Also note in a 2013 round of classleads the ab file for bandages was clarified when it was added to survival.
Survival - Bandages Syntax: APPLY BANDAGES [] Requires: Two cloth By applying bandages to yourself or others, you can drastically alter the amount of health one will lose to open wounds. The bandages will last until they are too loaded with blood to be effective. It is important to note that bandages do -not- reduce the actual bleeding amount - they only prevent the health loss.
In my opinion, neither of these situations should be conferring a mechanical advantage. Having favours stack with highfavours and truefavours is fine, because it's reasonably accessible equally to all groups and there is an established upper limit to stats. However, highfavours scale as all stats do, and result in cumulative increases in both damage output and damage soaking, which is a massive benefit in the already heavily team-oriented environment. It should not be feasible for one side to gain a bigger advantage simply because they either already have more players or are more willing to game the system.
If you want there to be an advantage to having multiple highfavours, I would propose to simply have them tick down exclusively, similar to how experience bonuses currently work. Your reward for earning the favour of two sects is increased uptime on your benefits, not double dipping.
Emphasis mine.
The most recent change to favours solved the highfavour stacking dilemma, but simultaneously introduced a new problem: capping all bonuses at +1 means several bonuses that already intentionally stacked now no longer do. Access to highfavour as a sect command renders the benevolence ritual entirely useless, as they both have the exact same cost but highfavour also increases belief and experience gain. In addition, being highfavoured as a Moradeim aspect renders modulation completely useless now.
Can we please just solve all of these problems by making highfavours, and only highfavours, not stack? This was a very simple solution as proposed and I don't know why the decision was made to confound existing applications of stat bonuses with such a broad change.
Besides the obvious "wow, this might really be too much" factor, stacking favours (and really, just having multiple sects) also kind of stress the small player base. What I mean is that ideally (at least from an efficiency point of view) everyone would be in one sect, with the way that belief works, because then you can spread the work of grinding belief back (or, if you're lucky, killing it back). But, even if we only had one sect, and all of our best murderers were successfully killing people from the other circle's sects (which is sometimes the case), someone still has to grind (just not you) and that kind of sucks. So there's something there (and it's come up before too in these threads, the problem of "paying to play").
It's also... I had woefully underestimated how much people like to play game of e-thrones, yes, even here, and at one point awhile back someone apparently tried to say there would in fact be only be one sect, and the problem that can come with that is that if there is just one sect, the person/people in charge of that sect would hold more sway than they would if there were other sects people could move to, and also have less motivation to treat people well. So, there's the human factor, too, and having at least a few options, even if they die down for awhile, probably helps keep people from totally dominating an entire circle. Maybe.
Is there a reason why trueassess doesn't show %'s server-side? I know it doesn't take much to do the math client-side, but it'd be a more user friendly thing for us, especially if it were a gmcp thing.
Now that I've left Demonic, I guess I can talk about this a bit more:
Jinx is amazing. Swiftcurse's speed was always acceptable because it was based around the probability of failure. Hit 3 affs on a 1.4s, Nice!, hit 1 aff on a 1.4s,that's the risk you took for the chance for 3 affs/1.4. It sets you back a bit, but not by too much. Now that jinx is in the picture, it's a guaranteed 2 - 3 affs on a 1.4s, and that is possibly the most phenomenal affliction rate I have ever seen. Jinx itself is hard to cure, being a single herb cure (+ tree). This is rocket-fuel afflictions, and a smart wytch/knight combo would probably be near unbeatable.
I guess I just want to highlight how amazingly good 100% swiftcurse+cadmus is. Thoughts?
The 'smart wytch/knight combo' is going to have a game plan of "get the enemy below 65% health so that the DK can execute them"; you know, the exact same plan that any decent team with a deathknight uses.
"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."
This just occurred to me. Would it be terrible to have starburst work like a sort of "reverse redemption" with deaths to other players? That way, someone is always going to get the first death as something that "counts" (or possibly the second death if the first one was to mobs, since players can already use a favour to preclude faith/belief loss from mob deaths) but when the second death hits within a cooldown period (can't make it exactly like a reverse redemption or it could probably be "abused", or at the very least, be perceived as annoying/unfair at times), there is no gain or loss to any sect. I believe there is already a per player cooldown for that, but a lot of times it's just not going to be the same player getting the second kill in those situations.
