size of the fight. So if it's a 9v9, and the opponent team has more than 3 melders, you might as well tell everyone to disable their protection scrolling, and concentrate on health scrolling - and everyone will get what is effectively a vitals healing boost. But if the opponent has only, say, 2 melders, then you will want everyone to continually put up protection, so that only 6 of your team has protection down at any one time - and it'll require all the dissolving capacities of both enemy melders to ensure whichever 6 they choose are dissolved.

Someone should sit down and test scroll balance, protection delays, and extrapolate what's the best balance ability to use in conjunction with dissolve to work out general numbers like that.

Ciaran

You can see who has protection up by who's not getting hit by your meld.

I support these changes with the implication that buffs to active meld-use are somewhere down the road.  In a general sense I like forcing a good melder to stay on top of things, instead of just dissolve/unleash staff for the win.  This is definitely a nerf, but I think it creates room for the *mancy and druidry skillsets to get a bit of a facelift.

Deichtine

I'm timing scroll balance in at 8 seconds. So yea a mage can easily continue to dissolve a few targets while keeping up their full offense at the same time. It'll mean having a rolling targeting tracker for a number of different targets which is not a simple thing to do to be fair but its doable.

Shedrin

So I'm thinking right now to make all damage effects and forced movement be blocked, and make sure movement hinder and general hinder not be blocked. We could go even further and have all the misc affliction effects be blocked as well.

Enyalida

Treelife is blocked by protection.

Maligorn

Ciaran said:

You can see who has protection up by who's not getting hit by your meld.

I support these changes with the implication that buffs to active meld-use are somewhere down the road.  In a general sense I like forcing a good melder to stay on top of things, instead of just dissolve/unleash staff for the win.  This is definitely a nerf, but I think it creates room for the *mancy and druidry skillsets to get a bit of a facelift.

I guess I have zero faith that anything particularly nice is going to come by a melder's way with the way reports have been going. I get what people are saying about subbing in some more active skills, but if you want melders to really be in the room and doing things, you have to lessen the extreme penalty for dying.

Shuyin

Yes, make mages exempt from the same penalties literally everyone else shares for dying. 

I'm down for more active effects, but I want an active way to check for protection and not have to wait for a meld tick

Ciaran

You could make whirl staff reveal who has protection up.

Tyamit

By penalty do you mean loss of meld? 

Maligorn

Shuyin said:

Yes, make mages exempt from the same penalties literally everyone else shares for dying. 

I'm down for more active effects, but I want an active way to check for protection and not have to wait for a meld tick

Hey man, there was a time when only effects dropped, not the entire meld. Report 1329 changed that. Okay, that's a good nerf, no prob.

Report 1574: "hold my beer".

I'm not really sure, but I think that the original intent for 1574 was to only have 1 solution accepted.

So that's why I'm saying this is a vent post. I'm just not ready for the quadrawhammy nerf.\

Report 980 coming in for the finisher. It's all over.

Danquik

My next report will be not only does meld drop on death, but terrain reverts to natural terrain type for area on death. >.>

Tyamit

Meld burnout for an hour on death incoming. 

Maligorn

Heheh. I do appreciate the humor, believe it or not. Thank you guys.

Deichtine

There should be a line for protection coming up that a mage can see, like earwort or rebounding. So you can work from that.

Fyler

Huh, what a strange change. 

I don't think the immediate dissolve changes are that big of a deal in group settings, most melders I knew didn't cycle through everyone to dissolve one by one (though maybe I was lazy), and the focused target shouldn't burn health scroll balance on protection.

DISSOLVE ENEMIES is a waste of power and time, I have no idea what that was added. Can't be used with unleash staff. Is a non issue for non focused targets. Big WTF on this one. 

This just seems like a backdoor effort to nerf unleash, because it's the only really significant change. Which was probably necessary.

The thing is, if your big AOE burst isn't killing people, it really has minimal/no value. It's just one of those things that either kills or it doesn't do anything, and 10 power with a 12 second delay+full mana is a lot to invest to drop 1 target. There's no benefit to hitting 10 people for half their health. 9 will recover quickly, and the one everyone was already beating on will be dead. Staffcast and save your power. 

Pyrochem is actually better at burst than a pyromancer now. Seems like Pyromancer is just a meld monkey now. 

It also requires the mage to be in the room to ensure the target is dissolved now, which is frequently suicide given the number of mana killers in the game.

So rather than addressing unleash staff in a real way, it's a just a hodge podge band-aid fix that discourages its use. 

Overall a bad change, IMHO. 

(This was an envoy report? Fire them.)

Falaeron

Lol. Good luck getting any active skills that are worth using through.

Deichtine

With report 980 isn't the big issue with melds in group combat how hindering they are? Letting all the hinder hit everyone regardless of protection will still make melders the most powerful class in group combat. I was thinking the idea was to bring melders down to the level of the other classes to make it so a team without a melder can be competitive? 

Maligorn

I seriously don't agree that melders had a necessity to be "brought down to other classes levels" (because they already were at that level). If you want to nerf bards though, please, be my guest, since they most closely resemble melds and are pretty crazy strong.

EDIT: Please, please bring mages/druids to monk level. That sounds like an excellent idea.

Fyler

Veyils said:

With report 980 isn't the big issue with melds in group combat how hindering they are? Letting all the hinder hit everyone regardless of protection will still make melders the most powerful class in group combat. I was thinking the idea was to bring melders down to the level of the other classes to make it so a team without a melder can be competitive? 

If melds are to stay, they have to be the most powerful class in group combat, because without melds...mages have a very small toolbox and a lot more restrictions than every other class. Without a meld they are largely the least powerful. If you want to nerf melds to be as effective as fae, for example, that requires a pretty massive rewrite of melders or they'll just suck. 

Melds are powerful, melders are limited. You have to address both to fix mages/druids. Which is also why we have chemantics/woods.

Maligorn

On a different note, I would be so happy to change the trans skill of all druidry and *mancies. But I've been saying that for months. Loldamage is boring as heck. But, I mean, this was January reports. May isn't going to have -any- reports (like, objective fact, no reports at all). The general trajectory for giving new actives and SOMETHING in compensation for this nerf is going to probably be, like, 4-5 months. You know, if those potential June reports are accepted in the first place. Nice.

EDIT: Maybe melder guild envoys should've lined some stuff up for February? But they probably didn't know if report 1574 was going to be accepted. Okay, so, March then. Oh wait, it wasn't melders that reached a consensus on this change, it was everyone else, so they were essentially blindsided. Noice.