True that. Then how about just not having afflictions on low end mobs, or just the ones able to be cured with basic skills? I know I payed a lot as a newbie trying to bash in Tidal Flats, mending and what not is needed. Of course had I know about the goodness that is influencing, that would not have happened, but that's another issue that was said would get looking into. Not that I don't enjoy the easymode option it is, but bashing and influencing being on equal footing means more options to level and thus less player burnout.

Double post. Sorry.

The solution here isn't to devalue influence. They're also two very different activities. Influence, like aetherhunting, is an activity whose success is based on skills, but additionally on your charisma. I don't think that making influence tougher for low level players is the solution, because bashing has always, and will always be, so long as the critical system is in place, horrible experience until you reach high levels. I've always seen influence as an activity one performs to earn experience, and bashing as an activity centered around acquiring gold at higher levels. Even at high levels, experience from bashing isn't that great.

In a way, Influence, Aetherhunting, and Bashing form a triad that aligns with a player's progress, IG knowledge of how the world works, and time investment. Influence provides a method that newer players can use to gather experience and gold at an acceptable rate without being harshly penalized for lower levels. Bashing provides a gold source for players who have invested a great deal of time and effort into gathering the experience needed to increase their critical rate to the point where they can gather gold effectively enough to make buying credits and outfitting their character in a viable way through IG means -possible-. Aetherhunting provides a method for high circles to achieve a higher rate of experience.

Essentially the current system of Influence provides the needs of players below circle 90 in a viable way, packaged into a single skill. Those who have invested the time and effort to reach the higher end then have the opportunity to split their activities into Aetherhunting, to gather experience more proportional to their advanced circle, as well as bashing. Of course the gold gained and the experience gained by demigods is and -should be- significantly higher than that gained early on. This is because they have learned the game thoroughly enough, as well as invested the careful planning and time required to achieve that place.

The flawed concept that it's demigods who have all the tricked out artifacts and such, and just somehow instantly magically gained them by becoming demigod, is completely fallacious. Unlike buying credits OOGly, achieving demigod can only be done through effort. -However- by reaching that high circle, the effort you've expended allows you to gather the gold to buy credits IGly in a way that is viable for gaining the skills and artifacts needed in an IG manner. It's still quite slow, but it provides a meaningful payoff and reward for expending so much effort. If you pay attention to the way the mechanics are set up, Influence provides a way to grow effectively until your critical rate increases. The higher critical rate allows for a steady increase in your IG capacity to trans skills, which you can invest into Aethercraft to push yourself higher in the face of those diminishing returns, and once you've reached the point where you can crit like a titan or demigod, you can finally realistically put your gold toward transing and equipping your characters with a realistic time investment to reward ratio.

If you make influence impractical -especially- in places like the Great Seal, it seriously hinders characters from reaching the higher crit rate required to live up to the -core- IRE legacy of 'free to play, pay for perks' by making the ability to progress through IC means impractical. Similarly, if you increase the difficulty of bashing high end mobs, but offer an XP increase without a -proportional- increase in gold to compensate for the excess time spent, you're also slapping that premise down as well. I play this game -because- it allows the opportunity for players who have put in the effort to achieve similar success to paying members. Yes, I do regularly buy credits OOGly, but I buy them with that thought in mind, and mentally value credits earned in game as having a higher moral value. To devalue that is to take away from the most important principals that all IRE games are based on.

Please, if mobs are to be strengthened, and the time required to kill them increased, -BOTH- the experience gained, and the gold reward needs to remain proportional to this extra time expenditure. Similarly, Influence cannot be made impractical. Illithoid and other high difficulty influence mobs are -essential- to both the experience and gold flow required at lower levels (through the needle trade). By curving difficulty, as well as experience growth, it means you're producing the same skew to higher levels that bashing suffers (though not to the same extremes). Influence is the bridge required to realistically gain the crit rate to hunt effectively in a reasonable timeframe. If you make that bridge harder by putting influence opportunities out of reach until higher and higher circles, you're just hurting the players.

The balance between the three methods of resource gain is essential, and should be maintained no matter -what- changes occur. Influence needs to remain an effective source of gold and experience for lower level players, capable of catapulting them to the crit rates needed. Bashing -needs- to retain its high gold influx in order to allow players to trans Aethercraft and other skills. Aethercraft -needs- to retain its proportional skew and compensation for the growth curve, unlike bashing and influence, in order to allow players to fight through the last stretch of experience gain and reach the point where their hunting makes steadily transcending their skills and gaining artifacts in order to participate effectively in the broader aspects of the game viable. If you break any part of that chain, it breaks the viability of 'free to play' and essentially makes it a farce where 'pay for perks' is the only path to success. And to be honest, I'm really not interested in a game where the OOG money I put in will forever separate me from players who have devoted the massive time and energy required to become great without it, or with less regular investment from OOG sources. It's what makes all IRE games so appealing.

I hope that this post has addressed the full scope and logical concerns about this particular aspect of the proposed changes in a clear enough manner. It's something extremely important to me as a player, and I dearly hope that it will be taken into account, and these changes won't simply be a way to punish people for working IGly for success and force OOG credit purchases if someone wants the vaguest chance to succeed. The possibility of that balance breaking down unless the new changes are very carefully handled is a logical one, and I put my faith in the administration to consider and compensate for that possibility. Hopefully my concerns are just that, simple concerns that prove unneeded.

