It's interesting. It looks like what happened if you took Hunter, added a bit of malignist with the attunement, and then threw in some druid style damage.
Honestly, it's hard to judge anything before we have a chance to use it. You can conceptualize all you want, but until we get to beta, it's going to be hard to say exactly how anything works.
I misunderstood your use of the term lowbie. I thought you meant pre-tri trans, low level, low max health lowbie. Not Baasche (tri-trans with Focus and Purge, but no other mini's or artifacts) lowbie.
That said, I wasn't thinking of any extremely high damage, I was more of looking to have it high enough to counteract Frost(not sure why it exists in the first place), but Scourge makes Frost less of an issue. I'm honestly looking for the damage to scale about the way it does now with most classes. Tri-trans without artifacts should be able to damage kill(granted, it's a more complicated damage kill than just qjabbing) others that are equally equipped for combat. Arti-giants like Risca should be able to mostly crush those tri-trans combatants without artifacts(ala his current Holo's or Juran's DSL/flare 300+ damage combos.) Tri-trans lowbies have the Decompose option open to kill arti-giants, should the arti-giants not crush the lowbie instantly.
As I said before, I think it's got potential to be great if he can get the numbers right as far as damage goes.
Will currently made Alchemy items be wiped? When the profession gets changed will I loose my resist rings/waterwalking boots, etc?
To be honest, it's not really a profession that looks interesting to me personally. I already have Hunter if I want to mess around with that sort of style.
The class looks pretty interesting, will be exciting to see how it actually performs. I just pray that there's no backlash right after it comes out and everyone is mage for the first week that causes it to do player-specific tracking of afflictions. Magic has already been saddled with Bard being punted into permanent inviability in our skirmish-heavy contexts on those grounds, and it would really suck to have another that requires two minutes of sustained fighting that doesn't speed up at all in groups. (My argument then and now about this: Straight damage classes stack with 100% efficiency, class-specific kills should at least see some of that love too).
Also, assuming that there's some mini-event when these classes are released like there was for Bonding, a request: For once, can it please not follow the stock template of "Magick has been screwed over by [group] and has lost [major power source]. Picking up the pieces, they have reformed what's left into [new thing]." It seems like time after time major events portray the Magick circle as either weak or incompetent, whether it is accidentally unleashing a chain of events which accidentally killed all the gods, having the bonding spirits banished and all the forestal magic destroyed by demoners, Khandava being corrupted (and the subsequent looting of Magick's vault of MacGuffins and the tomb of one of very few of magick's celebrities), or being completely excluded in the fight for Ki until Eloweth retro-fitted some code 2/3rds of the way through the event. I recognize some people are still sore over the age of Janus gifting magick with chalices of eventpwnz, but that age has been long gone, and given that he's now dead, we need not fear its return.
I would just be really happy if we had Magick take the active role for once and consciously do a ritual with the intent of transmuting the Crystal of Ages into the portable pieces, rather than having it destroyed in a firey blaze from Stavenn and the Mages learning how to use the leftover crystal chunks. The way the bonding event was handled I felt like we were the losers, even though we were getting new classes more powerful than those they were replacing had been in years. Just something to keep in mind, I guess.
Magick did have an active role! Your derp strategy of "follow the sparkly brick road" led Magic to opening a portal to the demon world (something Stavenn failed at doing for years) and summoning forth demonic entities that started a world war, costing thousands of lives and millions of dollars that culminated in all of the gods dying. Then, magick tried to stop the world from banishing the demons back to their world!
Well played, Magick.
P.S. I know you're not usually down for fire and brimstone, but Samaos has some rocking roleplay. She's a badass. Probably too badass for you. Svorai would probably be more your flavor. She's awesome and kind of badass, just cuter. (Samaos is hotter).
Alternatively, don't have an event for class change introductions because someone will invariably be upset about how it was handled. It'd be great if it were possible to please everyone, but that's just not the way it works and its best to avoid another thread full of people upset and insulting the admin who ran the event in a manner that is more of a tantrum than constructive.
