Overview
We’ve been going through the emails many of you have sent in regarding streamlining combat. There were a lot of interesting ideas! We’ve internally discussed every idea submitted, as well as some of our own ideas, and have pared them down to what you see below. There were many ideas that seemed to not have anything to do with streamlining combat but rather personal concerns about how to balance individual combat skills. For the most part, we think it is best to leave most of balance concerns to the envoy process. The goals for streamlining project are (1) to make it simpler to get involved in combat (i.e., removing redundant afflictions, reduce ambiguity in messages, reduce the learning curve) and (2) to make combat less frustrating (i.e., directly address perceived architectural imbalances--like the demesne system).

Now that the admin has pared down the list, we’d like to give everyone a chance to comment on what we’re currently considering, so please feel free to make comments and continue to offer ideas and suggestions. Remember what the goals of this project are!

Afflictions

• Combine: Peace/Pacifism
• Remove: shyness, loneliness, sickening(?), generosity (NOTE: We would not replace these afflictions with something else and some skills may simply vanish.)
• Update: Dementia (TBD), Vestiphobia (drop items in inventory)
• Make sure there are messages for when these afflictions end: attraction, choke, octave, bedevil
• Make sure there are cure lines to specify left/right: Pecked Eye, Fractured Arm, and Broken Wrist

Combat Friendly Commands

• Potionlist Summary: shows total number of sips for each type of cure
• Decay Command: Create a command (discernment) that shows all items close to decaying (5 Lusternian months?).

Spam Filter
Discernment Ability (toggleable) to filter some spam

Planar Rift
Lower Rift in Planar, perhaps making learning it a collegium quest.

Demesnes

• Demesne size: Base 10 rooms. Demesne runes: add two more artifact runes (converting the existing demesne artifact), each rune increases the size by 5 rooms. so a demesne can reach a maximum size of 25 rooms.
• Demesne effects on effect room caster is in and adjacent rooms.
• Dissolve: allow dissolve to work like raze in that it will strip protection + shield
• Consider a new skill to kill saplings.
• Consider a new skill to break illusory terrain.

Commodities
Vague requests to lower commodity costs in some skills but nothing specific. Would consider proposals with specific requests.

Armour
Review armour to make leather/chainmail/scale more useful to some classes.

Succumb and Lash

• Move Succumb to Moon
• Move Lash to Night

Messages

• There was a vague comment that we should provide a message whenever a defense is stripped. However, this should already be the case and you should bug specifics if you do not see a defense being stripped.
• There was a suggestion to have a message when someone else's shield goes down. However, there should already be a message when shields go down. If not, please bug with specifics.

Damage Scaling/Caps

• Review Warrior Damage Formulas (something that is currently pending).
• There was a suggestion to cap any damage loss to 25% of the target's max health. Concerns that this may have the effect of flatlining damage for a lot of classes, especially warriors (perhaps nullifying effects of runes). Also, some attacks are specifically meant to do more damage, so some exceptions would need to be made. Admin undecided on this.
• Take a look at damage scaling and adjust as needed.
• Make damage from denizens scale to player's max hp a lot more to lessen the massive difference between bashing tank-ability between classes

Easy Cure System
New Skill in Discernment: First Aid - diagnoses and also cures the first ailment in the diagnose list that has a potion/herb cure (assuming you have that potion/herb in your inventory). Takes balance.

There are a lot of ideas to mull over that probably deserve better consideraton than the rapid fire treatment they're going to get in about five minutes, but this...



...is a blanketly bad idea. Saplings need to be weakened, but the methods for removing both saplings and illusory terrain are in common skills. If saplings go down in one hit, there's no problem here. The dissolve idea is straight up imbalancing. It's too quick for shield removal.

Nice
I had some trainwreck concerns but this all seems pretty reasonable.

Nothing about bards up there, I either got overlooked or my email went to the wrong people.

One of my current hurdles is simply the number of afflictions that can be given by any one person in a single round, either actively or passively. It was made much better with the latest monk revisions, turning many of the modifiers into attacks, but enough still remains that it's probably worth mentioning. (Afraid I don't have too many specifics off the top of my head.)

As an example, a bard can set song effects (is it up to three going at the same time? or am I mistaken on how that works?), maelstrom (1-4 afflictions hitting you periodically), rainbowpattern (a targeted maelstrom, basically), and then start working on the active effects. I was recently hit by maelstrom and rainbowpattern in the same tick, which stuck me with five afflictions. I also happened to be in Octave/Maestoso, preventing me from curing most of what I had. It was impossible to remain deaf for more than a second given the way that works, and blindness is equally difficult. Given all this, I know I should've just run, but it didn't take very long to get to all this, and I guess that's my point...

First Aid should have two versions. One cures the first affliction on the diagnose list but does not actually show the diag list to the player. It would only use the appropriate cure balance. The second version would be the one proposed. Don't think the second one is really needed, since the first one seems best for easying the cure process... newbies could, theoretically, just spam First Aid to help them stay alive just that extra bit longer.

