WATCH needs to die too. It has long outlived its appropriateness now that stealth has been more than beaten into submission and brought into line. No other such thing exists for any other kind of contest that I can think of. If I anticipate you coming at me with a debilitator I can't throw in a command to steel my will against your attack and get a massive bonus to my defense. If I see you trying to target me with a spell or swing a sword at me I can't perform some maneuver that helps me avoid that type of attack. And on and on. Those things go through the skill system. I don't get arbitrary bonuses to my defenses against them simply because I know who's coming at me. IIRC, WATCH was supposed to go away a long time ago actually, but never did for some reason. Now would be a great time to kill it.

>> If their combats are lower than yours, but they still see you, then just kill them with weapons/TM and be happy?

Why should I be okay with not having the ability to utilizing my a primary skill in the way it was meant to be utilized simply because I have secondary and tertiary skills to fall back on? Honestly, I wish snipe would get gutted and reworked so I had more reasons to use it. I should have a reason to want to Vivisect someone over using literally any other TM spell. Right now I don't. It's just for training. And I don't even use it for that most of the time.

I think if you actually look at where everyone's perception is compared to literally all of their other skills, in particular their combats, you will see that this so-called parity you're imagining due to people not backtraining or whatever largely doesn't exist, at least it doesn't for anyone I know. Hell, I'll post my skills just for giggles:

Perception: 421 38.57% clear (0/34)
Stealth: 357 70.68% clear (0/34)
Evasion: 352 49.11% clear (0/34)
Targeted Magic: 341 76.82% clear (0/34)
Shield Usage: 305 89.52% clear (0/34)
Small Edged: 279 50.58% clear (0/34)

It's not my highest skill (that dubious honor goes to Scholarship) but it's close. And compounding all this is that I can move perception and keep it moving no matter what I am hunting. Hanging out with some newbie friends in an area ~300 ranks of combats below mine? No problem, perception is still chuggin' along the same as if I was hunting at-level.

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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 feel like you're missing my point, though.

Cool, we have something in common, because you're definitely missing mine.

>> If a survival secondary or tertiary has more Perception than you do Stealth, they've spent more time training than you have.

Question: If I could lock Stealth at 350 ranks in field goblins, would this be acceptable to you? Why or why not?

>> If the person fighting you trained 100% of that time in combat they are going to have a LOT more of all combat skills too. Weapons, TM, defenses, etc. There's a good chance you're not going to be able to touch them.

That's actually not been true at all in my experience. People tend to have MUCH higher Perception than they do everything else even if it's a tertiary skill, precisely because they can keep it locked and moving forever far beyond the point they normally would be able to. Things start to pull away once you close in on the 1000 rank mark, but in the range I'm in it's no contest.

>> That's actually not universally true. ...

Someone having and throwing up a barrier spell or using their tactics skill to improve their balance is not the same as having access to WATCH, not even a little bit, for a whole list of reasons. When I can enter a single command and have an instant, uncontested, undispellable, RT-less half hour long capped 25%+ bonus to my evasion ranks vs your TM, then we can talk equivalencies.

You totally got me on the IP thing though.

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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

> Question: If I could lock Stealth at 350 ranks in field goblins, would this be acceptable to you? Why or why not?

No, but for different reasons than you'd think. No, because stealth is an offensive skill, and offensive skills need to be trained against critters at level. That said, if it were already that way, it wouldn't be that big a deal. Every hour spent training stealth in goblins is an hour you're not gaining at-level combat skills, so it wouldn't bother me. But remember, I already agreed that some sort of cap on HUNT seemed fine.

> That's actually not been true at all in my experience. People tend to have MUCH higher Perception than they do everything else even if it's a tertiary skill, precisely because they can keep it locked and moving forever far beyond the point they normally would be able to. Things start to pull away once you close in on the 1000 rank mark, but in the range I'm in it's no contest.

