Veyrzhul:

How does hindering help me with this unless I completely lock him down and make him unable to attack at all?
Separating from the beast can theoretically help with normal beasts, but with pets, not at all since they can be moved and made to follow without use of eq/bal. Separating from the ents does nothing at all.

So paying a good bit of money for something to make me better at combat is a bad thing?

No, but what does it matter if all he needs to do between his attempts is hinder and run, and they hardly cost him anything?

Four power an attempt for either of us to get no where, that's a decent cost. when considering the kill method used takes 8.

I think you just got a really bad roll of the sleep dice

I love how you convolute things, Sondayga. I was stating in response to Rivius why moving you away from beast and ents is not a valid counter for this. What has your spending credits to do with that?

Four power to possibly seal the deal is what you consider a decent cost? Not even remotely.

And sure, this was an outlier in terms of duration, but it still shoudn't be possible to happen. Even without those outliers, though, the problem of sleeplock attempts being too easy (via sleepcloud or, a bit less reliably, beast spit), as stated by Placeus, persists.

Also after asking about how much health fae do have:

(Envoys): Iosai says, "Their health won't really mean anything to you."
(Envoys): Iosai says, "Looks like between 1 and 2k, generally."

Fae can be critted, so they can die in 1 hit. I agree, sleeplock is amusingly easy to pull off. Especially for Moondancers, who have a passive mana drain, they only have to upkeep the sleeplock and wait for Toad to be possible. Not so much for Shadowdancers, who have to actively upkeep the sleeplock and the mana drain. Let's not even talk about the aeon differences between the two.

Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you get unlucky. While pointing to other tactics isn't exactly the best way to make an argument, I do LOL at the fact that anyone thinks spamquisition is any less lame than this.

I'd rather beastmastery be deleted and get the old riding skillset back, but that definitely isn't going to happen.

Sitting in your demense and not ignoring whole parts of your archetype would probably help. You know, that occasional stun can break up combos making them miss their chance to time with pixie. You can even watch the timing on their pixie and time your attacks to hinder them at that moment. While they can call their ents back to them pretty easily with channels, this isn't free for beast whistle. Put some hadrudin on that TK dagger. Throw up a shield at a conveniently timed moment. There is a load of things you can do to actively defend yourself, and even several you could do to help do this passively. Complaining that you have to take a moment off of your offense to do something that messes up the other guy's offense... god forbid you do anything other than mash that TK vessel alias.

Requiring balance/eq to toggle metawake is probably the easiest solution for this, though. As it is now, you could probably spam metawake on right about the time their pixie is going to attack and have a chance to completely negate the tactic, as pushing commands through in this way often can get your command in between their chained, aliased commands.

Shikha, did you read the log? I was asleep the WHOLE time. That's like saying, "Well, sometimes you get unlucky and get hit for a 20 second stun by the first attack from a warrior."

If I use animatedagger, I lose part of my offense. That's acceptable, but I promise you, if I have to spend between 1 and 3 hits on his pooka every time he calls it for 1 power, I'll NEVER get any offense going at all.
As for getting back your beast, I already said that it is free for pets to move them one room and have them follow you. No eq/bal required.

What you and some others seem to fail to see is that what Sondayga did wasn't some brillantly timed maneuver; timing it with his ents might help in a marginally small number of cases, but is mostly just completely irrelevant. So, throwing up a shield at a 'conviently timed moment' - what moment is that? As soon as I start my offense again, at any moment he likes, he can pull this off. Sure, he might not have quicksilver stripped or the ents attack right after the sleep, but that hardly seems necessary.

Right now, you need bal and eq to put metawake back up. Obviously not to turn it off, or the whole dominate thing wouldn't work. Aside from that, he could just put all of those commands into a stratagem, so there goes that trying to sneak in a metawake/insomnia/whathaveyou between them.

