Regardless of what it was, Choke is actually set to change this time, instead of just talk. I'll be interested to see how you fare without it, as my guess is not so well. It's not just that it screws up curing and attacking for someone else, it's also that you have extreme regen and affliction curing. Night users can scourge faster than people can mount an offense in choke, and then it's just a matter of attrition with fae and succumb. Nightkissing or even Nature cursing someone to death is pretty much standard fare. There's a reason mages kill piles and piles of people with holo-nading into retard vibes.

I have yet to see a top tier combatant of any type who wasn't trans in all those skills and didn't sit behind some mechanic like choke that is finally getting whacked.

Think however you want i did alright when i didnt use choke though yes ill agree it was harder being that a shadowdancers offence without choke is not enough to take down someone like yourself, i wouldn't expect a moondancer hexen to kill without using aeon on me...

I've been a combatant in several IREs now, Lusternia included. In most cases, it pays to go for the Demigod first if you can overload them reliably. If their curing is not the most up to par, especially, it's more useful to get rid of them in the first ten seconds of a group fight. The newbies will go down with some simple room damage. Some newbies may be more annoying than others, however.

You're right in that there are definitely Demigods I would not waste my time on, but the majority I'd think you should focus on first when the fight begins.

hrmm to add to my talk with desitrus, i might be inclined to agree with you that there is no consistently successful combatant at top tier without those skills, but there are those that definitely do very well even if they can't kill the top elite without them which is what i was trying to point out....my statements were mainly in response so krin + salvation about lower tier combat..So i definitely understand your opinion but stand by what i've said..

@Charune: Hrmm personal preference for me is to hinder demis while you destroy there friends..they can be scary tanky and heavy hitting but without others with them they either run or drop to a group pretty fast...Thats just me personally though!

As a few have pointed out, the cost of entry issue isn't really as much about lessons as it is about things to learn. Lusternia combat not only has more afflictions, more system-breaking things (masked afflictions, sap, etc.), and more skills to learn, it also features a lot of group combat with high stakes, where you can't even get in there and be the slightest use without knowing how to handle yourself against not just one skill, not just one class, but a dizzying number of combinations of skillsets from multiple classes.

A newcomer to Lusternia is likely to be discouraged by this unless they're incredibly determined. We have lots of things to help: OOC clans, sparring opportunities, systems for sale or given away, champions offering training, etc. And they help a lot. But there's still a huge huge burden to get involved. You have to spend a lot of time being discouraged by being crushed in fights where you can't even tell what happened and when you lose it turns out something terrible results for your city or commune. It's easy to run out of resolve during this, and lots of people do.

Several times when this has come up, I've pointed out one easy thing that would help. The Gods should run more arena fights in Avenger. And some of them should be level-limited. If you're determined to learn how to fight, but it's hard to get your enemies to spar you so you can learn their techniques, this is a good chance to do it. Plus you could even see combinations of attacks, which you can't do in one-on-one spars. And it costs no one anything. But it's very easy for everyone to forget to do these periodically; we have a surge of them and then it slips people's minds, understandably.

Here's another idea. Imagine a new area that had a "scheduled conflict" similar to village influencing, nexus world weakenings, etc. but which was limited to newcomers, lowbies, and midbies. Everyone who was too high a level or had been in the game too long would be unable to enter or participate, at all. Best they could do is offer advice from a distance. Whoever wins gains for their city or commune some perk analogous to villages. Now you have something that really matters (but not quite as much as, say, "raid in Celestia! OMG get here fast!"), in which the young could try out their skills and be exposed to the skills of their peers in the other cities and communes, and "train up" for the other fights.

The problem: someone who already has tons of experience and a great system is going to create a lowbie/midbie alt and go win it. Because what we're really trying to do is help players who are inexperienced, not characters. Any mechanical system which tried to prevent that would fail; the only way this could work is if the players all agreed as a matter of etiquette, and for the good of Lusternia's growth and health, that no one went in to screw this up for the young folks. We'd have to have internal policing: if you find out one of your citymates is an alt of someone experienced, and is in there "winning it for the city", you punish him for it. If we could do that, or some other solution for the "alt problem" were invented, I think this would be an extraordinarly good addition to Lusternia that would benefit everyone.