I'm not sure what you had particular ideas you had submitted regarding bards, but I know we did go over several comments on bards. In the end, however, it did not appear most of the suggestions were aimed at streamlining combat (see opening paragraph above) but rather were personal viewpoints on how bards may be imbalanced. (Also, we tossed out anything extremely vague or general.) Anyway, if you think something important got overlooked, now's the time to let us know!

I don't understand the need for this change. I also don't like the fact that this will affect the tankiness of not just classes but also races. It will make a high constitution unimportant. It will also beef up faelings too much.

Also: I never sent in an email, (never thought about it) but I would like to suggest a streamline between protection scrolls, and faeleaf namely around auras of rebounding/anti-demesne affects. I think their separation is unnecessary.

Another thing that has been coming up that I haven't seen is larger groups versus smaller groups. Some people have been throwing around an attack limit, to stop zergs from focusing on one key person and flicking them from the face of Lusternia, summarily. It would mean a hard code that would make you choose your target before targetting that person when trying to use certain skills. System targetting would still work, but you would have to send target through the code and then your system could freely attack. This could minimize completely overwhelming a person where the only option is to be saved by your friends, trueheal, cubix, or find another means for a quick escape.

From your example, on the other side of the coin, if you are an affliction class, how difficult is it to layer on enough ailments to tie up the target? If the target can easily cure anything you hand out, then it is a losing battle. Also, how often is it that you get hit by five afflictions at once? If it is relatively rare, then that just falls under the randomness of combating this particular class. If it is common and people are falling to bards regularly, then perhaps it is imbalanced and bards need to be toned down--I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it's something for envoys to consider as I'm not sure if it really falls into the category of streamlining combat. Streamlining doesn't mean making combat easy.

While I am sympathetic to "zerg" complaints, I'm really not sure how your idea would work or how it could be easily coded, especially with a vague term like "certain skills". What are these "certain skills"? Can we list them? If there are too many to list, then the coding project would probably be overwhelming to the point of being unreasonable to implement. From a RP point of view, why shouldn't a group of people be able to overwhelm an individual?

Not a massive fan of the downsizing demesnes idea, would mean that we would need two or three mages to completely meld celestia (only plane I'm familiar with) which we often don't have, unless the damage and afflictions were toned up (and SERIOUSLY toned up for Aquas, we suck, seriously ) then it'd be a pretty bad Nerf.

Though I do like the adjacent rooms thing.

Having dissolve work like raze is a good idea but not a major buff, doesn't really counteract the "Zomg I'm a mini-mage now." part.

Would it make sense to have a "close combat" / "ranged combat" class system?

So a person can not be targeted by more than 6 people who are in a close combat class, and once that limit is reached, they can't even be targeted by ranged combat classes?

i.e. once a person is surrounded, the threads of the people are too close together, so nobody else can get a good target on said person.

(more of an RP suggestion than a combat balance suggestion) (I still think 6 people is a zerg, so maybe limit it to 4 people? (square vs hex))

Oh right... I think too many demense affects are better designed for long distance demenses...

Perhaps instead of having affects only be 1 room away, they work only in line of sight rooms away. So if you are in a corner, it's only 1 room, but if you are in the center of an open area, it works 5+ rooms in all directions.

One problem that arises is how to prevent people from gaming such a system. If I was the demesne holder or perhaps doing an instakill, then 4 of my friends could simply declare me and then I'd be immune from attack. However many ifs, ands and buts we put in to try to avoid gaming "close combat" scenarios, you and I both know there would be ways to find exploits--and we've seen that trying to plug exploits from systems often turns into a neverending headache.

/agree

Allowing someone to web, strip protection, and break shield in one balance is simply absurd.

Some questions I have:

*Why are Lash and Succumb being shuffled around?

*Why is dissolve being massively upgraded? If anything, I think reducing the balance time on Void/Nullify would be more appropriate, perhaps to the warrior-comparable time of half an attack, or ~2s for caster classes. Maybe even just put them at 1.5s? *shrug*

*Why are demesne effects being expanded to affect adjacent melded rooms?

*In your armour review, will you be looking at robes + shield?

*Why does FirstAid consume balance? (previously mentioned) I think if anything it should just require but not consume balance (unless you mean consume potion/herb/salve/whatever balance, in which case I totally agree that said balance should be consumed. Anything else would just be silly.)

Everything else sounds absolutely wonderful.

That'd be nice.

Aquamancer melds already have no real benefit at long range, Geomancers are way scarier

I wanna be a geomancer when I grow up

Definite no to the whole scaling denizen attacks thing. Some classes are better at things than others; that's how it is, that's how it always will be. Bashing is not difficult in any way, shape, or form. So some people can't just walk in and hit F1 over and over without paying attention until something dies in certain areas. Boo hoo.