Alright, I will be the first one to admit that Knights make for some of the best bashers you can find in the Realm. Highly protective armour (if they took Forging and got Fullplate.. even if not, Fieldplate is pretty strong, and can be runed), Surge in Atheletics, Flex for Strength, Weathering for increased health, Geburah or Yellow for more Strength or health, Ur'Guard and Paladins get Puella and Serenguard who take Stag get Medicinebag for some more healing ability.. yeah. Pretty tanky.

However.. when it comes down to the player combat, I find them at a serious disadvantage. All of our abilities are dependent of us having balance or equilibrium. By comparison, other organizations have entities of some sort to assist them, or a demesne for passive attacks that can throw off the opposition and give you some time to recover if you don't have balance or equilibrium.

Not to mention: We use poisons, yes.. but they are shrugged at a fair rate by those who have high Resilience, and a good part of the time they don't even make it off the weapon in question. Doesn't do a lot of good to hit 4 times collectively and have 1 venom actually come off that is subsequently shrugged off anyway.

Alright.. rant over. What we could use is something similar to the falcons used in other IRE games. You could even spiff it up like they did with the Serpent guilds in Achaea and offer each Knight guild a different type of falcon, to make them unique. That would at least give a chance of throwing off balance so you can't be webbed to death.

If everyone is going to have the natural ability to resist toxins, then they need to work a bit more often. The problem with this, of course, is that we cause limb damage, which would mean increased toxin effectiveness would also mean that we are able to crank out perhaps three or four separate afflictions in two strikes. That could become a problem since afflictions could stack up faster than herb balance can keep up.

Blademasters need some upgrades. Bad. I don't think we have a single ability that is detrimental to the adversary's offensive capability (except perhaps Impale and -possibly- PinLeg.. though PinLeg is nowhere near as useful as it used to be), whereas the stun effects of the Bonecrusher-types can throw -everything- off (no sipping, no eating, no attacking.. you can sit there and look at them), winding throws balance off, blackeye causes a blackout.. etc etc.

How about severed limbs? Make it so someone has to grow a new arm? That's what the regeneration salve says it was meant for, but there is no skill (that I have seen yet) that causes such an affliction. How about stunning someone that just had their scalp/ear hacked from their head, or at least a momentary equilibrium loss for the ear?

Just some random ideas. I like Knights, and I don't think I would ever change to a different class.. but right now, it seems like we are falling very far short of the power curve. Especially when someone can web you over and over again while they sip health and cure afflictions, and all you can do is writhe and get webbed again as soon as you get out, because you have no means to stop them from doing so.

Thoughts?


Lazul

Sidenote on SepticWound: I -think- dysentery causes some form of balance or equilibrium loss, and is a gut-related wound similar to Winding, however, it doesn't take an immediate effect like Winding and can be cured before it ever affects the person who is afflicted with it, causing Winding to be a far superior alternative.


Lazul

I just fought Asarnil and was bleeding over 1,000 health in a very short period of time. Murphy can do 41% wound damage in one strike (takes like 3p, I think) and 2,000 damage for the combo (although he does have artifacts). However, he did like 1500 before arties. Aslaran Serenguard with rapier and charbydon can afflict a person with trans resilience faster than someone with runes/hexes (and all of the afflictions are hidden).... the list goes on-and-on. Terenas, for example, has beaten Murphy (another knight with the ungodly Ur'guard physical resistances) by bleeding him to death exceptionally fast. Terenas is a _M E R I A N_ Blademaster Serenguard.

As far as I am concerned, Knights are not underpowered because they cannot:

1. Throw the target off balance for 0.5 seconds every 10 seconds.
2. Sleep passive (thus drain 100 mana every 10 seconds).
3. Do 200/300 health/mana damage every 10 seconds.
4. Give one random affliction every 10 seconds where 70% of them can be cured by focus mind.

