>Anti-Stealth-Skill is niche because, based on what you said yourself, you can only train it against specific critters that use stealth.

Unless you couple perception training to HUNTing on at level critters, which is what I think people are arguing for. No one is saying 'make Perception only trainable on at level stealth checks', and while you are right to point out that one cannot train perception to 1750 in Goblins, it is still grossly out of check with reasonable critter levels, and all too easy to train.

>I like the idea of perception being a psuedo-survival mastery skill, where it can improve your effectiveness at locksmithing or outdoorsmanship or prospecting or etc etc etc.

Personally, I think the game should get away from these dual check all encompassing things more frequently. I dislike for example that SvS is so overlappy, and no one is really training a character to have great Mind but weak Spirit. Perception should be the anti-stealth check and maybe involved in a few other things, but it shouldn't be arbitrarily roped into a bunch of random skills, and it shouldn't be trainable in virtual perpetuity as easily as it is.

>Which can be impossible to use in some hunting areas, especially modernized ones, given the way critters in those zones generate.

Then I guess you can't train perception on those critters. Just like not every critter is skinnable, or drops boxes.

>That's not what the word means. There are obvious and specific reasons why perception is involved with checks that relate to finding things. At best, you're arguing that it's redundant.

I don't think Perception has anything more to do with Locksmithing or Outdoorsmanship than it does with Forging. Or First Aid. Or Missile Weapons, Appraisal, Evasion, Tactics, or... I'll stop there... any number of skills which in some way shape or form require 'perceiving a thing'. Perception being tied to Locksmithing and Outdoorsmanship is, to repeat myself, an example of a skill being arbitrarily roped into something else.

The problem is you can easily apply that reasoning to a dozen other skills that do not factor perception in any fashion. It's arbitrary because that reasoning is only being used to justify its use for a couple of skills despite being more widely applicable, probably for legacy design reasons that frankly no longer really apply.

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Thayet
@thayelf // http://thayette.tumblr.com

"But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it's not corruption at all — it's law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law." — Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

>>The problem is you can easily apply that reasoning to a dozen other skills that do not factor perception in any fashion.

Not sure which situations you're thinking of. Finding herbs, metals, woods, traps, monsters, marking targets to steal... they all sound perceptiony. Not sure what situations don't factor in perception but could/should and aren't for arbitrary reasons.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

> Hiding while in melee is especially ridiculous - particularly if any of your opponents are currently facing you.

I would love if Stealth was involved in 'attacks of subterfuge', akin to perhaps another Tactics skill. That we can only utilize stealth as a binary 'attack from hidden' feels a bit dated and silly.

>Finding herbs, metals, woods, traps, monsters, marking targets to steal... they all sound perceptiony. Not sure what situations don't factor in perception but could/should and aren't for arbitrary reasons.

Respectfully, I think this is unreasonable of you to say because I provided a number of skills that also 'sound perceptiony', and you chose to edit them out in your response to me. Here they are again - "Forging (or any craft). Or First Aid. Or Missile Weapons, Appraisal, Evasion, Tactics"

Hence the reason I said 'arbitrary'. There are a number of skills that also 'seem perceptiony', but don't factor perception. Having it tied to Locksmithing and Outdoorsmanship is thus... arbitrary.

Tactics requires you be able to spot and exploit vulnerabilities in your enemies' defenses. Clear application for Perception there.

Evasion requires you actually see where your enemy is and spot where they might be moving or if they're feinting etc which is a clear application for Perception.

First Aid requires you be able to examine and judge the severity of a wound as well as spot differences in gross and subtle anatomy. Clear application for Perception.

Appraisal requires you be able to spot minute details of an object you are examining in order to determine its composition and value. Clear application for perception.

And on. And on.

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Thayet
@thayelf // http://thayette.tumblr.com

"But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it's not corruption at all — it's law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law." — Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

Honestly, we all seem on the same page for "hunt should have experience capped more accurately to the critter level," so the rest of this stuff is spinning wheels because perception the skill is not going to just become trainable against anti-stealth critters.

GMs just reassessed how skills work for 3.0 and perception made it. I'd be very surprised if perception suddenly stopped training and working for finding materials, foraging, finding traps, marking, and so on.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

<<I fail to see how spotting a flaw in a gem or a chink in armor is not essentially similar to spotting a hole in a box acid might spew out of or a bit of moss under a log.

Because you're looking at it conceptually as a searching for anything, whether a detail or an actual object. I'm saying the reasoning that appears was used to justify the choice of actions was those where you're searching for an object or creature that is hidden in some way that were decided to be the specific criteria for whatever reason, whereas simply looking for a detail about an object didn't qualify. Probably because the latter was decided to be more of an appraisal thing.

