And then you have your warriors, who go from weak to insane with a few thousand more credits invested.

- Trans Influence for charismatic smile, because I'm Guardian. <-- personal want though, I also transed it for better esteem-gathering.

- Trans arts because Celest has about -5 bards, and no one around to dispel maelstroms during raids, and also because most people need to be able to dispel mazes. It is incredibly useful to have! and can help tons in group combat!

- Dramatics is something Bards need to trans to extend their song (and the reason why I transed it). The song is obviously used in combat. But I guess it would be a different story now that bards song's aren't stupidly short anymore (mine was maybe 150sec. long after transing dramatics, 160sec. long with a TF).

- Aetherspace is pretty useful for people who want to get to places like Xion for hunting, and it's also CRUCIAL for anyone who helps a city run the particles for their construct. It's also stupid for any city not to have available people around to run said particles. But, this does have a combat need, if people ever bothered with construct fights and aetherspace fighting. Which we pretty much don't nowadays. So kind of moot.

By the way, just as an aside I think that the Heretic/Infidel/Inquisition skills are more necessary to effective Celestine combat than other skills in our primary skill set. I think they perhaps should be integrated into Celestialism.

I say this because I had a decent system (Iasmos's for zMud) and was Trans in Tarot and Celestialism. Pulling off a Soulless kill was pretty difficult and absolve kills were only successful in the chaos of group combat. Once I got trans Sacraments, combat (though not tested rigorously) is quit a bit better with Heretic/Infidel/Inquisition. So if it is essential to making a sub-par fighter somewhat competent I think it should be part of their primary skill set.

I say this due to the controversy over Paladins having Sacraments and access to this skill line as well. I'm not saying nerf/buff anything, just Celestines need it more and Paladins have more kill conditions for options.

Again, I admit I am not an expert in this field, but these are my observations.

You forgot discipline or whatever it is to increase your power regeneration time so you can pull of Inquisition.

I've been inactive for awhile, but whatever..

I have to say after ten years of playing IRE, I have found no better MUD than Lusternia. I enjoyed its concept, story, classes, and I miss it dearly since I've been inactive (bogged down from work, school, and other technical difficulties). However, I have to agree that while I believe that there are few OP skills. I feel that certain classes are "gimped". (I.E. Wiccan/Guardian) due to the power system and the complexity and effectiveness of systems. I don't need to go into detail, anyone who has played an affliction class knows what I am referring to. I love the Power system, however, I just wished it worked in the favour of Wiccans/Guardians a little more rather than a power-sucking, not-very-enjoyable combat class.

I was just addressing the first ones she mentioned. They aren't as important as resilience/combat/discipline/planar, plus high/low magic and guildskills though.

You can try to argue that you need every skill at trans for combat, but we're just not going to buy it! I stand by my previous post.

...how did I never know this? I thought Discipline only raised your ability to draw power from a nexus faster. I had no idea it actually made power transfer from your reserves faster.

Dang. That would be incredibly useful to me. I set around forever in group combat trying to regen power from a judgement or something, and setting up wrath/fool/enigma is also annoying.

@Estarra: Not really every skill. Just the ones people keep pointing out, Resilience, Combat, 3 guild skills, discipline, planar, up to tumble in environment. To be fair, that -is- a heck of a lot more than other iron realms.

heck, I did pretty good in Imperian with just the lessons I got from leveling up.

But eh, I'm with Tael. Lusternia is still the best, most fun, and most interesting MUD out there. There's a reason I choose to play here. I'm just pointing out certain negatives because that seems to be the point of this thread.

Was my comment so bad that it wasn't even responded to?? :sad:

I really think you can just increase the necessity of the skills to the lower ranks, and put in non combat -necessary- perks at the higher end. maybe start the skills at that point.

so for magic its like,

INept - magical resitance
AB
As your skill in magic increases, so does your resistance
Master/fabled/ whatever- improved magical resistance
AB
You have resisted your magics as much as possible.
Fabled - New cool magic skill
virt - nother cool magic skill
trans - really cool non combat breaking skill.

No, I'm all for making skills more useful by adding new skills if they aren't worth being full skillsets! And, to emphasize again (as people seem to be ignoring this), we are still discussing this internally and, again, I'm not adverse to discussing the issue at the meeting. However, arguments with gross exaggerations to get your point across doesn't really help your cause!

Inquisition is impossible without mythical discipline or so

This sounds good except that I'm not sure it really solves the problem. All that means is that you now don't feel like you spent 300 credits on a magic resistance artefact instead of a skillset. It doesn't actually make things cheaper to participate in. When you can't kill anyone without tritrans (wiccans), die to warriors in 10 seconds without resilience/combat, etc., you're just not getting anywhere in combat. I'm sure you know how necessary tumble is, and conglutinate is necessary to not lose tonnes of work every time you die, especially for orgs without a PvP rezz skill. And without discipline you're never getting out of paralysis, power concerns and focus mind aside.

I respect your view, but I think its more accurate to say you need a majority of trans skills to compete with the others who are omnitrans.

A GOOD skill setup is Tarot. World Tarot (trans) is not essential and now (thank you Talkan) useful in combat.

A BAD skill setup is Celestialism where you get a crucial kill condition, Absolve at trans and a majority of the skills (Cherub-Archangel line) are just duplicates of each other. The access to more combat options is critical and worth it, but they are not unique skills in and of themselves. Since the duplicates take up a skill slot, they make the skill set more limiting.

