I find it funny how in one thread you are saying how the new cities are getting completely trashed and on another you brag about being able to kill some denizens.

Hai Guido, sup?

Or how he cried on the forums about Narsrim griefing him and ruining the game and now awful it was to be griefed and then wasted no time in turing around and griefing the new kids.

Guido, what happened to you? You used to be full of teh lulz and win, and now you're just a bad, incompetent troll.

Yeah, Guido let himself go

Also, I wish all Mages melds were as strong as the Pyros

I don't wish this persay, but I wish Aeromancy was more direct and not balanced around three healing passives. To be honest, Aeromancy is pre-packaged to be awesome later. Pyromancy was packaged to be awesome -RIGHT NOW- and probably to continue BEING awesome. The skills of Aeromancy make us glorified field medics/amazing group combat support... that is, it WOULD, if we had our other guilds! So in 2 months, Aeromancy will actually show what it is supposed to do. It's really, really frustrating that we really get very, very little from our demesne - we have maybe two or three shiny gems and the rest is very questionable as of yet. It makes me slightly regret my choice to join Hallifax, mechanically, because I foresee Aeromancy and Pyromancy remaining the way they are for the rest of January and a bit of Feb. We had no chance to submit envoys last month for quick impression changes from our first week, plus with Ascension 2010 around the corner, I HIGHLY doubt the administration has the time to devote themselves to a period of Aeromancy and Pyromancy balancing where minor changes will go in and out rapidly and a few major changes to boot.

I'm not saying Aeromancy is weak - but at this moment, it is incredibly underwhelming compared to Pyromancy - or, in my opinion, the rest of the Mage specs. The demesne is strong, but.. just in a different way, like Ciaran told me. After testing and thinking about it, I can't really deny that assessment. I personally think that if a few demesne effects were flat out exchanged, upgraded numerically, or shifted around a bit we might have a much more impressive offense - but right now that is asking for too much.

EDIT: This is my personal impression from a limited amount of personal spars, some testing, some raid defense. To put it in to perspective, I have yet to see us do anything meaningful with our demesne for even defending against Vathael and co - which concerns me, since we -are- breaking their demesne while we fight them. Instead, we just psyvamp train them - perhaps that is just more effective, but that statement or guess in itself is worrying. Shouldn't a demesne be a great tool for planar defense? I'm just very underwhelmed with the offensive orientation of Aeromancy. We seem to be tankmages, 1v1.

Let me introduce you to Starhymn

I know the sad, sorry lament of Starhymn. I was considering going Cantor multiple times and was told "don't" by every notable fighter I know and trust. I don't want to see Aeromancy lumped in with that sad song (hurr).

Aeromancy is a great demesne; I'd happily take it over geomancy (or aquamancy! Almost Anything's better than current aquamancy!), and I'm sure most current mages would agree. Especially after the massive nerf to geomancy rockslide damage.

Each of the new melds are more like druidic melds with the affliction potential - except you get psionics. Best of both worlds in that respect. You also get extra things like windwalls, blizzard (both the new mages get a duststorm equivalent, a better one for pyros!), the healing (poor aquas, outclassed), etc. Your meld is hardly subpar. You also get 0p fling from raise staff to give concussion, which may well trigger airnet so they can't re-levitate in the air (and I'm fairly sure wing-based flight methods don't work while entangled either, even if you didn't time it with twister). Your 1v1 capabilities might not match pyros (nothing does), but your group-wrecking and supporting potential is certainly unmatched, and considering chain lightning I expect that's what the skill is aimed at.

The reason you're not using melds in defense is that ... you don't need to. You can, as you said, just psyvamp train them.

Chainlightning isn't as good as you're making it out to be, though. I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm overlooking the potential of Aeromancy (and it very likely not my style, regardless) - but I will be pretty blunt when I say that chainlightning isn't as awesome as people think it is.

edit: also, airnet isn't that good either (the writhe is very very very fast) and it doesn't trigger through forced movement so far as we've tested. It's actually counterproductive because airnet prevents you from ever reaching the sky, thus making our other demesne effects that are sky-dependent never trigger.

Killing the cosmic mobs currently has no impact whatsoever on either org - you know that, I know that, and yet here you are trashing me for trying to help you. You're a silly girl, Rika! I was being facetious, which is a word with several letters. The reason I went up there was the test the mob strength and that I did, but if you're more interested in who did the testing than what the results were then please get out of the city devoted to science and logic. Anyway, I lost more experience in one kill from Narsrim than the 16 or so novices I killed all lost combined. Praying at level 6 isn't exactly a terrible ordeal. You lose about a third of what you'd get from killing one denizen.

