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Open Combat: Harmonics Design
Hi everybody,
We are going to be discussing the general design of Harmonics. Harmonics is a primary skillset specialising from Cosmic, available only to the Institute class in Hallifax.
BEFORE CONTINUING, PLEASE READ THE RULES FOR THE OPEN COMBAT THREADS AT: http://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/3256/open-combat-a-synopsis/
This thread will be focusing on the basic design of the skillset, determining the current problems and finding ways to solve these problems, determining basic mechanical changes, etc.. We will not be going into specific skill changes at this time.
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Current Problems (as the administration sees them):
* Harmonics is a skillset which cannot decide whether it is a burst skillset or a buildup skillset, and has managed to land itself amongst the worst of both worlds as a result.
* Harmonics was heavily reliant on the aeon affliction and was weakened heavily by its changes.
* Harmonics is extremely time-reliant for kills, making it often impossible to pull off its primary kill method if you are not sitting in Delaware with the servers.
* Ruby, being the basis for their primary kill, is a run or die mechanic at best, its only real cure being entirely outside of the curing quadrangle and requiring balance, namely in the form of kether/violet (see trope: the only way to fight is to shield forever).
* The skillset is extremely one-dimensional. (Get it? Org built in 3d which worships 3d shapes is one-dimensional... I thought it was funny at least.)
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Comments
The gems are a theme we are keeping with the skillset, but the specifics aren't at all set in stone. One idea I did personally have was to give gems both a defensive and offensive aspect (and remove stacking for offensive) - When spun, they automatically begin to orbit around the individual, giving defensive buffs/passive effects as necessary (examples: passive healing of afflictions/vitals, passive DMP, retaliatory attacks). The researcher can then shift to a target, giving a passive offensive action on a single individual that will fire on a timer. Each gem movement will require one full equilibrium, as will spinning, though this does open a power option to move multiple gems at once.
The option to shatter a gem exists, dealing %+flat h(/m) damage to the target (and potentially a lower AoE damage to all enemies in the room). Shatterplex could then be changed to multiply this for all gems on the individual, potentially acting as a full kill when all gems are on a target at the cost of, of course, having to respin all their gems around themselves. This effectively gives them single target burst/killing potential as well as passive afflicting.
Inclusion of a timer or automatic return mechanic of some sort could force a haste upon the caster to pull off their kill (potentially all gems return if none are moved across X seconds), which would potentially negate the need for a kether/violet defense (which is frustrating to both sides, lets be honest).
We could also potentially have certain curatives having a chance to knock off a gem and return it to its owner instead, though this introduces RNG into the equation.
EDIT: For an alternative design philosophy - (Envoys): <redacted> says, "If you put together all five gems, you summon Captain Timewarp and he deletes you. The power is yours. Timewarp-e-teers."
Features I like and hope we can keep: Passive healing, hp/mana/ego regen, being able to target allies with beneficial effects Amethyst, jade, beryl, turquoise etc.
Feature I miss, but apparently it was a good thing to nerf(?): Diamond as a shield. These days, I don't see how it's any different from having access to bubblegum shield/beastmastery bodyguard/ shome shield artie that's out there that I can't remember the name of.
New idea- Replacement for Diamond: Some type of summonable crystal windboard/breezeskimmer 'mount' like wicca guardian Brooms for flying. I know there's been the argument for cloud construct/winged races. But that's only as long as we can have the construct, not permanently. Wicca can have access to faeling race, but they're still able to have brooms, and we're a city all about flying, so why not one more method? Alternative to board: crystal swan cloak like crowcloak, for flying.
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Quick idea and long idea.
Its hard to separate harmonics and aeonics as well you need to use both together for your kill route now so I've just posted thinking mainly about the institute class as a whole instead of just the individual skillsets.
------------------Short story:
Quick thing with minor adjustments would be to make them a build to timewarp akin to illumanti are build to insanity. Adjust temptimewarp to have a straight up command denial aspect building like insanity, remove its weakening of quicksilver. Nix Shatter plex/rubbies as a burst to 100% route and buff their active cast ability of timechant timewarp and adjust things like timeechos, aeonfield as needed.
This change really wouldn't take that much effort to switch them. On the test server if you pop timeechos, aeonfield, quickening and speed cast timewarp you can build timewarp on an target albeit very very slowly. So you could easily nix rubies/shatterplex and buff up the other passive casts and actives a fair bit to give them a solid build to kill route.