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>That's not searching for a THING.

Oh comon, that's a massive shift of the goalposts and an extremely semantic argument to boot - in this case 'thing' is basically code for 'physical object to be found' which is an incredibly narrow and silly way of describing 'perception' in any context. I'd say identifying the type of lock in a box is no different than identifying the value of a gem/pelt, or determining what needs to be done next to a crafted object, or ascertaining a weakness in an enemy.

In fact, 'spotting the trap' sounds about as identical to 'recognizing the perfect gem' or 'identifying the weakness in an enemy'. I think the language in certain ANALYZE combos even includes the the phrase 'spot a weakness' or 'identify a weakness'.

In any case, this is a pointless circle to go around. The reasons for keeping Perception tied to a few abilities but not others is not well defined, and since Perception is most noticeably used as 'anti-Stealth', then it should be trained in a similarly defined difficulty range as Stealth, meaning HUNT should only train in critter appropriate ranges.

<<Oh comon, that's a massive shift of the goalposts and an extremely semantic argument to boot

No it's not. Semantic would be telling you that massive doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Bonus: Pedantic would be telling you that it is spelled c'mon, or more properly, come on.

<<In fact, 'spotting the trap' sounds about as identical to 'recognizing the perfect gem' or 'identifying the weakness in an enemy'. I think the language in certain ANALYZE combos even includes the the phrase 'spot a weakness' or 'identify a weakness'.
<<The reasons for keeping Perception tied to a few abilities but not others is not well defined

But you're not just 'spotting the trap'. You are locating an object that you can extract. Perception has been an 'aid in searching for some object or creature' skill for the duration of 2.0 and 3.0 not the 'notice or exploit a detail about something' skill.

All I'm saying is that it's not arbitrarily decided that ability X gets perception as a modifier to it and ability Y doesn't. There is a reason for it. As a result, arguments based on it affecting an arbitrary selection of abilities are baseless on that merit.

You're free to argue about the rest of the stuff like non-combat applications of the skill can be used to greatly over-train combat applications of it, and combat applications of the skill teach in an overly liberal range for a combat skill. Those can stand on their own as arguments just fine without being bogged down by other arguments without merit.

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<<And numerous examples of the exact same behavior is found in many other skills that don't require perception, e.g., crafting, where you are 'locating an object that you can extract' from the total project.

This clearly indicates that you don't understand the point. You are not searching for an object or creature in your example, therefore it is not a Perception based task.

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>This clearly indicates that you don't understand the point. You are not searching for an object or creature in your example, therefore it is not a Perception based task.

I mean, I actually think this means you don't understand the point being made, but we're clearly just talking past another at this point, so I'm not going to continue this with you.

>>Why does transferring wounds with Empathy teach Perception then if this is the one and only true definition of the skill?

At least you finally found a needle?

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

It's a low level thing.

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Thayet
@thayelf // http://thayette.tumblr.com

"But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it's not corruption at all — it's law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law." — Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

I find your description nonsensical and itself pretty arbitrary but it's obvious you're not going to budge on the whole "perception shouldn't be included in checks for actions that have their own dedicated skills already" thing so vOv

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Thayet
@thayelf // http://thayette.tumblr.com

"But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it's not corruption at all — it's law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law." — Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

1) Capping perception with hunt at seems fine to me but... seriously, is there really a problem with people flocking to low level areas so they can learn nothing but perception? Realistically, everyone who's HUNTing in combat is doing so at-level unless they're backtraining. And if they're backtraining, they're giving you a chance to catch up. Exploit that!

2) If people are spending significant amounts of time training Perception out of combat, they're already giving you a MASSIVE PvP advantage because they could be learning combat skills instead. You don't need stealth when you can just stab someone instead, or melt their face off with TM. Are we just looking for TOTAL domination of people who spend a lot of time out of combat, or are required to in order to circle?

3) As was said before, Perception is not just a combat skill. In particular, it's used for the gathering systems, which are no small part of the game. You may not use it, but it's a big part.

4) Perception needs to have effective ways of training it. I'm all for more in-depth, more complicated ways of training it, but in the absence of Perception training, Stealth is the best defense in the game. If I can't see you, there are a very small number of ways to affect you. Game over. And a good chunk of the game is Survival tert, besides.

5) Warding is a combat skill too, and provides numerous ways of protecting against both weapons and magic through barriers and spells. Warding is arguably even easier to train than Perception, given symbioses and research. Are we going to remove noncombat experience for it as well? IMO this is a perfect apples-to-apples comparison.

