Really, the only reason that people don't/can't manual effectively here is the way that so many things are cured on several balances, and you need to at least be able to use them all to stay afloat, even if most of the time, you're only chasing herb and potion balances. I manually cured just fine on Achaea because there were, literally, two balances that mattered. Usually, herb/potion, sometimes herb/salve, depending on who you're fighting. Not so here. Potions are applied and drunk, herbs and purgatives have lots of overlap, and it just makes for too much for any mere mortal's fingers to tap out efficiently.

On a related note, though, since systems are so widely available, it just makes good sense to assume that people have them. It's unfortunate (and correctable) that it takes so much time to make one from scratch, and any streamlining process should assume that, some day, Iasmos' wife is going to issue an ultimatum against us, and he's going to choose her over us.

The investment in time isn't just on the system side, though. Curatives and equipment are cheap in the big picture, but credits are not. Assuming you can churn out three credits an hour (and a newbie can't), that's about 200 hours of PvE grind time for a pair of trans skills, which can be almost a minimum cost of entry for some archetypes, like guardians.

I would say that a good goal would be that a functional barebones system should not take more than 10 hours to code (or should be provided by the administration inside Nexus or some free, cross-platform client), and a new combatant in any archetype should be able to aspire to something greater than zerg fodder and deathsight spam at ~1500 total lessons.

Contrary to most of the above posters, offense is really easy if you have the skills. If the skills are rearranged a little, no real changes will be needed to the user input end of things.

Unmasked afflictions should all look the same. Everything that gives you stupidity unmasked should come with the same line. Instead of:


It would be better if we had:


Standardized output makes for streamlined processing. Make one line for each affliction, send it on a new line when that affliction is given unmasked. I appreciate that this is probably a wicked timesink for your poor coders, but knowing that your system is complete without worrying about each variant line or 255 character weapon name that might pop up later is such a nice thing.

TL;DR Summary:
Move one useful killing skill down to a fairly low level for each archetype that doesn't already have it, and standardize the output for each affliction. Nothing else needs to be done.

Talk to Romero. He certainly has no problem beating people with good Aeon curing. Although, you wouldn't hear him complain about Aeon getting a buff.

What exactly would that prove? That aeon isn't bad? It's not like I said it was...

I think the primary purpose of streamlining combat is to make the cost of entry more manageable, in terms of how you have to learn everything (including a jillion special cases) and have a jillion supplies before you can even understand why you died the first hundred times, and most people lose their determination long before that point. I have accordingly proposed an approach that avoids there being a trade-off or compromise where doing this reduces the complexity of combat for established people.

My proposal in brief says that we replace Grace of Innocence with a three-stage system. The first stage is exactly like it is now.

The second stage lasts until level 41 or it's renounced, and in this stage, many afflictions dealt to you, or that you deal to others, are replaced by simpler afflictions and/or damage. That way you don't have to have all the cures and supplies, and you don't have to deal with all the complexity and all the special cases. During this stage, masked afflictions are unmasked, and DIAG and WOUNDS have no equilibrium cost. You'll still be cut down by Vathael in twenty seconds, because all those afflictions just become damage you can't tank, but at least you only have to learn about a third of the complexity of combat before you can start understanding what's happening to you.

In the third stage, which lasts until level 61 or renounced, same thing but less so: only the most complex, system-breaking, or special-case afflictions get translated into other things (again, both when they happen to you and when you do them to other people). No more free DIAG or WOUNDS. Now you can do a lot more things to your foes, and they can do a lot more to you, but you still don't have to know all the fiddly details about how to disable your system to deal with aeon. During this phase you can start to work on offense a little bit too.

After that, combat is precisely as it is now, so there's no compromise, nothing needs to be rebalanced, nothing needs to be given up. (Sure, we could also do other streamlining, but we don't have to feel that we have to do it at the cost of combat's interesting variety if we don't want to.)

Shiri does have a bit of a point with aeon/burst classes. Disregard that.

