Veil of the Obtenebrate

Khizan

To put it bluntly, the Veil of the Obtenebrate is easily the single most terrible thing in the game right now. While anything that costs 2000 credits should be fairly powerful, the Veil is powerful in a toxic and disruptive way, and it's detrimental to the game as a whole. The only real function of the Veil is to allow people to hide from conflict, and that just doesn't work well in a conflict oriented game. 

Got an intruder in your city? Unless you've paid the 2000cr buyin, the only way to find him is blind prisming. Have fun! They kill a citizen? No chance of reprisal because you have no idea where he is. Want to hunt them later? No such luck, can't hunt them down. Get in a fight with them and they break out of the room? Not gonna catch them! 

It, alone, turns an irritating invader into a "goddamnit, just close the gates, we're never going to catch him". The only reason they've gone so long without serious complaint is because they were so expensive that nobody had one. Now that they're more common, they're easily the single biggest point source of 'anti-fun' in the game.

Something should be done.

Sarrius

As the gem before it, the veil needs tweaks. I think it should just work like cover tracks or soulmask.. high farsee and seek resist.

Selthis

Sarrius said:

As the gem before it, the veil needs tweaks. I think it should just work like cover tracks or soulmask.. high farsee and seek resist.

It does. High just happens to be 100%!

Khizan

Frankly, I'd be happy with just something like "Does not work inside of a city/council that you are enemied to".

Sarciossis

Just get Selthis on your team. He is the ALL SEEING EYE.

Ellen

Just a thought, but perhaps it could get the same treatment that the gem did. Keep the thirdeye blocking property 100% of the time, but limit the 100% total location protection to X hours per day. It could have non-perfect location protection the rest of the time, as Sarrius suggested.

Iluv

Veil is possible to bypass, maybe you should go on the doctor pepper saving plan.

But seriously, you have plenty of people in Magick who also have a veil that you can use to spot a person with a veil. If anything, a veil is a conflict generator.

Edit: Also if your only concern is veil in regards to city defense, traps (phased and unphased) will always give you the location of a veil'd person.

Juran

Iluv said:

Veil is possible to bypass, maybe you should go on the doctor pepper saving plan.

But seriously, you have plenty of people in Magick who also have a veil that you can use to spot a person with a veil. If anything, a veil is a conflict generator.

Edit: Also if your only concern is veil in regards to city defense, traps (phased and unphased) will always give you the location of a veil'd person.

I was with you until 'veil is a conflict generator'. It would only generate conflict among people that would be too afraid to go out without one.

Iluv

Well, I guess in that single regard, I am speaking for myself. I don't use veil to evade conflict. I use veil to bypass foreboding stone and bloodscent and to be able to use the veil to seek out people who do have one.

Bathan

Veil's just one of those things that really is detrimental to the game but will never be changed of removed because each Veil gives IRE 600 bucks.

Selthis

What if the strength of blocking dependent on distance from target?

I'm in stavenn, Khizan is in Reate herding cats(Kinsarmarians) into gathering like 3 shards before they get dismantled due to lack of coordination.  He seeks me out, due to distance he has basically no chance of locating me

He moves to Kinsarmar.  15% chance of it going through veil and giving the area or whatever.

He moves to Caanae. 30% chance of it going through veil.

He moves to Modin:  40% chance of it going through veil

He enters Stavenn proper:  50% chance of it going through veil

Oh no, i get caught out or not. Do I have warning up?  Do I switch it up on him and run to reate? Only the shadow knows!

Selthis

But Bathan is right.  Its one of those situations where it will probably never change due to 2k credits.

Bathan

This is one of those situations where MKO really did it a lot better than the standard IRE model. There was no thirdeye, no farsee, Magician had scry which would detect someone and say they are 'in a forested area far to the northwest' and that was it, aside from artifact auction scrying orbs. In their version of perception there was a trans ability that would allow someone to be unscryable for like, 10 minutes.

Imperian hinges on quickly being able to discern the location of your opponent which means stuff like cover tracks, scry, soulmask is just absurdly stupid and makes the game less enjoyable. Veil more so because an assassin can hang out in Kinsarmar for a while, kill people, et cetera and then when it's time to get retribution with an angry mob, no dice, 2000 cr artifact.

It is, at days end, an annoying artifact that shouldn't exist.

Juran

Iluv said:

Well, I guess in that single regard, I am speaking for myself. I don't use veil to evade conflict. I use veil to bypass foreboding stone and bloodscent and to be able to use the veil to seek out people who do have one.

Evade is the skill intended to bypass those things. If it isn't functioning well enough that a 2000 credit artifact is required to supplement, it likely needs looked at via classleads.

Iluv

It functions well enough, but it won't get me into Guildhalls unnoticed.

Luthyr

<pet> seek / glance

<pet> track / glance

You already mentioned prism.  In regards to city defense, they aren't going to be moving quickly away from you and if it is more than one of them you can locate someone without a veil in the group.

Sarrius

It is detrimental to generating conflict because it makes players harder to catch in a game where there is not much opportunity to make people take their lumps anyhow, piled on top of how most classes have a very good escape mechanic.

It isn't just city defense. It is just the game itself in general.