Now that Reave/stances have been looked at, could we please look at the thing where Templars get a damage enhancement that does mediocre damage with a pre-req of <75% health and three afflictions, but Deathknights get to do Soulquench+Fleshburn+Negating+Soulquench+Fleshburn for 400+ damage with a pre-req of <65% health with zero afflictions?
"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 Autocuring, could we get an AUTOCURING PRIORITY INSERT type of thing? Right now, if I want to make a new top priority it looks like I have to move every affliction down one rank manually, and that is awful. It would be nice to be able to insert affliction A at priority two and have it automatically bump priorities 2+ down one to make room for it.
"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."
Now that reave is here to stay, can we please look at Hunters being armourless? I reaved Hunter Ichimoru to death in 2.5 hits.
You need to be careful with giving always-on tank to high affliction classes (though this is exactly what was done with wytch in last classlead), but maybe that is where the damage meta has left us. In my opinion, a better solution may be one of the following situational (risk/cost/reward) options:
Add a new prepped basilisk action to mitigate damage for x hits/seconds [would be a tradeoff with room control/holding (snare/boomerang) and tankiness (new basilisk action)]
Add or change a wyvern aura [would be a tradeoff on affliction rate (natureaura) and tankiness (new aura)]
I will agree with that when they start making affliction speeds start out unfeasibly slow and ramp up to feasible affliction rates over time.
As it stands now I'm against changing damage over to a momentum based system because then your damage classes will end up in a position where they spend their entire momentum phase eating shots from an affliction offense that goes full speed right out of the gates, and that's just not a feasible position; by the time their kill method opens up they're already on the ropes.
If affliction classes want to gain in effective tankiness their offenses need to lose their inherent control.
"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 will agree with that when they start making affliction speeds start out unfeasibly slow and ramp up to feasible affliction rates over time.
As it stands now I'm against changing damage over to a momentum based system because then your damage classes will end up in a position where they spend their entire momentum phase eating shots from an affliction offense that goes full speed right out of the gates, and that's just not a feasible position; by the time their kill method opens up they're already on the ropes.
If affliction classes want to gain in effective tankiness their offenses need to lose their inherent control.
Wasn't this already the point of paralysis being nerfed into numbness, metrazol going from four effective applications to two, clumsiness being nerfed to a consistent timer, balance and equilibrium knocks no longer stacking, etc. etc.?
Affliction rate does effectively ramp up - this is the point of affliction stacks and cure hindering. You aren't optimal out of the gate, and this is why you try to lower someone's curing capabilities by going for locks or otherwise preventing cures. Going 'full speed' is a bad metric when your effectiveness is gauged on someone's ability to respond to a threat versus a direct number (doing damage to health). Why is it considered balance that damage classes can blast down affliction offenses before they can achieve any sort of stack, but making headway on affliction offense (given that very few afflictions hinder offense directly) is unreasonable?
I would say "if damage classes want access to lock breakers then they need to lose their inherent front-loaded burst damage" but we all know where the distribution of Fitness lies.
To start with, "very few afflictions hinder offense directly" is a crappy argument because those 'very few' afflictions make up a solid majority of the afflictions used in combat and those afflictions are used precisely because they hinder offense. It's rather like if I were to use my scimitar strikes to defend my broadsword strikes on the grounds that 'very few of my attacks do that much damage'. It may be true but you'll never see a scimitar strike so it's completely irrelevant to a balance discussion.
You consistently lowball the amount of disable out there. Confusion, peace, slow balance/eq effects, disrupts, buried numbness turning into paralysis, metrazol on offenses that require more than one arm, etc, etc. Implying that the control was removed from affliction offenses because paralysis isn't instant and metrazol isn't a 4-in-1 toxin anymore is disingenuous at best; anybody who has fought against an affliction offense knows that affliction offenses still carry a huge control component even if you completely discard the balance cost on active healing and other such survival mechanics.
The numbness change isn't much of a nerf to paralysis at all. It came about largely because of the sabreknight's ability to keep you paralysed forever while killing you with sabre damage; accordingly, the idea behind the change was to make it harder for a knight to keep you paralysed forever while damaging you down. It was fairly effective at that, since the knight affliction list was effectively limited to AB TOXINS, but it's fairly anemic for Wytch/Diabolist/etc because their increased affliction list lets them throw numbness behind other forms of disable where it either serves as blocking aff or grows into a full disable.
