In that sense, Drowse and Soulless are very simular.

What is the defence against Drowse run or kill them before you get so tired you keep falling asleep.
What is the defence against Soulless, run or kill them before they rub you 7 times.

Should soulless be changed too and given a defence... Maybe it needs a high power cost too. Funny, Thorgal doesn't complain Soulless is too good... oh wait, he has that skill.

EDIT: My mistake, it's deepsleep that costs 3 power, and that is probably what people are using, as drowse only gives a small adjustment to tiredness.

Power is basically immaterial as far as it's a resource, though, ESPECIALLY when the effects are permanent. (Or they take a long time to fix.)

The thing is, Soulless you can just get away in mid-throw, then come back after a few seconds and wail on them again.

Power is very material when it takes more then 10p worth to get the desired effect.

But it takes a good 5 minutes to reverse. You just can't do that in mid-combat. It's very different to just rolling out of the room.

Ya can't beat the Shiribot, Hajamin .

*peer Thorgal* What's that all about then?

I was implying Hajamin lost the argument...

As I've said earlier, if you manage to stay asleep for just one tick you'll stop falling asleep from exhaustion.

Or just use metawake.

And anyway, it takes 5 deepsleeps (15 power) or 25 drowses (about 7500 willpower) to take someone from fully rested to falling asleep, and if you're not at fully rested before you fight a Dreamweaver, that's just your own stupidity at work.

15 power isn't a lot.

And I use kafe, which is identical to metawake.

It means, however, that they're not going to be able to get you to that right away. Five power has to regenerate.

And metawake doesn't get stripped by anything, and you don't have to worry about putting it back up every time you wake up.

... You don't have to worry about putting kafe up every time you zonk out, either.

And it takes 40 seconds at trans discipline to regenerate 5 power. The difference being that they can still be fighting while their power regens, whereas while we're busy dozing off we can't carry on fighting.

A: People are never at fully rested.

B: The power begins to regenerate immediately upon casting the first deepsleep.

You are dressed normally, and utterly satiated.
You are fully rested.

level 80

No, kafe is not identical Shiri. Also, reading your post about soulless shows you lack some understanding about it. Did you know that soulless does not cost power to rub or fling? Do you also know that the card will last a full Lusternia month outside of the deck (the present number of rubs still present on the card)? If the person does get away after you fling soulless, you can just start the process over again. Since soulless does not take power to perform, you can continue to work the process until you run out of the cards, kill the person you are fighting, or are killed in return.

Let's now look at the skill Deepsleep. It takes 3 power and a large expenditure of willpower to increase the target's level of tiredness by 1. It normally takes me 4 to 5 casts of deep sleep to bring a person to exhaustion (12-15-power expenditure). A person with meta-wake, kafe, or even better both can pretty much wake up immediately after he or she falls asleep. The person can still get attacks in, healing, etc during those periods if he or she knows how to script heal or manually heal well. So Deepsleep is far from being a certain kill for the dreamweaver. It can give the dreamweaver a decidedly nice advantage against many, but against good healers, who use the right defenses, it will at best be a nuisance.

Heh, I thought kafe was identical, but I doublechecked because someone said it was different, and...it is. So ignore that. And actually, I knew all that about Soulless. But the thing is, it takes 8 actions, so if you escape (or somehow force them to drop it, but that only works for Wiccans or with some incredible luck Nihilists) they have to start from scratch. Deepsleep, if you escape, you're still screwed, often, because even though it costs power, if you don't run away, you can't cure the tiredness and will still be falling asleep. (And undoing can strip both of those defences, though you'd be lucky.)

Undoing can, but kafe is on the prompt so you can easily tell when it is stripped. Meta-wake is easily put back up once you wake up, so that is not hard to keep up either. Undoing will only strip one random defense at a time every 10 seconds, and that is only if it is the only embedded mote in the room. Maintaining the kafe and the meta-wake defenses would not be any trouble for a decent healer.

You can escape the dreamweaver and go somewhere safe to fall asleep. Also, you can seek to kill the dreamweaver since dreamweavers are mages/druids, the least tanky archetypes in the realm. Last, dreamweaving does cost an extreme amount of willpower. A smart fighter would allow the weaver to run himself or herself out of willpower, leaving the weaver with no real offense and lacking some defenses and important cures.

Using 15 powers to take someone from fully rested down to exhausted isn't cheap, but then again it isn't that costly. Guardians and Rune users go through 30+ powers in no times, heck Guardians take 50+ powers just to prep up. It's a powerful ability, but at least it is no where near devestating as feed or poison gas. Unconscious + large amounts of damage + no power cost associated > Deepsleep.

Anyway, I think the question of whether deepsleep should be downgraded cannot be answered since both sides cannot agree on the same thing. Personally I would think blackout is the mote that definitely needs the most looking into, every single person, Mages included, agree that it is undeniably overpowered, yet no admins have made any replies regarding requests that it should be looked into.

hartstoners can strip faster than once every 10 seconds...

You shouldn't lose metawake AND kafe, even if they embed undoing and just whore Spring.

of course not... but if you add a little know how, an enchantment and good timing you sure can.