That's essentially how it is set up for the Institute. You pick your damage type on weapon creation (based on the weapon you create).

What about people with attached runes, though? Need either an exception for them, or they're kind of boned when it comes to the adjustable damage types.

You could just resummon your staff/create a new weapon. The runes switch to the new item (or at least the do for Researchers).

Ahah, I wasn't sure if that worked for Researchers. I issued myself asking about it last night, actually.

That'd be a sufficiently good solution.

Summoning a runed staff does not make a new one, it just brings the old one back to you for no power.

Mages never needed tuning, but I think it should be fair that they only be able to tune their weapon at their nexus. Also a way to check their current tuning I guess.

Re: monks/warriors. I'd prefer if you consolidate all the elemental runes together, make it a super rune, then add the new types there, but if that's not preferable, I'd also be fine with simply adding an ability in Rituals/Totems that lets us further change 1/3 (or some other percentage) of our damage to excoro or divinus (as appropriate).

Not to throw that out there, but you know your current class/build has one of the most poison DMP out there, right.

And I'm sure that you've decided to randomly be the people's champion when it comes to poison DMP, which has nothing to do with any new attacks or anything, right, so I'm in favour of asking for more poison DMP as soon as we get more cold, lightning, and even more divinus DMP as well!

Yeah, more lightning resistance, please! Along the lines of Snake; 25 dmp to lightning in a readily accessible skill for everyone should do the trick.

Holy balls, is Snake really 25 DMP to poison on its own? Totems is rad.

Yep.

Terrible Idea: Introduce the new herbs fireblossom and cloudvine, which grow on the elemental planes of fire and air respectively. Whem mixed together, they result in a salve which releases asphyxiating when in contact with open air. Applying it to your weapon changes 33% of the damge it does over to asphyxiation damage.

I'm aware that I have a lot of poison dmp, but the trend is that most (if not all) the more available damage types have anywhere from 10-25 dmp available to any guild on top of their guild skills, between proofings and consumables. Pointing out a discrepancy in dmp avalible. The divinus/excorable issue has been well hashed, so I'm not going there, but of the types of damage: cutting, blunt, fire, electricity, cold, poison, asphyx, magic and psychic there exists either very few skills that output that type (psychic, for instance), a preponderance of resistance (cutting and blunt), or varying levels of commonly available (non-guild skill) protection. Commonly, you can get 10dmp to asphyx and breathing, 10 to magic from proofing, and 25 of the elemental types from proofings and potions. Poison dmp has a total universal availability of 6dmp at trans resilience, yes? Less then divinus and excorable.


Edit: And, no, no, no.. RAD is rad.

Edit: Someone suggested not having a full tuning available, but instead have a few preset (universal) setups that you can switch between, with whatever restrictions. You still get to pick your primary damage type, but you can't make it 100% that type.

We'd considered doing something like making it something you pick when you make your staff, but we wanted to have a bit of fluidity available (since they are stuck with that one until they change it, unlike bards/guardians/wicca/druids - the exception being the Institute). If it genuinely becomes a problem that it's 'too fluid', we could consider upping the power cost - but I really don't see the problem. If we did 'sets', you'd see 100% cold, 100% asphyx, 100% blunt, 50% cold 50% asphyx, 50% cold 50% blunt, 50% asphyx 50% blunt, 33% 33% 33%, and so forth, likely enough (for Aquamancers).

While there's complaining against 100% types, I don't really understand why - even if mages can shift on the fly, it won't affect you at all, beyond that they're hitting another of your already prepared DMPs - your DMP types won't shift, won't change, and you can't target vs a single type (though that might be an interesting skill in Discipline or something!) - I'm hoping someone could explain that too me. (Or is the complaint just about Asphyxiation?)

(Yes.)

(And poison.)

I don't get it. Is the vision that everyone should have universally accessible DMP to all damage types in the range of 20-30% For example, you suggest have additional consumables that protect against one specific poison type (like a consumable that provides poison defensive DMP).


Or is the vision that one needs to select the appropriate defenses, knowing full and well that one can either balance or stack against a limited few damage types (like tattoos or charms)? For example, maybe make frost, fire, galvanism mutually exclusive... though I think most people would believe that to be a bad idea.



