As a result of the original stat flattening, it addressed high base damage against players at the unintentional cost of bashing viability for races that depended on high str/int to compete with their low constitution or slow balance recovery. This ended up exacerbating the playerbase move towards races that had few downsides (human, faeling, specced elfen, illithoid to a certain degree, etc). As such, I think intelligence or strength over 18 (since human mages have 16 fully evolved int +2 from potentially titan/demi that are easily obtainable) should either deal additional damage strictly for bashing (along the same scale it was previously, perhaps) or have a higher crit rate (1% extra crits per point over 18?)

I was thinking about this the other night too, that PVE damage should be equalized across the board for all races/classes. It's really stupid IMO that some classes kill things faster than others due to damage. Let health of the player, alone, be the factor that determines where people bash.

It sounds like you're arguing the opposite of Nydekion; he wants certain races to do more damage based on stats, you want it to be the same damage in terms of regardless of stats (and attack speeds, I assume).

To be fair, I didn't state I was agreeing with him, just that it was also something that crossed my mind.

And it's only the damage I care about. if you have faster eq/bal that increases your potential, but what I would like to see is the high int blah guardian kill things as fast as the high str blah warrior, assuming both had a neutral balance speed. The fact that it takes me 3 times as many hits now on mobs as it did as a warrior is absolutely frustrating and bashing speed has been a bone with people since day 1.

I'm talking about things like a maestro instrument being 25% faster, and warrior weapon bashing speed being dependent upon weapon speed (which drastically changes how fast a warrior attacks), not racial bonuses.

Yeah. And especially in the case of warriors, STR means relatively little when it comes to bashing damage. An unspecced faeling warrior isn't at any disadvantage compared to a SL faeling, in this regard. I think this would be something to address with guild skills moreso than races (though I'm not really against it either way).

5 power for double your health with a chance the target will hit you. just health on a target. Which will mean instead of 3.1k health (not demie faeling or even close), I have 6.2k health and a limited amount of power, meaning that unless I find someone who could tank and let me dps, Solo-hunting means a cave-fisher usually can kill the illusoryself, bring me to half health before I leave the room, heal and recast illusoryself, and come back to kill it. Having to do that over and over again really does drain the 25% reserves that I would have each rl day, while tk city mages have the ability, a bit higher in the skillset, but for free. Warriors would be able to take it on with their armor and usually higher con. And it's hard finding a tank when there are only 3 other people in the commune and 24 people in Lusternia at the time. /endrant

Are you trans resilience? Do you have a rune of absorption? Do you have a beast with bodyguard and/or beast heals? Are you using splendor robes, a magic tome, have a sparkleberry bonus from herbs, etc? Are you using potential shrine powers? Do you use karma blessings? Do you get other health blessings? I mean, there are a -lot- of factors here that can stack with illusory self and boost its effectiveness to the point that makes you pretty surviveable given relatively fast bashing speed with minorsecond and boosting songs. There definitely are other guild/race combinations that hurt far more in this arena afaik.

Furrikin Researcher with Trans resilience, beast heal, karma, con and health blessings. Level 93, and I still can't beat fishers without running.

Lobo Shofangi, with no resilience, no beast, no health blessings at level 76. Can beat fishers almost on regen alone if they don't use their power attack.

There are huge gulfs in the bashing abilities given, both in class and race. Bards are somewhere in the middle. Not as tanky as monks or warriors, but faster than guardians and mages, with self-boosts in their songs.

Monks have been in a class of their own as far as bashing goes since they were created.

Warrior are better at higher tiers. Nor does it change the fact that there's a huge difference in bashing abilities between races and classes.

Is that really such a bad thing though? I agree with the others who say more differences, yes, even mechanical ones, are better for races than homogenizing races across the board in areas.

Yes. It is a bad thing.

Quoted for intelligence

It'd be less of a bad thing if influencing were on a par with hunting as a means to advance. It's far, far closer to that than it used to be, but it's still got a ways to go.

