Firstaid is an excellent resource, and I could see it definitely making building a system for new players much easier. You can easily utilize the functions to add afflictions you've caught with triggers and cure them with the curequeue. However it does have a few notable flaws.

A.) Slickness curing doesn't utilize cleanse when it's necessary, and is poorly prioritized.
B.) The absence of the use of powercures.
C.) Lack of tolerance of curequeue to aeon/choke/sap (suggest that it only evaluates one action at a time when the queue has aeon/sap/choke in it.)

I'd like to see what others have to say on this amazing skill and how to make it more effective as a tool for players both new and old. The expansion of firstaid and the universal application of affmessages are one of the things I'd love to see most.

Affmessages are already a great hit to illusions; if you extend them to everything, you only have secondary messages left for illusions, and even those would be mostly restricted for situations involving blackout.
I'm somewhat ambivalent about them.

Twoliners ftw.

IRE should just bite the bullet and make actual Nexus systems for their games. Firstaid isn't nearly enough to get people into combat.

It's a bit off-topic, but I'd like to make a comment based on Aetolia here. They recently (months ago) made a move to remove illusion as a major role in combat. Their Shadowsnakes class got their illusion capability in combat entirely removed (the new balance taken makes it counter productive to use it for anything but RP) and replaced with another mechanic. Their firstaid system is an automated curing system: you switch it on, and it runs by itself, without need for input. Their aff-messages system is pretty much complete, and they have configs to show damage taken, balance taken etc.

I'm not saying we should go their way, definitely not. However, the concept behind is important: All are moves to make system building for newbies easier.

No more illusions means no more complicated checks every prompt, after particularly often used messages, after every herb balance regain message etc etc. Affmessages make it possible to build a rudimentary affliction tracking or curing system based on 3 or 4 triggers. "^You have been afflicted with: (.*)\\.$" = send to script: "afflicted_matches = 1". Firstaid itself is a built in newbie system with its own flaws, that works on any and all clients, and gives all newbies the chance to survive attacks (if they have the cures) and learn how combat works.

Lowering the minimum requirement threshold for combat is a good idea. Newbie retainment issues aside, this allows people who have little to no coding knowledge to be able to build a rudimentary system and participate in combat even if they don't have the money to shell out for a pre-made system. The couple of free systems floating out in the forums already serve this purpose, of course, but not all newbies come here (in fact, few probably do) and having administration acknowledge their need and ease the learning curve would do a lot to make newbies enjoy their time here, whether they stay on as players in the long term or not.

Or you could just go the m&m way and hard code in illusions and be damned if someone throws an illusion at you that's not in your trigger list!

Hey, you can add your own illusions to ignore. I just added some generic dumb ones people like to spam as a convenience.

I agree though, delete illusions.

What I meant to say is that you can have a fairly robust system without fancy illusion handling.

Or delete illusions, give bards something else that's useful, and make it a general skill that takes half your mana and a 12-second balance or something, then we could keep it for RP. =_=

Illusions in Lusty now play a big role, but are not game breaking or anything. You can surely build a robust system without fancy illusion triggers, simple ones can do. But for a newbie, who has to learn cures, balances, 40+ afflictions, priorities, regen mechanics, etc etc, adding illusions to the mix is just giving them extra stuff.

"Hey, you gotta look out for afflictions X, Y, Z. They are dangerous. Their mechanics work this way, and that way, and the cures are this and this, and you can use this thing called gedulah to get out of the lock, and stuff. Oh, and they are given via 16 different messages, depending on the Guild. Oh, and on top of all that, out of the 5 guilds that can do it, 2 have availbility to illusions and just MIGHT try to trick you with an illusion that looks like one of those messages but is actully not. Lol."

Removing illusions won't solve the high learning curve Lusty has altgoether. Besides, the current combat scene is balanced around illusions. However, the idea behind it is valid: improve firstaid, or finding other ways to make entering combat easier than it is now will go a long way to making newbies have more fun.