Also noteworthy, after the change to numbness we got to watch point #1 in action as all the affliction fighters moved en masse from cigua-spam's "you never get to attack me" to clumsy-spam's "you can attack me but you won't hit anything". Oddly enough we're getting drowned in waves of confusion and peace now that clumsiness has been nerfed, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with the huge inherent control available to affliction offenses and everything to do with something else entirely. I just can't think of what it might be.
The large array of curing denial abilities greatly decreases the ramp-up time of affliction offenses. Getting to open up with cure negation goes a long ways towards putting the enemy on the back foot right at the start of the fight, and combined with the sheer affliction speed of the modern affliction offenses it's bordering on ridiculous to act like they have anything at all resembling a momentum bar.
If you had to build up afflictions before you could use prophecy? That would be a momentum-style system because your offense would start out weaker and gain power over the course of the fight. What they have right now, though, where the offense starts off running flat out? That's not. That's actually the complete opposite of a momentum system.
"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."
It's interesting that this conversation just happens to be heating up right now, along with Edric's discussion about going smoosh. So, the other night I walked into a fight in our desert that I was absolutely going to lose. I knew this going in. But hey, if people are in the desert they're bored and it's just good manners to entertain them at least once in awhile. I mean, seriously, that is why city loyals outside walls exist, etc... They are a way to say "plz come play with me" (or at least they should be viewed that way, hopefully by both sides).
I managed to avoid hitting the totem on entrance (woo, go me). But, within seconds, I was completely locked down, because there were TWO super afflictors waiting for me (surprise)! And the one I was actually expecting usually locks me down in short order. Actually, there was even a third nearby, but he did wait in the wings.
In short, I didn't even get to fight back before my inevitable death because awesome affliction hindering wall of death (and this is with me at least sort of optimized these days to cure against demonic at the moment with jinxed and haemophilia high priorities, have rage and use it, have fitness and keep that up when stripped etc...). Realizing it was a complete no-go, I tried to escape (because why bother), but there was no way in hell that was happening either. And as I'd mentioned, even the one person I'd expected can afflict like crazy and is also just good at it. That person was absolutely going to kill me walking out the Antioch gate and I knew that (but yay, I don't have to go grind just because I am a bad and die so why not). I hopped over the wall I'd put up for vortex and headed on out.
It manages to be even more frustrating than when I get smooshed (Edric's main problem/experience, and also mine when I was a lower health, less artied player). And I do get smooshed a fair bit even now, even though I am artifacted to the teeth (especially in terms of survivability, less so offensively), so the damage is no joke. Reave with the right combo of strength arties and artifact weapons (and possibly also runes?) does 230-250 damage to me per combo. That said, I probably won't be doing any desert entertaining anytime soon, not because of damage, but because of wall of afflictions. I mean, how much coding/being awesome do I have to do here? Not to win, or even come close to winning, but to not be almost instantly sitting around immobilized as I await my own death.
We really almost need (at least) two different games, because it looks like people want to PLAY at least two different games. That's probably what people are most disingenuous about, too, is what game they want to play, and how playable that game will be for everyone else. And really, all styles of play require you to invest a LOT of time asking questions, improving your little "system" (i.e. trying to understand coding), and understanding what (if anything) you can do against X. But super affliction heavy stuff seems to pretty much boil down to having a good tracker jacker, which a tiny portion of people seem to be able to build, much less build well, and from there, it's down to who has the one with better decision making, and from there, all things being equal, perhaps which prof can just throw more affliction shade faster. Actually, I think this play style is fairly dominant in Achaea, if you really want to play high stakes winner take all "who's got the better affliction tracker". Watch out though, might meet some people who are way better at it than you are.
Jules said: We really almost need (at least) two different games, because it looks like people want to PLAY at least two different games. That's probably what people are most disingenuous about, too, is what game they want to play, and how playable that game will be for everyone else.
I was following right up to this point. What do you mean? The way I see it, everybody wants to play the same game: come up with an offence, use it on people, win. Do this in solo fights or in team fights around objectives. The "problem" (if we can even call it that) is that naturally some people are just leaps and bounds better than others at that game, so only the top tier can really "play."
But I know little and less, so maybe there's some big thing I'm not noticing? What other game do people want to play?