Shit. My organization resembles that remark. SUCK IT, SELTHIS.
Oh wait, Kalon did that when we released Khandava. I get it now. /sheepish.
To be fair, everyone does it every time an event makes their org look bad or not to their liking. I wasn't pointing out anyone posting in the thread as doing it specifically anymore than anyone else. It is by and large why I think major events are probably more trouble than they're worth and why I imagine the divine take org requests with a grain of salt.
Magick did have an active role! Your derp strategy of "follow the sparkly brick road" led Magic to opening a portal to the demon world (something Stavenn failed at doing for years) and summoning forth demonic entities that started a world war, costing thousands of lives and millions of dollars that culminated in all of the gods dying. Then, magick tried to stop the world from banishing the demons back to their world!
Well played, Magick.
P.S. I know you're not usually down for fire and brimstone, but Samaos has some rocking roleplay. She's a badass. Probably too badass for you. Svorai would probably be more your flavor. She's awesome and kind of badass, just cuter. (Samaos is hotter).
All the signs pointed to horrible things happening. We knew that something awful would probably come out of those gates once we opened them.
We knew. We just didn't care. It wasn't a bunch of idiots doing it unwittingly, it was a bunch of idiots going "Well, there's only one way to find out what this big red button does..."
Also, I'll take Hastati/Samaos/Olanre over Baar/Janus/Thanatos any day. The world owes us a goddamned thank you note for that, imo.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Not really ready yet to discuss details of the Summoner profession, but, vaguely. The attunements concept is present as well in a more limited form, but Summoners will be more built around properly managing big attacks with long cooldowns.
Magick does NOT need another complicated affliction class with a high skill floor. Hell, we need to lower the skill floor on our other classes, so that new players can get involved in combat without needing tri-trans skills and an encyclopedic knowledge of afflictions.
I'd just like to comment on this a bit. This is very much not the effect that I am going for with the profession. Basically, the aim is "easy to play, difficult to master". The goal that I'd like to achieve here is so that newer players can simply pick up a combo or two and be an asset, but using the profession to the full extent requires much more than that.
Incidentally, and somewhat off-topic, so far responses to my queries regarding making affliction classes less complex (which mainly means easier tracking of afflictions) clearly indicated that there isn't really much interest in that. So I don't know, maybe this has changed?
I'm not sure if you could really make aff tracking that much easier from a getting people able to work with it angle. I suspect most people who don't have aff tracking has less to do with the difficulties involved in tracking affs (since that's really not hard from a logic standpoint) and more that they just lack the actual coding no how/inclination to implement a form of tracking in the first place.
I think the likely result of making tracking easier would be making the people who are already good with affs more precise/able to use affs they'd otherwise not for the fear of complicating their tracking (which imo they don't need at all), while not really lowering the bar to entry that much in most cases. Malig might be an exception to this since you're kind of forced into stacking multiple herb cures that all lack third person cure messages, but having never properly played the class outside of being a cath bot I'm not sure if that's just my supposition.
Really though, I'd say the chief issue with aff classes is more that a person getting into combat can flail away with damage and be moderately successful against equally inexperienced people, whereas flailing with affs isn't going to get you anywhere (so people probably just switch). I personally don't have a problem with that, and think the mage rework looks like it has a lot of room for both playstyles from just reading over abs.
Incidentally, and somewhat off-topic, so far responses to my queries regarding making affliction classes less complex (which mainly means easier tracking of afflictions) clearly indicated that there isn't really much interest in that. So I don't know, maybe this has changed?
Well. Yes and no.
The problem with giving affliction tracking increased transparancy is that doing so is a massive buff to affliction classes. It's not like the g-bot, which let everybody heal well without changing the high end; it would be an sizable buff to everybody playing the classes, regardless of how well they have it coded now, and too large of a buff for many, with the current affliction rates. Keeping up certain afflictions would become ludicrously easy...