RE: Inquisition

Run after infidel. Or serpent. Or, if you have a fast eq or bal race, shield. It also means disrupting your attack, I'll give you that, it sucks. But you can do stuff. You know what I could do while I was sleeping? Dream and snore, that's it.

Wiccan sleeplocks have always been pretty frustrating to deal with and beastmastery only made it easier. And lol...inquisition remarks. 12p to pull off something that you know is coming and doesn't even kill- great setup for a Celestine finisher. We're talking about helpless sleeping targets not people scrambling around trying to hinder a sacraments user. Oh Iasmos.

Shamarah:

Oh, I forgot to mention. The best counter to sleeplocks is to keep an affliction on you (e.g. ablaze) that deals damage. (Although a smart wiccan will try to put out your ablaze with cleanse or nature rain. I can't remember what other affs work for this.)

Aquamesne heals ablaze, for enemies and allies alike, so being in his demesne and putting himself on fire wouldn't have done a thing really.

Malicia:

Wiccan sleeplocks have always been pretty frustrating to deal with and beastmastery only made it easier. And lol...inquisition remarks. 12p to pull off something that you know is coming and doesn't even kill- great setup for a Celestine finisher. We're talking about helpless sleeping targets not people scrambling around trying to hinder a sacraments user. Oh Iasmos.

I've never died due to Inquisition, sans one time where I wasn't paying attention to it, and those times I never tried to escape it, and I was hindered by my own demesne at the time!

The ease of sleeplocks for wiccans has been an issue for quite a long time now as it really does not require much forethought or planning to successfully pull off this combo. Just a bit of luck (something that can be fairly inexpensively spammed and reset in the manner others have described) while waiting for a long sleep tick. There's a few ways I can see to address this while minimally affecting wiccan viability:

Solution 1: Add a 2.5 sec balance cost to pooka ordering.

Solution 2: Require balance and equilibrium to turn off metawake and add additional general skills to resist forced actions.

Either way, I think balance being required to drop metawake is a good option here. It can still be done, but would make it harder, involving a bit more prep-work and an opportunity for the other fighter to try to counter. Having it droppable off balance but then needing balance to put back up is lopsided. Wouldn't have saved you in this instance, because you didn't have it up to begin with, but would give people an option in the future.

I'm also a fan of ALL beast actions taking the user's balance, but that's mainly because I feel like players are way overbuffed these days, and less that it has to do with this particular conversation.

@Malicia: Inqui prep costs 6 power and you get a lot of support afflictions passively along the way. Sure, the inqui itself costs another 6 power, but it only costs that if you hit them with it, you can sit there and spam it with only a slight mana penalty, and after that it's NEARLY a sure thing that the person will die. Use holy light and it's lol easy. A Nihilist can spend 12 power between deathmark, contagion, ectoplasm, crucify and get a glorified web that stops sipping and applying for a few seconds and does a bit of damage (way more time on the prep for this too)... To finish the sacrifice, which is more luck based than anything, it costs yet another 3 power. Sure, I agree that abilities that cost more power should be more powerful, but if the sheer amount of power involved were intended to be the only determining factor the basin should be littered with corpses on crosses.

I'll just always hate inquisition because it seems too much of a sure thing unless the other person runs. With the right angel investments, the passives given from heretic and infidel on top of that, use holy light to extend the infidel and the inqui window, the notion that you should just wait for the perfect moment and web the celestine is a pretty good way to get yourself killed. Don't say shield, because your beast can strip that. A combat mechanic whose only truly reliable counter is fleeing isn't conducive to 'good fights', and seems to me to run counter to the indication that almost every other set of combat skills give, which is that fights between evenly matched opponents should be long and difficult unless one party makes a glaring mistake. Inquisition heavily favours the celestine in a way that only a few other tactics do for other classes... lo and behold, those few other tactics come into conversation and those very same inquisition users suddenly cry foul.