This route sort of makes them a bit like an illumanti clone though so it is maybe not the most interesting of ways.
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Long story:
Overhaul the hell out of them.
Ignore everything that exists before hand and wipe it all and build a new class.
Rebuild. Ideas. The crystal aspects. The crystals elements emerald, ruby, diamond etc. Each represent aspects of the class. Ruby as aggression, emerald as healing and protection and diamond as precision strikes.
Concept one:Caster like monks, cycle through different gemstone configurations with different spells and abilities locked under different configurations. You can have entire forking trees of abilities that you can flow and spec into in the middle of a fight.
Go down the ruby red route for bleeding, damage and high pressure aggression with an ultimate damage bomb set up ability. The emerald route for defensive and healing, self dodge, true heal like effects as an ultimate etc. ETC
Different gems have different harmony so it is easier to switch between Emerald stance and sapphire than it is between the more dissimilar ruby and emerald.
The mechanics of doing this I've a few rough ideas on. Initially I was thinking you could have them as caster monks simply casting a spell would progress you up through the ranks and create windows of high power and low power.
Concept two:A second idea after chatting with a few folk was a more predictive style of combat. EG each crystal has 5 tiers. 1-5. You have 100 crystal points. The lower tiers provide the weaker skills/buffs but have the highest regeneration of crystal points. The higher tiers have ultimate level abilities but lower crystalpoint regeneration. EG I was thinking something like Emerald could have some standard heal abilities at base costing 5 crystal points but regenerating 10 crystal points every 10 seconds so you could nearly spam the ability for ages. Ruby would have a similar damage style ability and cost decent but not overwhelming. The higher tier abilities would be exceptionally costly such as a trueheal like ability for 80 crystal points or a dchord level damage hit or other suitability threatening affliction or instant kill styled abiltities but the regeneration period in the higher tiers would be next to none. Moving into a tier would lock you into that tier for a set amount of time. This is just a rough idea but the general concept is you'd set up kills in the early tiers with high regen eg delayed affliction bombs from diamond, shifting into mid tier ruby for moderate damage/bleed/something to shift to high ruby for a huge damage spike.
Maybe not damage, we could shift it to something else but just as a general concept idea. Its napkin notes essentially.
I find myself liking Ianir's suggestion of utilizing multiple separate gems rather than only rubies to build towards an instakill condition that would be able to be accomplished solely through Harmonics skills, as opposed to continuing to have Harmonics' instakill dependent on an Aeonics finisher. This would allow us to divorce Harmonics and Aeonics from each other and focus on giving both skillsets attractive, yet separate features to give them a 'Wow Factor' that other Guardian specializations possess and they are currently lacking.
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When looking at what guardians and wiccans offer in combat, it is usually a combination of a high affliction rate, strong hindering, group separation utility, and/or an easy to support instakill. When I look at Institute I don't really see any of these boxes being ticked. Put more clearly, there's nothing in the Institute kit that the other classes in Hallifax can't already do better, nor is there anything that Institute particularly excels at compared to the other guardian/wiccan classes. Even pre-aeon nerf, the class with "Aeonics" wasn't even the best at 1) landing, or 2) sticking aeon. I think any rework of Institute needs to take these points into account and ensure that they end up having a purpose.
Timewarp
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The problem with timewarp is that it's a useless affliction for half the classes that can give it, and for the other half it basically only boosts the damage of a single skill (Loralaria RedRubato and Aerochemantics Static). The first effect, which increases the time it takes for quicksilver to come up, doesn't actually amount to any significant increase even at massive. The second effect, which increases the time it takes to CONCENTRATE from disrupted equilibrium, is only noticeable at the higher levels and requires using an active balance to actually take advantage of in the first place.
For Institute in particular, timewarp is an entirely binary affliction. There is just no feasible way for Institute to build timewarp at a rate that outpaces curing so the only way they have to reach that massive threshold is with Shatterplex. This requires one of the more boring set ups in the game to even do and the boring but effective counter aside, even after being able to use Shatterplex you need to set up an unfairly small timing window to actually TimeQuake. If the target does basically anything before the TimeQuake the entire offence is reset.
