Affliction tracking for dummies

Edric

I want to understand combat, and I think to truly get it I need to venture into the terrifying hot mess that is the affliction system (and I mean that in the best of ways.)

I get what afflictions are. I get how they work and how they are cured slightly less so. And keeping track of them is a whole different matter. So that's where my questions are going to be oriented.

1. I think the basic way of tracking afflictions offensively is to have some kind of list, to which I append afflictions as I hit an enemy with them, and from which I remove afflictions when I notice an enemy eat the cure. Is this correct?
2. Will there be a message for every single time an affliction is cured, or are some of them cured "secretly" without some message going out to the room?
3. Haemophilia and addiction are both cured by eating nightshade. If I afflicted somebody with both of these, and I see them eat a nightshade, is there a way to know which one was cured? Will it always be cured in the same order for everybody?
   
4. Is there a way to assess precisely what afflictions somebody is currently suffering from? Like DIAG, but for another person?
5. With the changes to afflictions in the last few years, are "affliction locks" possible still? Can any class do them? Can Summoner?
6. Are there diminishing returns for afflicting in team fights? It seems like there is a "spam damage" tendency but if everybody instead just focused on afflicting 1-2 things, wouldn't you be able to lock people down almost immediately? (I guess if you have enough people to instalock you also have enough people to instaburst). 

I imagine I'll have even more questions about this soon. Hopefully the answers here might encourage some other peeps to give this whole thing a try too. 

Menoch

1 - That's the concept. You can be more complex but this is all that is ever required. Trigger for when you envenom x with y, if successful hit, target now has y.

2 - No. Welcome to the only part of Imperian combat that is complex. My suggestion, utilize the 3rd person cures and afflict messages for your first entries into your new system. Bear in mind here that if you aren't paying attention to what your allies are giving your target in a team, you are going to overlap toxins and destroy your own efficiency. To directly answer your question, many times you will just see an opponent eat something, and yes, you must use that one line alone to determine what they cured.

3 - No way to know directly, no. There are a couple afflictions that are always cured first, for the most part though you will always have to use either some real hardcore probability and statistics sorta math, like a couple people have in the past, or you will have to refine your tracking off contextual clues. Maybe you saw them eat maidenhair and you don't know if they are still paralysed or cured metrazol or cured sensitivity. If he moves west, he is not paralysed and so must've cured that. Maybe you didn't see the guy eat kelp, but he has passive healing and he started smoking linseed again. So asthma was cured.

4 - Assassins/renegades have analyse, yes. If you are playing assassin or renegade and actually utilizing that skill to determine your affliction queue, you're basically driving a Lamborghini and keeping it under 35. Takes too long, and they afflict so quickly that your target shouldn't have a large amount of eating to do before locked, so less cures you track, less margin for error. Speed and reset aliases are your friend as an afflicting god.

5 - Yes, possible, no summoners cannot. I mean yes, summoners can, but it is so difficult as to be nearly impossible and with curing speeds for focus and purge at trans I really sort of doubt it, any longer. Summoner however, should not be worried about locking. You should be worried about quickly lowering health and making use of our new enlighten conditions, or get clever with addiction or something if you really want to use affs to supplement your damage.

6 - No, your diminishing return for affliction is affliction overlap. Tracking is what makes or breaks afflicting, if you are good, and you are accurate, and you pay attention to what your allies are doing in teams, you will be that clutch dude everyone wants in their back pocket for shardfalls. If you loop aconite and ciguatoxin and use pre envenoming or pre set macro combinations of toxin attacks, you will never be a real threat.

I've not played for a long time, I may be off some here. Talk to Iluv, Kryss, Septus, Wysrias, people that I've fought with that I know are competent coders and enjoy (at least occasionally) affliction playstyles.

Khizan

1. Essentially, yes. There are various ways to implement this depending on your client, but that is at the heart of it.
2. No. The majority do not do this and you have to rely on "Well, he ate kelp, so he cured KelpAff1 or KelpAff2." This is because perfect tracking would be far too powerful.
3. If one of the afflictions has a third-party cure message that you can see, process of elimination. Otherwise, no. The cure order is random.
4. You can diagnose other players with the Spectacles of Tomast assembly artifact, but the eq is too long to be practical for combat unless you're reporting to other people.
5. Yes. Summoners can, but not effectively, and are far better off pushing for an enlighten kill.
6. No, but affliction strategies take far more coordination because two people using the same affs cancel each other out while all damage stacks. Also, affliction strategies tend to be weaker due to having more critical failure points; if you are depending on a Hunter/Summoner to Brainmelt/Enlighten and you lose that person, you also lost your strategy. 

Jules

Let me ask you this.  Do you have solid rebounding tracking (for example) and do you understand it well enough to tinker with it and think about tweaks?  If not, work on the basics first.  If you're like me, it will keep you busy for a long time.  

Dicene

Might I add that a big part of using afflictions with most classes is reducing the amount of guessing that you have to do by building a stack intelligently. As a sabre-knight for example, you can build a stack of hemotoxin, numbness, clumsiness, sunallergy, butisol, nausea, asthma and until you get to asthma, there is no guessing apart from on tree and purge cures(which only have 2 and 3 possibilities each at that point). In general, you can use all the 3p message affs(hemotoxin, sunallergy, butisol, stupidity, and sulfonal) along with another aff on each herb and when you see an herb eaten, you either see the 3p message and know exactly which aff was cured, or you don't see it and you know exactly which aff was cured.

