Posted by Lachdanan on October 14, 1999 at 04:53:09:
I figured I'd put my $.02 in on some of the recent posts. First off is the Hasted Berserking Rager conundrum: Now that I've droned on and on and on about THAT, I'd like to point out that I, too, faced foes that I had NO chance of defeating. An evil shaman was able to tool me like nobody's business. Dispel, weaken, plague, poison (oops no swords no matter how much +str eq I had) and then bust out the demonfires. No bashie for me, no trip (if the guy was smart), etc. I can't complain about that, however, because I know that if _I_'d been a shaman (Knight shaman with FD? Nasty) I could smack those shamen around. However, I wouldn't have been able to beat up those axe-spec warriors as well, then. Or thieves. Or outlast a hold person like I could with Lachdanan. Each class isn't able to defeat EVERYONE. After playing Lachdanan I got really up for the idea of being a shaman. After getting tooled like that, I thought yep, I'm going to kick some ass. I did kick a fair amount of ass, but I was still meat against certain things, at which point I simply had to run. My point is, even if it is true that Invokers can't do ANYTHING against a thirsting rager with spellbane up, this isn't unbalanced. Invokers can pretty much tool anything else in the game. I've seen an Invoker kill a Lich solo using buffet. I've seen Invokers dish out UNSPEAKs once a round with pillar, when levelling. That they can't always kill a rager that's thirsting doesn't make me too sad. And no, I'm not playing one right now. This post is already entirely too long, I'll comment on some of the other things I wanted to later.
Diarmuid's complaint is, if I'm understanding that there is "nothing an Invoker can do" to these berserking rager types. Of course there are things you can do, and I think you realize that, but there's nothing you can do without an external source. Ie you could get your earth elemental, your water elemental, even that creature from Drizzt. You could get those abishai things that Zendrac ran around with all the time. Also, you can simply run away from the ragers into a bunch of mobs. I realize Invokers can't summon, but there are mobs aplenty in the Old Thalos area. Also, there is the quicksand factor. Remember that spellbane and bloodthirst and resist are like 3 tick powers. Slap down some quicksand and a conglaciation, and the rager in question (unless cloud or arial) takes around a MANGLES every so often for the time it takes them to struggle out of the quicksand. I'm certain there are more things an Invoker could do against a single thirsting rager. However, in almost every fight I saw you die in, there were more than one foe (dishonorable DOGS! :P). If you are going to complain about not being able to defeat two or more of them, sorry, I'm not with you. Now yes, many many times I'm sure you had to word from a single rager who had bloodthirst and spellbane up. Likely when you didn't have all sorts of mobs to smack them around with. But having to word is quite a bit different than dying.