... for those people who understand afflictions, healing priorities, and those such things well enough to maintain an affliction offense. The burden of coding knowledge here is trivial; you could handle everything to track those afflictions with nested ifs and variables, though there are better ways to do it. The problem here is that the people who don't know this stuff won't be able to take advantage of 100% transparency. The burden of game knowledge placed on an affliction class is very high now that gbot means you can't go stomping people who respond like they're manual healing with mittens on.
And so, the circles who have a lot of affliction classes have difficulty issues, because a significant amount of our classes are hard-mode classes, and this is mentioned nowhere. Druid, Priest, Knight, Monk, Warden, etc... these are very accessible classes. The new player who picks one of these classes is doing pretty well. Trans your bashing skill and you can play a meaningful role in shardfalls, get kills, and have a lot of fun.
The new player who picks Renegade or Malignist or such is going to be garbage tier and basically contribute nothing. If they've got a unrealistically high level of knowledge, they can deal mediocre-speed afflictions with no kill method and maybe help set up brainmelts or annihilates if another competent person is on the team.
Or, you know. They can reroll AM and participate at a level above setup monkey.
And, you say Mage isn't going to be affliction primary.
But!
They have a damage/kill system that scales based on attunements, and attunements are focusable herb afflictions. I can't say much at all about the new Mages without actually seeing how they work in the beta, but I feel confident in saying that their attunement system makes them a de facto affliction class, regardless of your intentions.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
So not to complain but is it realy neccesary to give mage windbrace? I mean I like the idea of having phase ability but it seems stupid for it to be a trans skill that does the same thing as phase and is at the same lesson requirement as phase. But instead of strolling around being Mr.Sneaky for hours on end you get a whole 20 seconds... which if it didn't have the channel time and was instacast would be totally badass little break to heal up in combat for tops of 20 seconds. But as it sits if that was the purpose the mage would be like lol windbrace..... sip health... you stop trying to fondle the spirit of the sky.
Aside from that and a few other small things I like the look of it even though it means i'll have to break down and find someone to help me learn to code.... which I should have done along time ago anyway.
I like affliction classes and I would work on improving and coding them but how does it help me? The only class that I have ever did some tracking and affliction work is renegade, and honestly I don't even play the class because its really ineffective in teams compare to a Runeguard or Druid
The battles these days are not 1v1. 1v1 is actually discouraged. Its mostly team battle and affliction stacking does not work well in teams. I'd rather have 4 druids in my team then 4 renegades, even though if played well, they would be more powerful but its way easier to get 4 decent druids then 4 GOOD renegades. Even if I had four renegades, I'd probably want them to garrote/choke.
I sort of feared that Mage would be a momentum hunter sort affliction class and even though you might say its not, its basically a class which would require skill to really be effective. I'd hope we can do something about it in the beta, and make mage a decent class without having to worry about complex stuff like tracking attunement. It sucks to track bloodpoison and its going to suck to track attunement
Not saying I don't like the work. I love it but its going to need some changes to be easier to use. The class looks complex to me by just reading the abilities!
Make all afflictions have an internal counter and do damage/affliction at tick. Slow down sabres. Improve armor resists. Or give damage penalty/affliction on you. Change focus to a 6 second cool down. Don't make so many things focusable. Change how HP scales. Give focused off afflictions a remission chance. Make afflictions hurt. Cat needs skinning.
Regarding Windbrace. I appears to me that the 20 second cap is there to make it strictly limited to scoping out enemy teams in shardfalls and the like. Although, I'm fairly certain 20 seconds would be long enough for someone to find a raid room in an enemy city if they already know the layout.
As far as the difficulty in using the new Mage, if you're a young Mage in a shardfall, you wont need to track attunement. If even just one more person is hitting with occasional afflictions, those attunements are going to stack at least a little. I'll have any young mages spamming one or two combos with semi useful afflictions like recklessness or impatience. The older mages can stack attunement with each other and wreck their target.
Question: Will curing attunement through things like focus have a 3p message? Since part of the point is to stack the same herb as the attunement you're focusing on, it'll be miserably inaccurate without some kind of message.