Oh no, I missed this thread As the tae'dae representative, this is a very bad thing...

Seriously though, part of why I haven't been playing is because of tae'dae racial issues. Tae'dae get shut down by webs, entanglements and balance loss skills much worse than other races and this is a problem because they can only be monks and knights, which depend a lot on speed. Allow me to explain this in more detail with some simple examples. These numbers are somewhat rounded off for simplicities sake but the real numbers should be fairly close, since tae'dae balance malus has a big impact.

So lets say you're a race that does a knight attack every 3.5 seconds. A web takes 1 second of balance from you, and has you webbed for 2 seconds.

So, if you're webbed near the start of your attack, it takes 1 second of balance away from you (the webs are gone before you get balance back) and your attack is changed to taking 4.5 seconds.

If you're webbed at the end of your attack, then you get balance back before you're free of the webbing. You are webbed for the full 2 seconds, and your attack takes 5.5 seconds (3.5 + 2 - 5.5).

Rebounding aura meanwhile is 6 seconds. Even at 5.5 seconds, you're faster than aura, though healing potion, parry etc. are also impacted. For most knight races, it's clearly manageable.

Now let's look at a tae'dae knight, knights being the only class (besides maybe monks) that tae'dae can passably be.

You attack every 4.5 seconds (instead of every 3.5, due to the slow balance). A web takes 1.5 seconds of balance from you, and has you webbed for 2 seconds.

If you're attacking and get webbed near the start, you get balance back after the webs are gone, and the balance loss makes your attack take 6 seconds (4.5 seconds attack + 1.5 writhe = 6). Rebounding aura is now a really serious problem.

If you're attacking and get webbed at the end of your attack's balance, you're webbed for 6.5 seconds (4.5 seconds + 2 seconds = 6.5 seconds). You're now slower than rebounding aura is, on top of the other things that a knight has to deal with (parry, stance, healing potion).

My experience as a tae'dae knight was I could do fine against people who didn't entangle a lot. Winnae killed some fairly high level combatants, and could get a number of others to run from him. But some people who died easily at first realized that if they used a web or hangedman-heavy strategy, Winnae's tae'dae knight offense would become extremely easy to handle because he would become too slow to get past the various defenses.

So, what I think that tae'dae need more than anything else is a racial skill that gets them out of entanglements faster. Essentially a race-based contort, perhaps with a cooldown. Alternatively, a skill (we could call it juggernaught, or something) that makes them lose less balance time to balance-stealing skills (including entanglements). The general idea of a slow but tanky race is a good thing, but adding more damage or more tankiness wouldn't make them viable because of the way the classes tae'dae must be (knight and monk) depend so much on speed, and all the tankiness and high damage hits don't matter if you can't bypass defenses to make those attacks effective to begin with.

Thanks for reading!

Then what about quests that require you to be able to kill in order to complete it. I don't know of any quests where you need to be the last one influencing to finish it, but there are quests that require you to be the one doing the killing strike, or even face a tough opponent alone.

So I'd much rather have equalized hunting and influencing opportunities for all.

Equalizing bashing is not as simple as some might believe. Does it mean that the thousands of credits invested in weapon and jewelry runes to boost speed and damage now mean nothing? If not, how do they factor into your new equation? What about defensive and offensive abilities that help in bashing and/or influencing? Racial differences? Where do you draw your baseline, anyway?

I'm not against a good baseline for every archetype, but there are so many things that should then boost that to make others far better at it than others.

Hm? Monks are far better at higher tiers than warriors since they have access to hyperactive and spread their crit damage more evenly with 3 attacks to a warrior's 2 or 1 attack(s), plus they have access to razing and ease in mitigating a number of conditions that everyone else has trouble with.

Aetolia helped to equalize bashing by making a skill that causes the damage from your last attack to carry over to your next attack within 15 seconds. So, combo classes (in Lusternia, 1h warriors and monks) would benefit from it less than single attack classes.