Something like making focusbody time range from 2s to 1s (as opposed to the ridiculous 4s to 1s it is now), and similarly decreasing the scaling of stancing/parrying success with Combat rank would be nice. Requiring transcendent Resilience is fine, as the skill is effectively Evasion and Antidotes in one.

I'm pretty sure it's not like antidotes at all. That was poison damage resistance, this is the (far more necessary than poison resistance) ability to shrug venoms, which knights and monks give alongside the damage you need to soak up.

Though I understand the sentiment, as someone who doesn't want to have his investment devalued, I disagree that there would be no reason to bother if a change like this went through. I would sincerely hope that scaling the general effects of these skills would be accompanied by new abilities at the highest skill ranks, thus giving us fun, NEW reasons to learn them.

I'm 98.36% sure that Antidotes increased the chance to shrug poisons (at least, in the Imperian example to which I am referring).

IIRC, poison damage is most often counted as a physical type, so in the majority of situations resilience provides poison damage resistance as well.

@Zarguan: Yeah i guess your right but having only just spent lots of credits in the skills mentioned it would still annoy me quite a bit heh...And i did literally learn those just for the bonus to focus mind, power regen, stancing not because i care about focus spirit etc.....But yes if new decent skills were added i could be happy with that but i don't think resilience should be changed...

Edit/PS the reason it would really annoy me is that i just put those credits/lessons into both my main characters!!

I wasn't trans combat but of course back then there weren't things like maneuvers, and you could hide behind rebound very effectively with proper timing. Of course I wasn't inept either, I could at least stance head chest gut arms legs

Though was trans discipline, resilience and magic... those are just too important, if you want to stay in a fight long enough to do what you want to do.

in Aetolia, I can fight top tier (read: omnitrans with artifacts) with a good system, mythical corpus and trans mentis at lvl 80. That's all (except for the obligatory diagnose). Over here you need... well, everything. it's quite a disparity

You don't need all that you say you do even if you are a robe wearer. You just need to learn how to fight competently and defensively if need be. I have a trans guild skills/focus mind/shield parry robe wearing character that I've killed many omni-trans people with if not at least people 200% my might. I can put up a fight against Thoros without running every time he attacks (at all). It's not hard. It just appears most people would rather complain and scream nerf instead of figure out their possibilities of what they could do to help their situation.

It depends on the class sometimes. I'll agree that I can hold my own against many people 1v1 due to skill alone. I have a noob Nihilist who can manage pretty well in a fight as long as i have my system up and running (note: by manage I mean survive... NOT kill). In fact, during my mage days when Ixion had his whopping pre-nerfs, and Daevos was one of the best, it took them forever to hack me down (if I didn't kill them first). It's 80% skill, but the other 20% (transing skillsets) plays a large factor as well. I can tell you that my performance jumped huge gaping canyons when I went from master resilience/combat to trans both. Also, people tend to forget how great an impact that DMP played in nerfing everyone's tankiness. it made a large difference and left many classes way too squishy where before, their skillsets were based around the fact that people could survive for a little bit and kill via attrition.

I have nothing valid or really relevant to add to any of these discussions, just wanted to respond to Aison's comments about history. Catarin wrote a history about the Paladins a while back that got admin approved, would it be out of the question for the Celestines to work with these new revelations about Tresalyne and whoever-else in their history to create something more comprehensive?

Yeah! That'd be cool.

Unless some of the Admins have certain plans, I think that is a absolute open possibility. Even if they DO have stuff already written and a clear direction established, OOC ideas have been appreciated in the past.

Also open to be address is a backstory to the history of the existing Celestine mobs (was Torili really a street tough in on the West side of Celest back in the day? Stay tuned) and how they interact with each other. However the atm is the guildhall which makes perfect sense.

Every guild is able to submit a player written history. You should talk to your guild patron about it, however, because there's a bit of a 'process' to it, that I'm not going to splay all over the forums.

Now it's time to go hide, so as not to be inundated with these inquiries!

As a Saboteur in Imp I could fight toptier with 1 trans skill and diagnose..