The thing about aeon classes is: They're burst. If you fail, you have to wait to try again. There's no sustained offense, it's mostly 'now or never'.

Warriors? They'll keep whaling on you even when their power is gone, totally unrestricted. So will monks. Druids potentially can, too, just nowhere near as well. Mages definitely can. Wiccans/Guardians? Haha, no. Vines/Vines/Vines/Vines/try again/fail/vines/vines/vines/vines. Replace vines with web as needed. Add in faeriefire or waning or random lash as needed.

Forget about even playing as a Guardian/Wiccan if you don't have decent latency either, for that matter, though I suppose that goes to combat in general as well.

(Did anyone ever mention how useful it would be to put Wrath/whatever the Nihilist version of it is to a 5 power cost?)

(I suppose I should also be pointed out that Guardians/Wiccans need fairly close to tri-trans before they can even approach killing someone.)

What...I'm not making any points about aeon classes, don't put words in my mouth!

What was that? You take pleasure out of kicking dogs around? You terrible person!

^^ this

Plus:

The thing with affliction classes is there are to many afflictions spread over to many curatives, making it impossible to stack afflictions making affliction classes nearly useless in what they are designed to do.

Affliction classes in other IRE games can pull it off because their afflictions are stack-able, because there isn't a multitude of balances to heal on and almost every affliction doesn't fit into at least two of those balances (barring focusmind/tree tattoo). So you can toss a couple herb afflictions on someone and they have to use two herbs to cure it, not use a herb for this one, and a purgative for that one.

Even curing paralysis is easier here overall, because it has a separate balance, something that also makes affliction classes in other IRE games more viable due to paralysis being a herb cure there, meaning they can cure paralysis and keep fighting/defending or they can cure something else with a herb.

Affliction classes are... laughed at mostly, barring choke/succumb/fae. Damage is low - midrange and again afflictions (once you take advantage of a system, meaning affliction classes are awesome against the systemless) are easily taken care of by being spread out over curatives and most have multiple curatives to handle them.

Warriors on the other hand are both affliction and damage classes. They beat you to death with damage and simultaneously afflict you as they beat you to death with damage.

Guardians/Wiccans either attempt to afflict or they attempt to beat you to death with low - midrange damage/mana leech you to a kill falls in here too. Not both at the same time.

So people seem to be saying that the purpose of streamlining is to make combat easier to get into for new people while not reducing the complexity for high end fighting. A daunting task!

Two posts that seem to be addressing this directly are:
Syrian's post about adding basic versions of essential combat skills.
Lendren's post about having combat complexity depend on your level.

My concern with Syrian's proposal is that I'm not sure it would help enough to be worthwhile.

For Lendren's idea, I'd be afraid that people would reach level 61 way too quickly for the stages to be effective learning steps. Stretching the stages out to level 80 at least might help. Maybe even higher. But otherwise this is a really interesting idea.

Lendren's idea is indeed interesting; one problem with it is that if you set the level at which you have to deal with the full complexity of afflictions and curing too high, we might have a few top tier combatants run around with midlevel alts, basically abusing the system to have it even easier in combat.

I think streamlining should mean a flow in functionality. Should a novice Nihilist kill a tri trans warrior? probably not. Should a Shofangi have 0 ways to really kill anyone at virt? no.

Everyone should have options based on their level. Very few guilds have this. Bards have almost 0 options outside of their novice skills (specs are just passives, an insta, and discordant really). Celestines have no options before judge or absolve, Nihilists have Torture thats the only reason they arent on here. Wiccans tend to have almost no options early on. etc etc. Some guilds can be played at low skill ranks, others need alot of investment.

Ideally the progression should be steady and combat should be smooth not riddled with bumps.

That's why those stages also limit what you're able to afflict other people with, just as it limits what they can afflict you with.

I'd say that standardized output would make everything miles and away better. I could delete some bajillion triggers if that happened, which would make my system more streamlined and easier to read and thus more accessible to other people who want to fiddle with it. Plus it'd cut down on client-side lag.

