Tip in choke: Do not spam. The latest action sent will be the one processed, and every time you send a command, the timer is reset.

Krin, you are not helping. Choke is escapable, but it is incredibly difficult. It needs a cure. Maybe make it cleansable.

The "cure" is to leave the room, which is almost acceptable to some of us. However, I agree with Akui that it definitely needs more setup conditions. I still think Choke should slow the caster's passive effects, too, but I know I'm alone in that boat.

Zarguan I was on that bandwagon the day it came out. I was like hell this is a copy from mages in achaea, but WTF their effects still active??!!??!!

IMO choke should kill ents, 1-2 ents per ent tick.

The problem is that the "cure" is not leave the room, the "cure" is leave the room and get far enough away that Choke fades. 1vs1 this is next to impossible to do if the choker has enough literacy skills to read which direction you went and follow. In the case of tumble they can beat you to the room. Heck, even in group fights if the Choker is really wanting to keep you choked they can follow you out while the rest of their group deals with who ever else is there.

Maybe if the "cure" really was leave the room that would be a start.

It's a pretty telling testimony to Choke's ability to control the outcome of a fight when at least two people using it can't cut it as any other class, but stomp around as 'scary fighters' due to nothing more than having choke.

I will also point out that I don't really care if choke gets a nerf or not, in fact my email to the administration regarding streamlining combat said to leave choke as is. However, valid points have been raised here and the biggest valid point is that Choke does require you to code multiple healing systems. Despite the attempt to deflect and downplay the strength of passives inside of choke by the Glomdoring players, it does remain one of the most overpowered skills there are and the double edge nature of it is completely lessened by the fact that an SD can sit behind passives and only send an action as needed whereas for the victim of choke every action is required and often multiple are required just to 'try' to escape.

Retardation Vibe - knife sigils - removing of other passive attacks.= Choke

It is all the pros of retardation and none of the cons. Except it chokes the user too, which the choker/retarder has control over and knows how to mitigate their offense to benefit.

Actually, it wasn't that passives aren't amazing in Choke (they are) - 'we' were saying that the strength of passives can easily be turned against the Choke caster.

As far as choke goes I agree here. See, if choke is dropped on you at the right time (when you're prone paralysed maybe stupidity too) you have to enter many commands just to get back to the standing and unafflicted stage. However, the attacker who choked will time it so they have very little wrong with them, allowing them to execute an offence. A system can't really cure for you in choke, unless it totally disables your keys while it cures you, but then a SD will more often than not keep you in a state of not being able to attack. It's very difficult to code the right system for maximum efficiency in choke curing, and one of those issues is variable pings to the game.

Even then, if you're a knight with 1handers you're in trouble (2 commands per attack minimum if you've pre-envenomed your weapons). i remember using choke as a bonecrusher, and it was generally more trouble than it was worth to bother putting it up because of the double attack requirement. Even when i had a throatlock it wasn't very touch and go if it was worth it.

End of the day, you can't really defend choke in its current form, it's affects some classes WAY worse than others. You can't really cure or fight in it unless you yourself have ents or a demesne or passive attacks, and even then you're immediatley at a disadvantage. The whole game would be better off with no-body having access to choke, and instead give shadowdancers something else to make them good. Choke has been SUCH an issue, a headache for both sides and the admin too, really is it worth holding onto? I think it's caused more trouble than its worth. Hell I'd be happy if you replaced choke and a couple of night skills, and just gave them evileye flat out. (I know the admin HATE that ability but I'm making a comparison to how much more trouble choke has caused)

While for as long as I've known you, which is since open beta, we haven't agreed on a whole lot. This, we agree upon. Retardation vibe was situational only for mages due to the factors you mentioned. In fact many mages didn't use it in favour of themselves being able to cure, and having vibes. Choke should be a situational ability, not a use-for-all-cases ability. When the glom warrior class uses choke, it's very situational indeed. If used at the right time (IE you get a mangle/paralyse/stupid stack which isn't impossible to do) then it was a powerful ability. If you used it wrong, then you got rolled. It just seems that a shadowdancer has it a LOT easier when timing it. Simply make sure they have no afflictions, dish out a couple to the target, choke and continue.

I've recently been working on making a curing system, and the biggest problems I've ran into have been herb balance (you can use it 3 different ways - eat/apply/smoke - and each of those is stopped by different things, so you can't just go "if I have anorexia/slitthroat/etc I won't use herbs"), and things like octave which require you to cure differently (ie no eating horehound unless deaf). For aeon/sap I just try to cure the things that stop me from curing them, rather than having a whole another system for them. I haven't added anything for choke yet, but probably it'll be focused on things that hinder offense/curing.