Khizan

The problem with blind prism is that it's just that: blind. It's also a giant visible "HEY YOU HAVE INCOMING" alert that's easy to avoid. And it also makes it much, much harder to utilize guards or city defenses against the invader, which is problematic when you consider that the invader with the Veil is, almost invariably, heavily artifacted.

It also means you sit there going "Boy, I hope this intruder just stands there and lets me fight him. It sure would suck if he just traveled out of the city like he can do easily!" and contributes to the "Nothing can be done about it, just close the gates and turtle" mentality that, unfortunately, is the only thing you can really do when they're determined to get into the city like that, because there's nothing you can do to them. This is especially true of predators, who can bypass traps.

The trap point is somewhat valid, except it's reliant on a single profession. And not only is it reliant on that profession, it's reliant on a single member of that profession to keep that profession active, keep an updated and current list of enemies(both personal enemies and potential invaders), and to effectively serve as the gatekeeper. It can be effective(against Sabs and Sabs only), but it's also stupid and reliant on a stupid mechanism.

Also, it's BS that phased traps exist at all and present a significant hindrance to a phased assassin/renegade, and I'm surprised you haven't asked for that to change. 

EDIT:

@Iluv

It seems like you're mostly justifying the Veil because you need it to serve as a 2000cr bandaid over flawed stealth mechanics, when what you really need is just better stealth mechanics to prevent the Forboding Stone from screaming about every movement.

Khizan

Some ideas:

• The Veil deactivates for X minutes following an attack against another player, with a longer period after a kill of another player
  
• Reduced protection while inside a city you're enemied to
• Decreased protection against nearby farsight attempts. You're alerted to successful attempts and immune to attempts that aren't in your area or an adjacent one.

Luthyr

I'm confused.  This isn't something that is new.  Why the sudden interest in something that literally hasn't changed across three games?  I understood the issue with the gems and population representation, but nerfing an item just because it's difficult in finding someone doesn't really seem viable.

Delrayne

It's coming up now, because of the volume of people that own it has gone up. Which invariably brings more attention to the matter.

Lionas

Luthyr said:

but nerfing an item just because it's difficult in finding someone doesn't really seem viable.

The word you want is reasonable. It is certainly viable.

Luthyr

Good point.  Yes, I was thinking "reasonable", not "viable".  Thank you.

Khizan

Luthyr said:

I'm confused.  This isn't something that is new.  Why the sudden interest in something that literally hasn't changed across three games?  I understood the issue with the gems and population representation, but nerfing an item just because it's difficult in finding someone doesn't really seem viable.

Because, while they were always irritating, they weren't so common as to be problematic. Now, though, virtually every intruder I see inside the city is impossible to find while they're there, and they're impossible to track down to find bounties on them. When I see a citizen die, odds are I won't be able to locate the person who did it. The phylacteries, giftbags, and other such promotions have made the Veil far more common than it would otherwise be, in addition to the natural inflation of a game like this, where artifact power accumulates over time.

In many ways, it has effectively added a 2000 credit buy-in to conflict, and its main use is to prevent and escape it. It's disruptive and terrible game design, and it could use a modification to bring it in line.

Luthyr

Playing devil's advocate to you argument would be that having a veil is nearly required to effectively assassinate someone inside a city/council and have a chance of escaping.

From experience, Kinsarmar's changed layout is beautiful for siege and it is rather difficult to find a good spot to jump people.  You really shouldn't have a problem narrowing it down.

Khizan

Luthyr said:

Playing devil's advocate to you argument would be that having a veil is nearly required to effectively assassinate someone inside a city/council and have a chance of escaping.

Yes, that would be where I said that Iluv is using the Veil as a 2000 credit bandaid to cover over things that should be classlead issues. Just as it shouldn't take a 2000cr investment to reliably find the infiltrator, it should not take a 2000cr investment to infiltrate.

Possible fixes:

• Remove the the ability to lay traps in phase, which prevents the trap/eyebot gatekeeper.
  
• Change it so that shadowing somebody and following them after the shadow does not trigger the Forboding Stone.
  
• Add a "stealth-prism" to Spatium. It would be a regular prism, visible to the target and people in the room, but travelling with the prism wouldn't fire the Forboding Stone.
• Add the syntax "evade grate" to allow them to enter the sewers undetected.

Iluv

• Change it so that shadowing somebody and following them after the shadow does not trigger the Forboding Stone and Bloodscent.
  

Luthyr

Or another idea would be to give assassins a time delay on deathsight going through.  Giving them a head start, so to speak.

Sarrius

It is showing up now due to how often it is ran up against and how much effect it has on retaliation and conflict.

Khizan

Luthyr said:

Or another idea would be to give assassins a time delay on deathsight going through.  Giving them a head start, so to speak.

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It's hard enough to catch anybody as it is. I don't think this is really needed. 

I mean, if I start running as soon as I see a deathsight message, I've got to be awfully close to catch them before they get balance back and escape. If I take even a handful of seconds to turn on a defense like runes/putrefaction/distortaura/drop rites, they'll have more than enough time to escape even without any delay at all.

Xeron

Introduce artie at a lower cost that allows sensing people with veils, but doesn't personally give veil effect.

But really, the veil is the one artie I would be quite satisfied to see gone IRE-wide.