Okay, so I flexed into Ecology to try it out (I got lessons galore from the wheel), and I've got some questions.

First on my mind: why is familiar sting seem so terribly inferior to animatedagger? Both of the skills restrict your offensive capabilities, require vials of poison, and can be disrupted. Animatedagger, however, is reliable at some range, can afflict infinitely and doesn't cost power. What gives? Should make the balance on familiarsting longer, take away the power cost (or have a powercost associated once, when you first clasp, something to enable unlimited famstings until you unclasp), and make it so that if the person who is being targeted smacks it, it goes passive and you have to spend the balance on it again.

Second, this has been brought up before, but in a demesne that moves terrain, it takes annoying timing to get your smudges to actually hit who you are targeting. They 'fixed' that by making quickburn, which costs 4p. For what it is, I think that 4p is only a tad too powerful, but 3 is definitely warranted. I don't think it fixed the issue at all though. For waiting 5 seconds, I feel like smudge effects should at least hit in tree elevation, if not additionally in the air. Quickburns can stay only hitting the terrain level of the caster, that's fine by me. BerserkFetish would still work the same, a short period of fast afflicting for a chunk of power. All the smudge abilities seem fairly useful, but the annoyance of using them effectively is a real turn off.

Last, why isn't Senso allowed exacty, or Ibululu for druids?
I figure that for druids senso is blocked to stop you from doing broken legs and senso together with sap, but that's still meager affliction stacking that can outpace druid balance. I'm missing the big shocking powerful combo here, I think. It seems pretty good, but on par with what other tertiaries for druids have, and dosn't seem to powerful for bards.
For bards ibululu won't ever go through to stop familiarsting with ibululu and deathsong. That's fine as is, I can't see a viable way to code around that. Druids could use it though, it seems like a useful thing to have, without overpowering druids all of the sudden.

Why isn't there a BOND QL/QUICKLOOK?

There have been a lot of ecology reports in the last year, which have made strides in making the skill more usable. I'd love to see the eco-envoys continue working together on it. You mention familiarsting and the available venoms, both of which have recently been improved, but maybe we could go further.


I'd certainly support a reduced power cost or a further extending the venom slots. The power cost is pretty prohibitive for both bards and druids who have more important things to be spending 3p on, and having it be only 10 slots is also not terribly useful. The biggest issue I have with familiars though, is the way they work with transmigration - they are too much of a liability to even bring with you into combat in most cases, which is probably why this hasn't really been addressed.


I'd support quickburn costing only 3p, sure.


Report 391 was the recent one expanding the venoms available... They opted to keep out senso, ibululu, and crotamine entirely, rather than splitting them up between a bard and druid version of the skill. I think it's really because they don't want to open the door of differentiating the skill.


I don't know!

Also, Escozul isn't a choice though they said it was going to be...

Okay, after doing some testing, I realized that the random timer on the front of smudges burning made it really hard to actually hit anyone in my demesne when treelife is up. Forcing druids to use 4p(or 3p) or have the main hit/aff skill in the tertiary have a high chance of totally missing targets is silly. It really should hit tree terrain, or not have a random timer, so that treelife can be planned around. That would open it to timing precisely with demesne, but that should be balanced against the difficulty in actually doing that in a real fight with hindering enemies.

If you are familiarstinging, your bond should be invunerable... if you aren't, there is 0 point to having the bond there, as far as I can tell. It dosn't have any real use on the field if it's not clasped (and therefore wiping out your ability to actively use poisons on any reasonable level)

Sounds like a bug then?


My issue with the bonds in combat isn't with the bond being attacked. As Raeri tried to address in report 401 - The liability comes from the fact that if you die while deepbonded (which people do for the bonus stat + other effects), and the bond is in the same area as you, you reform at the bond's location - ie, the same spot where you died, resulting in an almost assured double death with the now drastically increased costs to essence/xp loss incurred twice.