I mean, some people seem to want to play a game that is almost a niche within a niche. If super affliction reigns supreme and is THE way to win, the people who build amazing affliction trackers (and who probably play the most super optimized version of a super afflictor profession) are pretty much the only people who can really play. Every so often, there are big discussions about it, because some people would really like to see that be the preferred style of play. They're right about damage being a problem, but I do get the feeling their endgame is to also push the game towards heavily favoring some of the blur of affliction plus hindering classes (many of which seem to already be incredibly powerful 1 v 1 or in small groups). Basically, Edric, they are locking you so you can't fight back, and they can do it VERY quickly (similar in speed to being smooshed as a matter of fact). I think it's even more frustrating from a player perspective than being smooshed because you aren't dead yet, but you are just waiting to die. By the way, a version of an afflictor class that seems to avoid this, is the Achaean alchemist class, which has a very intricate setup that is going to get you if they're good and you're not, but from what I experienced, doesn't do it by aggressively hindering the opponent's own offense.
Ahh, I see what you mean. So it's more of a meta-game issue, by the sound of it? Meta is shifting from spam-damage to spam-afflock permastun or something of the sort?
On that note, if that is an undesirable direction for the game to take, what other alternatives are there? Damage overload was a problem and seems to have been nerfed somewhat in the last year (except for this new Reave thing I keep hearing about). Am I right? So now we're moving to affliction spam to stunlock beyond any hope of survival. While perhaps refreshing after huge damage instagibs, the lack of counterplay probably makes that method un-fun too.
But then what are we left with? Instakills? Slow down combat so the ideal method of killing somebody is through one of the instagibs?
Actually, there is a lot more damage going around than afflictions. Nearly everyone in Antimagick is a Templar and for good reason. Nearly everyone in Magick is a Runeguard or Druid, also for good reason. Demonic? The number of Deathknights puts all other classes to shame. The amount of people who use classes based almost purely on afflictions can pretty much be counted on one hand.
Well, for groups, you need a leader who can prioritize targets and keep the rest of the group on target. That alone takes a lot of skill and good judgment based on carefully honed experience. A good leader will change his priority list based on what the enemy is doing, too. In fact, only a few people in the game do it well, and circles are incredibly dependent on these people for good outcomes. For things like insta-kills, they're often more of a way to say, help force someone who keeps spaming barrier to drop it, etc... There is so much more to think about in group combat once you start experiencing it first hand, and I will be learning those things for years to come. It really is so much more than just "too much damage" or "wall of afflictions" although both of those seem to be problems if they're heavily favored.
Actually, as a way of catering to people who absolutely love affliction classes, taking a good look at alchemist might be a good way to find a way to make everyone happy. Maybe. And Kryss, I am not disagreeing with you there. Neither is our crotchety old Khizan, if you look at it.
NB: I'm not an advocate just for affliction methods, I am simply an advocate for playing with style.
Firstly,
No fighter worth his salt will stick to a pure damage class for long unless (a) he couldn't play anything else, (b) the odds are hugely stacked in his favour or (c) there are good auxiliary reasons to. The reason for this is mechanical rather than preference. The reason is simple:
99% of people can see themselves dying at 0 health from 3 miles away.
The only times when a person will not attempt to protect themselves from dying to damage (however they do it) is if (a) they're slow-reacting, or (b) the damage is overwhelming (50,60,70% hits). The learning defensive curve against damage is also very simple. Throw up a defensive barrier, heal, or get out of dodge.
Consequently,
The fighters who want to be better will always gravitate to different play methods.
This isn't a rant against damage. It's my opinion of why damage will always be a suboptimal choice in any small scale engagement of consequence. To make it relevant in these small scale engagements necessitates undermining the utility and effectivity of other play styles. I understand that affliction combat isn't everyone's cup of tea, but making damage relevant in small scale means affliction combat becomes no one's cup of tea.
Finally,
As to your concerns about facing the wall of affliction-doom. Anti-magick is best equipped for fighting against affliction spam in the form of three classes - Monk, Outrider, Ranger. There is nothing wrong with playing damage classes - the problem is that a lot of people end up with the mentality that damage is the be-all, end-all of fighting. Sad to say, that is far from the truth, particularly with AM having access to two wonderful classes that can absolutely beat the pants off affliction mumbo-jumbo. Maybe it's time to expand your repertoire rather than back down from the fight.
I like damage. I like afflictions (I like pk). Just to get that out of the way.