I think it's important to note that currently, it takes more than 1 weekeend to write a system that is useable in combat.

It should not take that long. Part of the time required to make the system is collecting all the variant trigger lines. This is not an issue of skill, this is a question of typing speed...

I must live on a different planet from you. I have spent nearly a year on my system so far. It has about 17000 lines of code of which about 1700 are triggers. My "to do" list is hundreds of items long, i.e. my system is a long way from being good. Granted you said "combat" and my system addresses a lot of other things as well, e.g. influencing, aetherships, speedwalking. But combat is a huge portion of the system.

So "it takes more than one weekend" with "It should not take that long" is well beyond my imagining.

Any good healing system is never finished. There is always some better way you learn to do things.

Any basic cure me of afflictions + health sipper is easily written in a weekend.

A system that you can rely on in many situations is an ongoing process. I am not sure about Iasmos, but for myself, I love coding. I code constantly. I spend most of my time playing lusternia standing around as I code something or other. In fact, I am coding right now.

I also use Treant a very good system that is constantly undergoing changes, my version of Treant is heavily modified and will probably continue to be tweaked and modified both as Treant improves and I find new things myself to add to my own system.

So yes, coding a good system can be daunting. If you like coding though then it is not an issue.

Let's put it this way. My herb curing queue in Achaea is 1 and a half lines in notepad. Because pipes are part of herb balance here, I can round that up to 1 and 3/4 of a line.

The Lusternian queue is 4. And that was after I had to cut it down (which was probably good, but anyway) because it was so long that zmud cut it off with like 15 afflictions left to go for being too long. Then there's 3 different types of focusing, wounds, enchantments, and elixir cures/balance. Then there's also the salve part, which is also quite a bit more. It seems overly complicated for complication's sake, or to make it appear more difficult.

I still remember getting into Achaean combat, and how daunting it was at the time. Back then, I didn't know of any clients other than java, I didn't have the slightest clue how to code anything beyond 'You have fallen asleep --> wake'. I learned how to do everything manually, which was -damn- hard. Obviously, it should've been.

Here? It's gotta be impossible.

I'm not sure thats true of the people that streamlining combat is geared towards. Like myself for instance.



This is all well and good and coding will always be a part of playing a mud to some extent. But I think the idea is to make it less necessary to stand around coding to get into combat. Some coding should be necessary I think and it should even be a complex process but not a overly complicated or busywork process.



This is a great way to do things but I would really like to make my own personal system from scratch, I've been playing Lusternia for quite awhile now but I've just kept slamming into both my lack of coding experience (read nonexistent) and the shear weight of the work needed to do.

I'm not all interested in making combat itself easy or a freeride, I just want getting INTO combat to be easier.

If combat in IRE becomes so easy to code for that anybody can do it then it loses what IRE combat is all about. There are a ton of muds out there that all you need to do is code a response to some text and you are well on your way (not that I am advocating you go play one of these), but IRE muds are not that. They are complicated and that is one of the largest draws to them.

If all you want is to "get into combat" then you can easily code a system for that from scratch. If you want to excel at combat then you either need to have coding experience or know somebody who does.

It's like the ability to change a flat tire over the ability to swap out a transmission.

Streamlining combat should not have anything to do with "I can't make a system that lets me excel at combat" It should be about fixing the issues with combat period. Damage scaling being way out of whack, affliction classes not able to do what they are designed to do, melds being a bit to decisive in fights.

Again, if you want a health sipper and cure me of enough afflictions that I can participate, that is easy to do. If you want more, then you need to put some effort into it.

As I said in my post we don't disagree it should take effort to be good at combat and certainly alot of effort to be the best at it. We just disagree on how much is too much. I'm nor do I think is really anyone interested in making it easy, just not quite so difficult or overly complicated as it is now. I want it to be complex and interesting not complicated and tedious.



These things are great ideas and should I guess be looked into but they are less about streamlining combat and more about fixing bugs or imbalance problems in the current less streamlined system.