Denust, biased a bit?

Low int races deserve no boost, and need none... Nobody ever complained about Lobo mages doing too little damage, because they couldn't possibly.

Fixing insane Acrune/Forren and whoever damage is fine, but I think they overdid it, so buff it up about half way between what it is now, and what it was.

Then, figure out resists please.

Biased how? When has the point of the game ever been about punishing RP? That is the precise reason I was a Loboshigaru instead of Human or Merian or whatever else ultra high-INT race. Instead of making the OOC decision that, oh I do more damage as this race, so I'll reincarnate into it, I decide to go with the person Denust was and made him a Lobo.

I'm not saying put 10 INT on the same level as 11 or 12 INT, I'm just saying that a minor low end buff would be at least merciful to the weird people like me who pick races that aren't necessarily suited well to anything. After all, that's all I've really heard about Loboshigaru on this forum: that they're substandard pseudo-warriors, which is what they seem best geared for.

I disagree. Obviously making any logical argument wont change your opinion, so I'll leave it at I disagree.

That's not an attack at your character or anything, just how everyone is on forums, essentially.

-cough rouges cough-

I haven't seen much logic in your arguments, Shryke, just the comment that: preceded by what appears to be you agreeing with your own idea.

Whether or not the races deserve a boost is a subjective opinion, just as is my opinion that they do deserve one. Therefore, such a comment has no bearing on a logical argument. However, as for needing them , I disagree. Arguably, dwarves and krokani are two races that are not often used in Lusternia. I've heard it argued that krokani would be good choices for certain archetypes, their particular merits discussed on the forums, but never actually acted upon; dwarves were nerfed long before I started playing and it would seem they never were popular since. Tully is the only non-NPC dwarf I've even heard of. Back to Loboshigaru, I will concede that Denust is a major exception rather than the rule, but that was my choice and I'm not changing my mind on him. Again, I've heard it several times on this forum that Loboshigaru are really only fit to be warriors , and even then they are sub-par, a race that tries to come across as tanky but is a below average choice. Now while popularity doesn't necessarily translate into how effective a race is, the current metagame of Lusty appears to trend to the races that have one extreme stat at the cost of the others. The now modified adjustment to attributes only seems to throw into relief how truly unbalanced these extremes were and how accustomed certain players were to doing such damage. I wholeheartedly agree with nerfing higher-end damage, to the preliminary concept Estarra tossed out about adjusting the relationship between CON and HP: that it should be brought down a notch so people can't just OMGPWN another player by virtue of an astronomically high, comparatively, stat.

As for giving low extreme stats a minor boost, this should rather narrow the range of attacks. For example, rather than the low extreme for a given attack being 300 and the high extreme being 1500; why not make it 450 to 1300? It's not a severe handicap to the higher extreme characters and median characters shouldn't notice much difference, but it wouldn't be so much a chore for lower extreme characters to function in this very combat-oriented MUD. I am not advocating a massive shift for lower extremes, I would just like to see racial variety encouraged in Lusternia, without players worrying about how well this race will do in this archetype and only picking races that will best fit. Odd characters have players behind them, too.



And I detest what you are implying with this statement.

that stat stuff denust your talking about is all fine in dandy but than if all races are to be equal no need for lobos to have lvl 3 health regen is there.

I'm not advocating equality or you may as well just wipe out all the races and only have Humans.

well my point still stands if your stats dont affect damage as much i dont think loboshi need the huge health regen they get?

That's not what I'm arguing at all. I'm not saying to give X race a boost to Y stat, I'm saying adjust damage so that low extremes do slightly more damage, and high extremes do slightly less damage so that we have a narrower range of extremes without totally disrupting everything like the first release of this balancing did.

Consider this hypothetical statement about current damages:
A particular attack is observed as having a range of {250, 500, 600, 450, 900, 550, 700, 1300, 300, 750, 1200, 300, 800, 250}, where none of the values are critical hits and where each attack is executed by a character of a different race each time.
The average damage is: ~632.
Extremes: 250, 1300

Then consider this, if the damages are adjusted:
The same attack is observed as having a range of {450, 600, 550, 500, 1200, 500, 700, 800, 500, 950, 500, 450, 1100, 750}, where none of the values are critical hits and where each attack is executed by a character of a different race each time.
The average damage is: ~682
The extremes are: 450, 1200

Now, narrowing the range of extreme values doesn't really have much impact on the high extreme (If you mourn the loss of 100 damage, then I have no idea what to say to you... "CRY MOAR", maybe). The lower extreme take a minor boost, to the minor benefit of the median. I feel a minor adjustment along these lines would neither harm high extreme characters overmuch, nor benefit lower extreme characters overmuch, while maintaining a comparable median for everyone in between.

