If you make all affs cured in exactly the same order or give everyone perfect tracking, everyone is eventually going to fight exactly the same.
That's a fair point.
who can finish their kill chain fastest.
The (rather unpopular) hinder effects exist to prevent this, although it is true that we need to make some of them more tangential to the actual offense.
making certain affs easier to track is probably a good idea. Primarily mental ones
Paralysis, Metrazol, Confusion, Lethargy, Slow Bal, Slow Eq, Stupidity, Clumsiness, Weariness, Peace. All the afflictions that prevent you from healing them. A million and one writhes on top of it all
We can certainly adjust that, I'll just note that the reason for hinders is to prevent combat from degenerating into the "who can finish the kill chain faster" issue described above. So we can change them so that they don't sync so well with the actual offenses, but I don't think we want to be removing them entirely.
@Garryn, bear in mind several of those are helpful to vulnerable affliction classes in terms of staying alive. I'm thinking primarily of clumsiness and weariness. Clumsiness doesn't even fire 100% of the time, it simply creates a helpful extra breathing space. Stupidity is also little problem, is cured easily and is very hard to stick. Though it shouldn't remove your pants because it's just silly. Lethargy shouldn't increase balance times as much as it does or could be totally changed, either or.
I think 'toxins' should mostly be used on the main offense for assassins/renegades/predators. I guess defiler is okay too. Secondary skills like traps, arrows, axetoss, sure. But not other things like dsl/qjab/spear stab.
I'd prefer just limiting what afflictions each class has access to. Like sure, anyone can envenom in weaponry for single slash/throw, but not for things like DSL/qjab. Instead, give those professions something along the lines of Kanai's PREPARE skill, where they can augment the next hit(s) with certain afflictions.
A small set of common affs for all the knight profs, and each profession would get a few unique to that type of knight (e.g. Templars could get sunallergy, nerveburn, some of the more 'physical'/fire-themed affs, RGs could get things leaning more towards mental, DKs get debilitating things like metrazol, benzene/benzedrine).
I always found it kind of retarded that knights 'poisoned' people (the old Chivalry/Brutality message trying to justify it was pretty lame).
Warding doesn't need toxins (I think flintlight should be made more non-arti friendly).
Making confusion and slow eq not stack would be nice, or a cap on how much the eq time can be increased maybe. No class should be thrown off eq for >10s just for trying to execute an offense.
The only other aff (besides peace which is generally accepted to be a mistake I think) on that list that I think is a bit disproportionate is stupidity. My reason for that is that its not that big a deal to spam your way through for single attack classes, but trying to execute an offense as a combo class while its stuck is an exercise in futility reallistically.
Gonna throw this out there. I've never really made use of it, but Hunter can "basilisk trigger ahkan confusion lethargy shield" and give him 10s+ of no-eq next time he touches shield. Might look at adjusting how those two affs work with each other, as well as causing the afflictions to hit after the shield goes through.
In regards to stupidity, maybe it should only hinder curing attempts (focus, tree, smoke, herb, purge, might, fitness) but not attempts to use offenive abililties.
In regards to Azefel's suggestion on aff pool limitation, that sounds like we are slowly approaching the idea of Knights hitting limbs to provide unique style specific affs. That is a Lusternia system. Just watch out for affliction bloat.
I don't know how much I agree with the idea, but it might give us a new excuse to demand a knight remake..? They are Bards/Malignist/Monk are the last classes that truly need an update.
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This is a bit of a tangent, but I keep hearing about these 'new combat/kill methods', yet remain unsure what they should actually be. To date, we have: - raw damage (druid, defiler, ranger, claymore knights, etc) - timebombs (limb damage - most of AM classes, bard resonance (wasn't intended that way, but it effectively is one)) - afflictions into instakills (assassin, hunter, wytch, diabolist, to a lesser extent predator and outrider) - afflictions into damage overload (knights, summoner, wardancer, mage) - power meters (monk, priest, summoner, to a lesser extent mage, defiler and druid) - damage over time effects (mage, summoner, outrider, defiler) - bleeding (outrider) - incurable temporary effects (priest, runeguard, wytch, defiler)
Positional effects are out, the game doesn't work like that. What else is there to add?
You're breaking down the categories wrong, and "power meters" isn't a kill method, it's a thing used towards a kill method; summoners use taint to work towards enlightens or damage kills.
I'd divide it up more like this: Afflictions, Time bombs, Damage, Split Pressure.
