Off the cuff thought.
Discipline, Engage: You move in to engage someone in combat. Does not require or consume eq/bal/anything. It is a declaration of intent/positioning on the battlefield/whatever.

If you are -not- engaged in combat with someone: You deal/receive less damage, have a moderate/great chance to resist affs from each other, etc. (not sure how this would interact with demenses and other area effects, though. Maybe it should only work against single-target effects? Rationale being the 3rd party is afraid to hit their ally and so spend more effort focusing on hitting their target and less on putting power behind the hit.)

If you -are- engaged in combat with someone: Combat proceeds as normal (i.e. the way 1v1 currently works) with your target.

You may not engage in combat with more than one person at a time.
If your target is engaged in combat with someone else, you may not engage in combat with them.
Also, there is no bloody mana drain associated with this ability (ditto ought to be true for obliviousness but that's another can of tuna).
Knighthood Engage would work as an addon to this, issuing its current set of effects in addition to the above.

I do forsee some problems with this, such as Ixio- engaging in combat with me or someone equally novice with regards to combat, but this should 1.) give smaller groups the ability to actually do stuff 2.) require a little bit more tactical planning with regards to target selection 3.) promote Lord of the Rings-esque group fights that are really lots of small, 1v1 or 1v2 fights happening across the greater front.

Critique me.

I bring 8 you bring 10, so 2 of your guys cant hit any of mine? Either way, super fighter targets your, say wiccan. No one else can help the wiccan mana kill? No one can hinder for timed instas like judge? This would require changing far too many skills to ever really be considered. Although I do like the sound of a mono e mono skill I do not see it happening at this time. Sorry

Mono e mono translated to 'mono y mono' in my head, and made me think of.. same-sigil marriage. Vote for enchantment rights!
I assume you mean mano a mano.. literally: "hand to hand"

Discrimination!

Hey, but you can stick a flame to a flame? Flamers unite? Poor monoliths, living in a hypocritical society that has a double standard. Two flames, that's okay, but two monoliths? Out of the question.

you know those flames, they'll latch on to anything that sits still long enough

Two minutes together and we're ordering a U-Haul for them?

I know the type.

Best derail ever?

I had an idea kind of like this one recently. The trick is to figure out how to not leave people out or leave them feeling like they lack control, but I think I thought of something.

How about a combat skill or a knighthood skill, let's call it phalanx or formation. I was originally imagining it as a skill for a spear specialization used by knights, hence the term phalanx.

What you do is make a squad, then for each spearman or person using the combat skill, you set up some divison leaders and this spreads the squad out evenly into a line of rooms. This creates a "snake" or "battle line", or a "host.". The squad members are divided up evenly along the length of this line. The squad leader's group makes up the head of this line/host, and can lead it around as if it were a snake.

If a group of non-squad members enters any room that the line occupies, they are automatically divided up evenly along the length of the line. I imagined them being herded by menacing spears. If they lead their own line into an enemy line, then they can control how their group gets divided up, otherwise it is divided up randomly but evenly.

At first, you are blocked from moving into a different room on the line other than the one that you started in, though you can retreat away from the line. If you kill the spearman/division leader person for that part of the line, or make him retreat (not into another part of the line though since that would be blocked), then that part of the line "breaks" and movement into other parts of the line becomes unrestricted for those people. This is because they have broken through the enemy line by killing whoever was holding it or making that person retreat.

I think this could work thematically, would break up teams, but leave players in control and let everyone play. It would also be cool since you would be holding or breaking through the enemy lines as you fight.

Feedback please

As it's been said all around on the forums... not many people believe that forcing 1v1's is the solution to problems, nor many like the concept. I'm not sure why're you sticking with that idea.

I agree that there should be more emphasis on smaller group fighting then giant zerg fighting, but this idea sounds extremely complicated both to implement and use. This would also break classes designed for group action.

While I believe that horde v horde combat is ultimately detrimental to both gameplay and setting, I don't believe that forcing 1 v 1 fights is the way to fix that. Perhaps something to the effect of increased damage/affliction resistance based on the number of people who have targeted you with a hostile ability in the past, say, 20 seconds.

Something like this discourages targeted blasting, while still allowing groups to be useful together.

Other IREs have bigger engagements and that doesn't seem to make it detrimental for them - Lusternia is already "too small" by many peoples standards. How would making it even smaller actually help?

So you're claiming that other IRE games have bigger group fights and that you want group fights in Lusternia to be even larger?

That... isn't what he said at all. O.O

Not A != B

Well, I did ask because I wasn't sure what he's saying. This was a thread about group fights and he's either off-topic or wants what I was asking.

I agree that it seems silly, but the point wasn't to make it "can't hit", I was going more for a "don't hit as hard". Though frankly I was always under the impression that classes and skills were balanced for 1v1 combat, so I thought this was a good compromise to emphasize 1v1 while still permitting a group aspect, albeit in a lesser form. I agree that there needs to be teamwork and group play, but frankly huge group v. huge group is just not nearly as fun (for me at any rate).

You probably have some idea for how disheartening it is to show up to a group fight only to have 20 people all hit you at the same time, and you go, in the immortal words of Noola, "Bamsquish".

Vadi mentioned that other IREs have big group fighty things that don't seem to be as problematic. How do they solve this problem? If their solutions work, why should we bother reinventing the wheel?

Higher emphasis on 1v1 fighting isn't necessary; that's not Lusternia's focus, nor has it been in quite some time.

I don't see why it should be, really. To me, team efforts are more challenging and more rewarding.

That said, encouraging smaller-scale group scuffles isn't a bad thing (ie, 3v3 that was mentioned earlier, for example).

I'd prefer future additions that encourage smaller group fights than adding some forced mechanic to all pvp.

You can do this partly by making the focus about something that isn't org vs. org. The war seal event is one such example.

Another thing you guys should consider is that people can learn the game much more easily in 1v1 than in group combat. So that's another reason why 1v1 will always be part of the game. Since it will always be part of the game and the game will therefore be balanced for it, it should probably occur outside of the arena. But some kind of 3v3 setting would be a good start I can agree.

Arena.

It exists precisely for 1v1 learning.