I'm going to respond to Iniar's damage things first, because I fundamentally disagree. I know how an aff class will kill me, and I can 9 times out of 10 know when it is about to happen (usually a couple of rounds or more in advance). That doesn't mean I can avoid it. I can look over my fights with Kryss or whoever, pinpoint exactly at which point I might fall behind or whatnot and formulate an optimal response that on paper will guarantee I will not die. However, human error and needing to maintain your own offense renders that pretty much a nonfactor. I could shield every round when I was slightly at risk or whatnot, but given aff/damage outputs, that means I will be shielding every three rounds (and not maintaining an offense).
Furthermore, damage and affliction classes both have methods to get around the turtling style (particularly applicable to one v one). Admittedly not all of them do, but the vast majority. I do get what Iniar is saying, but I think that's a statement made in the context of a vacuum, not in an actual fight. Personally, I don't find extreme damage or extreme afflictions any more intimidating than the other. Some classes obviously lend themselves more to one approach, but generally at the high tier they're both decided by someone making a bad gamble/choice/etc. (This assumes numbers are somewhat in balance, obviously.)
I'm not even touching the discussion on if aff classes have too much control or if damage classes do too much.
This isn't a rant against damage. It's my opinion of why damage will always be a suboptimal choice in any small scale engagement of consequence. To make it relevant in these small scale engagements necessitates undermining the utility and effectivity of other play styles. I understand that affliction combat isn't everyone's cup of tea, but making damage relevant in small scale means affliction combat becomes no one's cup of tea.
You could solve this entire problem here by changing things so that affliction offenses are no longer a solid wall of hinders.
Without that wall of hinders damage wouldn't have to be so ridiculously frontloaded. Tankiness could be smoothed out and roughly normalized between professions. You could gate things behind momentum mechanics with a reasonable expectation that players will reach the peak level of it while they're still in condition to benefit from it. Barriers wouldn't have to be a hard counter to so many classes.
The sheer amount of hinders that the affliction classes throw out is at the heart of pretty much all the problems with Imperian combat, IMO. It is what starts the cycle.
10 Damage classes can't push through hinder, request upgrade 20 Affliction classes get gibbed before stack completion, request upgrade 30 GOTO 10
That is how we ended up in the situation we are in now, where Kryss is spitting out confusion every 1.4 seconds while I do 450 damage sdrop combos from a standing start, and it's not going to go anywhere better from here. Getting rid of the hinder would let both sides back down. Without all the hinder, I wouldn't need to be able to splatter somebody inside of 15 seconds. Without splattering inside of 15 seconds, affliction classes could afford to have a slower stack rate.
This is a thing that has to be done eventually. A combat environment where one offense hinders while the other does not is never going to be a viable system.
"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 the state where single combat tends to be when both people are roughly as skilled: a stalemate that is decided only by error, be it human or mechanical. I'm fine with it being that way, because the alternative is favouring one side or the other. Obviously things like class balance are going to have an impact on the threshold for those errors but most any class has a handful of imperfections and 'broken' things.
I would say that classes focused on limbs or with the option of pursing limb-based offence have more of an edge over affliction styles than straight damage classes. Saying that however, there are very few classes that have straight up damage as their only option; fewer than the amount of classes revolving totally around affliction use. Just because one approach doesn't work well for a situation, doesn't mean another won't. Clearly it's not for everyone but I find that seeing what works, getting a little better and coding against this and that to be highly enjoyable, certainly one of the main draws of the game.
Whatever boat is floated, the important thing to note is that there is more than one play style and not participating in the others when you could afford to is a shame, because they all have interesting points.
I think it is important to note, and this was argued by the same persons, no less, that for a long time affliction routes were considered OP because even a terrible affliction offense could overwhelm a vast majority of the curing people had.
While some concessions were made in this direction, there was never any equivalent step up in ability required to compete for damage routes. Thus the discrepancy we are all aware of and that Kryss outlines, where the people who do, not can, but actually DO utilize affliction focused offenses can be counted on one hand.
The largest argument for a long time, and for amazingly good reasons, were the little outlier problems 'good' pk'ers took advantage of. Old calo, maidenhair stacking with old metra and cig, etc etc. Those things were deemed OP because they were uncounterable by damage routes, because they shut down your ability to attack. We just don't have those same issues anymore, not to that extent, and I have not noticed any sort of comparable rise in the barrier to entry for damage, even though the changes originally deemed OP by the same complainants in this thread were made to weaken affliction offenses. Track rebound and shield and get to dsl is and should be a good thing, but I think prudence is required the further we tread down the "let's make sure only people who could kill you a zillion other ways can use an aff offense effectively" path WRT affliction focused combat.