I've actually asked for this before regarding Firstaid, but a generic message when an affliction is cured would make FirstAid a little easier to use. That way, you only "need" two triggers to handle all afflictions, and don't have to play "gotta catch'em all" with trigger lines. Which, of course, can be somewhat of a bother when there's 289 different afflictions around (which was my count from the wiki when I first tried to make a system).

What Ssaliss said.

How is combat "Balanced around illusions"? Some skills in illusions sure, but illusions don't do anything as such, beyond tricking a system. It doesn't give afflictions, it doesn't drain vitality, it doesn't hinder. The entire purpose of it is to trick systems, meaning you raise the coding requirements even higher, as instead of only coding for when you actually get afflictions, you also need all sorts of checks and balances to make sure that you actually got the affliction. Removing illusions from combat is good.

As someone who's had Illusions for a long time and often tried to encourage guildmates to find combat uses for them, I'd nevertheless entirely agree with (and have said several times before), illusions are one of five or six things that we could replace, to do far more for the "streamline combat" initiative we made last year than everything else we've done put together.

I personally use Illusions solely for RP and for personal entertainment. If Illusions were removed as a combat-skill, it would also mean that we can remove abilities that detect illusions, allowing for more immersion when it comes to the usage of illusions, say for rituals or ceremonies.

I'd suggest putting illusions on a long equilibrium timer of about 5 seconds, which would be short enough that you can chain-illusion in a scripted ritual or type out manually in an impromptu event, but long enough that it won't be viable for combat. I'd rather not have it use up half of your mana, because having to sip mana after weaving an illusion will break the immersion, and immediately reveal that you're the one that has been weaving illusions.

Actually, with a sufficiently long balance (5-10 seconds or so) and a painful willpower drain (say 10% or so?) a mana drain may not need to be present at all. Just my two coppers.

All of that's kind of tangential to the original post, I think.

I'm still annoyed that while Bards have illusions, they're utterly worthless for combat simply because we can't combo them with anything. They are, however, really, really fun to have for RP, and I would be really, really sad if they had severe restrictions. If you want to remove them from combat, simply give everyone an always on, no drain defense that perfectly detects them.

Well, there's three or so acrobatics moves they can combo with... but that really doesn't amount to much at all.

Yeah, really. Acrobatics is a really nice defensive skill (and has a nice trans skill if you're a monk), but otherwise the offensive skills in it seem to be just flavor.

Illusions don't "don't do anything". Illusions do a lot. For the more system breaking ones, they send their victims into a loop, trick them into using power cures, or could even plain spam out people. For the minor ones, skilled and well written illusions eat balances. By illusioning an affliction they don't actually have, you can divert a use of herb, cause them to sip a purgative, take smoke balance or whatever. Consistent use over the entire course of a fight effectively makes it a skill that slows sipping/herb balance for your target. Note that you can achieve this effect even WITH some anti-illusion triggers. To prevent your system from looping entirely, many people add a check whenever they eat a herb and don't cure anything to clearing their system of afflictions in that stack. This allows the system to move on without needing to diagnose. THIS STILL EATS UP A HERB BALANCE. Depending on the exploit and illusion used, it may well be impossible to fix the loophole in the middle of combat. You're effectively being given an affliction you can't cure, that slows your curing balance.

A smart illusion user can find out what kind of system he's up against. He can break it if it's poorly coded, or he can consistently apply a slowing down of herb/purg/salve balance to the target. Whether he can exploit this to capitalize on his own offense is another story, but to entirely dismiss illusion from combat balance is flawed to say the least.

Removing it from combat eases entry level into combat. Improving firstaid does the same thing. But all of these have repercussions: for an illusion-enabled class, you're basically taking away their ability to slow an opponent's balance. Whether or not it sees use at the moment is irrelevant: the possibility, the capacity to do so is being removed when you remove illusions wholesale from combat. Envoys need to think over carefully the effect on their classes and make adjustments as required. The admin needs to, too, assuming they're even interested in this idea in the first place.