So I've had the desire to play Lusternia again, but coming up with a way to be viable at anything besides influencing as a tae'dae was eluding me. I thought then that I'd try to come up with a suggested fix to some long-running problems which I could suggest to envoys, and then I had what I thought might be a great idea.

Lusternia should follow the succesful game mechanics trend in Aetolia and take out weapon speed as a stat. I believe that this has been a long time in coming. If you think about how emphasized on speed physical combat has always been, in Lusternia and other games, and how making anything besides a high speed build work for a physical class has never been considered a good yet balanced strategy (until recently in Aetolia), you might agree that weapon speeds should go. If you have played and PvPed in other IRE games, recall the other physical class besides knights- monks. They had no speed stat, just racial speeds, and a slow and tanky monk was always viable, unlike a slow and tanky knight.
What Aetolia did with one class so far, their Sentinels rework, was to make all Sentinel weapons (including artifacts) have the same speed. So only racial speed modifiers exist, as is the case with other kinds of classes. The change was very well received by the player base over there. Aetolia is also reworking their knights with the goal of making slow and strong more viable, so it's very likely that Aetolia will continue to phase out the speed stat with other classes besides Sentinels as well. The Sentinel class in Aetolia is a knight class now.

Lusternia has begun to do this already by decreasing the effect of the speed stat for monks.

Consider how much easier to balace the game would be without a weapon speed stat. Pick a baseline speed, based upon the relevent curing rates, and set this speed value at a point from which every race (no matter how slow or fast) can have a viable offense. With a base speed value, faster races would not be able to invest in speed to become shockingly fast. Slow races would not need to invest in speed to beat curing rates, while completely sacrificing their supposed strength advantage.

As an example, I'm not sure what the minimum knight attack speed right now is, but I'd guess that it's under 2 seconds. The maximum meanwhile is over 6 seconds.
Apply healing is four seconds long.
If the baseline time was always 3 seconds, a tae'dae would swing at 3.61 seconds and a faeling at 2.58 seconds. Balancing weapon stats to make both builds viable would be fairly easy from this point because you'd only have two stats to deal with and the speeds can be considered in calculations easily.

If people or the admin badly want a third stat for flavor purposes, I would suggest dividng damage into crushing (physical damage) and cutting (bleeding damage). This would provide increased character to different kinds of weapons, such as axes, swords, hammers and flails, all having a different emphasis from each other. A hammer would be almost entirely crushing damage, a flail would have some bleeding, most swords would have a bleeding emphasis. Rapiers could rename "crushing" to "piercing" for flavor purposes since they neither crush nor kill primarily through bleeding.

Having played IRE MUDs since the late 90's, I honestly think that Aetolia's new approach is the only viable solution to balancing physical classes. Guardians, Mages and what have you have never fluctuated ceaselessly between being over and under powered like weapon classes have. Monks (in other IRE games) had only racial balance as a factor, and slow monks were always viable there. I don't believe the correlation between using only racial balances and classes being considered to be well balanced is a coincidence. It's due solely to the lack of a speed stat being used by those classes, because abilities affected by only racial speeds are easy to balance. With artifacts, you can't find the sweet spot of damage to speed ratio, because then people will build a weapon with no speed and high damage, stack runes on it, and switch to it for huge bursts. A flat line speed would prevent this as well as fix the other problems, and make some of the most interesting races in the game viable.

Thanks for reading

I have my doubts as to whether you can get below 2 seconds balance recovery as a warrior. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's not possible. You don't need high attack speed, either, although it helps certain offensive setups.

With the ability to temper, everyone already has the same speed, though, I would assume, so I'm not sure what it would change. I'd think that Forging and Moon/Night weapon auras play the biggest role in speed stat differences.

To many warriors, it seems that the game really is balanced around demigod with full runes. I feel like a broken record, but I believe that warrior artifacts cost more than any other archetype and ultimately do less.

That's because it is? Envoys are told to balance around omnitrans demis with artifacts, and anything less than that is a secondary concern. I personally try to make sure that nothing I can prevent screws over people that aren't omnitrans demis (what with me not being either), but alot of people just don't.

Let me clarify. Demigod warrior with fully runed weapons is more of a baseline, not a ceiling.

How about making speed something alike to DMP so that extreme high values don't scale linearly?

High end warrior speed already got downgraded with the last changes (quite a while back by now). It's not really much of an issue, I think. It's just tae'dae that are slow as hell, but that's not a specific problem with the warrior class.

I too have played Aetolia and Imperian, and Lusternia is simply too radically different from those games for any comparisons between them to be useful. There is really nothing inherent in Lusternia's warrior classes that makes speed superior, since they rely on deep wounds rather than venoms. There are no problems with the warrior archetype that can't be solved by number tweaks.

With years of warrior balance problems behind us, I don't agree there and I'll tell you why. The way people used to create burst damage weapons by dropping off as much speed and precision as possible is probably why warriors do essentially no damage today. As I said originally, the "sweet spot" of damage to speed ratio can't be found with artifacts around, so long as speed can be sacrificed in order to improve damage.