P.S. I whined and moaned just as much when I went by Guido, maybe even more, and back then most people didn't like me either. As for my sense of humor, it got run over by six years of real-life bull****.

Esano: raise staff is not a 0p fling. It doesn't work inside, or against targets without balance. Fling works in both of these instances. As for airnet, it only works against voluntary fliers. Forcing someone into the air doesn't entangle them, making airnet nigh pointless. For some reason most aeromancers don't even know this, it would seem. Chain lightning is a joke as well. Try testing out a skillset yourself instead of reading its ABs and claiming to understand its value.

edit: no, I didn't say raise staff should be as good as fling, I just said that it wasn't, so you can take your finger off of 'reply'.

Aeromancy is very underwhelming to me as a player because I am much more offensive and aggressive in the way I like my PK. I would prefer to be a Pyromancer right now for that reason. I expected that Aeromancy would be about storms and thunder and lightning as -WELL- as the gentle wind and clouds it happens to encompass. It has too much breeze and cloud, and not enough 'I make Zeus look like a chump, kid'.

edit: I guess it ate the rest of my post. I was just going to say that Azoth is right - a lot of Aeromancy's effects are very disagreeable with one another.

That's not a problem with the class, that's just a preference...

The edit is a problem with the class: Airnet and Twisters clashing in priority, Blizzard's actual offensive portion being sort of lackluster, Thunderclouds doing next to no damage, Rainbowclouds being unable to be cast demesne-wide, Swiftwind being next to useless as well as Illwind being about the same, Chainlightning being questionable in strength.. the list goes on. Rainbowclouds is very powerful, and Miasma is potentially also powerful. The three defense effects we got, so far as other people have stated, invalidate strategies that were already long beaten to the ground and buried as useless - yet we're balanced around them so far as it seems. The design oversight here is that we don't have our other 2 or 4 guilds which our demesne will be a lynchpin to. For now, we're stuck supporting ourselves and our own class.

Rainbowclouds isn't 'very powerful', it causes confusion on movement. Confusion, a one-herb cure that, even if left uncured, has no impact on further movement. Maybe have failing to get through a squall cost equilibrium instead of balance.

You don't know what else it does, and I laugh because of that.

EDIT: It has a very likely chance of making you turn around to walk back in to the room, along with the confusion - just for reference.

Well I walked through it a good number of times, so the other effect must be very cleverly hidden.

I'd be willing to show you in the arena, if you like. Maybe I'm just lucky, but it triggered a handful of times in a row in my tests.




I'm not sure if it's on a timer or something - maybe we could ask to buff the likelihood higher. :/

Flinging someone indoors gives them a damaged head which, as far as our testing has been able to determine, does nothing but eat up a regen cure. And it still costs 3p and is on a 6s bal (it's actually possible to have cured concussion from a badly-timed fling before the person recovers their super balance).

Raise staff not working against someone without balance is something I'm aware of, and it's not that hard to work around if you invest a little practice in learning when your opponent will be on-bal. It might also be a bug; I haven't heard confirmation in either regard.

And if you think chain lightning is a joke (debatable, as always), you've still got 3p scissorkick from whirlwind or squalls to break up and slow down groups - squalls are even currently unremovable, for that extra bit of joy.

And you really shouldn't be complaining about airnet and twisters. The safest place in a geomancy demesne is burrowed - fear the 100 damage every 10 seconds from poison! It's actually worse to fly, due to stonerain (similar effect to twisters, which is similar to aquamancy typhoon or druidry treelife in that respect - only pyromancers, it seems, don't get an anti-flight effect), and before now only geomancy didn't have an effective anti-burrow skill (flooding prevents burrowing, and druidry roots instantly pulls up burrowers). There aren't any in the new skillsets, which means we're not alone!

But yeah, airnet/twisters mean that flying is not really even a brief option in an aeromesne; you don't necessarily have to wait for a demesne tick to bring them back down to you, if they're using a blockable method of flying.

Swiftwind and illwind should each be equivalent to a level 1 bal/eq bonus/malus for one skill every 10s, which can add up to a nice boost/loss over a fight. It won't effect psionics, true, but it's certainly not to be sneered at. Look at how much effort people went to forge high-speed weapons before the recent change!

If it doesn't fit your play style or the admin had a different vision of what the skill was to be focused on, that hardly means its ineffective.