Recently among the envoys, a lot of debate has centered around changes to skills that are extremely powerful against those who have not transcended certain common skills, one of these being mantakaya-envenomed daggers. I do not want to discuss this issue (if you have opinions speak to your envoy instead), and this thread is not about any single ability directly.

Instead, I'd like to ask the forum community to give their opinions on how you want combat in Lusternia to be balanced and adjusted. One opinion that consistently emerges is that all combat should be balanced on the assumption that both participants are transcendent in both relevant guild and common skills.

I personally disagree with this view, and believe that while combat should be balanced with the extremes of an omni-trans attacker and an omni-trans defender in mind, it should not be predicated on those extremes being necessary. Is this at odds with the general consensus, however?

If I can give some examples -

* Should affliction locks assume that all combatants have equal access to focus mind and focus spirit when determining the ease of those locks?
* Should skills which are negated by transcendent abilities (Winter in Lowmagic is one that comes to mind) be considered useless and upgraded?
* Should skills like tumble, climbing, leap and flight be treated as escape methods that every prepared combatant has, so that hindrances are balanced on the assumption they are always available?
* Should someone who is transcendent in their guildskills, but only moderately skilled in their common skills be excluded from discussions of combat balance, and any issue with their viability in combat instead put down to their lack of skill?

So, what I'm trying to get a feel for is how you want combat to work, and how you feel your envoys should address balance. Should we only consider the effects of abilities, tactics and combos against someone who is transcendent in almost every skill, or should we consider the effect upon a variety of targets with different skill levels?

I would like reasonable, calm responses, and I would ask the moderators to aggressively moderate this topic and remove any post that involves:
1) Nation rivalry (eg, "Serenwilde is just bitter because they can't fight!")
2) Flaming of any kind against individuals or combat history (eg, "Elryn sucks at combat, haha!")
3) Individual ego-stroking or boasting (eg, "Elryn is awesome at combat. The rest of you are crap, obviously your opinion is worthless.")

Depends, really. If I were to say what I prefer, I would prefer if skills were balanced for people who are Inept at all common skills; that may or may not fit with Estarra's business plan, but one of the reasons I don't get involved in combat (Granted, a lesser reason) is that without transcendence in several skills, I'm basically crippled in combat.

The other IRE games are balanced for Tri-Trans guild skills. You can take any guild in Imperian for example, trans your guild skills, and not be horrible at fighting.

In Lusternia... you need at least trans or high discipline, low or high magic needs to be trans or high, transcendant planar, high environment, etc etc... as well as guild skills.

It should be balanced towards those who have trans guild skills.

Another way to look at it is if you balance stuff around for inept, you are going to get extremely powerful omnitrans people running around. So let's say a normal damage 2 handed sword(runed) does 1400 damage per hit. And you nerf it down so it only hits for 800 to inept resilience people. Trans resilience people are going to be near immune to damage if that is the case.

There are cases where you probably want to assume most people cannot do this and balance it though.

Are you sure it isn't? I'm fairly certain I could, as a tri-trans Moondancer or Shadowdancer, with no other transcendent abilities kill 99% of Lusternia with ease. I wouldn't need transcendent Resilience. I wouldn't need transcendent Discipline. The question posed by this thread is regarding viability. Viability is a matter of how practical and workable something is. If I can kill 99% of Lusternia with tri-trans then no one can argue it isn't viable. It might take more personal skill - but it certainly is possible.

People can make claims that you "you cannot fight" without transcendent Discipline - but I did not have transcendent Discipline until about 2 weeks ago. I find the persons who make claims that combat is not viable for them is a reflection of their own player (person behind the character) inabilities.

With that said, to make combat viable for persons who are skilled you absolutely must take into consideration what is possible at the transcendent level. This is really the backbone of the IRE combat system. Let's use an example:

Geomancers can create stonewalls. Stonewalls take a substantial amount of time to crash. Geomancers can raise duststorm to mask exits. Geomancers have an array of passive effects that can stun, knock prone, damage etc. Geomancers have chasm, a 12 second delayed instant kill.

If you get trapped in a room with a geomancer who has stonewalls surrounding each exit and you cannot tumble/leap/fly, you will die to chasm as you will likely have no decent means to escape. Does this make chasm too powerful? Does it make stonewalls too powerful? Does it make their demesne too powerful? Absolutely not. With tumble and other means available, it is -extremely- easy to avoid chasm. If it was anymore difficult, it would borderline impossible on anyone skillful and prepared.

No, this is not what I am asking.

I am trying to find out whether the effect of abilities on people with less than transcendent common skills should be a factor when we look at adjusting those abilities. Not the only factor, but should it be considered at all?

No-one is going to balance combat while ignoring the influence of common skills entirely, to do so would obviously be absurd.

What overwhelming advantage does transcendent Dramatics, Aethercraft, Highmagic/Lowmagic, Arts, Riding, Influence, Environment, Planar, Magic, or Discernement grant?

If you want to really boil this down, you are talking about Resilience (poison shrugging) and Discipline (power regeneration, focus body time). I feel the attempt to mask this as "omni-trans" throughout this thread is an attempt to make it sound worse than it is.

