Bump'd. Because it's a much needed change, and there's really no reason to keep it as is.

Agree. Essence conversion parity much needed.

I just want to make a comment as far as combat balance goes. Note that I have missed some of the pages of this thread, because I haven't had time to catch up with it all yet.

Most games, when they are heavy in PvP or something along those lines, have administrators who are monitoring the PvP that is going on and watching the skills being used, the classes winning consistently, etc. These admins then take it under advisement, run the math, and release changes based on the current metagame. The idea of listening to the whining of your playerbase, when most of their stories don't even agree, seems to be counter-productive and in many ways, is the one essential thing that I see holding Lusternia back as far as combat balance.

I'm not saying that combat is unbalanced, I'm not even saying that I think it's balanced or perfect or that it's massively flawed. My entire point here is that letting the playerbase (who, I might add, is the most biased group of people to be working on it) tell you what's wrong with combat is just not working here. Reading the logs and reading the forums and monitoring in game combat at ALL levels (not just the attention whores, newbies, and griefers that post their logs on the forum) should be enough for the administrative staff to see the problems and fix them.

I would even go so far as to suggest an admin creating a character and playing extensive PvP in the current metagame and take that directly to the table to code with.

Just my two cents on the issue.

I love you

But Rian, we are always watching!

In seriousness, a few of your assumptions are incorrect. Several of us wholeheartedly enjoy watching fights, and not just during events! Sometimes we see problems and attempt to address them ourselves, and sometimes the envoys bring things to our attention (their job, after all!) and we use the experience we have watching fights or from combat experience here or in other IRE games to help determine how to handle the issue. We are entirely invested...

...and everywhere, oh yes.

*grins* Maylea, are you new? I honestly haven't ever seen you around before... might be me, though.

I suppose I just think that there's no reason why there should be massive forum topics devoted to the playerbase trying to tell the admin how to run the game. The envoy idea is an interesting one, yes... but do you realize how much more amazing it would be if you had someone who loved coding like... combat only, and just spent all his/her time watching battles/fights/spars and gauging how different changes affected things. He could even use the main server as a live testing thing... and then , when he was sure the changes were working right, he'd ANNOUNCE it...

I don't know... just seems like you could cut out the middle man (envoy) and kill the amount of people who don't know anything or people who just like being negative. *shrugs*

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

ROFLMAO

ROFLROFL

Did I say ROFL yet?

LAWL

*goes back to her grave*

Serenwilde is all tolkien-esque, Glomdoring is like sleepy hollow.
Ackleberry needs to return.
Hundred Acre Woods.
Do want. Yes please.