You get an easily trackable stack like that, then you add in "if they touched tree, they don't have numbness" and "if they smoked a pipe, they don't have asthma", then you track other cure types like salves and smokes, then you transition into a soft lock and hope focus doesn't cure anorexia(or loshre it as RG) or you pour on useful salve affs like slow herbs or you add sensitivity and try to burst them while they're curing things that they might have higher priority.

Not all classes have it that easy(Hunter is forced to do a physical and mental each combo, and if the opponent cures impatience(which is on an herb with 0 3p affs), they're going to start focusing random mentals down and you're going to end up with a very inaccurate list unless you probe, get lucky(or get slightly less lucky and use statistics), or let them cure them all while you push on physicals, then start transitioning to mentals again later), but everything that focuses heavily on toxins for their aff power can use 3p affs pretty heavily as a clutch to reduce mis-tracking early in a match.

Menoch

Tying onto the most recent comment, the real power behind afflicting is that you are systematically shutting things down. Slowbal and sloweq are fun, but confusion and eqloss or arsenic and ether can really clinch it. Bear in mind who/what you are fighting, and how they are fighting you. The faster affliction rate classes and statpacks tend to be the least tanky, so mitigation where you can get it is great. Also, a queue that initially relies on disparate cure types is excellent to start working with, but if you are only watching your own afflictions and cures on target, then you will not have a good time in teams as an affliction spec. Just be careful to remember while coding that things are not always cut and dried when it comes to pk. People might run in and start smashing your target with affs halfway through your lock.

Cassius

And always...those damn passive cures.

Khizan

Menoch said:

 if you are only watching your own afflictions and cures on target, then you will not have a good time in teams as an affliction spec. 

The problem is that the only affliction information that is reliable are the afflictions you deliver personally or afflictions that have clear and obvious third party messages so that you don't have to rely on reporting and can track them 'real time'.

If you are relying on team tracking over a channel for non-unique messages it's very very easy to end up in situations that go like this:

1. I DSL target with afflictions A and B
2. I confirm that DSL has landed without rebounding/shield/parry/etc preventing it.
3. I send the command to announce my afflictions.
4. G-bot heals affliction B
5. I actually announce the afflictions.
6. You see my announcement and afflict based on them having affliction B.

The vagaries of the internet and G-bot ticks combine to ensure that any kind of reporting that works like this is subject to this kind of thing, so it is only intermittently accurate even under the best conditions. It's somewhat possible to mitigate this with coding, but it's a lot of work for some minor gains. 

There's a good reason why your Azefels and Septuses have decided against implementing team tracking, and this is it. It's just not reliable enough.

Kryss

Demonic tracks afflictions together because it generally makes us perform better as a whole. While the situation Khizan described does happen, it's usually only seen in the opening round of combat before curing balances are pushed behind. The afflictions used here are generally high priority openers like paralysis and metrazol that have clear afflicted messages and don't need to be reported.

Iniar

That said, @Fensrun is crazy and compares the reported affliction with the actual strike and -everything- in between.

Raff

This is OP--finally figured out how to change my forum account. Might as well post on the guy that's making use of all these things.

@Jules

What do you mean by solid rebounding tracking? It's a silly question ("track whether rebounding is up on the guy you're attacking duh") but... What else does that entail? What would a *solid* rebounding tracker do additionally? I'm asking because that's as good of a place to start as any.

So far I'd be able to gag/highlight the rebounding message to say whatever I wanted and be flashy so I'd notice. I guess I could also do some kind of "queue eqbal raze" or whatever else I might have to get rid of it. But I have a feeling there's something I'm missing here. How could I make it better?

And for everybody else... wow. This is a lot more complex than I expected, especially if it's not a simple matter of matching a curing message with a given affliction. That's exciting though, lots of room for growth and learning. Thanks for all the input.

Iniar

things to track

[ ] rebounding going up

[ ] rebounding dropped by enemy

[ ] rebounding razed by me

[ ] rebounding razed by someone else

[ ] when I hit rebounding, be sure to give the enemy rebounding

[ ] when someone else hits rebounding, be sure to give the enemy rebounding

[ ] when I raze and -don't- hit rebounding, be sure to drop rebounding for the enemy

[ ] when someone else razes and doesn't hit rebounding, be sure to drop rebounding for the enemy

[ ] enemy smoked linseed, about 3.8 s later, I will raze rather than strike, even before rebounding pops up

[ ] enemy smoked linseed, walks out of the room and returns > 3.8s later - rebounding should be put back up

[ ] enemy out of sight for more than 5 s, -maybe- assume rebounding

[ ] a reset button

A few other things but you can work those out.

Khizan

If you're a Summoner, you don't need to track rebounding outside of "That idiot smoked a linseed pipe I should probably enlighten them".

Iniar

That's too simplistic.

If that idiot smoked a linseed and I have more than 2 seconds left till they regain their smoke balance, THEN I should probably enlighten them.

UNLESS

I am dropping hellsight as an instant alongside my whispering-madness, then you can play the RNG wheel of doom.

Jules

What these guys are saying is that Jules should have been a Summoner  (maybe).  

Shou

@raff You should also make sure to capture the many different ways of your side's rebounding raze. A few shatter, others smash, some more slash.. gotta catch 'em all.