The resilence thing has nothing to do with damage, and everything to do with shrugging.

The biggest balance issue with common skills is dual mantakaya daggers. They are passive PERMALOCK if you are inept resilience and inept discipline. Heck, a single dagger on the 4 second channel is enough to perma lock someone who can't shrug and can't focus faster than 4secs. At trans resilience and trans discipline, daggers aren't a problem at all. So, should the daggers be the ones that are nerfed so that against trans people they are worthless, or should they remain permalocks for people with inept common skills?

This isn't an issue of making omnitrans people uber, it's a matter of making fighting available to more people. I have a suggestion, but I doubt Estarra would go for it... and that is to make all passive skill benefits based on rank rather than number of lessons. So, the jump in effect from inept to novice would be the same as the jump in effect from mythical to trans. This would create a logrithmic growth of effect vs number of lessons spent, rather than a linear one, and allow someone with Master 50% skill to have the same benefit as someone right now with Fabled skill.

This solution wouldn't touch trans skill at all. Also, it doesn't have to effect ALL passive benefits - it could just be the ones necessary to balance skills like daggers, so focusbody speed, poison shrugging, magic's effect on succumb and toadcurse, etc.

It is not about advantage. This is about whether the mechanics of Lusternian combat should presume transcendance in common skills when determining whether they are reasonable or not.

If we hold to the current belief that transcendence must be presumed for matters of balance, then in the future perhaps those skills may become necessary to transform some abilities from overwhelming to useful. At the moment, you are right, only certain common skillsets are generally required.

I would like to see proof that a speed warrior using rapiers cannot do the same (except they can also throw in some pin leg and all that jazz) more so with the recent change to afflictions. Give a Shadowlord Faeling 2 max speed rapiers, both envenomed with mantakaya, and see how it turns out.

Umm, warriors have a 50% afflict rate. Daggers have a 100% afflict rate. Assuming no resilience and thus no shrugging, this is.

What "skill"? Let's focus on core of the issue - the problem is that Focus Body time in Discipline is too greatly impacted by skill rank. Outside of this single example, what are you concerned over?





Point? Blademasters have 2 blades. In a given combo, you will average -1- poison. With rapiers as a Shadowlord Faeling, you can combo every 2.5 seconds or so. Focus Body time for inept is like 4.0 seconds. Once you factor in pin leg, sliced tendon, impale gut, etc. you are going to easily be perma-locked. I've seen it done and had it done on an alt.

So you are of the opinion then that transcendence in common skillsets should be the only measure upon which skill balancing takes place, Narsrim?

That's fine, if that's your opinion.

That said, a 50% chance of hitting with two rapiers each having that, you're looking at a fairly good chance of one venom hitting each two swings, on average.

Throw in the fact that poison affliction rate jumps up to 100% on a critical body part...

Yes, it's a statistical measure. Sometimes they will not get the hit, sometimes they will. Even though, a faeling with max speed rapiers/hammers can reach 2 second balance time, throwing a 50% minimum chance of a poison every second. That's worse than the dagger.

So we have to ask, should it be balanced for the people with inept or transcendent resilience? I do like the logarithmic idea.

Then the question would be, would you make skills deadly against people who are not trans in specific skills or skills worthless against people who are trans in those skills? Interesting quandry.

And Shorlen, please elaborate on that idea? I don't understand it.

Warrior combat is balanced assuming that everyone will have some basic stancing and parry. Is it trans? No. Is it an investment? You bet.

Focus mind was required to fight hexers not so long ago. It's better now, thankfully.

Focus body time is still a major issue.

Druids need to learn realitycheck. Mages need to learn chop.

It's a lot of little things that add up. "Omnitrans" I think is a rather exaggerated way of phrasing it, but we do certainly take into account high-level common skills in envoy discussions.

I don't think it's a matter of "good or bad" in this case. I think there's a ton of greyscale, and I think the mere existence of this thread is going to polarize people. Anyways, I'm off to bed. Maybe I'll expound in the morning.

Narsrim's Amazing Fix to this Problem

Focus Body time should be standard. It should not be impacted by Discipline at all. This would, more or less, clear up 95% of the concern.

Narsrim, as usual you seem to be arguing the details and missing the point.

There are a number of skills in the non-guild skillsets that are generally regarded as required for combat, focus mind and tumble immediately spring to my mind... because I'm still chasing tumble, and only very recently got focus mind.

No, I know they are not trans, but there are a lot of lessons to spend in the non-guild skillsets and that increases the overall cost to entry into combat.

Are they necessary? Perhaps, perhaps not.
But life is certainly going to be much harder without them.

Edit:
And to address the original question, my view is that combat should be balanced for omnitrans, but should scale gracefully.

I disagree with needing all these skills. I"m not the greatest fighter, but really, once I figured out Aeon a bit, I don't have an unbelievable zmg I can't do this disadvantage. I certainly in no way feel useless. Secondly, yes, dueling it may be needed. When has a major event (raid,influence, ect.) hinged on duels? Not often.

The daggers should be nerfed.