Sect skills in PVP

Tyden

Took the night to think on it:


After experiencing my first dose of group PK in Imperian with the ToC. I will have to say that having sect skills be so "game-defining" is not something that is good for the health of the game. Being told I need to have sect skill "breach" to effectively pk or escape "kill rooms" is foreign to me. Then being told that I need to join a certain sect to get Breach is even more foreign to me.

I am very new to Imperian, but to sort of neglect PK to sects not wanting to conform to the ways of PK based skills is blah. Basic skills in my opinion should always be at the forefront of combat, while these sect based skills should be more "flavor" or perhaps even making a normal skill better. The only counter to something though? Well that just seems off.


My two cents, feel free to batter it down

Iluv

To be fair, right from the beginning I told you not to join the Sect you went with and to join Flame. Now you know why.

Ultrix

For better or for worse, sect and city membership are not simply for "flavor", they are pretty much mandatory for PvP as they gain you access to a wide variety of support skills that are class/profession neutral.

I personally dislike the idea of this type of forced membership as it limits options greatly, but that is how the game mechanics are currently set up, and if you don't utilize them, you're at a severe disadvantage.

Juran

Sects have the ability to custom tailor their miracles around what they want their sect to be. The problem is, most people have no interest in combat and want miracles that help them bash or duplicate commodities.

Finding a sect that fits your playstyle is more important than finding a guild that does.

Khizan

Sanctuary is really only a major problem in that one specific situation you were in. You were trapped in a one exit room in a situation that didn't let you use grove return or aspect gaze or portal out or whatever.

There's also a lot of situational possible escapes that could have potentially worked in the arena.

If they were in the sanctuary room next to you, you could have imploded(AB EVOCATION IMPLOSION); Outrider/Outrider/Monk has one blocking class and can't doubleblock the implode. If they were outside of the sanctuary room and it was just blocking you in, you could have gone for a prism or an airwalk to them, since Radiance has a 30 second eq time.

Now, if they sanctuaried next to you, left that room, sanctuaried again, and went with radiance, you're a bit screwed there. Depending on the balance on worm snipe, it may have been possible for Kabaal to worm snipe Laeka with 10 barbeds in the 30 seconds that it takes to radiance. Could also gamble on a root strip. If waymarks can work in arena your bards could have prepped one, but I'm not sure if that works. There's also shackling yourself to take advantage of the fact that you can't radiance a shackled person, though that is a huge gamble.

However, you could also have avoided that entire situation simply by not forting up in a one-exit room. This would have given you more lines of retreat and you could have broken out of the trap pretty easily. The big thing in that fight is that you guys crawled inside of a bottle and then they stuck a cork in it.

Yeah, there's less chance of them escaping a one exit room, but there's also less chance of you escaping from it. I've lost count of the amount of teams who have tried to hold a one-exit room only to lose because they ended up having no place to run to. In a serious fight I consider the one-exit room to be something of a trap option unless you are REALLY confident in your skills.

For what it is worth, Conquest is the dominant AM combat sect and we've never bothered to pick up Breach.