Question: Will curing attunement through things like focus have a 3p message? Since part of the point is to stack the same herb as the attunement you're focusing on, it'll be miserably inaccurate without some kind of message.
That's one thing that will need to be sorted out - currently curing attunements has no 3p message, but whenever you do something that increases the target's attunement, you are told which level it's at now.
Will focus only cure attunement if no other mental (or same herb) afflictions are present, or does it have a random chance of foregoing the corresponding herb stack and getting rid of the attunement itself?
I like affliction classes and I would work on improving and coding them but how does it help me? The only class that I have ever did some tracking and affliction work is renegade, and honestly I don't even play the class because its really ineffective in teams compare to a Runeguard or Druid
The battles these days are not 1v1. 1v1 is actually discouraged. Its mostly team battle and affliction stacking does not work well in teams. I'd rather have 4 druids in my team then 4 renegades, even though if played well, they would be more powerful but its way easier to get 4 decent druids then 4 GOOD renegades. Even if I had four renegades, I'd probably want them to garrote/choke.
I sort of feared that Mage would be a momentum hunter sort affliction class and even though you might say its not, its basically a class which would require skill to really be effective. I'd hope we can do something about it in the beta, and make mage a decent class without having to worry about complex stuff like tracking attunement. It sucks to track bloodpoison and its going to suck to track attunement
Not saying I don't like the work. I love it but its going to need some changes to be easier to use. The class looks complex to me by just reading the abilities!
Honestly, the best answer here is this is what defines the between a gimick combatant (see: 90% of pvpers) and the 'good' fighters. The ability to code any form of reasonable tracking and know who has what and when, allows your offense to be more flexible. It also allows you to work near seamlessly with people who are equally adept. At the end of the day, it's that awareness that differentiates the people are who "good combatants at any class" and well...your j.v. red shirts.
A lot of us don't like the paradigm that anti-magick has developed into. Their entire circle is four to five varities of druid-like mechanics. You show up and hit one button and you're contributing. The problem is, they already have built in mechanisms that allow you to be really good and exploit multiple avenues of attack. It's why Azefel/Ozreas are scarier than Ageranu/Juran, but on a significantly lower budget. You don't see this in any circle except for AM.
Mage reads like a solid attempt to make a class where you can druid it up and be relatively effective (See: all of AM) but with some strategies that reward you for rubbing two brain cells together. You have to applaud that.
Edit: Also, four good renegades will never be scary (in teams). By the time you have me set up enough to kill me. My team has killed three of your renegades. It's why Iluv was next to useless in teams. Assassin/Renegade is the God of Arena. But unlike Gannicus, their abilities did not transfer well to the team fighting environment. Your job in teams? Choke and garrote when people are prone.
I find myself more amused than any reasonable person should be by watching Mages spin in circles and wave feathers and ring bells and such while doing alchemy.
So can the conjuring of the sigils and such still show them doing backflips while ringing a bell and burning the circled polygon and crossing the streams and such?
Thanks.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Comments
To be honest, it's not really a profession that looks interesting to me personally. I already have Hunter if I want to mess around with that sort of style.
Well played, Magick.
the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
All the signs pointed to horrible things happening. We knew that something awful would probably come out of those gates once we opened them.
We knew. We just didn't care. It wasn't a bunch of idiots doing it unwittingly, it was a bunch of idiots going "Well, there's only one way to find out what this big red button does..."
Also, I'll take Hastati/Samaos/Olanre over Baar/Janus/Thanatos any day. The world owes us a goddamned thank you note for that, imo.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Incidentally, and somewhat off-topic, so far responses to my queries regarding making affliction classes less complex (which mainly means easier tracking of afflictions) clearly indicated that there isn't really much interest in that. So I don't know, maybe this has changed?
I'm not sure if you could really make aff tracking that much easier from a getting people able to work with it angle. I suspect most people who don't have aff tracking has less to do with the difficulties involved in tracking affs (since that's really not hard from a logic standpoint) and more that they just lack the actual coding no how/inclination to implement a form of tracking in the first place.