Except that aetherbashing for that "fight through the last stretch of experience gain and reach the point where their hunting makes steadily transcending their skills and gaining artifacts in order to participate effectively in the broader aspects of the game viable" wasn't so viable until quite recently in the game's history.

Also, keep in mind that pushing up gold drops for mobs will just raise the in-game credit:gold ratio. More gold in the system will just lessen the value of the currency. Things will inflate and get more expensive; it won't really make it better for everyone, since Lusternia's economy does not have enough gold drains to make it similar to real-world economy.

You're forgetting that with the increase in the time it takes to kill the mobs, the rate at which gold enters the market will significantly drop. You may claim that it will drop the credit market in turn, but experience shows that such adjustment is far slower than the increases, if it occurs at all, due to the high rate of circulation of current gold and the much higher emphasis on credit supplies than in purchasing power. In an overwhelming supply driven economy, which the credit market is, given the constant growth of gold entering the market and overwhelming glut of gold, credit market is the true determiner of market prices. Additionally, increasing the gold drops in proportion to the coming extension of the time required to kill mobs will not increase the rate of inflow, merely maintain its current rate.

By bashing and influencing being on equal footing I meant buff bashing XP, not nerf influence XP. And by buff I mean put them on the same line. But this might just practically not be achievable. Or we can just not fix what is not broken, heh, but the admins are tinkering with mobs now so it felt relevant.

Here's a question for the admins: Is influencing in fact designed to be the faster lower-cost alternative it forms now?

I dunno about everyone else, but influencing was not faster for me. When people start making comments that influencing is so great past a certain point, I just feel lost! I mostly influenced up until about 86-ish, then I got forcefield and switched to hunting.

Well, some of us can't reliably tank anything that is actually worth hunting (Muud killed me before I got EQ back from my attack at one point, Dio has like 5 things stacked in one room, etc.). Even the stuff that I can tank, unless I'm getting stupid lucky with crits, I influence at basically the same speed while getting 1.5x the XP per mob. That's before health-leeching stuff like garshades, which are absolutely terrible and not even worth it. :shrug:

Influencing a mob will net you exactly the same exp as killing it. If you have dramatics, you can even make them harder and increase gain via storytelling. The big difference comes from two factors:

1. Stuff that you just can't influence. There's enough in aetherbubbles and newer prime areas that I don't feel it's too great of a hindrance (especially if you can influence the undead). And if you think needing to go to aetherbubbles to influence is too big of a deal, then stick to bashing. It's an overall smaller investment still compared to transing resilience, etc.

2. You can't critical when you influence. I feel like this is counter-balanced by esteem, and how esteem can be stored long after it is earned, whereas corpses have to have something done with them within an hour of being slain. If you want influence criticals or some equivalent, then we need to do something about esteem. It's already really easy to build up and maintain in large amounts.

It's exactly that lack of criticals that makes influencing perfect for lowbies and midbies. That lack of criticals is factored in, and influence, if properly prepared by the right buffs, can often gain gold and experience at an equivalent rate to those with higher critical rates. With the way the critical curve works, it makes influence the best method, without question, until you reach your high 80's where aetherhunting the experience curve begins to equal it, depending on how effective you are at influencing, and compared to bashing it typically surpasses it into your mid 90's.

I'm still sadly untanky. RoA, Bodyguard, IllusorySelf are all absolutely wonderful but bad luck will kill me, so I don't often chance tanking to the limits of my ability. I just completely avoid clumps of anything, if I can. I've done double fishers and a handful of garghouls, but the first was scary, and well, the second was garghouls. I miss Drawdown and I'm jealous of Forcefield.

Mmm, sweet sweet putrefaction.

Trying to get bodyguard, but RoA is too much for me to afford.

I just wish researchers had some decent damage reduction. 10dmp (approx) from turquoise, but only if I have a turquoise crystalweapon, 5dmp otherwise. Amethyst is nice for regen, but doesn't really make up for lack of damage reduction at all. :|

You think I can reliably tank those things? Forcefield just gives me a chance.

I still think I'm doing something wrong. Even as a Wiccan with crazy DMP to everything I was really wary around groups, but I see people who can burn through them without breaking a sweat. Either warriors are designed to tank literally three times as much at once (while still killing quickly) or I'm just bad at it.

The double crit chance for 1h warriors should be a pretty big part of that.


Better than I can!

I don't mind their kill rate, and by that I mean my kill rate in comparison, really. I just think it's silly to stick with the archetype of the frail wizard when designing classes with decent int, cha, or both. Warriors are tankier than casters because of Surge and plate armour; they don't need their base con to skew higher as well. Warriors have twice my health and kill at least as fast. I'm not sure how much armour differences affect each hit to say for sure, but I'd assume I take at least as much damage as they do.

(I realize this is getting slightly off topic, but I think it's still an interesting conversation to have, and I'd still like to know if I'm just being overly cautious or something, if anyone with better bashing experience could chime in.)

Kill rate does have a direct impact on tanking ability, however. The faster something dies, the less damage it's able to deal. When you're talking about tanking 2-3+ mobs at once, you're cutting the amount of damage you're taking significantly when one does down.

Er... last time I checked it, I got 50% more essence for influencing critters vs. killing them (unless I influenced them with empower or weakening). I figured that was the counterbalance for not getting crits. That and the lack of afflictions.

Has that changed?

Nope. You still get 50% more from influencing than killing the same thing.