Afflictions: Afflict-to-damage and afflict-to-instantkill are the same thing, basically. Annihilate outright kills you. Septus' 100%+ disembowel outright kills you in an indirect manner.
Time Bombs: Classes that involve setups that don't rely on constant attacks and maintaining momentum. Limb breaks, Bards. Kanai building comes close.
Damage: Druids for sure, Mages and Summoners less directly. A class that can rely on damage kills as long as they keep their momentum going. Damageknights and Wardens and such don't really qualify; they will not overwhelm a decently tanky opponent's healing capabilities.
Split Pressure: Priests. Druids, Malignists to a lesser extent, Outriders too. They can pressure health and mana, and they can kill at a certain mana threshold, though in the case of the Outrider it's because clotting is a mana hog.
Generally, every class falls into one of these categories. Some, like Predator, fall into more than one. Really, I suppose my problem isn't so much that we need new kill methods so much as that we need to see more of the ones that aren't "affliction" and more interesting ways to progress them than "double afflict at ~2 seconds, use your affliction execute."
We can certainly adjust that, I'll just note that the reason for hinders is to prevent combat from degenerating into the "who can finish the kill chain faster" issue described above.
This is exactly how it is now, except that some classes get to actively hinder their opponent's kill chain while progressing their own. Classes without their own hinder-centric offense or time-bomb mechanics get choked out by affliction classes because they're eating a steady stream of hinders while the other guy is not.
@Garryn, bear in mind several of those are helpful to vulnerable affliction classes in terms of staying alive.
Without the crazy amount of control, affliction classes wouldn't need to be glass cannons any longer and could be made a bit tankier. This would also make the damage classes easier to balance, because you'd be tightening up the range and my targets wouldn't range from "Physical Resistance? I think I've heard of that?" to "Physical damage? That's still a thing?".
"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."
@Garryn, bear in mind several of those are helpful to vulnerable affliction classes in terms of staying alive.
Without the crazy amount of control, affliction classes wouldn't need to be glass cannons any longer and could be made a bit tankier. This would also make the damage classes easier to balance, because you'd be tightening up the range and my targets wouldn't range from "Physical Resistance? I think I've heard of that?" to "Physical damage? That's still a thing?".
But, if you removed crazy amounts of hinder. People wouldn't be able to affliction delta #1 to victory. <-- fake sadface
The weird issue you run into, is you can't really trivialize afflictions. The lethargy and confusion effects are 'too' good. The mere fact that they can overlap is (<-- real sad face). I've been suggesting this for what seems like years, but 'hinder' afflictions should not be "oh my god I can't hit or oh my god when I hit it feels like forever" but it needs to reduce your output somehow. For damage classes, this is a damage malus. For affliction classes, this is a mechanic like clumsiness where you're not hitting the afflcitions/second. That's the penalty for curing.
The problem you run into then is that some of your afflictions are too good not to use. I've beaten this dead horse for years but ciguatoxin is too good. People are only starting to realize it. Why is it good? It's a three for one coupon of can't heal, can't run, can't hit. Why the hell would I not use it? Two years ago I suggested breaking up those afflictions into 3 lower priority toxins. It got cried at. Same thing last year. Hmm, I wonder what's going to happen now? Following this, Septus hit the nail on the head. Years of misdirected design have backed us into a corner where maidenhair and kelp have all the good toxin afflictions and everything is just kind of idly stashed in a closet of woe. Not sure how you're going to fix this, but you need to break out of the paradigm of "maidenhair is the cureall to all forms of paralysis." That sucks, because there's two forms of paralysis and they overlap. (P.S. There are a lot of mechanisms that cause paralysis that can be treated in different ways...or so I heard). That was an argument to diversify cures, by the way.
As an addendum, you should rebuild some of your toxin and affliction effects. Some of your toxins are 'too' useful, making two-hit classes sort of nuts.
Oxalis: Unblind -AND- undeaf. No reason to use anything else. This is really two afflictions in the same toxin.
Strychnine: Undeaf -AND- sensitivity. Whelp, this is always a balance issue. Why don't we de-couple sensitivity/undeaf (because it makes no sense) and make strychnine the sensitivity toxin and make a new toxin, canyouhearmenow, strip deafness. Oh, this would apply to all skills of this nature.
Those are the two offenders that pop into my head. The more you spread out afflictions/toxins afflictions/skills, the more you force people to diversify their offense. I swear to you, if you break down ciguatoxin...toxin queues are going to all get an overhaul.