6) Stealth needs to be able to be trained outside of combat due to it's potential for abuse. As was brought up in the Rising Mists thread, with the exception of Thieves, Stealth is primarily used for abuse of lower level players. And it's REALLY good at that.

I'm all for making Stealth more interesting and useful at-level instead of just making it impossible to train Perception, though. I train stealth as a WM, and it would be nice to have something significant to do with it in the cases I'm actually able to hide from someone.

- Saragos

<<5) Warding is a combat skill too, and provides numerous ways of protecting against both weapons and magic through barriers and spells. Warding is arguably even easier to train than Perception, given symbioses and research. Are we going to remove noncombat experience for it as well? IMO this is a perfect apples-to-apples comparison

To be fair, the GMs did say that they wanted to make Warding a contested skill defence like any other combat defence, but that comes with all sorts of issues. E.g. very few creatures would actually teach the skill and there would likely be lots of gaps in the hunting ladder because of it. And even if there were no gaps, everyone would hunt the warding training creatures exclusively so the skill could be trained.

The solution they went with instead was to keep the status quo of the skill being a cap on potency with the ward itself being contested instead of the skill, and expanding the variety and availability of wards while at the same time making sure each individual ward wasn't a comprehensive package and that even stacked wards couldn't provide a complete warding coverage.

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> As was brought up in the Rising Mists thread, with the exception of Thieves, Stealth is primarily used for abuse of lower level players.

I prefer the use of sharp pointy things to abuse lower level players. I'm not sure what stealth does to abuse them, perhaps hide and tease them to death from the shadows?

<<5) Warding is a combat skill too, and provides numerous ways of protecting against both weapons and magic through barriers and spells. Warding is arguably even easier to train than Perception, given symbioses and research. Are we going to remove noncombat experience for it as well? IMO this is a perfect apples-to-apples comparison

< To be fair, the GMs did say that they wanted to make Warding a contested skill defence like any other combat defence, but that comes with all sorts of issues. E.g. very few creatures would actually teach the skill and there would likely be lots of gaps in the hunting ladder because of it. And even if there were no gaps, everyone would hunt the warding training creatures exclusively so the skill could be trained.

< The solution they went with instead was to keep the status quo of the skill being a cap on potency with the ward itself being contested instead of the skill, and expanding the variety and availability of wards while at the same time making sure each individual ward wasn't a comprehensive package and that even stacked wards couldn't provide a complete warding coverage.

Yeah, I remember that conversation, and I agree with that decision. I'm not griping about Warding. Especially given my impressions of the changes of the barrier review. In general, the 3.0 world's unspoken rule seems to be that defenses against an action are more easily trained than the skill for the offensive action itself. I'm fine with that and don't see it as a problem. As I said before too, while I don't really see HUNT experience with lower level critters as a highly exploited problem to begin with, putting some sort of cap on it would also not be the end of the world.

- Saragos

> If I am successfully sniping you with Vivisection I already outclass you. Which, with stealth, is hard to do now.

But what makes it so hard to do? This is a legitimate question - I'm not asking it rhetorically. I keep track of my experience gain, and with the way I train now, which is entirely in combat, I have my shield, evasion, stealth, and perception gain roughly in line. I have a bit more perception, as a legacy from before I got my training act together, but otherwise it's in line with what I would expect from my skillset. My stealth definitely isn't lagging behind. In fact, it's ever so slowly gaining on my perception due to the rank difference.

If the issue is that these people can just train out of combat... again, we're back to the fact that these people are choosing a sub-optimal way to train and are neglecting combat skills, or are forced to for required skills. If their out-of-combat training time + their in-combat training time is greater than your in combat training time, then that's just an issue of the other person spending more time training than you. That's just how it works. If some of their training was sub-optimal, your combats might be in line together to give the illusion of parity, but it would only be an illusion in terms of time spent. If their combats are lower than yours, but they still see you, then just kill them with weapons/TM and be happy? I mean, oh well if they've power-trained Perception but aren't up to par in combat. As a WM, it's not as if I can score all my kills with TM.

If the problem is that stealth caps out before your weapon skills, again, I understand. I've experienced it with my baby necro even at low levels (in fact, it's pretty painful there), but this is an issue that everyone with an important primary skill that needs to be trained in combat deals with. I don't really see it as a problem or something that needs to be changed.

Finally, if the issues is that they can WATCH or engage other countermeasures once you're there... again, I see this as appropriate. I believe the whole, "I can attack and attack and you can't see me no matter what you do" thing should be the province of battles only where you completely outclass the opponent. This is why I think Stealth attacks should be better than they are. Because, at-level, you shouldn't assume that you're going to get lots of them in, IMO.

- Saragos