Ah, gee. I really was planning to test out Muud bashing soon. Oh well, I can do it now anyways since I still have the old Muud numbers.



Have you watched Supernal/DL raids at all since the last round of changes? They are by no means equal at all, above and beyond the other org smobs at this point. The self-heal powers they have make them last significantly longer, to the point where you lose what adrenaline you had going into it and just get bored.

There is no fun in seeing the same big mob go from deep lacterations to a glancing cut x100.

Having been on both Moon Avatar raids since the big change for smob powers and on a Demon Lord raid, I feel like if we took that DL group and hit moon avatars instead, we could have handily slain them all. Instead, we managed to only kill Baalphegar and Ashtorath. Is 2 DLs = 3 Avatars where you think it should be? Serious question here.

I really can't speak about the Supernals, but I think it is telling that the Magnaserefaxian group that took out all the fleshpots and all the night avatars could only kill Japhiel. When I asked around with them, there was a very similar sentiment - the night avatars were way easier. That's the sole basis I'm lumping them in here, someone else feel free to back me up.

If you're going to buff this specific group anymore, please trash the self-healing stuff. Or, not withstanding that, give it to ALL the org smobs. Because it is just that ridiculously good - I don't think you'll find other different, worthwhile abilities to give to the others to even it out and you'll just leave massive feelings of inequity.

I've been unable to make a really exhaustive comparison because of certain people preventing a large enough comparative sample, but from what I've been able to test, it's seeming to be about a 20% decrease in total experience gained per unit time for me. I can't verify that I'm gaining more per influence (everything's under 0.01% anyway) but even if I am, it's taking enough longer that it's not quite breaking even. Even if I could keep going on guards constantly, it's down to about 70% the speed of bashing tunnel trash as an elfen titan bard. But in practice, it's less than 50%, because tunnel trash has an effectively infinite supply, but guards are limited and highly contested. I think I'm going to just leave off at titan.

Also, in regard to influencing, we might want to look at scaling of ego damage when using an influence type that doesn't match a denizen's disposition. Example: paranoia on a sensuous mob. Sometimes quests require you to engage in this sort of influencing, and if the damage notably increases the more attempts you have to make, this might have made it unreasonably hard for some races to complete key quests when they otherwise might not have before.

That's one idea. Orc-fluencing was a bit of a joke as it was, but if I HAD to do it for a quest, I could generally plow my way through it. I worry that with the current set up, anyone who's an orc (or a Krokani, or even thoid) is just gonna not have access to that content.

=(

less reason to get influencing now.

I would actually look into things like godrealm mobs, normal cosmic mobs etc.

Lets review something about cosmic/ethereal guardians/mobs.

Weaker mobs:
- Demons/Angels

Strongest mobs:
- Up in the air, vortex/continuum are strong. But daughters are almost always in large clots, hit hard, and blackout as do ladies.

Weakest smobs:
- Spheres/Pots

Strongers smobs:
- DLs/Supernals.

Now, this seems like it should balance, but I think Demons need a buff themselves. Only Celestia and Nil cost power for anything dying. Everyone else can gain power from their mobs but do not lose anything. This is an important factor in the lacking balance between old cosmics and new cosmics as well as ethereal.

As to invasion mobs? Those should not be effected in my opinion. Many of them are already rather powerful (mummers, merian, and archangels), making them stronger only makes them more likely to 1) be used in neutral zones to avoid status. 2) Be a requirement for every raid/fight. Invasion should not be required or single handedly win anything, it should be a minor boost to distract people or help when you actively fight.

I'm not sure about killing godrealm denizens, but. Influencing Lord Lyreth's muses with empower, all defenced up, being a normal lucidian, I use to empower one with 9 hits. After the change, this has changed to 11 hits. I don't notice a difference in experience (I wasn't really paying attention to it) but I did notice the esteem was a fair deal higher.

Okay, so here it is.

Old Muud



And New Muud



It actually all feels reasonable right until the very end. I couldn't even get a solid hit count of them because random heavy crits while they were shielding were ruining it for me, but they both could tank early WSCs, that much was certain. Necrotrophs in particular just don't seem very worthwhile at that point, especially with three in a room at the boils, especially with the extra insanity you get while wading through Muud to get to them.

In other news, is there any hope that the tear at the end can be worth more than 250 power? That's going to be pretty measly for the effort now, especially if you expect several people to get insane for it.

250? Only got 100 from it last time I ran it with some people; that was with the Bell though.

I added 250 to the ravenwood with it.

Oh, gold might be slightly out of control in some situations too. I cleared the parasites in the asylum and got 8347 gold in drops, when I used to get 4500-5000 normally. Not that I'm trying to complain, really... but that's a significant shift. It's also reflective on all gold drops everywhere - even deepstone rockeaters can drop up to 200~ gold now.

Oops, I forgot this also has affected essence offered to gods, which I think wasn't emphasized so much, but is about what you would expect. Here's a few of those for those who might be similarly curious but use "offer corpses" too regularly.

With 18 cha and various influencing buffs, influencing feels a lot more profitable essence-wise than it did previously. I don't really have any decent/hard numbers from previously that I can compare to, but previously I think I was pulling in about 250k essence/hr influencing. Now, I'm getting a bit over 333k essence/hr.

Of course, YMMV depending on cha and other such things. I've also not noticed much of an increase in terms of ego use/damage. In some cases, it was feeling drastically lower, actually.