You can refuse to consider comparisons to other games if you want to, but such comparisons aren't necessary for discussing the idea. Have Mages, Guardians and Bards been better balanced overall than Knights and monks? If you agree that they have been better balanced, do you think that their simpler speed formula accounts for that better balance at all? If you feel that it doesn't account for it, then what does?

@Sylphas, the fact that everyone tries to have the same speed stat isn't a reason to keep the stat in the game in my opinion, but rather is further evidence that a speed stat should be done away with entirely, for it serves no purpose besides complicating attempts to balance the class.

Agreed. I've only begun to notice this (then again, I only recently became an Envoy).

The problem with knights isn't the speed...the problem is that knights don't do that much damage vs other knights for starters. Unless you are fully runed and demigod your wounding won't stack that great unless you are pureblade. For example...my character is a blademaster and having a guildmate in the arena with me doing nothing but curing...I couldn't get wounds to stack for crap even with poisons and trying to very where I was hitting. Also, the missing rate is high for knights so yes if you are a slow class then you are going to have issues. Speed will help as it allows you to get more attacks off quicker but as others have said with the ability to temper every knight can have max speed if they choose.

If you want to fix knights...make the miss rate drop and make the wounding a bit higher so that you can actually build it up and have a chance of doing any good in combat. Not sure about against other classes but so far against knights I have found that unless you have a good skill to back up your knighthood specilization and stack wounds or afflictions, or are pureblade you are going to be stuck not being able to do anything serious.

I'm of the opinion that our real issue lies in the unreliability of our afflictions more than anything. Our wounding is fine, but if you get a slice-ear when you know you're in the theoretical range for a possible slitthroat, you can really mess up that much-need lock, or have all your work undone. There's also the fact that our poisons have a chance of just not coming off the blade, or in the event they do, they get shrugged 1/3 of the time (which is a lot!). More hindering leads to more wounds being built, and when you keep getting low level afflictions that just don't hinder, your enemy gets time to cure up the wounds so long as they are moderately competent and have fair curing. More wounding -does- help, but I don't think we need it. We just need to have more control over what happens when we swing those swords.

Speed helps, but most people don't hit at a regular rate anyway due to hindering.

Right. I'm saying that removing it won't actually change anything, so I'm not sure what the point is. If everyone uses precision weapons or everyone uses damage weapons, Tae'dae will still be abysmally slow and non-viable. If you make it so that damage is viable, Tae'dae still isn't going to be good unless you make strength scaling ridiculously unbalanced, since other people will still do more damage per second.

I probably should have stated my argument more narrowly, but if you leave the speed stat in and buff knight damage, people can abandon speed to make runed burst damage weapons. I think this was a factor in why Knight damage is so bad now.

Whereas if there was no speed stat, you couldn't make burst damage weapons that were a major balance problem at one point in time, and therefore you could buff knight damage without artifacts making it really unfair on normal people, because the damage output wouldn't fluctuate with weapon switching.

You keep saying these things and I just can't even begin to understand your argument. If you just remove the speed stat, nothing will change. Even completely overhauling weapon stats won't change anything with slow races like Tae'dae because of the nerf to stat scaling.

Maybe an example will help. Back in the day, Daevos used to have two runed out katanas. One was a wounding katana and hit me for like 10% of my HP. The other was a damage katana and would hit me for like 75% of my HP, because it had a minimum of precision and speed in return for max damage.

Eventually people got tired of this and knight damage was nerfed. If you just upped knight damage again, the same thing as in the above example might begin to happen again, though perhaps not to such an extreme degree. But if you didn't let people min/max their weapons as much, then the above couldn't happen. If you take out the min/maxing by removing speed, damage over time is standardized that much more, than if you just tightened stat values. Once damage over time is standardized within specific limits, knight damage becomes easier to balance overall.

After years of consistent failure to balance knights by tweaking their values, and endless concessions to artifacts, some underlying change is warranted. Lots of people think they could balance it by changing the numbers but everyone who's tried has failed. If tweaks to the damage numbers have failed to fix the problem for this long, continuing to rely on them as a fix would be a mistake. The system needs less variation before it could be balanced and since damage artifacts are here to stay, the area to simplify should be speed.

Ok, I can see that I guess. It doesn't even begin to fix slow races, though.

I'd settle for a good starting point really, since I don't see knights getting balanced ever at this rate.

Lusternia has been around for more than six years, and I am sorry to say this, but if the admins haven't manage to fix knights until now I doubt they will ever do it. Ever.

We're talking here about the same people who posted statistics about what races are most played with the clear intention to look at the races who aren't played at all, and surprise, surprise! They have only made a few changes to the most played races, leaving a race nobody plays untouched (Taurian comes to mind).

We're talking about the people who have said that there is no need for a special envoy for monks (Malarious said that in a post a few months ago, and no admin bothered to deny it, so it must be true).

On a more optimistic note, trying doesn't hurt either