*note the above is my entire offense in Wicca*

Point taken. Counter-point:

Would you rather be dealing with 1000 points of bleeding damage that you can effectively heal using Kingdom, clotting, and chervil.. or deal with a Bonecrusher that can completely stop your healing with a stun attack as well as causing you to not be able to swing back by stripping you of your balance and paralysing you?

Most of my arguments are made for Blademasters, which are shadowed vastly by our Bonecrusher counterparts, in my opinion. Perhaps I am not looking in the right place for our strength, but as of yet I haven't been able to find it.


Lazul


EDIT: I say 1000 points of bleeding damage in such a light fashion, even though it looks quite serious, because I dealt with that sort of thing fighting emaciated virgins on Astral. Granted, they can't afflict like a Knight can, but the fact is that it can be dealt with, whereas when you are stunned, you are just stunned.

The time frame must be considered. Had I not toaded Asarnil, that 1,000 bleeding could have easily become 2,000+. Furthermore, I can always sip/eat berry the moment stun ends so that (while annoying) is still dealable. And finally, I had been clotting like crazy and eating chervil. I did not suddenly accumulate 1,000 bleeding. I accumulated it -while- clotting and eating chervil.

EDIT: It might be worth noting that Rend is a lot easier to use for an Aslaran than other races; however, it is still extremely effective. As I said previously, Terenas was able to take down Murphy with damage through his ridiculous Ur'guard physical defenses (full plate, putrefaction, etc).

He also fails to mention for the first 1/5th of that fight his system had buggered up so I got a few gut hits in before he did much to me. I was nearly at the rend/re-impale stage before the fight got interesting, and the bleeding I did was swamped under the 5-10 chervil he ate every round or two.

I wasn't healing wounds correctly, yes. However, even afterwards and with the chervil, I was still bleeding 1,000 at one point. I only wish I had logged it.

Curious: Is it a -regular- problem that you face when faced with a Blademaster that you accumulate that sort of bleeding damage, or was the fact that you got there to begin with the result of a temporary fault in your reflexes?

For a Blademaster, everything revolves around what we -can- do, if we are given that opportunity. Whether you like it or not, at some point a Bonecrusher -is- going to stun you with some form of attack, because they can do so by attacking various limbs (ie, gut for balance loss, head for blackout/stun, etc).

The fights I had against Murphy I spent a good amount of time stunned, paralysed, or off balance. Not a great deal I can do to stop that sort of thing, or I haven't quite figured it out yet. Probably the latter, as I am still pretty new at combat.

I just think that the skillset for Blademastery needs a bit of looking into, to make it more on par with our counterparts. The skills are supposed to have their unique qualities, I understand.. but the vast majority of Blademasters will be willing to state that in comparison to the Bonecrushers.. we are vastly outclassed.


Lazul

Narsrim, I would say that you should clot/eat chervil more often so as to not let the bleeding build up rather than try to heal all at once. When fighting any blademaster, it's extremely rare for someone to make me bleed over 350-400. I don't even need chervil too much- kingdom and a couple clots does the trick.

Lazul, I don't like the idea of falcons because that brings feasibility back to speed knights (which are instantly overpowered and unbalanced- see every other IRE game for examples, mainly Achaea) as opposed to strength knights. I do completely agree with your asking for upgrades or alterations for blademasters. Unreliability of poisons with anyone who has skill in resilience- point. Inability to stun or knock off balance- point. We've been trying to get upgrades for blademasters for a while now. Rend is a nice start, but nothing has been done to help blademasters shut down enemy offense.

As much as I miss falcons.. here, it would be a bit much. I'd hate to see a Bonecrusher with a falcon tossing me off balance as I deal with the effects of wind and knockdown. Blackout... Heh, no thanks.

The problem with upgrading the Serenguard knights is this.. if you upgrade Blademasters, you make the Paladins and Ur'guards stronger. As I see it, the other two knight archetypes are much better off than we are. I'd like to see some changes to Stag. I suggested a new ability 'Stagtrample' which would only be used in Stagform. It would work like trample in riding and cost about 5 power. Of course then, Hartstone would get it. They're strong enough in their demesne.

