That's way too many credits for that. We should just get a mob-only raze-like skill in Beastmastery (or make Attack or Aggressive able to do it). It really doesn't seem like something that ought to be a Great Rune.

Like... report 624?

I disagree that it is too many credits. I also disagree that a skill in beastmastery is a perfect solution because it's on a restricted timer. I'd be willing to pay to remove the timer and rest assured that I don't need to worry about shields too much when bashing.

Why should casters have to buy a beast, waste credits getting up to aggressive in beastmastery, and finally waste trains getting two marginally useless skills to raze (eventually requiring the purchase of a kikikoru reagent), when warriors and monks get an ability in a skill that requires only, what, 50 lessons or less? Not to mention the extra bit of coding just to make it useful for your beast to do that - despite the fact that raze is on a 10s balance anyway, so if your beast doesn't raze at the right time we're right back where we started anyway. This is mostly just frustration at report 624, but even so.

I'd rather buy an artifact and call it good; ideally I'd prefer a new ability for casters, or to make highmagic/lowmagic abilities work differently.

Obligatory But the RNG!!!

Edit: Redacted.

Except that's not a waste otherwise, where having a rune to do that one thing seems wasteful to me. Mages get a free beast, bards can in theory drop shields quickly anyways (and aren't hurting in bashing, can you say free dmp to all?), and wiccans/guardians have other perks that warriors/monks don't get (nymph, for instance). Training your beast isn't a bad idea, beasts are quite useful, and it's waaaaay less expensive. Not being able to raze mob shields is annoying, it's not the end of things. I'd far far rather have a beastmastery ability (something I'll train anyways) over an extremely expensive artifact for something so terribly limited, and I would never buy such an artifact.

Bards don't get DMP all, it was a bug.

Manse artifact
Ejecter Button
Syntax: Eject (Person)
When pressed this button will eject a person out of your manse to the Aetherplex.

Ooh. And if used when flying around aetherspace, it jettisons them.

Admittedly, it's been a long time since I did a large amount of hunting. However, when I have tested blanknote for stripping shields, I found that they got shields back up before I got eq back about half the time. When I averaged it out over a lot of attacks, it was still slightly faster to just wait for their attack. (Much to my chagrin, as I'd reprogrammed my reflexes, and then had to take all that back out.) I could probably improve upon it by doing more careful timing than just "blanknote when my eq comes up if the shield is up", maybe even make it slightly better than waiting. But it'd be at best a barely noticeable plus, and no slam dunk like raze/swing is.

When I was a bard, blanknoting a shield was the same exact thing as sitting there trying to yank it off via high/low magic; they just put the shield back up before you can regain your balance to attack. You're still sitting there waiting.

Obviously, because no one is actually using these abilities for those purposes, it needs a change. It's pretty much confirmed that warrior/monk bashing is far superior because of that amazing ability to raze and keep hitting, rather than sitting and waiting (or hitting the shield until you catch the mob off balance before they can put it back up... or they health leech off you and you get a nice crit, etc). Something that is again, also obvious, is that varying classes will get different perks over each other, but why should that condemn casters to less-than-ideal bashing? Bashing is already pretty boring as is and even at level 100 you've still got to go at it; why does it have to be more painful for the (far squishier) casters? I also realize that monks and warriors have a chance to miss, but that really hasn't changed their superiority.



Less expensive than what?

Less expensive than the 7 lessons it takes warriors to learn raze in Knighthood or the 89 lessons to learn raze in Kata?

Let's put this in a better perspective:

5000 gold just to buy the beast
36000 gold just to stable the beast for ONE REAL LIFE MONTH
104,000 gold for the 89 lessons to get to aggressive in Beastmastery (I generously rounded it up to 7 lessons per credit)
14000 gold for the 140 reagents to train in Battle and Aggressive (and again, this is being rather generous and choosing the lowest price unless you made them yourself)
----
So we're looking at over 160,000 gold just for that, and I didn't include the price of food.

That's 20 credits at 8000 per. Or you can go ahead and pay 500 credits for the base price of a beast. Either way.

That is definitely not less expensive. Even if you didn't have to be on balance to order your beast to raze the shield, asking THAT much of someone JUST to raze when monk and warriors get it their first day of being a novice? Come on. That's ridiculous.

It is less expensive compared to what Ilyarin suggested, but like I said earlier, I would prefer it if lowmagic/highmagic shield removal abilities were changed to actually be worth a damn.

I'm sure there was some other stuff I wanted to say about making it so caster bashing wasn't so far ahead of warrior/monk since they can miss hits, but I think I've gone on... long enough... kay.

edit: derp math. don't bash and post, kids.

The high/low magic skills weren't intended for solo use, or to ever outpace putting up shields, and I doubt they will ever be made to do so. Casters aren't really hurting for hunting, honestly. It's easier to bash as a monk/warrior, but having an outrageous rune to break mob shields won't fix things. It's more annoying that I can't raze like that during PvP, I don't mind it at all during PvE, and hunt pretty darn well with my plain ol' cudgel and stag.

Keep in mind that casters now also have far more variable damage typing, and more and more mobs each week are being outfitted with resistances and weaknesses. Additionally, some casters have better passive healing/tanking ability then warriors/monks.

I've never experienced any sort of drain on resources to maintain my stag (that I admittedly got for power, not gold), and I have it trained to beast battle and aggressive, even without some razing ability.

If there is some huge imbalance in classes, I'd rather it not be fixed by an expensive artifact, but in the classes themselves or commonly available skills. It's not like beastmastery is a 'trash' skill (like arts, perhaps?) that you aren't likely to want for other reasons.

I agree that an expensive artifact isn't the solution; it was just something Ilyarin threw out that he really just suddenly thought of and said he'd pay for. I'm not trying to back that up at all, I just think requiring caster novices to spend tons of IG gold just for the ability of some more advanced bashing that counter classes get basically for free is unfair.

I don't think it's fair to say that guardians/wiccans are always going to be on the top rung since, once the rest of these phases for damage types and things go through, that's not going to hold true anymore. Warriors and monks are going to get their love, I have no doubt about it, and then casters are going to be left hanging. And really, how many years have warriors and monks been sitting up there? And it's not exactly like they are lacking right now, either.

So while I realize that high/low magic nullify/void are not meant to be abilities to use solo, I see no reason why they can't be adapted to be useful in PvE.

How would you even do that?

Either it takes EQ / balance, in which case you use it and the mob has a chance to recover their shield (just like the case is with bards right now; shield stripping for bards is great, but it can't be used every time the shield comes up or you're just going to be spamming shield-drop on it for a little while until you get ahead)... or it doesn't take any EQ / balance, in which case we might as well remove shielding from mobs because you can just put it in your bashing alias.

(We've already suggested that mobs not be able to shield and that was turned down)

Compromise: Put it on something that can be chained with your attacks, that you can use on each attack (when it has balance), and which isn't available on every single attack so that mob shields still have some meaning. Tada.

This's the solution most likely to get through at this point, so if you don't like it, I guess you don't have to use it. I prefer at least trying to get the option out there, and if it needs modifications in the future, it can get them.

At the very least it raises awareness of the problem.

My own idea:
A mailman's satchel (maybe even a dingbat item!).

This satchel can hold vellum, stationery & letters (that have had nothing written on them), blank canvases and blank sketches (much like a rift)!

These things don't decay while in the satchel.

I'd buy it.

EDIT: If it had a different name.

That's what a 50cr customization is for.

I see what you did there.

A stockroom-switching-artifact. Makes it possible to keep more than one shop tied to a single stockroom, which means it's much easier to keep several shops stocked.