Don't get me wrong. I agree the method sondayga used is totally cheap and overpowered in that the person on the receiving end doesn't have a lot they can do about it. Change metawake to be harder to strip, and be sure to put it up next time. Maybe take a look at your own team's stuff too, though.

@Neos: Certain archetypes are more resistant to inquisition because of passive effects that can hinder the celestine even if you are pretty messed up.

Additionally, any changes to pooka should likely carry over to nihilists and cacophony forced action versions since it's essentially the same mechanic at work.

Nydekion:

Additionally, any changes to pooka should likely carry over to nihilists and cacophony forced action versions since it's essentially the same mechanic at work.

Be sure to try to spread the nerf as far along Magnagora as you can. I see caco's sleeplocking people all the time! Nihi's can actually do this with a demon doing double darksilver, order metawake down, doublewhammy sleep, but changing domination to take a balance loss breaks a lot more legitimate tactics and uses than it fixes broken ones. Making metawake harder to strip in general sounds a lot more reasonable a solution to me than ruining dominate.

Also, way to 'accidently' leave out the guilds with dominate powers who are allied with your org right now.

Sorry Shikha, tldr. If you have issues with inqui, make another thread. You're agreeing that sleeplock is overpowered and posting novels about inquisition that are likely inaccurate.

Malicia:

Sorry Shikha, tldr. If you have issues with inqui, make another thread. You're agreeing that sleeplock is overpowered and posting novels about inquisition that are likely inaccurate.

Doesn't sound like you didn't read it, sounds more like you aren't interested in responding. That's cool though, because I don't expect the forums are the place where anything like this is going to be fixed anyways. I wouldn't even ask an envoy to waste a report on something like inqui, because it keeps getting buffed, so obviously the administration views it as needing to be more powerful if it isn't working as intended.

Is this discussion really happening again? Requiring balance/eq to turn off metawake would make sleeplocks completely impossible on anyone competent.

I suggested a few things initially. Of those, two aren't all that helpful: Being able to put up metawake off bal/eq doesn't help at all, really, and attaching an eq loss to ordering only means there is a little more timing necessary. The latter is better than nothing, though.

The third suggestion still stands, mainly to prevent outlier cases like what happened to me:

Cap the time you can fail to wake up. Not sure about a reasonable amount.

Honestly, though: In the end, all of these solutions aren't great as long as the premise of putting your victim to sleep as the INITIAL attack of the burst offense stands. Either the wiccan still occasionally has enough time to pull off the kill even against perfect curing; in that case it will always be a matter of 'attempting it until it works', without the victim being able to help it. Or perfect curing will prevent the kill in all cases, that's arguably even worse.

I have no idea how feasibly either wiccan guild can achieve mana kills without sleep locks, if at all. I'll just reiterate what I already stated in a thread about sap:

SOMETHING THAT PREVENTS YOUR OPPONENT FROM DOING ANYTHING BUT TRYING TO CURE
(like sleep+aeon or sap)
SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE TO BE THE FINISHER OF AN OFFENSE, NOT THE OPENER.

Because it's just damn boring to either die without being able to fight back or cure out and have them run away and try again once they have their power back.

Further idea: Change (or remove) Sleepcloud so that it can't be stacked with other things (including warriors dual-spamming morphite + rend).

Something like making sleepcloud make a mist around the owner, next person to attack the owner gets hit by the sleepcloud, or sleepcloud has a random delayed-time effect; basically, making it so that it can't all be shoved into one macro.

Sorry, but 4p for a macro that can put someone down and unable to do anything for 18+ seconds is not a cost. So what if the time is random? It's still possible to get that, and that's a problem. Nor does such a macro actually take any skill, it just takes trying repeatedly (and running while recovering power); you don't even need the pixie when you have sleepcloud, the only fae required is the pooka.

There's no prep involved in that, either.

Well the problem with the sleepcloud change is that if you remove that, you still have the issue of beast spit morphite. It's slightly more difficult since you have to work around resiliance but it's still essentially the same problem.