It seems better to forgo the use of bonds altogether and just leave the bond at a safe room in a manse or similar and either keep the fetish for the utility it offers or just ignore that as well - which is what most ecologists do. The fact that bond sting isn't really worth using anyway just makes it that much easier to feel okay about not being able to safely do so.

I'm not sure what you're stating here. Whenever I use smudges, they have hit in the tree elevation whenever I'm up there with a singular target. If you're talking about why one person in a particular group of people doesn't get hit, that's because smudges have only have a chance of affecting x-number of people in a room. I think it varies between 1 person and 6, but it's not guaranteed to hit everyone in the room, no.

When you're up there, yes. She means they should hit ground and trees both, so that if treelife/bane ticks after you drop the smudge, it still hits. Half the reason I'm not a druid anymore is because as much as I hate screwing with blind/deaf, it's preferable to screwing about with different elevations.

I believe what she means is hitting both elevations at once, because the randomness of the burn time can making timing the smudge with treelife/treebane/persons own movements difficult.

EDIT: Man I didn't even read Sylphas' post before writing this, whoops.

Oh, that. I just don't bother with treebane solo anyway, though I wouldn't have a problem if it were suggested to alter that. Go go Ecology reports, less than effective that they may often be.

I have no objections to smudges hitting both elevations, nor towards ibululu for druids, senso for bards and escozul for both. There is some precedent for different versions of the same skill for different guilds.

I'd also like to point out that Illuminati have a similar issue with regards to bond QL and reforming at your bond leading to double deaths. While I haven't tried envoying the former, trying to envoy the latter just resulted in homunculus health being increased slightly. Would not recomend spending a report on that, since nothing is likely to come of it.

If I do an eco report, it would be on smudges first, then probably familiar concerns, probably familiarsting.

I really just want esco to stop people truehealing out of sap...

Probably why it'll never go through now that you've mentioned sap, but feel free to prove me wrong!

But it was already approved in a previous report... well, then again so was a review of Glom eco familiars. Yeah, hopeless.

I dunno, I feel that if I or any other class goes through 8+ power, tedious timing, commodities, and trouble to have a chance to kill someone we should at least have a way to stop them from truehealing/suspendendedanimating out of it (if we are paying attention), if those skills won't go away. Perhaps that's just me.

As far as I can tell, Valley smudge's afflictions are totally negated by levitation, which eco druids/bards have no way of stripping. Anyone know otherwise?

LowMagic Spring? Not a great idea, but it's there.

I think I'm just going to give up on bringing my bond to any fighting areas... or bothering to deepbond at all. Flight is nice, so I might bond and leave the thing in a manse somewhere. The only bond abilities are familiar smudge (useful, most of the time), familiar sting (not near useful, most of the time) and increased shrugging (which has only triggered once or twice in my experience) but at the cost of no active poisons.

Fam sting needs improving, and the transmigrate ability definatly needs a lot more work. It makes sense to me to have transmigrate work like this:
You die, ouch
You float around as a soul.
You find a good spot, and do TRANSMIGRATE.
Your bond rushes into the room (like bond recall) and..
BAM, you transmigrate.

You could impose limits on this, but as-is, it spells a pretty rapid redeath 99% of the time, as Talan brought up. And for the amount of utility your bond gives you (minimal?), it's not worth ever having it with you...


As for Familiar sting. Because it stops you from using active poisons, costs 3p, and is only 10 poisons hits, I can't see ever using this. If it was less costly to use, and/or you had a reduced chance of shrugging famsting poisons, sure. But for 3p, hitting undependably with 3 or less hits of poisons (33% shrugging plus stuff like poison trade and athletics immunity), it's a flop. I'm thinking of trying to envoy it to either cost less power (or none, but with other drawbacks), have more dependable afflicting, have it inform you when poisons actually hit, or have more poisoning capacity.

That's been repeatedly required before for lichdom and homunculus. It isn't happening.