I'm sorry, but it's not a matter of experience, it's a matter of math. As a survival tert, I cannot absorb ranks faster than a survival prime. If I have more Perception than you do Stealth, it means is that I've just spent more time absorbing Perception experience than you have Stealth experience. And the higher the ranks we are, the greater a time disparity of absorbtion that implies. If I'm smart, and training optimally, I've been training it in combat and have tons more combat ranks than you do too. If I'm training less optimally by sitting in front of the WM guild all the time or doing whatever, I've STILL spent more time absorbing experience than you have, I just don't have the combat ranks to go with it.

If I'm facing someone who has tons more ranks than I do from noncombat learning, either through teaching, or casting warding/augmentation spells, but I can beat them, I'm not going to be sad that I couldn't use every skill the way I'd like to against someone, I'm going to be thrilled that my training was superior and they left me a gap to exploit and thankful they didn't spend all that time training in combat instead, because then they would have murdered my face off instead.

Let me put it another way. If I rolled up a noob Necro or Thief and you made a noob anything, and we were going to duel after 200 hours each of training, I would be absolutely thrilled if you chose to spend a significant chunk of your time collecting rocks and being taught in town.

Also, FWIW, I don't train Perception in RP situations because it's too spammy.

> Someone having and throwing up a barrier spell or using their tactics skill to improve their balance is not the same as having access to WATCH, not even a little bit, for a whole list of reasons. When I can enter a single command and have an instant, uncontested, undispellable, RT-less half hour long capped 25%+ bonus to my evasion ranks vs your TM, then we can talk equivalencies.

Will agree to disagree with you on this one.

- Saragos

If that's the case, and your passively watching, then you shouldn't be able to do anything else, unless you take a nerf. So if you watch, you in turn take a hit to evasion perhaps. I doubt that would go over so well.

>>It is more like
> a single command and have an instant, uncontested, undispellable, RT-less half hour long, and stacks with other perception buffs.

Fixed that for you.

In my experience WATCH gives a bigger buff than actual perception buffs. When PvPing at-level (or even against people above me) I can usually power through a perception buff or negate it with my own perception debuff. If the same people use WATCH then everything I do with stealth (which is everything as a Thief) is negated by the buff from WATCH. It allows people who can't even see signs while I'm hiding to stop me from even being able to hide if engaged, and spot me while trying to hide if not engaged.

> Watch needs to go away completely as a mechanical command and turn into an RP command, or it should eat concentration like a hungry hippo. Preferably the former.

I just really like the idea of encouraging stealthy players to actually act stealthy instead of the patently ridiculous hiding in front of your face when you already know they're attacking you. It just doesn't make sense unless they blind you. Watch is a decent way to achieve this, but I think there's a better way. If they were to ask me to refactor the Stealth situation, I would probably do something like this:

* Buff snipe/ambush/poaching accuracy and damage. Make them heavier on vit damage to make them a good opener to get through the base Damage Reduction from hit points.
* Remove Watch.
* Add an escalating debuff to consecutive stealth use against a single target that increases each time you hide after making an attack, up to the standard debuff cap. So after the first attack, the debuff would grow with each successive hide up to the cap. More stealth skill gives more hides before you hit the debuff cap. Invisibility status gives more hides before debuff cap. Snipe might also give more hides before hitting cap.
* Make sure there are a few contested ways of avoiding this debuff, to a certain point. Tactics would be a good skill to use. For example, throwing dust in someone's eyes makes a subsequent hide not add a stack to the debuff.
* Make sure the messaging is good to accurately tell players what's going on rather than just an invisible debuff that you only know about if you read the forums.
* Separately work on Thieves and Backstab if they're not up to snuff following this change.
* Leave PvE alone. Significant work would probably have to be done here before importing this system.

Example:

Necro decides to kill Cleric from stealth. Spur of the moment thing, so no buffs on for simplicity's sake on this example.
Necro hides - no debuff, since no attack has been made.
Necro deals good damage.
Necro hides again successfully, despite the debuff - 5% debuff (1/4 of the cap)
Necro ambushes again, hits again.
Cleric debilitates, hits with a weapon and clips Necro with a spell.
Necro is concerned about the next hide with the debuff and injuries, throws icky necro goop into the Cleric's eyes. Success!
Necro hides. - Still under the same 5% debuff from before, but Cleric's perception is also penalized.
Necro ambushes again, does more damage.
Cleric recovers from eye goop.
Necro tries to hide again - 10% debuff. Fails due to injuries and debuff.
Necro tries again to hide, hoping to get lucky. - 15% debuff. Fails.
Necro decides to fight it out in the open from here on. Cleric has taken some serious vit hits, so if Necro can land some hits, they should do some serious damage.