Let's not forget exactly what it is that makes combat here so amazing, which is the depth and complexity that you can have. I had so many different macros for different aff queues in assassin that I'd struggle to remember them all when I'd switch. They each had a use, and a purpose, and most were probably utilized repeatedly. I enjoyed creating those scenarios in advance in my mind and picking what to shut down first and how to go about it. No, not everything should be so difficult, and we should ALWAYS have an easy in, low investment in credits and code way to play the game, that definitively includes pk. No, we shouldn't defiler up affliction combat, either.
Personally, I don't find extreme damage or extreme afflictions any more intimidating than the other. Some classes obviously lend themselves more to one approach..
Great, yes. This is what I'm saying. Both extremes exist, and @Jules is the kind of player who can afford to spend $ to learn the classes that do best against affliction heavy offenses. Even fine tuning what she is capable of doing with Templar would be excellent, just like you can. Anti-magick is certainly equipped with the tools to handle these problems, just as you always demonstrate. She's already solved the 'too-much-damage' problem, now she can work on 'too-much-affs' problem, just like you have.
Comments
Survival - Bandages
Syntax: APPLY BANDAGES []
Requires: Two cloth
By applying bandages to yourself or others, you can drastically alter the amount of health one will lose to open wounds. The bandages will last until they are too loaded with blood to be effective.
It is important to note that bandages do -not- reduce the actual bleeding amount - they only prevent the health loss.
The most recent change to favours solved the highfavour stacking dilemma, but simultaneously introduced a new problem: capping all bonuses at +1 means several bonuses that already intentionally stacked now no longer do. Access to highfavour as a sect command renders the benevolence ritual entirely useless, as they both have the exact same cost but highfavour also increases belief and experience gain. In addition, being highfavoured as a Moradeim aspect renders modulation completely useless now.
Can we please just solve all of these problems by making highfavours, and only highfavours, not stack? This was a very simple solution as proposed and I don't know why the decision was made to confound existing applications of stat bonuses with such a broad change.
"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."
Now that Reave/stances have been looked at, could we please look at the thing where Templars get a damage enhancement that does mediocre damage with a pre-req of <75% health and three afflictions, but Deathknights get to do Soulquench+Fleshburn+Negating+Soulquench+Fleshburn for 400+ damage with a pre-req of <65% health with zero afflictions?
"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."
"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 will agree with that when they start making affliction speeds start out unfeasibly slow and ramp up to feasible affliction rates over time.
As it stands now I'm against changing damage over to a momentum based system because then your damage classes will end up in a position where they spend their entire momentum phase eating shots from an affliction offense that goes full speed right out of the gates, and that's just not a feasible position; by the time their kill method opens up they're already on the ropes.
If affliction classes want to gain in effective tankiness their offenses need to lose their inherent control.
"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."
Wasn't this already the point of paralysis being nerfed into numbness, metrazol going from four effective applications to two, clumsiness being nerfed to a consistent timer, balance and equilibrium knocks no longer stacking, etc. etc.?
Affliction rate does effectively ramp up - this is the point of affliction stacks and cure hindering. You aren't optimal out of the gate, and this is why you try to lower someone's curing capabilities by going for locks or otherwise preventing cures. Going 'full speed' is a bad metric when your effectiveness is gauged on someone's ability to respond to a threat versus a direct number (doing damage to health). Why is it considered balance that damage classes can blast down affliction offenses before they can achieve any sort of stack, but making headway on affliction offense (given that very few afflictions hinder offense directly) is unreasonable?
I would say "if damage classes want access to lock breakers then they need to lose their inherent front-loaded burst damage" but we all know where the distribution of Fitness lies.
Also noteworthy, after the change to numbness we got to watch point #1 in action as all the affliction fighters moved en masse from cigua-spam's "you never get to attack me" to clumsy-spam's "you can attack me but you won't hit anything". Oddly enough we're getting drowned in waves of confusion and peace now that clumsiness has been nerfed, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with the huge inherent control available to affliction offenses and everything to do with something else entirely. I just can't think of what it might be.
If you had to build up afflictions before you could use prophecy? That would be a momentum-style system because your offense would start out weaker and gain power over the course of the fight. What they have right now, though, where the offense starts off running flat out? That's not. That's actually the complete opposite of a momentum system.