I think the likely result of making tracking easier would be making the people who are already good with affs more precise/able to use affs they'd otherwise not for the fear of complicating their tracking (which imo they don't need at all), while not really lowering the bar to entry that much in most cases. Malig might be an exception to this since you're kind of forced into stacking multiple herb cures that all lack third person cure messages, but having never properly played the class outside of being a cath bot I'm not sure if that's just my supposition.
Really though, I'd say the chief issue with aff classes is more that a person getting into combat can flail away with damage and be moderately successful against equally inexperienced people, whereas flailing with affs isn't going to get you anywhere (so people probably just switch). I personally don't have a problem with that, and think the mage rework looks like it has a lot of room for both playstyles from just reading over abs.
Well. Yes and no.
The problem with giving affliction tracking increased transparancy is that doing so is a massive buff to affliction classes. It's not like the g-bot, which let everybody heal well without changing the high end; it would be an sizable buff to everybody playing the classes, regardless of how well they have it coded now, and too large of a buff for many, with the current affliction rates. Keeping up certain afflictions would become ludicrously easy...
... for those people who understand afflictions, healing priorities, and those such things well enough to maintain an affliction offense. The burden of coding knowledge here is trivial; you could handle everything to track those afflictions with nested ifs and variables, though there are better ways to do it. The problem here is that the people who don't know this stuff won't be able to take advantage of 100% transparency. The burden of game knowledge placed on an affliction class is very high now that gbot means you can't go stomping people who respond like they're manual healing with mittens on.
And so, the circles who have a lot of affliction classes have difficulty issues, because a significant amount of our classes are hard-mode classes, and this is mentioned nowhere. Druid, Priest, Knight, Monk, Warden, etc... these are very accessible classes. The new player who picks one of these classes is doing pretty well. Trans your bashing skill and you can play a meaningful role in shardfalls, get kills, and have a lot of fun.
The new player who picks Renegade or Malignist or such is going to be garbage tier and basically contribute nothing. If they've got a unrealistically high level of knowledge, they can deal mediocre-speed afflictions with no kill method and maybe help set up brainmelts or annihilates if another competent person is on the team.
Or, you know. They can reroll AM and participate at a level above setup monkey.
And, you say Mage isn't going to be affliction primary.
But!
They have a damage/kill system that scales based on attunements, and attunements are focusable herb afflictions. I can't say much at all about the new Mages without actually seeing how they work in the beta, but I feel confident in saying that their attunement system makes them a de facto affliction class, regardless of your intentions.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Bard is a heavily confuse+disrupt class as it is, and now mage has innyo essentially, but reversed and more required build up.
I can see bard and mage doing some heavy cc'ing.
As far as the difficulty in using the new Mage, if you're a young Mage in a shardfall, you wont need to track attunement. If even just one more person is hitting with occasional afflictions, those attunements are going to stack at least a little. I'll have any young mages spamming one or two combos with semi useful afflictions like recklessness or impatience. The older mages can stack attunement with each other and wreck their target.
Question: Will curing attunement through things like focus have a 3p message? Since part of the point is to stack the same herb as the attunement you're focusing on, it'll be miserably inaccurate without some kind of message.
A lot of us don't like the paradigm that anti-magick has developed into. Their entire circle is four to five varities of druid-like mechanics. You show up and hit one button and you're contributing. The problem is, they already have built in mechanisms that allow you to be really good and exploit multiple avenues of attack. It's why Azefel/Ozreas are scarier than Ageranu/Juran, but on a significantly lower budget. You don't see this in any circle except for AM.
Mage reads like a solid attempt to make a class where you can druid it up and be relatively effective (See: all of AM) but with some strategies that reward you for rubbing two brain cells together. You have to applaud that.
Here's a request:
I find myself more amused than any reasonable person should be by watching Mages spin in circles and wave feathers and ring bells and such while doing alchemy.
So can the conjuring of the sigils and such still show them doing backflips while ringing a bell and burning the circled polygon and crossing the streams and such?
Thanks.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."