I from what I've scanned from the BodyScan thread, certain damage types have too many defenses set against them (cutting, blunt, magic) whereas other damage types have no mutually viable defenses (asphyxiation, poison, psychic). Not sure if this is an oversight or part of the plan...

but it certainly becomes problematic when a guild can suddenly turn 100% damage mod against a damage type for which there are few to no skill specific defenses (excluding the ALL DMP).

No, I mean have coded in sets, decided by admins/envoys. So, as a geomancer, when you summon your staff you do the current damage layout of 50% poison, 25% cutting, 25% asphyx. You can then tune to the 'fume' staff, and do.. say... 50% asphyx, 25% cutting, 25% poison. Numbers off the top of my head. You have a few setups you can pick from, but you don't get to totally customize your damage typing.

And no. The complaint is not about Asphyx. You get 10dmp to that if you have lowmagic (and highmagic should have the same IMC), but breathing exists, so it's no big deal.

I was pointing out that it seems odd that all other damage types have buy-able dmp, or can be totally negated, but at trans resilience the common person gets 6 poison dmp. It dosn't necessarily need to be that you have 25-ish dmp to everything, but as long as the majority of types have universal dmps of 25 or more, it's odd (and unbalancing towards those types) to have a few that don't.

Edit: And who does psychic damage? The only thing that really comes to mind is.. mindburst.

Mindblast, not Mindburst, Mindburst is the Insta. Also psiblade, and demonweb,
But the damage on Mindblast and Psiblade is laughable so dmp really doesn't make much of a difference for them. Demonweb on the other hand, idk, since I've yet to see it used one me or anyone else.

I know exactly what you meant, and I'm also telling you that you would find a strong push (by at least one admin!) for there to be 100% cold, 100% asphyx, 100% cutting, and so forth options available to mages. That was the entire reason we brought in tuning - the fact they can pick fractions was more an added on feature.

I think you're carrying the issue way far afield - if the problem is that one or two damage types available to mages have minimal DMP, then that's something we can address. I really don't believe 100% cold or 100% fire is a problem - no moreso than 100% magic has been for moondancers, for example.

It's a red herring of an argument - the (perceived) problem isn't switching damage types, it's that some have available to them damage types with minimal mitigation.

Restricting access to said damage types isn't going to fix the problem (and only hurt mage bashing) - if there's problems, we should fix them, not apply band-aids so one class can function better than others or worse than others or however it is today with the latest problems.

We want surgical repairs where possible - this isn't surgical, this is a finger band-aid for a broken nose, as far as I can tell. It won't solve anything regarding the actual issue.

If we'd rather, however, we can go back to old mages, then give aquamancers a 100% asphyxiation (appropriate for drowning!), Geomancers 100% poison, aeromancers 100% lightning, pyromancers 100% fire attacks, and call it a day.

However, I realize that it A.) will allow mages a variety of bashing options and B.) will give them the same options we've allowed guardians/wicca/druids, however it will not C.) address the fact some damage types have far fewer DMP available than others.

Restricting tuning beyond what exists won't add C into the solution set, it'll just remove A and/or B from it.

@Eventru:

I've been logging in and skimming threads, but I'm still not sure why tuning was given to mages.

If we look at Bards, Druids and Wiccans they got a second attack while Guardians got an extra/modification to existing attacks.

Without having much of a look into the mob weaknesses and resistances it seems immediately obvious that tuning is superior if only because you can just tune out any resistances, if you aren't doing full damage to a mob it's your own fault. I'm not quite sure of any reason not to tune a staff to 100% except in cases where the weaknesses/resists are equal for the damage types.


That being said I'd be interested in looking at the spread of damage types available, if only because of the comment that restrictions on tuning will hurt mage bashing. Immediately guilds such as the Moondancers and Bards come to mind, both have the choice between a 100% magic attack or a fixed mixed damage attack, they can't, for example, strip out the cosmic damage type when it doesn't suit them and they will have to accept that but if mages are forced to work the same way it will hurt them? This sounds rather weird.