Posted by Diarmuid on October 15, 1999 at 07:26:26:
In Reply to: I didn't make my point clear, I'll try again. posted by Lachdanan on October 15, 1999 at 06:19:53:
> > I'll write where I respond to specific things below. > Yes yes, I know, I've been told about Pillar being two rounds. My mistake. > > Since when? How can a healer hurt an Imperial Antipaladin, both at hero ranks? Probably just as often as you can hurt a hero rager bloodthirsting, a healer can harm the Imperial Anti-Paladin. Yes, healers aren't meant to be player-killers, they are meant to give help to groups. Invokers are a mixture of both. Great at pking some classes, at some levels, but also great at helping a group, with shields and raw damage (on mobs). I can give other examples, if you want: Arcane muter vs. Entropy Lich, Dawn thief vs. Imperial Duergar Axe spec (good example Arolin, thanks, I'll use it), and I'm sure there are more. In every single post I have written I always exempt healers. Look at my farewell note, and my other posts. Healers are always exempted from the discussion regarding all classes being able to at least do something to another class. As for your other suggestions: I played an arcane muter and I fought a lich and I didnt die every time, I even won once, and fled the other times, but managed to hurt him each time. How? Even arcane muters get minor forms, like boar or wolf. If the muter chooses to go defensive, or water, those are deliberate choices they have made, knowing full well they limit themselves in certain ways. Invokers do not do that, they make no such choice, they are dependant upon their spells. As it should be. And their spells should be damn powerful, given all it takes, in real time hours of practicing, to get them. And as for the other ones, the thief can hurt the duergar, he can blackjack, backstab, flee, knife, etc. It's not sure, its hard, but he *can* hurt/harm/affect his opponent without resorting to something that is not a power/skill/spell of his class. The invoker cannot. And I'll deal with your mace thing in a moment. > So don't cast. Load up on +dam eq to have in your inventory, a nice noremove mace, and just walk in and beat the poor rager to death. You get two attacks for probably MUTILATES (with good gear) and he gets 8 attacks for hits and injures (and that's if he gets ALL attacks, dual wielding). Considering you will have at least twice his hp, you'll either kill him or make him run. Instead, you tried every single invoker spell on baned thirsting ragers, and gave them...well, let's count...50 invoker spells (roughly) multiplied by 4 free hits (more or less) a total of 200 free hits you gave them. Yikes. Alright, lets address this. First, you say load up on +dam equ. How much stuff do you think someone can carry? You assume I have all the protections, but that takes up alot of space. Thats three different sets of wands for barrier/aura/shield. Thats something for stone skin. Thats something for flight. And lets not forget food and all the other general things you need. And no matter how much +dam I have, I still need the regular hp/spellsave/mana equ too. But fine, lets even say I have this +dam set you speak of. I tried using a mace. Because I know that elemental hands only gets one attack per round, rather than the two attacks regular weapons have. (Why this is the case, that using your elemental hands gives you only one attack per round, has never beenexplained to me and doesn't make sense, but we accept that for purposes of this discussion). I had a norem mace, avg 28. Fordurn to be exact. And I had had myself enlarged so I was still holding my held item. Oh, and I hasted myself so I could get that extra attack and better parrying. Guess what? The rager is hasted too, and he parries much better than I do, and hits much more, and when I did hit him, it was for lower case damage, not the MUTILIATE you are talking about. And he hit me on average four times a round. He was dual wielding, of course. So it boils down to he was parrying/dodging/evading my attacks, and I was not parrying nearly as much of his. Even with all my damage reduction, he hurt me more than I hurt him. Sure, I didn't have so much +dam as you envision, but it would not have made that much of a difference. I don't have enhanced damage. My 13 damroll compared to a 30 damroll say? One hit per round? When they get four or so per round? (And that doesn't include their typed attacks, that's just the automatic attacks, so you have to add in drum, or pincer, or cranial, or flurry, or throw, or roundhouse, or whatever.) It just doesn't work. Guess what? My two > > If you have to go get elementals that means the powers of the invoker are not up to the fight at all. > Invokers are damage-spell-blasters. But they can wear +dam eq and a mace just like any healer. So again, if you want solely things you can do within yourself, here's one. But it doesnt work. Trying to be a warrior fighting a real warrior just didn't work. > > You obviously haven't done this very often. First, notice that every rager assassin hero, for example, is an arail -- taishanrawr, veshiko, etc. And lots of cloud giants -- who all fly right over quicksand. > There's a reason for this, I'd wager. Quicksand screwed their lives for so long and they saw others get screwed for so long that they said 'hey, screw this, I'm making someone that flies.' Point is that my suggestion wasn't a cure, it was just that, a suggestion. I realize that and you are absolutely right, they wanted the perm-fly. I would too. I simply said it because of your suggestion. I obviously thought of it too -- and by the way, using it was when I had most of my opportunities to test out spells. When I would catch nesam in a quicksand, I would flee, come back, try a new spell, etc. That's how I was able to try all the spells. To test all the various suggestions. To switch to a mace or dagger or