"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."
Ok, against my better judgement:
I like damage. I like afflictions (I like pk). Just to get that out of the way.
I'm going to respond to Iniar's damage things first, because I fundamentally disagree. I know how an aff class will kill me, and I can 9 times out of 10 know when it is about to happen (usually a couple of rounds or more in advance). That doesn't mean I can avoid it. I can look over my fights with Kryss or whoever, pinpoint exactly at which point I might fall behind or whatnot and formulate an optimal response that on paper will guarantee I will not die. However, human error and needing to maintain your own offense renders that pretty much a nonfactor. I could shield every round when I was slightly at risk or whatnot, but given aff/damage outputs, that means I will be shielding every three rounds (and not maintaining an offense).
Furthermore, damage and affliction classes both have methods to get around the turtling style (particularly applicable to one v one). Admittedly not all of them do, but the vast majority. I do get what Iniar is saying, but I think that's a statement made in the context of a vacuum, not in an actual fight. Personally, I don't find extreme damage or extreme afflictions any more intimidating than the other. Some classes obviously lend themselves more to one approach, but generally at the high tier they're both decided by someone making a bad gamble/choice/etc. (This assumes numbers are somewhat in balance, obviously.)
I'm not even touching the discussion on if aff classes have too much control or if damage classes do too much.
You could solve this entire problem here by changing things so that affliction offenses are no longer a solid wall of hinders.
Without that wall of hinders damage wouldn't have to be so ridiculously frontloaded. Tankiness could be smoothed out and roughly normalized between professions. You could gate things behind momentum mechanics with a reasonable expectation that players will reach the peak level of it while they're still in condition to benefit from it. Barriers wouldn't have to be a hard counter to so many classes.
The sheer amount of hinders that the affliction classes throw out is at the heart of pretty much all the problems with Imperian combat, IMO. It is what starts the cycle.
10 Damage classes can't push through hinder, request upgrade
20 Affliction classes get gibbed before stack completion, request upgrade
30 GOTO 10
That is how we ended up in the situation we are in now, where Kryss is spitting out confusion every 1.4 seconds while I do 450 damage sdrop combos from a standing start, and it's not going to go anywhere better from here. Getting rid of the hinder would let both sides back down. Without all the hinder, I wouldn't need to be able to splatter somebody inside of 15 seconds. Without splattering inside of 15 seconds, affliction classes could afford to have a slower stack rate.
This is a thing that has to be done eventually. A combat environment where one offense hinders while the other does not is never going to be a viable system.
"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 would say that classes focused on limbs or with the option of pursing limb-based offence have more of an edge over affliction styles than straight damage classes. Saying that however, there are very few classes that have straight up damage as their only option; fewer than the amount of classes revolving totally around affliction use. Just because one approach doesn't work well for a situation, doesn't mean another won't. Clearly it's not for everyone but I find that seeing what works, getting a little better and coding against this and that to be highly enjoyable, certainly one of the main draws of the game.
While some concessions were made in this direction, there was never any equivalent step up in ability required to compete for damage routes. Thus the discrepancy we are all aware of and that Kryss outlines, where the people who do, not can, but actually DO utilize affliction focused offenses can be counted on one hand.
The largest argument for a long time, and for amazingly good reasons, were the little outlier problems 'good' pk'ers took advantage of. Old calo, maidenhair stacking with old metra and cig, etc etc. Those things were deemed OP because they were uncounterable by damage routes, because they shut down your ability to attack. We just don't have those same issues anymore, not to that extent, and I have not noticed any sort of comparable rise in the barrier to entry for damage, even though the changes originally deemed OP by the same complainants in this thread were made to weaken affliction offenses. Track rebound and shield and get to dsl is and should be a good thing, but I think prudence is required the further we tread down the "let's make sure only people who could kill you a zillion other ways can use an aff offense effectively" path WRT affliction focused combat.
Let's not forget exactly what it is that makes combat here so amazing, which is the depth and complexity that you can have. I had so many different macros for different aff queues in assassin that I'd struggle to remember them all when I'd switch. They each had a use, and a purpose, and most were probably utilized repeatedly. I enjoyed creating those scenarios in advance in my mind and picking what to shut down first and how to go about it. No, not everything should be so difficult, and we should ALWAYS have an easy in, low investment in credits and code way to play the game, that definitively includes pk. No, we shouldn't defiler up affliction combat, either.