The admins decided that he was right and we were wrong, I guess. Or they just agreed with him. The rest of us wanted to UPGRADE city skills, namely Via, instead of horribly nerfing anything.

Hey lets make every guild a 100% duplicate of each other like Achaea while we're at it.

I feel just as disheartened as you do. Now, my character can't flow, but each guild in the Serenwilde relies on the other for seperate reasons. Flow is now worthless. It was one of our main commune abilities.. (yes, a commune ability, because we all used or benefited from it) We have to WALK to a village, provided the rifts aren't distorted, which any non-retarded raiding group would seek to do first, try to get in, and let's just ASSUME that the enemy hasn't set up greatpentagram at the gates of a village. Guess what? That means, we can't always just walk in. The cities also have access to magelock, which is useful in keeping people in or out, with villages that have a door. Now you have spores, which are a security risk. Who can keep up with a million spores in their inventory?

As Shorlen stated, catacombs gives the cities quick access to the villages, but I don't want to make a comparison between catacombs and flow. They're two different abilities. Flow was unique and useful and can be stopped by greatpent or tainting. Why make it local? Why flow if you can walk a few rooms over? If Narsrim is in the area with a target, he could just beam.

If we want to talk about imbalance, let's look at the players with tfs all of the time and 12,000 health, artifact runes and other issues, as Narsrim mentioned.

I'm moving soon. I honestly need a few weeks away.

How the heck did you get that out of my words?

EDIT: Forget it, there are more fun and less stressful things to do than play Lusternia all weekend

Take a day or so to sit, and breath. Look at the changes, use the changes, experiment with them. After, compile thorough, well thought out reports, instead of instantly jumping on to the forums the second the announce is posted, and commencing with a bunch of complaints that will only serve to have this thread ignored by all sane Admin.

Remember, skills are watched as they are changed - it is feasible it could be tweaked again. Be patient, and have heart. I'm sure you'll all be able to work around it, you're fairly intelligent individuals.

Just a little hypothetical situation to toss up:

In the past:

Druids used to be fairly assured that they were safe in their demesnes. No enemy in a real combat situation outside of the arena could wisp them or flow to them (with an army).

Right now:

Druids can't even use their damn forested demesnes to escape death, but any army can just all follow one opposing druid/wiccan and flow to them by walking one room inside th demesne or just wisp them.

Sum:

Whoever made these changes may have had the best intent in the world, but they literally just screwed over druids hardcore. I feel bad for them...

I suppose. Maybe if other Nature skills get vastly upgraded, it'll be fine. Used to be that Flow as the only worthwhile skill in the entire skillset, except maybe vines. Now the entire skillset is essentially worthless

Trust me. At a glance, anyone with any knowledge of how the ability worked and how it works NOW can form a conclusion. It wouldn't take a week.

That's just ouch to flow. At least Moon users have beam to get around for local area, this just sucks for everyone with Nature. I don't really think it'll take a report or a week for people to realize something really blows. Take a look at Blackeye and Vapors, it didn't take a week of testing for people to realize- Wow, blackout is rediculous and needs to be axed, or something.

If there were a vast amount of changes that tweaked various skills such that some were stronger and some were weaker, it would require some experimentation to see how it balances out in the end.

However, when you take abilities and just nerf the crap out of them, it doesn't take a lot of insight to readily see that the ability (like Flow) is now worthless as the primary use for it (which is founded upon experience from the past IRL year) is gone.

If Flow is to remain like this, I vote we remove it entirely from the skillset and add in a healing ability or something as no one wants a trashed out skill.

For moon users, flow is useless and redundant in 99% of all cases right now, since beam is just blanketly better - it does take 6/12 seconds to perform, but if you succeed, you have balance when you enter the room. With flow, you are off balance for quite a while. And if they are running around to avoid Beam, they aren't doing anything worthwhile anyway.

Or change it to....

Taint forest -> Taint forest

Pure forest -> Pure forest


as most people wanted?

I don't recall mentioning anything about a week, and my statement of 'take a day to sit and breathe' was a simple 'calm down' statement. My point still stands, however, that a well made, polite report on the changes will be much more likely to sway the Administration than 300 posts flamed onto the forums in the span of the first hour of the change.

Ha, Tarot got the shaft bad . Hermit was only good for running away and now it isnt' good for that. You can just trigger to touch border soon as you have balance and such to screw over a guardians 'escape'. Anyways, Communes don't have access to paintings? or those wormhole type things? Erm yes they can do both those things..my bad.

Serenwilde has 1 urban room. Paintings are required to be placed in urban rooms.

And you obviously have no idea how the "wormhole" things work because they don't work like wormholes. Go read up on it and then come back.

All of the changes were pretty bad. Who in the world would ask for that? Touching the map just to destroy it? They've made that nearly worthless too. I'm not trying to be biased. Flow was hit the hardest, but hermit/cata were hit hard too.

Yes let me find my endless resources on how skills that I haven't even tried work. Thank you. Regardless flow WAS too good and was a massive anti raid tool. It made defense way too easy.(You could flow from Seren to Rockholm provided they were both forests right? I am not actually too sure, never used it.) And don't bother with the OMG A MONO STOPS IT again. Admittibly if Seren only has a few urban rooms it will be hard to get too a mine or village.

Btw: How does the 'wormholetypething' work?

I think maybe the admins are trying to make sure teleporting isn't too powerful in general.

The discussion of Flow was it was way too powerful for a low-level skill.

So.. you could have moved it... instead of nerfing it into oblivion...


EDIT: for spelling

That's a little extreme. Let's look at the skills in the skillset:



The only skills that do anything sigificantly worthwhile are Barkskin (minor damage reduction, not sure if it is even noticable), Rooting (resistance to summoning), Vines (entangle target if you are in the forest, web enchantments are blanketly better, and available to everyone), and Torc (which is completely worthless to me, as I have next to unlimited mana with drawdown and sprite and perfection - I'm not sure how druids fare).

The completely worthless skills are Gate, which replicates the newbie Planar skill, Ethergate, Nut, which has no use except in the rare instance a totem is missing, Faeriefire, which is just worthless, Guard and Growth, which might have some use if I was an herbalist, but I'm not, and Rain, which just counters SPRAY GROUND.


Compare this to Elementalism. Here, I'll highlight the useful skills (though yes, others can get some of these through enchantments):



EDIT: I'm not saying these two skillsets should be identical or anything, but the basic skills of a magi and a druid are NOT equally useful, and they should be equally useful, if you ask me.