Note: Ciguatoxin split is
1 toxin for 'cannot leave the room' (physical, purgeable, focusable, tree-able)
1 toxin for 'cannot use tree' (mental, purgeable) <--- here too
1 toxin for :effort: my attack is ineffective (untyped, purgeable, focusable, tree-able) <-- see what I did here. Most hinder impact, most ways to cure.
I've been suggesting this for what seems like years, but 'hinder' afflictions should not be "oh my god I can't hit or oh my god when I hit it feels like forever" but it needs to reduce your output somehow. For damage classes, this is a damage malus. For affliction classes, this is a mechanic like clumsiness where you're not hitting the afflcitions/second. That's the penalty for curing.
The problem is that if it reduces my output to the point where I can't continue a viable offense, the problem hasn't actually changed at all; the affliction class gets to hinder my offense past the point of success while pushing for a kill.
"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."
That's why you should learn to prioritize cures! As long as there's no overlap, I can't stick Khizan with:
-can't attack/can't tree/can't move
-does 20% less damage
-has a 40% balance penalty
-peaced
If you keep slow-eq and slow-bal smoking cured, break apart lethargy/confusion, and nerf ciguatoxin (like it should have been), you can intelligently sprinkle afflictions based on curing.
The toxin for tree prevention should not be focus-able. (You didn't specify that but you did call it mental).
In my opinion, ciguatoxin doesn't need to be split up into three toxins. It would be fine if it just prevented tree. That way, we can keep peace as it is as a focus-able attack prevention that only stacks with galingale affs (less important and much harder to keep up). We have plenty of holding skills as is and a few of them that need to be adjusted for parity (numb knees) so a toxin for that would be superflous.
Yeah, in far less classes. I think splitting it up isn't a terrible idea whatsoever.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Paralysis should stop channeled skills and stop tattoo use, but that's all it really needs to do, 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."
I don't care how it get's solved. The paralysis cooldown isn't getting the job done.
Dsl ciguatoxin
wait
I CAN DSL CIGUATOXIN AGAIN. OMG. OMG
There's no reason not to use paralysis. It's at the top of everyone's priorities, because it has to be. Splitting it up is one solution. However it plays out, you shouldn't be able to prevent someone from hitting you.
That being said all the damage offenses need to be ratched down to reflect the fact that they're balanced around being paralyzed some of the time (The best example of this is Wardancer. Nevermind me, I'm afflicted to hell and back, relax, 280 damage.) We're seeing a lot of the inverse Khizan problem. If people cannot hinder, they're getting turned into jelly half way through warming up their toxin queue. Then they submit bad classleads and build entire classes around spam hinders.
In regards to sensitivity, it should keep its undeaf requirement and should strip deaf when present as professions that give these afflictions without toxins would have no other way to give it. If you were to give these classes a way to strip deaf outside of sensitivity then perhaps a change could be made but I find it completely unnecessary.
For Oxalis, we can make it only strip blindness.
When we change ciguatoxin to only prevent instants and tree, (Garryn do this), we can remove its ICD as it will be no longer necessary. This is a good thing because building your offensive system to account for paralysis CD is only hard for newer players who already have a hard time getting into affliction combat.
A change to cigautoxin will be good, whether it be that it simply blocks tree and channeled effects or even increasing its ICD.
Changes to lethargy, confusion, slowbalance/equ are also good, such as preventing their being stacked.
Clumsiness and weariness don't need changes in my opinion, ESPECIALLY if the effect of ciguatoxin is getting changed to not be so all consuming of one's healing. Because you will be able to make the choice of having your tree vs a small chance to miss without worrying that you can't do anything unless all you do is eat maidenhair (hello knights).
Stupidity should have less commands to pick from and should possibly not mess with player input. However, it will then likely just be filler because autocuring resends things so well it will barely have any effect.
The biggest issue that I have with stupidity is how much spam it adds, especially when it decides to do things like 'stat' or 'observe'. I think it would be a much less annoying affliction if it simply had a generic one-line message, instead of potentially filling your screen with stuff.
I would love to see stupidity pick up the 'confusion message'
You reach back ready to smite Khizan. Oh look, you're holding a stick. This stick is awesome. Why would you swing it at Khizan.
The worst thing about stupidity is that someone thought it was a good idea to add remove armor, remove pants (wtf?), and touch shield to the stupidity list. I have seriously had this scenario happen.