I'm just waking up, so pardon if I'm a bit slow and/or am missing something. However.

Albion is almost as strong as Elohora/Luciphage, and is far stronger than any other half-formed. Luna is on par with Japhiel, while Selene is slightly stronger than Methrenton.

They (Nature Avatars) all also have health on par with Elohora/Luciphage (~4x that of a fleshpot), and are in areas where raiders cannot meld (not without killing Maeve first, anyways).

They have always had the strongest attacks in the game, until we brought Supernals on-par (and spheres/fleshpots were given the same setup, with variations on afflictions/damage types), and any changes after that were made universally. IE all Avatars heal, do damage when attacked, and do a vengeance blow. All numbers (chance-to-occur) are identical.

I wholly dismiss any notion that the demon lords/supernals are somehow more difficult to kill - Vortex's raidability has been the topic of discussion for some time. As well, I understand Celest had a meld waiting on Celestia, anticipating them? They also went and fought 3 half-formed at once - not advisable! Celest does it when they have large numbers (25-30+), and even then I wince - and then they only skate by because Baalphegar is a bit weaker than Japhiel, most like.

In fact, I checked over some logs (back when we did the upgrades, we wanted to be able to track how long, how often, etc things were being killed for each side!):



A total of 5 minutes to kill 3 Demon Lords (yes, I know they go for Baalphegar and face 3 at once). Comparatively:



Killing 3 Night Avatars took 20 minutes. And these don't even all gang up at once, but rather you can kill gwyllgi, then glumki, then lhiannan and only be fighting 2 at a time, at most. Of course, both of these are far too short to be clearing at that speed. Ideally, a Demon Lord should take 8-10 minutes to kill, Luciphage markedly more (~15 or so).

Sorry, not buying it! I really think any perception of difficulty variance between half-formed and nature avatars is simply perceived and not actualized.

All of that said, I neither agree nor disagree, right now, that some things (like the rate of self-healing) may need to be toned down. Far prefer to see it in practice. But that's really a conversation for another thread.

With the greatest of respect, your conclusions and desires are flawed.

Just like to point out that killing 3 night avatars took more than 20 minutes - there was 20 minutes between the death of the first and the death of the third, but that doesn't include the time it took to kill the first. Ditto for DLs.

I will say, though, that I didn't think Japhiel was any stronger than the Night Avatars. We just weren't expecting Japhiel's death (and Shakiniel's followup room attack) to wipe out so many, so we switched to Shak rather than moving out and getting back the people who died. We didn't make this mistake on the Night Avatars (so no, we weren't fighting smobs for all of those 20 minutes).

I didn't think you were fighting smobs for all 20 minutes - it's not realistic to expect someone to spend 20+ minutes fighting smobs non-stop under the old system. Obviously you should move, regroup, and go at the next one. For better or worse I did not set it to log first attack, so I can't speak to how long the fights themselves actually took - however my sole purpose was to break the notion that Half-Formed are somehow far harder than Avatars. It definitely took you far longer to kill two more night avatars, compared to how long Celest took to kill two more demon lords.

It (that half-formed are not collectively far harder than avatars to raid) was the only conclusion I was drawing from it (looking at you, Ilyarin!), which is wholly supported by all the other facts and numbers like mob level, attack speed, % chance for each attack, damage/afflictions of each attack, and scripted chances to heal, room-attack and vengeance attack - all of which you can't see yourselves.

Any other conclusions you think I drew from it are purely fabrications of your imagination, mister! Or mis-speakings of my early morning mind!

That was back in March. Look for the most recent one, and try to figure out exactly when it started, too. We had Nil completely staked out, with even a full Viravain war shrine, and really only had the disadvantage of a minute or so of forewarning for Sahmiam before we went up due to running into him at the Aetherplex. We did the same sort of set-up with going for Baalphegar first. It went pretty badly, but from what I could see, it wasn't from surviving damage so much as just not being able to kill them. They'd just heal constantly. We only had Sahmiam harassing us at the start and it took a good long time for them to gather a defence force. It only went -really- downhill once the defence force actually got in and started actively picking off the whole group instead of just charging in one by one. They did not manage this quickly. I can't say how long exactly it was, but it really did just get boring sitting there, swinging to seemingly no effect.

If Avatars can self-heal too, and supposedly with the same proc rate, I can only feel like there is something suspect in the code. Moon avatars were never that -tanky- after the changes. Do the heals proc more if there's three DLs/Supernals in the room as opposed to two? Or was it more a matter of simply not having a large enough raid group comparative to your instance? Because if that's what you're getting at, okay. If it's not, then, uh... still not buying it.

And you can leave it at that. I just wanted to make sure I still got my two cents in.

We'll definitely look at cosmic lord/avatar healing. That was one of the workarounds we used so they wouldn't die so quickly because we couldn't increase their health anymore! Now we can, so there may not be a reason to have it (except possibly for RP/effect, in which case amounts should be greatly reduced).

I can't comment on the xp/essence changes since I'm human with a 100% xp buff at the moment, but the esteem changes and the gold changes are really nice.

but I will be really sad when credits sell for like 9k a piece

Has anyone else done much on astral? I feel like UV-tunnels might be better at this point. My ability to chain link has dropped considerably with my inability to kill fast enough. I have this vague feeling an 8+ person astral group won't work particularly well now.