Those very people complaining are the ones I defeat easily with non-artifacted weapons. So I would take the complaints with a grain of salt, just like I would take those who say any other arty is is needed to do well with a grain of salt.

After a rebalance of the sort that the construct committee did so well, there will always be moans - it was one of those jobs where it was never going to be feasible to satisfy everyone. After all, the grass is always greener on the other side, and it's a rare skill to be able to assess these things with any degree of objectivity when you're so bound up in the successes of your character and your nation.

In that context, making the process transparent would only slow it down intolerably, as well as subjecting the committee members to constant and draining lobbying from citymembers less able to view things fairly. The committee members should certainly consult (and they did), but if they are made accountable to the player orgs they represent then exactly that weight of bias which the choice of committee members was specifically made to avoid would impact on the committee's ability to reach consensus in any case.

And you're right. It was definitely more of a meow - the committee members did a really good job.

The Topic on It

Theres also an envoy post on it from when I did all this.

I dunno, I'm trans in neither but do competently against both. Admittedly I'm a warrior with fullplate and immunity, which mimicks Resilience in a way, but I got a Magic-proofed cloak to compensate for fewer lessons in Magic. I really don't think that either are -required- for combat.



As I think has been said before, an edge is an edge, and in a game with fast-paced combat like Lusternia, even a small edge suddenly turns into death. Take the following scenario. There is only one cure balance in the world (for simplicity) that cures everything on a 2 second timer. Let us say your opponent can afflict precisely every 2 seconds. Now, in normal combat situations, they'd be frustrated because they can't stick -anything- on you, and you're fine 'cause they cant. Give them a 10% bonus to afflicting rate and suddenly you're being hit every 1.8 seconds and are quickly overwhelmed. NERF! you cry, because you suddenly no longer stand a chance against them. But 10% is a very tiny edge, they argue. And so on and so forth.

Now, I understand that combat in Lusternia is amazingly more complex than that, but I think that the fundamentals are the same. As soon as you can break through someone's defenses, it may only look overpowered because you can't keep up, when in reality they may only have as little as a 10% edge.
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The above being said, I think that miniskills sound pretty nifty. I'd also appreciate more transparency on what skillsets actually do. 99% of my knowledge of a skillset's secondary abilities are hearsay and unverified. For example, I didn't know until the beginning of last summer (after a year and a half of playing) that Discipline reduced the tic to gaining more power on the prompt, nor did I know that Combat improved warrior-based damage/wounds/whatever. If these "secondary" effects could be detailed in the helpfiles, that'd be freaking amazing.

Just curious, but ... there must have been wonderful stuff going on in Glomdoring that I've just never heard of, what exactly did Kaervas do? Everytime I logged on I just heard people complaining that Kaervas never did anything.

Or are you just trying to make a random example and hoping that because he was marshal for such a long time that it meant stuf was happening?

About as much as you did as GM. :]

Though my contribution to Glomdoring was always as one of the few fighters and leading groups etc. Though I'm somewhat unsure of what relevance me being such a great leader has to do with the focus of Lusternia.

Well, off the top of my head, our population got a lot bigger. That happened while he was CL.

But no dragging passive-aggressive Glomness into this productive thread, plz. Rly. Plz.

Sorry, next time I'll break of my side question into a whole new thread. I keep seeing things said repeatedly and I have no idea what they are talking about, so I ask... so sue me!



Ok, yes that is why I was asking. (Though since you weren't there when Glomdoring was founded I'll take the reference to mean the second time I was GM and not the first time)

I have to say that there's absolutely no way I can see anyone supporting raising a Demigod at this point for any practical reason.

Now that the Ascendant skillset is fully known, the advantage to raising a Demigod is fully known. Raising a Demigod cuts down the amount of time a new Ascendant has to hunt.

Now, at a 1/3 essence transfer, any Demigod under 40,000,000 essence can be easily overtaken by a dedicated Ascendant bashing/gaining 2 million essence a day for a week (essence from Domoth Crowns does count towards this). That's really not too tough. That means raising *any* current Demigod excepting Kaervas and Exeryte will save that Demigod... one whole week of bashing.

Raising Kaervas means he'll get Affinity and Aegis relatively quickly... but compare Affinity and Aegis to a new body we can throw in the Domoths.

There is no comparison.

(And Kaervas knows I had been leaning towards him as a candidate, but really... raising him just makes it *harder* for him to fight due to the whole phoenix vs. reincarnate thing. Now... well, the reasoning against raising a Demigod is very, very strong.)

PS: If you don't see an issue with the Ascendant skillset, please read the thread Sojiro made and linked to. We were having a long discussion with Morgfyre, we came up with some extra ideas for things that might "flesh out" the skillset so it wasn't looking like it was completely based on cults, and I think the most recent thing we put up had some neat ideas, nothing overly powerful, and worked at avoiding the whole "infringing on Gods" issue. There is a huge issue with expecting players to spend 2+ months of their life in order to gain access to something that is a status symbol for the Administration (as we were told Cults were). The skillset is very Cult-oriented. The Cult stuff doesn't need to be removed (I personally would prefer it was just made general-Ascendant, but if the skillset is neat and useful on its own without the Cult stuff, it's certainly not going to be a whole lot more powerful with it and at least it'd still be worth learning without having an active Divine order or order-hopping).

I was just wondering if it were possible to make another Blessing for Domoth's maybe, a Greater Blessing which would be only blessed on the Bearer of the Domoth.

Also, as Rika state earlier about Demigods getting some more RP orientated abilities, something like enter/exit messages (direction must be in it of course), maybe be able to customize the ascend message and other things like that that aren't combat but just to add more RP flavour to them.

Didn't the admins say no to that, since it would make being a god less unique?

Your last sentence right there is just a terrible statement. Demigod is in no sense of the meaning unattractive. The fact that you find it so means you are taking it for granted. If you weren't a demigod you wouldn't be able to kill half the newbies you do on deathsight.

@Catarin yeah what Nejii said but more detailed. They used greater pentagram to absolve a domoth uncontested. It's one of those things for team players where you want to help out the group rather than yourself. It's like druids who take runes just for rad.

I didn't say great pentagram needed upgrading or boosting. I said it was a very situationally useful trans skill and high magic needed to be looked at. It used to be what? 10 minutes? For the same cost? And it got downgraded to 1 minute and is still 10 power and nothing else about the skillset changed.

Just give highmagic a serpent clone.

Come on, people, don't be lazy and suggest clones of skills that exist. That's a quick road to nowhere!

Meh I wasn't -100%- serious.

Change highmagic greatpent to be a skill that costs 4p and pentagrams everyone on your allies list.

Edit: All allies in the room obviously.

Be better in many cases than what we have no.. though still far inferior to serpent

Well, actually, I've always found high magic to be more beneficial than lowmagic. The only thing I want from lowmagic is serpent and it's a prerequirement for the popular herbs.