exotic. To refresh my protections if I still had hp enough to return and try another round or two. Etc. > But even so, I did exactly what you suggested. The conglaciation did lower case damage on them, Lachdanan. In two ticks of them being trapped in quicksand, I got a decimate! MASSACRE and devastate!. Two lower case damages and one upper case. Not even mangle. That did, well, pretty much nothing to them as you can see. > But if you were in there hitting them with your trusty mace of dragonis or equivalent, that MASSACRES would come in handy. So long as you weren't giving them 4 free hits every other round. Yeah, the extra two lower case damages might have helped. But since the average warrior hero has what, 850 hps, it wasn't going to help enough, not even close. You can do the math. > > And another thing, saying that bloodthirst and spellbane are only 3 tick powers is misleading. > No, it isn't. A hero warrior probably has...roughly...400 mana at his disposal. Truesight is 50, thirst is 5, spellbane is 50, resist is 50. At 105 mana every three ticks, he's going to run out before he can truesight again. I won't even go into him trying to keep up warcry, or berserk in combat. I haven't played a rager in about a year, so I'll trust you on those numbers. But it doesn't really matter to me because whatever the numbers are, this is what they are in fact doing. And they can let trusight drop since I can't blind them, and they can rebloodthirst with ease, as your numbers showed. And warcry is every 51 hours, right? Not really a problem. Fact is, since they all seem capable of doing it, it isn't a problem of enough difficulty to justify the current situation. > > The issue I spoke to regarding multiple foes was completely separate from the bloodthirsting/area spellbane one. The issue there was one I've had all four years I've been here, which is that many people break/leave their roleplay, they break the role of the char they have chosen to play, in order to get a pk win. > I agree with you 100% on this, I think the roleplay of those ragers in your log was utterly shitty. If you aren't here to complain about losing, just the poor roleplay, then 'nuff said, IMHO, you are just plain right. I was never here to complain about losing that particular fight. I even titled the post about it so that it should have been obvious. I had already spoken out about area-spellbaning ragers, and if anyone had cared to really read my post, I said that i would have likely died anyway. I mean hell, there were six of them. No, the issues are entirely separate. The general roleplay of ragers has just sucked the last couple months. I would be very interested to know how many hours it took to hero ragers like Taishanrawr, Veshiko, Sinrath, etc. I would wager quite a bit of money they pretty much speedranked up when they heard the master cabal was not going to take the orb, and I would wager very much that they have thin, if any, character development. I can't snoop, so I cannot be sure. If I am wrong on this, so be it. I apologize. But I doubt I am in this instance. > > I disagree here. Many classes don't stand a chance without some form of external help. Try fighting a Master Invoker as an Imperial sword-spec without shields and/or haste and you'll see what I mean. Also see my example above. Ah, but it is not as simple as that. First, he can get haste, by himself, just as I can get barrier/aura/shield/stoneskin. There are postions of haste. Also, he is not required to use swords, he has two specs. And, he can always trip the master. And, as everyone always says, mages are in general better at higher levels and lesser at lower levels, and should go especially for invokers, they *should* have some advantages at higher levels, because of all they go through to get there, all the hours of perfecting spells. And besides all that, again, my point is not that every class should be able to KILL every other class with relative ease. No, the point is every class should be able to at least do something consistent, using its own powers, to harm/affect every other class. (Except healers.) That sword spec can use weapons that exploit a vuln. and unless he is using elemental weapons against an invoker, his swords will hurt the invoker. And if he gets the jump on the master invoker, he can trip, or whatever. > As for the stuff below, I'm not going to comment on it, I'm probably just wrong on all of it. My real point was that you saying that every class should have a chance to beat every other class alone without going to get other things isn't true, and never has been. I disagree. I think that's exactly what balance means. It should of course be harder for some and easier for some, but every class should have a shot, and a shot using only the skills/spells coded for that class. Thank you for replying. This is the sort of rational, non-agressive, non-angry discussion that the forum is for, imho.
> > If you need an external source, that means the class is not enough by itself to do anything. That means there is no longer balance. Each class should be able to affect/fight every other class,
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> >at least to some extent, and be able to harm every other class, at least to some extent, even if it's not easy. As it is now, not a single spell, nothing, will hurt the rager. Instead, even attempting to cast it, will harm the invoker.
> > That's right, no mobs. One on one every single class should be able to fight every single class with just the skills/spells that were coded for that class. If an invoker has to go get mobs, something is wrong and things are not well balanced.
The invoker, however, cant even really get the "jump" on the rager, because ragers can spellbane and thirst in combat, while we cannot quaff a fly potion, or reshield ourselves. If we are caught without a bashing shield, we get bashed to death. Etc.