Yes. I learned this the hard way after buying trans Sacraments.

I would say that resilience is fine, because resilience covers the most common damage types and poison shrugging. Magic, though, is a direct copy of other realms' equivalent miniskill. Give it skills. Skill additions would be less disruptive than making it cover more damage types.

Quick-fire ideas:
Modulate--MODULATE TO ; damage taken from one non-physical type is converted into a different non-physical type for one minute
Mana tap--convert variable amount of power into mana, requires but does not take eq
Flux--Def that grants 4% chance to nullify magic-sourced damage. Does not negate non-damage components of attack. (4% is natural warrior miss rate, right?)
Libation--+2 int, but mana drain on par with metawake to maintain
Amplify--creates room effect that changes a random non-physical damage type into unblockable damage for all people in the room, element visibly changes every 15 seconds.

If we've been balancing around omni-trans, then obviously anyone who fails to meet the standard of being omni-trans will be unbalanced competitively. But if that's all, shouldn't we just:

1. Redirect balance towards more of a middle ground than omni-trans
2. If omni-trans folks end up too powerful and impossible to deal with, dumb down some of the benefits

This is assuming that the aim is "pay for perks", not "pay for invincibility" or "pay to break even".

You forgot to mention that Absolve is almost completely useless without the skill to view mana that is rather high up in discernment. Kind of like, as Kaalak said, Inquisition is useless without really high discipline.

From the perspective of someone who does not play Lusternia anymore (I play Aetolia now), here are some of the things that made me quit. (Some of this may be out of date.)

The utter dominance of the warrior archetype in high-end combat. I wrote out an epic post about how, assuming equal skill, high-end warriors utterly dominate every other archetype in the game in 1v1 combat but I'm not sure it's worth bothering to put here. However, the way in which warrior wounding inevitably outpaces curing, especially in combination with the fact that warrior potential is boosted by artifacts and demigod far more than that of any other class, means that warriors utterly dominate the PvP scene. Look at the majority of the top-tier fighters - it's not a coincidence that most of them are warriors. This has been an issue for a long time and little has been done about it.

The eternally increasing entry costs for combat and complexity of combat. The entry cost thing seems to be getting covered plenty good by other people so I won't dwell on that one. What I mean by the growing complexity of combat is the fact that the Lusternian admins seem to feel the need to add 10 new afflictions with every new primary skillset introduced into the game. The sheer bulk of afflictions, in addition to the ubiquity of difficult-to-code-against skills like aeon and sap, makes system creation extremely difficult and makes it very difficult to get into Lusternian combat, far more than in the other IRE games.

The overwhelming number of mechanics, with new ones being added constantly. The first big unique mechanics were in the release of the game and were very cool - power, villages, and the ability to kill Supernals/DLs/Avatars. Then there was Aetherspace, which was also very cool but turned out to be kind of pointless and today is pretty much not used except for fights outside nexus worlds (well, there were apparently a few days when you could get to 90->100 through aetherhunting abuse, but I assume that's been plugged). Then there were nexus worlds, which were awesome in concept but turned out to be kind of lame and boring when you actually used them. Then there were domoths, and the playerbase seems to have come to a consensus that they pretty much suck and, on top of that, only level 100 people or ascendants can actually participate fully in them. And the best part here is that I'm pretty sure there are even more big mechanics that were added to Lusternia at some point that I'm entirely forgetting about - because they were forgettable and generally just didn't add a whole lot to the world. Oh yeah, like the big complicated shrine system that everyone pretty much ignores except to throw wrath/distort/etc whenever people raid.

The problem with all this is that it starts to get silly when you're dealing with twenty-eight different conflict mechanics, all of which affect your city/commune. Now, it's cool to have mechanics-driven events happening all the time, but when you have as many as Lusternia does it really gets overwhelming and annoying. The whole complexity issue also further deters new people from wanting to get involved in the world as it just confuses them and pretty much restricts full activity in the whole game to the most absolutely hardcore of players.

In my opinion, the game should have been centralized around one or two such mechanics which could be expanded and tweaked over time instead of adding fifty billion systems independent of each other.

(One notable exception to the downward trend towards suckdom of new mechanics in Lusternia was Wildnodes. Wildnodes was always quite fun, except the whole waiting-off-insanity thing. Oh yeah, that's another irritating mechanic, insanity.)

The avenger. It's been bitched about since the beginning of the game and it's still stupid. I'm going to guess that plenty of other people have also bitched about it in this thread so I'm not going to bother discussing it.

Those are the main ones I can think of at the moment. If some of these things were fixed, I might ( ) consider coming back but I really can't see the game being reworked like this so it's probably not happening.

Oh yeah, one thing I also got fed up with that isn't really the admin's fault is the genuine bitterness that large portions of the playerbase harbor for each other. Back a few years ago when Lusternia opened pretty much everyone was friends OOC but now the forums are a warzone with both sides continually accusing the other of metagaming and bug abuse and crap. The people who do this occur on all four sides, and you all know exactly who some of the people I'm talking about are. I don't consider myself completely innocent with regards to this, but I was kidding the vast majority of the time. And while some of the people who do it are kidding too, there are also quite a few that aren't.

I'm not sure how this happened, but... it did.

Given equal level/skill/omnitrans and the TrueShield and damage fixes at high levels, they don't actually dominate in 1v1 anymore. A couple specs are based around stun, which tends to be what overpowers people, not the class itself. That goes back to my whole CC point.