If I were Divine for a day...


I would change the way village revolts work. Village revolts were and is one of the most exciting and unique creations IRE provided. It's still one of the only things I enjoy participating in but they are too short. Village feelings are too good. While it may give influencers a rush, maxing them out in between revolts, it gives a single org too much of an advantage. I'd decrease the impact feelings have during revolts and instead, change it to provide increased power and comm tithes to the allied org. A good revolt should last more than 3 minutes. Or five. Or ten. You get the idea.

Warriors: This has been discussed with no real answer in sight. I would take an example from the good book of Achaea where unartied knights can create 'arti' level weapons and compete. Delete runes and instead, give smiths the ability to imbue weapons with elemental damage (warrior only, ideally. Sorry monks but I hate you). Let us temper weapons to give arti-level stats. We can create new artifacts for warriors. Give unartied warriors a chance to deal decent wounds. I love the part where I'm discussing combat with a Squire only to end it with "oh and if you don't buy runes, you'll suck." Soften the resistances to physical damage- we are hurting in this area. We're forced to use rapiers because of the speed requirement in combat. In Lusty, combat does not stand still. It is so hard to maintain wounds when you consider the constant movement, passives, hindering, built-in buffs and defenses along with myriad ways to heal. Damage option is not viable. Bring back the damage knight. I hate pliers. I hate that I have to spend another 1500cr to switch runes to alternate weapons. Warriors have the highest cost when it comes to competing.

I would remove the use of bubblixes during aetherbubble conflict. This includes domoths and aetherflares. Why? Because this artifact gives a distinct advantage in a race where everyone should start off on even ground. And it is a race. It's a race to get there first. Where is the challenge? We have pricy aetherships and fuse points. Use them.

Speaking of aetherflares- weakenings were so much better. Why? Access to the nexus world where you almost always used colossi was fun. You had ground and aerial combat. Aetherflares were alright at first but with bubblixes, the experience feels less rewarding. If you remove the bubblix from the mix, you will see much more aetherspace conflict.

Wildnodes: Still fun but let's disable shrines during these events. Yes, I said it. Let's also include rules that orgs can no longer assist one another or be disqualified. Oh if only. Would be exciting to have a single event where it comes down to the sole skill and cohesion of your city or commune. Such a novel concept where Lusternia is concerned these days.

Icewynd: The bashing there is too good! Was talking to Veyrzhul about it and he pointed it out. Easiest bashing in the world. Thank god for demigod-level hunting with no insanity but the area is Avenger-protected, you don't have to move while on a mound and the creatures don't gang up. Make the spawns aggro so that you have to take care with how many you release. Make it dangerous.

I would change the way monks deal damage. Short and sweet. They have what warriors wish they had and with less credit investment.

Teas, beers, city potions, tinkering stuff. If we couldn't have dual trades, it would be neigh impossible to acquire this stuff. Too much new stuff. We need to stop buffing. I would delete so many buffs, everyone would seem naked. Cult buffs, shrine buffs. Cull and trim bby.

Make distort cost. Delete ripple/flux/liveforest/passive insanity on enemy planes. Distort in villages/Prime is fine to me.

Delete bards. Hee

Nerf TK already.

I would delete the entire karma system. Karma curses are pointless. I suppose this goes hand in hand with my desire to delete many buffs in general.

That's all for now. Was just musing and then started typing.

Let's wait for special reports first?

I'm going to go through and respond to a lot of this but:

Warriors
Okay, so you want to bring back damage warriors. I strongly disagree.
The problem with warriors is this: they scale. You have a youngling warrior who has all their skills transed, but no artifacts! They have x power. You give them all of their (granted, stupidly expensive) artifacts and suddenly they have x^4 power. Because warriors rely on non-boolean attack methods, they have the potential to scale massively! If you look at a class like say.. Druids (or any aff class), you either have the affs or you don't. Adding in more artifacts doesn't make those affs any more powerful, not having them doesn't make them any less powerful, they just are or aren't. The scaling nature of warriors creates this enormous range of warrior power, the lower ends are useless, the higher ends are totally broken. The very thing that makes our warriors 'unique', wounding, is the source of their extreme balancing act. Fix THAT problem, and you've suddenly opened warriors up to much more intelligent balancing. Similar to wounding, damage is a scalar factor, and can get totally out of hand really easily, which is why I think it'd present just as huge a problem, if not a bigger one than the current situation.

(So yes, delete the runes, or MASSIVLY nerf them in some way. Pony up the 'refunds' (store credit). Cry Moar. Nerf the effect of certain weapon stats that generate these huge swings, and add part of the difference into baseline warriors. Remove the huge range of wounding. Tone down the layers of rng required to do anything. Tone down warrior stacking. Either make each weapontype within a skillset totally identical stat-wise, or make them identical stat-wise and give each some unique balanced thing only it can do. Possibly make more unique warriors in general, remove samey guild skills.)


EDIT: I'd also like to point out that, with a few exceptions, warriors really are the only ones who see this problem as much. It used to plague monks more, but has become less of a problem for them as damage bonuses have been removed or lessened, and speed adjusted. The vast majority of the other classes are either condition killers (like Inqui), affliction 'lockers' (like Druids, Nihlists, and Moondancers), aff overwhelm classes (Illuminati and Choking Shadowdancers), or some other variety of non-scalar overwhelm (like Harbringer bleeding or TK bursters).

EDIT2: Also, after the last two guilds for the 'new' cities come out, I don't think they're likely to be adding in new guilds. I'm sure they have other big mechanics to introduce, but I'm going to suggest that the timeslots that had been devoted to writing new classes and guilds be devoted instead to re-writing old archetypes. Warriors and Druids totally need it, even after the special report. Really, Things should loop back around to look at the oldest guilds first, they really need love now-a-days to compare to these newfangled guilds.