Compare this to tempinsanity, where just having the affliction slows down its own (and all other slush affs') cure time by 50%, on top of the command denial, though this is a minor factor most of the time. The other aspect is that tempinsanity is a mental aff, which makes it much easier to build with the reduced curing from having another mental aff. Timewarp is a steam aff, which is very limited in terms of actual affs to design with.
Gems
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I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with the gem mechanic. I think the problem is more with what the gems actually do. There are also too many that give individual healing/defensive effects. I hold the view that offensive skills are generally better than defensive skills because defensive skills are only effective if the person is being targeted and usually if they are then a bit of vital healing and an affliction cure every gem tic isn't going to be enough to make much of a difference. On the other hand, the offensive gems give effects that honestly don't make any sense for the Harmonics kit. There are a couple of random dust and slush affs, a weird clot-weakening effect, and some mana and ego drain. None of these contribute towards anything that Institute aims to do.
It can be very nice to be super-tanky, especially in PvE, but it means for balance purposes you need to have a very limited offensive capability or you're basically the king of classes. Some defensive tools are great, but when the skillset is fully kitted out with them you're basically making it a PvE only skillset (in PvP people will opt to ignore you and actually wipe out the threats first while you flail ineffectively).
I mean, 99% of Hallifax is Tessenchi anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm like the only old Institute member left aside from the Conclave
I'm a consent-based roleplayer! Kindly ask first, and I will return the favour. Open to developing tinyplots.
Atlantis is my client of choice! (Guide)
Healing will still be healing though.
Suppose Harmonics was changed to work more like Nihilist/Celestialism investments, where you do CRYSTALSPIN <list of at least two gems> and then every N seconds a gem effect happens in the order spun, with passive gems doing nothing on their turn except eating N seconds to keep the passive effect going. Now it's suddenly a lot more strategic, because you don't want to just put up every single gem you have, since that means waiting 12N seconds for each gem effect to recur. For bashing you might do CRYSTALSPIN AMETHYST EMERALD TURQOISE; for influencing you'd like BERYL JADE, while for PVP you'd prefer something like RUBY ONYX or RUBY SAPPHIRE.
AcceleratorGem, instead of putting up all the gems at once, would become the Scourge/Wrath option that makes two gems proc at once.
Design wisely trends towards offense focus with some beneficial passives. Survivability is, ultimately, a frustrating and uninterested design concept. Old healing had that problem.
To draw a contrast, see Harmony - widely regarded as the middle of the road Monk Secondary - in which you pick 3 effects out of 15 to have up at once. Nobody complains that having access to 3/8 health and mana and ego regen and mantra wind and mantra prism all at the same time is OP, precisely because you can only have one of those effects up at once. So too can it be with Harmonics.
I said "high end" which 1/6 mana regen wouldn't fall into. I guess I didn't make the connection that your intent was for the "tankiness" side to be made up of such minor buffs. My main point was that it's problematic if you have "great" offensive and defensive flexibility that you can toggle between, even for X balance/eq/power/etc.
I like the idea of a cascading failure (though however feasible it might be in practise, who knows...)
So rather than having the gems having a timer that counts down, have gems spun around the target have a timer that charges to some limit at which point they can be overcharged.
So rough idea would then be...
1) Spin gems around a target and have the cascade limited to a single researcher's gems by requiring a resonating target.
2) Once enough time has elapsed such that a gem is charged, can attempt to initiate a cascade failure by spending X power to overcharge Y charged gems, which go into a brief overcharged state, rapidly afflicting/draining vitals/negating curing/whatever...
3) IF (Condition Z AND remaining charged gems when overcharged state ends) -> the cascade continues to next gem/gems... (or alternatively, each gem might have its own conditional prerequisite for becoming part of the cascade).
4) ELSE -> cascade halts, crystalplex shatters, charges reset. Start cycle again.
If timewarp/quake are staying, this could be where timewarp is rapidly delivered to enable a Timequake. If not, then if the cascade continues through say three stages, detonation/shattering of entire crystalplex kills the resonating target.
Pros:
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- Little reliance on Aeonics, though Aeonics may facilitate reaching whatever cascade continuation conditions are decided to be.
- Rubies run-or-die mechanic replaced with disrupting the continuation of a cascade.
- If each gem has its own prerequisite, some flexibility in how to continue a cascade
Cons:
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- Cascade continuation conditions = ???
- Not a true insta.