Dsl person
-Limb break, butisol, hemotoxin
Passive tick --> stupidity
Dsl Benz/Benz to set up Vivisect person..lolno, touch shield.
I solve that by having no shield tattoo (Shielddance Barrier and Bulwark don't trigger in stupidity) but I agree that stupidity could be made less anti-fun.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Comments
The (rather unpopular) hinder effects exist to prevent this, although it is true that we need to make some of them more tangential to the actual offense.
Yep, we can do this.
Making confusion and slow eq not stack would be nice, or a cap on how much the eq time can be increased maybe. No class should be thrown off eq for >10s just for trying to execute an offense.
The only other aff (besides peace which is generally accepted to be a mistake I think) on that list that I think is a bit disproportionate is stupidity. My reason for that is that its not that big a deal to spam your way through for single attack classes, but trying to execute an offense as a combo class while its stuck is an exercise in futility reallistically.
I don't know how much I agree with the idea, but it might give us a new excuse to demand a knight remake..? They are Bards/Malignist/Monk are the last classes that truly need an update.
"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."
But, if you removed crazy amounts of hinder. People wouldn't be able to affliction delta #1 to victory.
The problem you run into then is that some of your afflictions are too good not to use. I've beaten this dead horse for years but ciguatoxin is too good. People are only starting to realize it. Why is it good? It's a three for one coupon of can't heal, can't run, can't hit. Why the hell would I not use it? Two years ago I suggested breaking up those afflictions into 3 lower priority toxins. It got cried at. Same thing last year. Hmm, I wonder what's going to happen now? Following this, Septus hit the nail on the head. Years of misdirected design have backed us into a corner where maidenhair and kelp have all the good toxin afflictions and everything is just kind of idly stashed in a closet of woe. Not sure how you're going to fix this, but you need to break out of the paradigm of "maidenhair is the cureall to all forms of paralysis." That sucks, because there's two forms of paralysis and they overlap. (P.S. There are a lot of mechanisms that cause paralysis that can be treated in different ways...or so I heard). That was an argument to diversify cures, by the way.
As an addendum, you should rebuild some of your toxin and affliction effects. Some of your toxins are 'too' useful, making two-hit classes sort of nuts.
Oxalis: Unblind -AND- undeaf. No reason to use anything else. This is really two afflictions in the same toxin.
Those are the two offenders that pop into my head. The more you spread out afflictions/toxins afflictions/skills, the more you force people to diversify their offense. I swear to you, if you break down ciguatoxin...toxin queues are going to all get an overhaul.
Note:
Ciguatoxin split is
"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."
If you keep slow-eq and slow-bal smoking cured, break apart lethargy/confusion, and nerf ciguatoxin (like it should have been), you can intelligently sprinkle afflictions based on curing.
In my opinion, ciguatoxin doesn't need to be split up into three toxins. It would be fine if it just prevented tree. That way, we can keep peace as it is as a focus-able attack prevention that only stacks with galingale affs (less important and much harder to keep up). We have plenty of holding skills as is and a few of them that need to be adjusted for parity (numb knees) so a toxin for that would be superflous.
"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."
For Oxalis, we can make it only strip blindness.
When we change ciguatoxin to only prevent instants and tree, (Garryn do this), we can remove its ICD as it will be no longer necessary. This is a good thing because building your offensive system to account for paralysis CD is only hard for newer players who already have a hard time getting into affliction combat.
Changes to lethargy, confusion, slowbalance/equ are also good, such as preventing their being stacked.
Clumsiness and weariness don't need changes in my opinion, ESPECIALLY if the effect of ciguatoxin is getting changed to not be so all consuming of one's healing. Because you will be able to make the choice of having your tree vs a small chance to miss without worrying that you can't do anything unless all you do is eat maidenhair (hello knights).
Stupidity should have less commands to pick from and should possibly not mess with player input. However, it will then likely just be filler because autocuring resends things so well it will barely have any effect.
You reach back ready to smite Khizan. Oh look, you're holding a stick. This stick is awesome. Why would you swing it at Khizan.
The worst thing about stupidity is that someone thought it was a good idea to add remove armor, remove pants (wtf?), and touch shield to the stupidity list. I have seriously had this scenario happen.
Dsl person
Passive tick --> stupidity
Dsl Benz/Benz to set up Vivisect person..lolno, touch shield.