Perhaps you might enlighten me?

I don't think watering everything down to the point of where we all drink different shades of water for races, eq/bal etc is going to be a solution either.

If you water down con/char high bal/eq races are going to be the answer.

If you water down bal/eq as well racial advantages/disadvantages are going to be the answer.

If you water that down too... there's either going to be something else or we're back at status quo where we're all human just with different hairstyles/colours etc.

Though I'm doubting many of you believe me when I say that.

Again, I don't know why people think we're going to water things down to the point where all races are the same. I've said over and over again that is not the case!

We are thinking about making further adjustments. Nothing has been decided, I just wanted to keep you guys in the loop--though in hindsight perhaps that was wrong of me to do!

Yes, we could have buffed everything up to match the higher numbers and maybe we should have for the psychological good feeling that would give people. However, that would entail raising damage ranges to match the high ranges of 3000+ damage staff casts and whatnot. So lets say we would have to adjust the average staff cast to be 2500 damage, and proportionally raise the corresponding damage ranges for swords, minorseconds, kata, etc. Obviously we would have adjust con bonuses accordingly, perhaps doubling everyone's health score. Mobiles would become just too much fodder, so they too would be proportionally buffed, etc. Would players think this is neat or would there be a wtf reaction? I'm not sure. Perhaps if there was an admin around who suggested this to me before we decided to be more conservative and tighten the ranges, we might have found out. But as it is, I'm fairly satisfied with how this is working out. Overall, I think the DMP tightening from which all this flows is going to be a very, very healthy improvement in the longterm.

(In case it isn't clear, we are still monitoring the updates, testing on a test server, and slowly making considered tweaks.)

I agree with Estarra, it's not the end of the world, the admin here are one of the most responsive of any IRE game and they won't screw us over. So, chill.

Ciaran makes sense though, not sure yet if I 100% believe that.

I don't think buffing -everything- is necessarily helpful. Nerfing is annoying to the players hit by it, but it wastes so much less time and not everyone has to readjust. I think there would have been a "wtf reaction" as Estarra put it. I can see what you're saying, Myndaen, but in practice it'd be too much of a hassle. Nerfing is fine.

The actual degrees of nerfing seem to be a bit out of whack here though, but at least it's a move in the right direction.

warrior bashing now sucks, not only it takes more swings than usual, we miss...

So, does anyone have any -other- ideas to solve the problem? So far I've only seen my own...

Can we try implementing this?

Oh I'm not saying that bringing everything on the same ground is bad. I'm just going with the 'extremes' that have been shown in the past of Lusternia and thus expect the worst when it comes to 'watering everything down'. ;P

PS: Staffs only did like 1200 at most to me in the past, as monk or MD. I think putting them down to like 800 now is a bit too much too, but that all is still being monitored isn't it?


EDIT: @Ciaran: From what I -heard- they decreased the mob and pvp dmg to go along with the reduced and capped resistances. So in effect it perhaps is more or less like the scale you listed already.

What I'm still unsure about is the difference between the defensive and offensive classes now. The defensive may have lost a lot while the offensive gained / remained the same...

My 2 cents.

1) Most races are fine.. they have been awhile.. Some are far better than others at certain things (see imperial merian int) And few are rather crappy (Viscanti in all forms... dwarf in the wrong guilde etc). Kephera, mugwump, faeling, are some of the nastiest races for their own reasons. However they have their respective waeknesses. If Mugwump were slowed for instance all eq based skills plummet in terms of power and use, and eq guilds lose tankiness if eq allows them to live longer (timeslip, shield, web, hinders).

2) I expect the divine wont water everything down so its all a big ocean and we are just different seas. I would like to see my damage higher... I did 500 damage with symbol.. and 700 cosmicfire. That is pathetic... I have 18 int. The cosmicfire did more because they had fire weakness. But I would like to see Guardians have a bit more damage so damage kills are more viable (Even with omen not sure nihilists could really pull this at such low damages).

3) The resistance changes means pvp damage can be looked at for some guilds. High magic damage guilds... read as: bards and wiccans... can have their damage brought down from being half health and such.

4) What is the effect of shields, and robes now? What stats refer to what DMP points?

5) Still love the Admin for their work and trust things will come back down... when theres an earthquake you tend to get aftershocks people. So things will be fixed I trust or forums will fly off the handle with complaints and admin will say something about oops.. and fix it. They really do listen!

1) I think the only thing that makes viscanti significantly worse is the lvl 2 sip penality. Since high stats are watered down they should do better otherwise now because of racial advantages and resis.

2) I think dmg -was- brought down already. The most I hear is 800 moonbursts and staff casts. That's kind of pathetic for a class that (should?) have the option to dmg kill.