Erm, astrologers can't get to bubbles by themselves. Astral spheres, yes. Aetherbubbles, no.

I am aware, I put it in there because imo the primary benefit is getting to astral.

You can't simply ignore the benefit of one-man cone when discussing constructs, unless you wish to really get to the root of what cone represents - means of power gain. Three person cone was fair in my opinion - since Serenwilde passively generates more than one million power per RL year by way of totems (of which there is no city equivalent).



It's a nice utility benefit, yes, and that was the purpose of including it - it was something communes wanted, the administration at the time disagreed that it was necessary but felt this might be a nice, logical, IC solution to it.

However, you cannot continue to vaguely compare communes to cities in terms of utility - as there is a tendency to over-simplify it, and people have a habit of making generalizing statements.

Single person cone is a very powerful utility effect, if you look at it from a more macro-power-economics standpoint.

And you can't just throw in totem power generation unless you want to discuss how much better statues are at defending a city. I'd give up the passive power generation if we could bond all of our totems.

As Sylphas has pointed out the pay off for totems is that they worse for defense. ffs, Hallifax actually chose not to have all of their statues bonded.



Your statements remain unconvincing and, in some cases, disturbing.

Edit: Hmm, nevermind.

As an aside, we probably will not make any immediate adjustments to constructs (unless there is a bug or big unforeseen imbalance) but rather monitor how they are for awhile. We will probably review them at a later date, though, so please continue the discussion!

A big imbalance such as described in my previous post, in regards to a +1 sip bonus (including Ego and Mana) vs. +15 carrion for Crow users or slightly enhanced effects for Stag users?

Yeah, there's nothing minor about a sip bonus

Ok, I'm just going to compare them line-by-line in a format that is hopefully a little easier to see where we're seeing the differences.

CODE

Blacknest                                 |   Standing Stone                            |   Iron Machine
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOUCH - Sends a guardian crow | TOUCH - Sends a guardian foal   | TOUCH - Gives a Tainted Spike
for 10 power                              | for 10 power                                | for 10 power
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CROW KNOCKDOWN - Usable once per month,   | Foal makes it easier to move more rooms     | SLAM SPIKE - Once per day, spike can be driven into
your guardian crow will pull down all     | before becoming more hasty                  | the ground to cause an earthquake, which will sprawl
flyers overhead for five minutes          |                                             | everyone in the room and have a chance of stunning
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guardian crow gives very small chance of  | Very small chance of partially intercepting | Spike can be POINTed at others to cause disease
attacking when the owner attacks          | an attack                                   |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maximum carrion of a Crow user is         | The power of Ringwalk, Parade, and          | Spikes gives +1 sip bonus
increased (+15 carrion)                   | Ancestral Curse are increased for Stag users|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5DMP to all damagetypes                   | 5DMP to all damage sources                  | 5DMP to all damage sources
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please please please please please look at these comparisons. Note that some of these are restricted to a sub-type of an organization. And that there is a pretty clear difference.

The Blacknest and Standing Stone are rather more comparable than the Iron Machine which is off on its own level.

Just make a +1 sip bonus for mana only, and let's all move on to something more fun, like bug fixes and skill balancing.

I'm all for moving onto nerfing Fillin/Balestone/Geos/other skills, and buffing/fixing Aquamancy/Telepathy/warriors/other broken/UP skills.

Why don't you just make the +1 sip bonus effect Viscanti only?

EDIT: Also I am a little curious how Parade can be made any more effective, in Stagform its already made free and quicker, what more does the Foal do for it? and the other skills in question?

Why don't we just lower their sip malus to -1?

We already asked that, they said that the sip bonus was not intended to balance a race. Which leaves the reasoning for giving a sip bonus to Magnagora as a great big question mark; trying to help Viscanti out is the only at all reasonable explanation I can think of.

Two of those listed Constructs do have limited groups that they affect though, so I don't see why we couldn't make the sip bonus just affect Viscanti, or replace it... from that chart I feel that it's pretty darned clear there is a significant imbalance in regards to implementation. +1 sip bonus is not at all comparable to +15 carrion, the sip bonus is far and away the superior benefit. And it is definitely NOT a minor one, like the other new-Construct effects.

Er, I think the sip bonus is supposed to be more comparable to the "guardian crow gives very small chance of attackign when the owner attacks" and "foal gives very small chance of partially intercepting an attack". From the numbers given, it is more useful than those two, yes, but it should be compared to them and not the skill-based ones.

The POINT SPIKE is not particularly useful except for nihilists and cacophony (and to a lesser extent ur'guard) or in conjunction with those in a group, making it a closer match for the totem-specific ones.

And slam spike is pretty useless overall: 4s balance to sprawl everyone (including allies) with a chance for a 1.5s stun (again, including allies) given to the side with geomesne (which sprawl twice every 10s anyway).

I'd also like to see you discuss the other constructs. Hallifax got a pretty raw deal here, far moreso than Glomdoring. Celest's phial is better, although I don't think they needed any more construct-boosted defense (or, for that matter, do aquas need another method of movement hindering). Poor Gaudiguch gets to grief the forests with their secondary construct, and not much else from that one.

Uh, no? The ones that give a PvP bonus are compared to one another; intercepting some damage, doing some damage, or doing afflictions are all pretty clearly the PvP oriented directions. Also, POINT SPIKE is absolutely useful for Cacophony, they are built off of taking advantage of these afflictions! The extent of its strength can be discussed, but it's definitely not useless, nor even close to it.

Carrion / Sip bonus are the not-PvP-limited effects.

Slam spike is as useful as Crow Knockdown is, which is why they get compared. Glomdoring already has sylphs, after all.

If you want to put the other Constructs up in a list to show how they, too, are far below the benefits that Magnagora's construct provides (as you allude to in this post), please feel free. I'm just comparing the two Commune ones (which do have abilities restricted to a subset, despite the statement that these constructs should not) to their Magnagoran counterpart which is leaps and bounds above. Point Spike meshes extremely well, and the sip bonus is far, far more helpful than any of these other Construct benefits (especially +15 carrion capacity...)

There is quite definitely a disparity here, and there still is even if you change around the comparisons the way you want. As you yourself already agree. I'm just not sure how it can be made any more clear at this point, because there is not yet any response from their end as to why they don't see the same thing.

No wonder the admin have such a withdrawn view on the forum goers ability to give good suggestions on game balance.

If you're going to give Magnagora sip bonus, may as well give Glomdoring level 2 night regeneration and Serenwilde herb balance.