I'm all for toning down warrior stacking in groups. Balancing around group combat sucks but I'm for that.

On warrior combat,

Had a spar with rafael. First spar since coming back. New system (m&M).

It was silly. I could sit there and laugh at whatever he was trying to do. He would parry head and laugh at whatever I tried to do.

Oh and that ice hunting place. Only place in IRE you can turn on your auto hitting, don't move, start a one piece episode and 10-20 minutes later have gained a level.

I don't see a problem with having a good bashing ground. You either need something good enough to compete with aetherbashing, or everybody will just semi-afk aetherhunt.

Villages are supposed to be addressed in the special reports. And there was a thread about shrines not long ago that hopefully will be included in the special reports too.

Oh, and how to design weapon damage is shown below in a very professional graph.

:D

I have no idea how many hours you think are in a day, but it's certainly not 24. :P

See the part about "After the special report, after the two (last?) new guilds come out"!

Balance is hard to do around group combat. Ultimately, if you're aiming for balance at group and 1v1 combat, your class either gets to be tanky, damage, or healer. The last two being moderate tanky. Paladins, at least, are tanky. I guess I haven't had a chance to put them to heavy use practically, but I'd bet fair cash that numen, numb, honour, ablution, lustration, parry, plate, and forging runes, + whatever else I missed, all play in to more overall mitigation than others get, at least on some level. Problem is - best offense is not always best defense.

Warriors
As far as warriors go, I think the special report will help a fair bit. Still bummed about the cost (which I've invested a lot into already), and the fact that other warriors who don't have runes and demigod will struggle a lot in combat. One thing is being limited by your skill - which improves with practice- and another is having a giant roof over the top of your head called game mechanics. There's classes that are pretty much impossible to fight against as a warrior too, unless you happen to be the one-hit-tendon guy against a squishy robes.

That said, being a warrior is amazingly rewarding, especially when you pull things off like building wounds on other warriors or managing to make yourself a threat to certain people.

I agree that more weapon variety would really rock, and I think Roark actually did ask us for ideas for those. It was brought up, and he asked for feedback on how to make the other weapon types more attractive.

Spec-wise, I think pureblade is actually pretty darned solid, and bonecrusher has gotten a bit better at least. I'm not too sure how axelord is doing on the 1v1 front. I have my gripes with BM as a spec. It doesn't do as well on good curing and armour.


Karma
I actually like karma blessings and think they're amazing. Though I have an unsubmitted report for making chaos and death blessing a little better for curing systems, and Viynain mentioned wanting to make Nature into something more useful. Karma curses are downright worthless and unused too. I think giving a beginning period where they can't be removed is a good start. No need to delete the entire system though. Could just adjust that.

Bards
As a warrior, I actually enjoy fighting bards. They don't hinder too easily, and there's a flow to them that you can follow. It sort of sucks that 9/10 times you have to fight them in octave, but in general they really aren't the hardest thing you have to fight, and they're one of the fairer classes. You want a headache? Fight a nihilist, researcher, illuminati, druid or TK as a warrior. They can probably stop you indefinitely.

TK
It is too easy.

Wildnodes
Good idea, actually. I especially like the idea about the stupid shrines. Infact, let's delete those from everything while we're fixing lusternia. That would go a long way :)

Well, I am all for deleting shrines, but as far as the special report is concerned, I'd rather nerf them a lot, see if it's enough, then ask for more if needed. I've no problems using envoy slots to adjust things post-special report.

P.S. Where were you guys when I was writing the Special Report > : (

Deleting the majority of shrines as they stand now sounds wonderful. We'll see what happens after the report!

Another thing possibly up for in-depth consideration after the report/newclasses would be to rework the entire godwars/shrine mechanics? Make shrines an integral part of godwards and.... nothing else, please!

Hey, if we address warrior stacking, can we also address:
1) Druid stacking (thornrend);
2) Mage stacking (bursts and psybomb)
3) Bard stacking (P5th and deathsong)
4) Monks
5) Well, at this point I've gone through about half of the classes, and they all can stack to the same degree or better than warriors can; I don't get why a small handful of you are so vocal about warrior stacking when there's much worse out there.

Edit: Clearly we need to just remove group combat entirely, eh?

(Druids stack thornlashes... and then you just autocure out of all of them with a novice who can ignite! Just don't unablaze yourself and you're 100% thornlash proof until someone nature rains!)

Again, the difference is scalar vs boolean combat. So, I'll give you that one for bursts (which everyone says are hax) and not much else.

EDIT: To be clear, 90% of warrior combat is scalar, while for other classes it's either close to none, or a far lower percentage, so stacking is less of a fixable problem. With a fix to warrior/wound stacking, you'd still be able to do other affs to someone (as all classes) without having such a direct multiplication of power due to wound addition.

Sojiro:

Well, I am all for deleting shrines, but as far as the special report is concerned, I'd rather nerf them a lot, see if it's enough, then ask for more if needed. I've no problems using envoy slots to adjust things post-special report.

P.S. Where were you guys when I was writing the Special Report > : (

I was inactive and trying to forget about this game. But I'm back.

Enyalida:

(Druids stack thornlashes... and then you just autocure out of all of them with a novice who can ignite! Just don't unablaze yourself and you're 100% thornlash proof until someone nature rains!)

Which, unless I misremember, will be fixed by the special report.

Newp! Thornlash wasn't touched.

EDIT: Oh, you meant the ablaze tick thing, right. I wasn't sure that all made it in.

"I have a stackable skill that can be triggered off a command and thus not even have to worry about the person igniting, but you can't count that because it potentially can be ignited!"

If you're going to complain about warrior stacking, you really need to not be so against looking at your own.

Oddly enough, group combat stacks.