The only thing we need are a few afflictions that might require regeneration to cure and a stun added to sliced off ears.

Let me drag up my standard knight underpoweredness rant..

The afflictions blademasters ive are random and weak, not predictable by any stretch of the imagination, and don't work with synergy enough to prevent their healing (which is almost always a simple herb or sip.) Bleeding is useless while chervil exists in it's current state.

Since knights have no passive offence, it's stupendously easy if you fall behind on healing to simply web over and over, which shuts down their attacks entirely. Not to mention that combat can have largely the same effect, particularly with shieldriposte.

I think possible fixes would be:
Making chervil run on a balance, either its own or regular herb balance.
Give scalping a stun, and ear perhaps a short period of being off-balance.
Give knights some sort of passive offence. A pet would be going too far, but something a little like contagion for everyone. Ur'guard would get this and contagion, so no worries about them being rendered useless.

The word for this is unfortunately one Shiri will censor, so I'll have to settle for "ludicrously, absurdly untrue".

So true, Gwylifar.

I think Blademasters are underpowered too. I'll post more next class.

Reasons why I love Blademaster-

Targetting Arms = useless. Cut arteries and pierced nerves, awesome 30 to 50 bleeding, wow!

Targetting Legs= useless since pinleg takes away half of our offenses and despise what the AB BLADEMASTER PINLEG says, the affliction is at critical, not heavy which means an additional 20 wounds to get there. And all we can do is REND, which as everyone have stated the bleeding is easily stopped. Pierced/sliced arteries again are absolutely useless.

Targetting Chest= Puncture lung, puncture chest, collapselungs. Puncture great for draining endurance but 6 out of the 9 guilds don't use endurance. Puncture chest causes blackout, quite useful. Collapselungs, requires puncture lung in the first place, virtually impossible to pull off, and causes blackout, (redundant) and inability to smoke, whoohoo.

Targetting Gut = Dysentery, um, makes you stinky and occasionally throws off eq. Impale- same as pinleg. Disembowel- instant kill if left un-treated, only useful one.

Targetting Head= Scalp/sliced forehead, yay whopping 20 or so bleeding, whoo. Sliced ear, what the hell does this do? Behead, only useful one out of them all, easily preventable by parrying head.

Just looking at our deepwound afflictions, only disembowel and behead would be detrimental to anyone, but if you can stance legs, parry head/gut 50/50, you would have almost no problems. Unlike Bonecrushers that can knock other people onto the ground to stop them from parrying head so they can go for bash brain, Blademasters are unable to do anything of that sort.

It is entirely possible for a Bonecrusher to knockdown/wind someone on the first two swings, and since the target is proned, he is unable to parry at all. Then the BC could proceed to repeatedly smash legs and gut so they are unable to either get balance back to stand, or if they managed to, will be knockdown again. Murphy took me from 5000 health down to vitality by getting 7 consecutive wind in a row where I wasn't able to get balance back at all. Does anyone ever have any problems like that with Blademasters?

Narsrim- I haven't posted my last three fights against Murphy, but quite frankly, I couldn't kill him because he could simply parry head and apply healing to gut and I could never disembowel or behead him. Rend is crap now that everyone is triggering quaffing down 5 chervils and completely negating the bleeding.

And poisons are worthless, even an Aslaran Serenguard with 260+ rapiers cannot afflict that well when the opponent is trans Resilience.

Done and Done- An astute and accurate assessment of blademaster skills.

My stuff was good too, Ixion

You guys are making me want to switch to Bonecrusher pretty bad right now hehe. But I like Blademaster, swords are cooler. Hopefully they make some adjustments!

That more or less sums up the thoughts of every Blademaster out there.

Murphy can do 41% wound damage with 3 power? Jelaludin does 8% wound damage with 3 power...