Fix your current skills, not ask for more upgrades. Druid demesne is already very good, it doesn't need to be made into impossibly hard to fight in.

debug murder
debug murder
debug murder


Thats all I have to say.

Message Roark.

Roots needs to actually work, never has.
Pathtwist needs to be lowered to a maximum of 3 power cost, or failing that work like Demesne Summon over a distance.
Gore needs to do the considerable damage it claims it does.
Medicine Bag needs its own balance, 20 second like Allheale sounds good. Meaning if you are lucky you can use it once in a given fight for a boosted health curing. (most fights don't range longer than 20 seconds, duels not included)
Stagform needs to give physical resistance to blunt damage
Regrowth needs to have Briar walls removed and Storm put in
Fused Runes need to stop vanishing when a person loses link.

There are other fixes Hartstone needs, but those are the ones off the top of my head. They definately don't need more skills, they need the skills they do have to first of all work, and second of all work on par with other skills around them.

Demesnes are fine as they are besides the little buggy tweaks they need and their role in village influencing (which I agree is utter crap). There's no need to downgrade them at all. Mages are, as the gods have stated over and over and over and over again, SUPPOSED to be powerful in their demesne. You SHOULD be cowering in fear of a demesne and get your ass raped in one. If you want to downgrade demesnes, then give mages a huge diamondskin upgrade and another elemental defense boost so every attack does damage to us AND a damage upgrade because otherwise there's no way we'd survive.

EDIT: Watch your language. ~Shiri~

Also, if we should die in a demesne so easily, there should be an attack in a common skillset with no chance to resist that pulls you out of your demesne so we have a chance at beating you. Or somesuch.

No, if you're dumb enough to enter it, you suffer the consequences, Shiri. It's not IMPOSSIBLE to get out of a demesne. Besides, the people I spar such as Narsrim, Murphy, Daevos, etc... they don't seem phased by a demesne. They just get frustrated because my survival rate just skyrockets, which is SUPPOSED to happen. Oh, they still kill me every now and then if I make some big mistake, but I'm not completely helpless.

Edit: Shiri, you did NOT just edit out the word crap in my last post... please tell me you didn't.

No, Revan, I edited out the word s- in your post. I hope you actually forgot what you wrote there, and are not openly lying.

In any case: dumb enough to enter it? WHAT? What kind of argument is that? Then we should have a chance to MAKE you come out so we have a chance to beat you, or you could stay in your demesne (which you can, incidentally, kinda make up on the spot, earthquake to fill with the stuff, etc.) and we can't kill you. What you're proposing would be an immense design flaw, since we wouldn't be able to kill you in a demesne, and you wouldn't...come out of a demesne. So no one would ever be able to beat a mage. That's just ridiculous.

Revan, be quiet. As has been said over-and-over, the idea "don't fight a druid in his or her grove" doesn' t apply to Lusternia because the "grove" in this case can be be expanded to cover any area -and- be as large as 400 rooms. There is a huge imbalance here that will hopefully be fixed in the future. There is no denying it so don't try.

Furthermore, Shiri is right. It is difficult to get out of a demesne. If a Geomancer puts up stonewalls, it is impossible for anyone without tumble. Given you can also create statues (which by the way, Druids could not) and summon them up to 399 rooms away, it gets tricky.

I think the best solution would be to have a 3p skill in environment that lets anyone un-forest/taint/flood a room at a corner of a demesne with a hefty equilibrium loss.

I wasn't even talking about getting out of a demesne, as both of you have somehow gotten out of what I'm saying. I'll assume that's a miswording error on my part, and reiterate:

It is almost impossible to GET A MAGE TO COME OUTSIDE OF HIS DEMESNE to fight him. Not to get out of the demesne YOURSELF, but to get the MAGE to come out. That means that, if the "don't fight a druid in his grove" argument applied, you would never be able to kill a mage. Because they could just sit in their demesne. And not come out. At all. ...so, yeah.

I distinctly remember saying crap, but it's not a big deal.

Anyway... Nars, I'm not denying that it's difficult to avoid the "don't fight a mage out of his demesne" idea. I'm saying that without it, we're rather helpless, and Shiri's idea of pulling someone out of his or her demesne is the worst idea ever heard of. What if I were to take away all of your fae/angel/demon with but a skill, Shiri? Irrevocably, as you so want it? You wouldn't like that, would you?

I wouldn't really care if there was an environm,ent skill that let people break demesnes for a VERY hefty cost, in fact I do agree that it would balance the design mechanics of a demesne alot. However, as an aside, i also believe that a trans mage's demesne should not be broken by a mage of lower skill level. That's another story though.

Take away a mage's demesne and you take away 80% of their combat ability. It shouldn't be easy to do, as what Shiri wants.

Indeed. I was exaggerating. The point was that UNLESS we have something like that, you can't use the "mages are meant to be overpowered in their demesne" argument. We don't, so you can't.

I have no qualms with a mage/druid being very powerful in a demesne so long as they have to be in it too. I really like the sphere of influence idea too where a demesne could be up to 400 rooms big but the effects fire like this: the room with the mage is current speed, as distance increases between the target to the mage, the effects slow down progressively to the point where there may even be no effects on the outer parts if it was far far far away from the mage.

I'd also like to add that another thing that would balance things out a GREAT DEAL would be to add a skill to druidry/geomancy/aquamancy that does this:

At any point in a demesne, you make forest/taint/flood over it regardless if it is or is not a fringe. This would allow demesne to be cleaved into chunks (the max number of room melded would still be 400). Effects must be raised in each piece. The cost for this ability would be 4-5p.

Would there be a probability factor in it? If you had 4-5 mages on another mage's demesne, it would completely skew the battlefield in a very simple way. There should be -some- resistance factor involved at the very least determined by skill level. *shrug*

Duh. That's the point. More Mages should be more powerful than a single Mage. And sure, we could make it only work if the skill level of the caster was at or above the skill level of the opponent. Thus, the only person who could this in a trans geo demesne would be a trans druid/aquamancer

Really now? Considering that Demesne only contributes to the top half of Elementalism, I think you might be exaggerating that statistic by just a tad, especially since you still have 2 completely full and active skillsets.

Go mage and say that. Go on, I dare you.

You do realize I was fighting as an Aquamancer at the same time as you were still one, right?

Then you should really know better than to say that, my friend.