You should code in each type of herb cure as a seperate balance, and cure based off those.

IE Drink balance, herb balance and salve balance.
Then track your afflictions that prevent. Use variable such as canEat and canSmoke.

EG: #IF (@stupidity AND @canEat) {eat pennyroyal}
#IF (@anorexia AND @canSmoke) {smoke coltsfoot}

That's a very basic way to do it.

by a 'whole system' for aeon we mean you need to check before ANYTHING if you have aeon/sap etc. IE your INITAL alias might look like this.
#IF (!@aeon) {use_normal_curing} {aeoncure}

Then your aeoncure would look like this
#IF (!@anorexia AND !@sleep) {sip phlegmatic} {#IF (@sleep) {wake} {#IF (@anorexia AND !@asthma) {smoke coltsfoot} {focus mind}}}

That's VERY simple mind you, my system had a full module for aeon, including disabling of my offensive hotkeys and a big announce AEON-AEON-HANDS-OFF-KEYS plus the ability to distinguish between aeon and sap, cure them both.

With choke, the best you could do was to have a system based off a push button. So when choke was on, the system would be disabled, and the alias curechoke would be bound to a button. Pressing this button every time you were able to move would do an action to prioritise standing up and being able to act. Not the best way but choke sucks.

Absofragginglutely. Despite the fact that others have pointed out that illusions aren't as key and thus as widely used, your point is spot on. Just like choke, sap, aeon, and a handful of other skills, the processes of developing a curing system and learning to fight are both far more heavily impacted by illusions than by most other skills. Illusions, choke, etc. are a pain because they are exceptions: you do almost as much work dealing with one of them as you do dealing with all of knighthood and its specializations, for instance.

Thus, choke, illusions, and a number of other things are ideal places to streamline combat because they're places where a very small change in the game can have a very large impact on reducing cost of entry. That is the real reason they should be focused on, if we were serious about streamlining combat; not because they're "overpowered" or "annoying" or "unfairly favors passives classes" or any of the other red herrings this thread keeps chasing (which may well be true, but are beside the point).

But don't worry. We're not really serious about streamlining combat, not to anywhere near the extent it would take to make Lusternia start adding new people instead of recycling the same few score die-hard combatants it's had almost since day one. All we really are doing is a few token efforts that will appease people while letting those die-hards angle for advantage and make lots of noise. Anything that would really help will either endanger someone's golden goose, or the idea that if we make the club less exclusive it might let in more of the riff-raff. So choke and illusions are both safe.

There was actually a "retardation vibe"?

Yes, every few seconds it canceled out one of the other mage vibes in the room, and could be destroyed by using a knife sigil. Knife Sigils were outlawed by the mage guilds for a long time, but you could get them off the black market and watch mages who whored retardation cry when you used it.

@Lendren Other than the sap and ectoplasm illusions and the 10 line illusions of some people (which is more a spam issue than anything else) I have never had any trouble coding around (and by coding around I mean learning Arts so that I can see through most illusions or just making my system illusion proof to begin with) any illusions.

Illusions are no where near the level of pain and difficulty to deal with that Choke is.

Illusions trip me up a little bit here and there, but it's not hard at all to code a set of failsafes to ignore any not-well-thought-out illusions, such as "You eat a bunch of pennyroyal."

Right, there will always be an illusion that slips through - Sap/ecto illusions when done right, but for the most part you can very easily adapt your system to deal with illusions. It doesn't even really take any extra coding or thought.

If that is true, then just let people with nightsight up be able to use the exits, look, observe, and inv commands. It should fix most if not all issues.

How will it fix most issues? If as stated 95% of Lusternia users are on Treant they already have access to the map in their top right corner. They already know the exits. Look doesn't cure anything, exits doesn't cure anything, observe doesn't cure anything. So great they can look around and see what they already know... they are fracked.

The problem is not in "oh no I don't know where to run" the problem is in "oh no I have multiple afflictions from passive ents keeping me from running"

Maybe its just me ,but how exactly do illusions have that much of an effect on combat? The only thing I ever illusioned as a Harbinger was choke, which stopped most people curing long enough for me to have an edge. And that was only the one that appeared when someone walked into a room. (Ugh. I am bad with remembering skill names)

Illusions in Lusternia have far less impact on combat than the other IRE games where there is a whole class (saboteur/renegade- Imperian) that relies so heavily on it.

Here there are ten other things that are more beneficial than illusioning something most of the time.