How do you survive as a druid/mage with these nerfs?

1) Be ready to only meld important rooms, and break a room of your own meld if you need to expand (add new syntax to allow this for free?)

2) Ask about something like "unstable melds" where say you already have 10 rooms, 4 rooms were done "unstable" if you attempt to expand further it unmelds old rooms (with a message) and melds the new one, so you can progressively expand your demesne. You must label then unstable so you can have some rooms that wont break.

3) Druids are a touchy subject as they are already incredibly hard to break in forest cases, really they lost the ability to have a demesne as large and thats it. Most things arent really changed in 1 on 1 as effects still hit if you are in the same room.

4) Practice lots.

I thought it might be nice to make this since three people have asked me what to do now that melds are under the weather.

I am leaving geos, but I been planning that awhile, and setting up for it since I saw streamline nerfs coming.

On a side note, the help files need to be updated. Mages and Druids can by no definition control "Vast tracts of land" anymore.

Sorry, can you clarify the unstable bit? I'm a bit confused, is it a game mechanic or just something to do if you mess up?

I read it as him suggesting that certain rooms in your demesne could be flagged as not-so-important, and then when you wanted to shift your meld into new rooms, those would automatically be unmelded to keep you at the ten room limit.

One advantage I see to the otherwise awful nerfs is that it's going to take more than one druid/mage to oversee a melded village/plane. Previously the best fighter would meld and the rest of the mages or druids on hand would run around using their non-demesne abilities, which works fine but it's not what I made a druid to do.

Unless of course someone has the artifact, in which case **** them. I think the artifact should only give +5 rooms, cost loss, and druid/mage champions should get doubled meld size with their champion artis.

Personally once I've finally transed bookbinding that's what I think I'll be aiming to get.

That's not really an advantage. Any fighter is going to have the runes and depending on the time you are on you could be spending a lot of it fighting outside your demesne while contributing about as much as you do now but without effects due to issues with melding certain areas even with another demesne user, maybe less as a druid as mages could change environment on you more easily to prevent you using some of your abilities more so if the sapling change goes through as well.

Correct.

This way you keep some versatility in expanding.

Excuse me? We should just ignore whatever the costs of entering into serious PK are? They are what they are, even if the admins decide to spike them up by forcing us to buy a 200 (or 100, now) credit rune to be as useful as the next guy, and we should just smile and say "If you're a fighter you'll afford it"? Every time the cost of participating increases, everyone suffers - they either need to pay more to participate or they're excluded altogether.

As for melding, a druid can fight at pretty much full efficiency within a friendly druid's meld, but once you take us out of the forest we're helpless. Ask any Hartstone, ask any Blacktalon. Mages can use illusions and psionics to put up a hell of a fight wherever they are, but druid secondary and tertiary skills are much too support-oriented. You're not going to hold anybody in one place with them, let alone get a kill.

Which is why if the idea of streamlining was to reduce the difficulty of entry in to pk then reducing the size of melds has just made the demesne runes more important and may be considered a requirement soon.

The people who are serious fighters, who are going to grab every advantage they can will not likely be happy with others melding too close to them, they will want to be making their 30 room meld as strong as possible so it is difficult to break with their effects lasting just that bit longer.

You should spend some time looking at places that you expect people to be watching with melds and consider how you would meld those places with a 30 room demesne, this would likely give you an idea of how common it would be for people without demesne runes to be asked to meld.



Which has been an issue since forever and why people have asked for viability outside their melds, I am well aware of how useless a druid is outside of their meld having been one for quite some time now. As I mentioned on envoys I would be kinda happy to have a skill that would prevent me from using a meld but in exchange I became less reliant on it, of course I will insert a claim that this means that it becomes easier to join combat but really I just want saran to turn into a massive ent.


EDIT: Oooh also, motes/runes how would they work. Same as effects or could they be bound to the druid/mage and radiate an "aura" that passively afflicts with a random affliction from the list of bound ones.

The terts of druids are seriously undervalued. With dreamweaving, you can drop someone down to sleeping repeatedly in seconds, a sort of attrition that can't be beaten. And ask Krellan about runes, he uses it effectively to no end. In fact thats all he does besides his lucky mana kill from his friends sapping mana for him, he just snipes runes and is there entirely for support. It works more than effectively.

Yeah, dreamweaving is actually a pretty decent Tertiary, especially in conjunction with demesne effects and beast sleep. Unfortunately, it is INCREDIBLY buggy, and is only really viable in waking form, as any attempt I've ever made to do anything in dreamform has resulted in me either doing nothing, or biting it because my body ended up someplace it shouldn't have been.

EDIT: Just because I've put it everywhere else, (my demeeeeeeeesne T_T)

I rofl'd.

No one in their right mind outside of a demesne will just stand there and get Deepsleep'd repeatedly. Runists? When is the last time you've seen anyone kill someone with Runes 1 vs 1 outside of a Demesne? The tertiaries of Druids are nice in their demesnes, but the current discussion is about how Druidic tertiaries are supposed to do anything outside of them now that their bread and butter has essentially been taken away from them. Personally, I'm in favour of bringing back the old room sizes and just keeping the same room/adjacent effect. That alone would've solved most of the problems with Druids, but I guess not. In any event, hopefully this summit will address some of those issues with Druidic tertiaries, though I remain pessimistic.

That could be more like 30 seconds ish of spamming deepsleep on eq/power, which would be about 12-18p(4-6 deepsleeps) depending on sleepmist.

Yes please. I want to be able to meld the entire Glomdoring again, or both seas. Though I suppose the problem with 200-room demesnes was that you could have the only break points located four areas away from the contested spot and covered with guards or something (I never played a melder seriously until after they got shrunk).

Also, serious lolz at Krellan kicking ass with runes and only runes. Two unmasked afflictions at a time? MmMm!

Aqua's still got hit pretty hard by this change and I'm very unhappy that they weren't looked at before it went into effect...we now have to wait for our envoy to get the skills back in order.

at 25 rooms you could probably meld etherwilde and the main section of celestia (only two I've had experience with) with a decent amount of strength

Also the way I read Romeros statement it is that Krellan is functioning as a support role, he's slinging runes while other people are doing the actual killing. I would be curious to who he would be killing if he was managing to use runes solo outside a demesne though.

30 rooms is easily enough to meld up Celestia. Unbreakably at that.

but that is after buying a 200 credit artifact and people already have issues with the cost to participate in combat.

I'm just waiting to see if we end up with some version of groves really.

Yeah, the whole "we're nerfing a class, but if you don't want to be nerfed, buy credits" thing was a little off.