Something like this would be more dynamic and interesting to me, especially if there were several different ways that targeted different types of defenses to delay that debuff. It's just a suggestion. You guys might hate it. But I've never liked the unlimited hiding right up in your grill thing from DR, and stealth attacks feel weak to me.

- Saragos

I don't mind the stealth system as it currently exists, I'd much rather see changes in other areas of game balance.

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I agree that the ability to hide ad nauseum, even at melee, is a bit much, and I think SARAGOS come up with an interesting and potentially viable response to the somewhat overpowered bonus granted by WATCH. Now that wounds penalize hiding to a much lessened degree, damaging an opponent to try to weaken their stealth capability is not as surefire a way to counter stealth; instituting something that provides some respite from incessant hiding would be an interesting and more strategic system.



For some reason you just can't stop thinking about glarmencouplers.

Hiding at melee should be like a barbarian or anyone trying to debil a person over and over... God stealthy people would rage. You actually have it really good.

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Wow, it sounds like 2008 up in here. Stealth isn't the insta-win that it used to be guys, regardless of how unrealistic you find it. If you get beat by someone you know is coming because of stealth then you shouldn't have been fighting them or you need to learn to PvP better. Stealth is about useless in at-level PvP these days. There is more ways to counter stealth than there is to counter perception.

>>Nope stealth isn't Insta-win but there is no reason to go back to those days either.

I agree. Personally I'm ok with how things are right now, watch and all. I could get on board with capping Perception gain to the same as Stealth for combat, but with the multitude of ways to extend Stealth learning (especially for survival primes) I think that would be a pretty hard thing to do and would end up benefiting stealth users more than anything.

Unless someone is willing to go through the entire stealth system and re-balance everything from the ground up, then I say leave it alone. Any band-aids that would be put in place would just swing it in one direction or the other and create even more angst for one group or the other.

> all the non-combat ways to learn perception aren't going away, so it'll probably even out.

Interesting. I would love to find some non-combat ways to actually move perception (I can't seem to lock it with collecting, hovers around 7/34). What are the other ways to move perception outside of combat?

If not, COLLECT <item> should work for any item you collect. You'll lock outdoorsmanship long before you'll lock perception, but you should be able to lock perception at any skill range within about 15-20 minutes just using collect over and over, since the exp scales with rank. I haven't tested at the extreme high end, but it's for sure good for more than 600 ranks at least. Probably a lot higher than that.

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My suggestion for fixing WATCH(at least until a full stealth review) would be to give the watcher incremental bonuses for every Search that he performs against x opponent up to a maximum of y%. This would give it a utility value in situations where the person is completely unable to be found, but the WATCHer would have to work for it, rather than getting it as a freebie.

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

>> In the past there were ways to train stealth to infinity by way of certain NPCs (shadowling) and those were removed due to being unbalanced, so I'm not really sure why these were implemented in this way.

Because the more things change, the more they stay the same. DR has always been "MageRealms" and right before 3.0 rolled around GMs became very afraid of stealth as a "God Mode" defense and commenced nerfing it in many different ways, the current inflated perception cap on HUNT clearly being one of them.

Now that we have act on hidden, worse armor mixing penalties, quasi-invisibility, and WATCH (Don't even get me started, I ranted when it was released. Slap in the face to stealth guilds... Whoops there I go), things are seriously skewed in the other direction.

That's really the bottom line here, is that these ridiculous inflated perception caps are a direct measure to counter certain GMs previous assessment of stealth as a win button. Unfortunately for anyone playing a stealth primary, those days of stealth being OP are gone and yet here we are with these silly countermeasures still in place. Such is life in DragonRealms.