When you pact a demon lord, they hit you for enough damage to kill low level characters.

Player mercenarys don't work for 2 reasons

A) Mechanicly, you can't fight well as a rouge.
B) If you where somehow able to fight as a rouge it would be difficult finding work; If you work for celest, mag wouldn't want you.

Then clearly rouge is underpowered and should be upgraded to be on par with mascara and lip gloss.

Damn red and makeup, so UP. Give the red and makeup a little love!

The suggestion wasn't for player characters to be mercenaries, so these problems are not germane.

I want to raise a point in favor of large groups - well, sort of - that nobody's mentioned yet.

You're a young Lusternian, you want to get your feet wet in player-vs.-player combat, but you know most people would spank you without blinking. Suddenly your org is raiding, and they have the numbers. This is a perfect chance for you to get involved, see a little of what it's like, without as much fear of death or, worse, your comrades yelling at you for not being perfect.

Sure, that one fight is unbalanced. But situations like that can help people get involved for the long term.

And yes, I know that not every large group has noobs in it. Just pointing something out.

Undoubtedly. Saklas earned brownie points for being a boulderblast whore during influencing. Killed someone not once, but twice with it.

Granted, she was slightly younger, squishier, and a Geomancer. Now as a bard, she's lucky to be able to nail someone once.

Price one pays for political advancement, I suppose.

What if there was a nexus power like disruption that separates any same org players into separate rooms, they cannot be forced into statues or aggro mobs with this power, but it means that org alliances would be key for combat, as would having mercenaries. This would only work for defense, and if it was implemented Avatars would need working. (it would split up all players, defense AND offense, so you can't just group gank the individual assaulters)

Seems like it would balance raiding, if there was some way to make it so individuals could attack avatars etc. Maybe something like there are surrounding rooms from which you can attack the Avatar so you don't have to be in a group..
*shrug*
It seems like an oddly simple fix, but it would also be fairly radical.

Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

Please, no.

I was beyond annoyed at the combat I faced yesterday. It wasn't because of the size of the groups attacking and defending, however. It was simply because I logged in, put up defenses, touched my cubix, and died. There's just no way to see something like that coming and no way to escape it once you're in it (tumbling was unsuccessful).

It still annoys me how other archetypes and organizations seem to get all the "OP" abilities that lock a room down, summon the opposing force, and/or attack from adjacent rooms in large groups. I would gladly trade in a few of my non-useful abilities for abilities that actually have an effect on someone else in group combat. I'd even give up a bit of strength to be able to shoot arrows into a large group.

One-on-one combat is great fun for me. Combining abilities of one archetype with abilities of a few others, however, quickly makes things less fun. Who wants to walk into a room with Barrier, Carcer, Choke, Brumetower, Greater Pentagram, etc, that all stop you from going anywhere. You could overcome one or two of those limitations and escape with some degree of success, but get past all of them? Not likely to happen before you're dead as a door nail.

Choke needs tweaking, no doubt, all those other skills pale in comparison to choke. Please nerf it just as shammy gets it, lol

Hrm I totally did not start this thread...darn lying forums

lies

In any event, the cities have barrier, Glomdoring has choke, and Serenwilde has 50,000 aeon whores. Close enough to balance for me.

BTW, as a bonecrusher you can just whore stun to keep people from escaping, and it's surprisingly effective.

If you'll allow a nosy Achaean to give his opinion...

Mercenary organizations are a nice idea, but there would have to be coding involved in the following areas:

1) Contracts. People would need to know who a given mercenary group is working for at the moment.

2) Payment. In order to make rogue mercenaries viable, the 'coin' would most likely have to be Power transfers of some sort.

3) Mercenary neutrality and 'immunity'. Joe the mercenary shouldn't remain an enemy of Celest after his unit fulfilled a contract for Magnagora. From his point of view, he'll just as happily work for Celest if they win the bid next time (this one could be player enforced by all mercenary organizations agreeing to only work for clients who respect a code of some sort).

Heh, it's nice when this is the only reason people can supply.

But hey, we do have shafts!



EDIT: ^--- thank goodness this smiley is intact, I need that one.

Aeon whores and stun, you say? Speed defense (quicksilver/adrenaline) and not being able to get a single hit off because of passive hindrances, I say.

I'll join the "Nerf Choke" campaign. Make it last for a minute or two only...

No, there wouldn't. I say again, what we're talking about there is not PCs being mercenaries, it's players temporarily controlling NPCs who are mercenaries. It'd be like guiding, only instead of taking over Spindle you'd take over a mercenary, and your regular character would get paid in credits per hour for the time you allocated to doing this. Naturally there'd be coding required for that, too, but it's infinitely simpler than for PC mercenary groups, particularly given that Lusternia is so strongly anti-rogue already. Sorry that I was apparently unclear about this in the original post.

learn to heal manually in choke.

I choke anyone, demense users, moondancers guardians, because I know (even without drink) that I can effectively outheal them because there is no reliance on a system to keep me alive in it. Were people to become stronger at healing themselves in choke, (warriors are kind of screwed, I'll admit, but the rest of you don't have excuses) choke would be more of a liability than an asset.

Murphy was dam good in choke, even if the redcap change and the drink change that shadowdancers have now is a big boost to chokes power, and pretty much every class bar warriors can perform equally if not better in choke than shadowdancers, consider that if you watch for it you get a 2 second advantage over the shadowdancer as well when they drop it. Its just about being prepared for it. Group combat on the other hand choke is insane, drop it in an allied demense and you pretty much win, I remember taking down a group of about 8 highish celestians/serens with ashteru like that.

Murph didn't fight in choke, he used it as a finisher, to freeze them in a ****ed up state. Where he could end it at leasure.