While we are in the test cycle, any chance that something could be done so that shield wasn't mandatory for pvp? It seems pretty broken that you have to use evasion/shield in PVP or lose. Thanks!

Math just isn't nice considering one possible formula makes evasion God, and makes the shield and parry skills worthless. This was 2.0.

The second possible formula makes shield useful, but also pretty necessary if your enemies are using ranged attacks. This is what we have with 3.0.

The third possible formula available allows parry to help against ranged attacks, but must be tempered so as to not make shield a worthless skill again. This is what I've selected to pursue for now...


Players are just BEGGING to need only 1 defense. If I had a million dollars I'd hire the 10 coders and spend the next 6 months making a generic "defending" skill, and stick ARMOR skills in with SURVIVALS. Then we'd figure out what to do with Paladins, Traders, Rangers and Barbarians that use the Armor skillset. Messaging would ultimately just be "fluff" as there would be no parry, evasion or shield skills.

Of course, with this approach shield type no longer matter, nor does weapon balance. DFA goes away, etc. Some Guilds would lose out substantially as they no longer have an easy to train defense available to them. Others win, as the harder to train defense goes away. Like I said, million bucks, 10 coders, 6 months. Maybe we'd improve it... but I really think it'd just be a bigger mess and DR would lose in the end :P

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"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

<<The third possible formula available allows parry to help against ranged attacks, but must be tempered so as to not make shield a worthless skill again. This is what I've selected to pursue for now...>>

This is a really good plan and I'm excited to see it work out down the road.

I feel evasion should always be your primary form of defense, why risk damage to gear when you can just walk by your foe? Unless like parrying had the chance of flooring an opponent instead of off-balancing them?

How about if against missle attacks parry only used like 75-80% of your current stanced parry skill percentage - (which would account for random accidents like batting a rock into your own head)

Making shield still the preferred method for missle defense, and parry's trade-off being it's better for weapons, and with Evasion noone's left with just one defense to rely on and benefits/options to choose from. (cept bow users, but parrying with a bow or parry stick has been on my 'want' list for awhile)

And I'd guess against multi-opponents it'd be best to have all 3 available? or that too crazy and easier to stick with parry?


I mentioned Defensive techniques before, and I still think there's some viable and fun silly options -
fortify yourself behind a shield or 2 for extended defense boost at the cost of RT(tank up while targetting a spell)
plow from missle to melee and back to missle while holding a shield with no disengagment penalty and attack damage
why couldn't a barbarian try to use an impact weapon to bat an arrow or slung stone back at their opponent?
set up to try and disarm an opponent who attacks during that window leaving their weapon at their feet(whenever that becomes a thing)

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An agonizing pain fills you as you feel your tongue turn to powder in your mouth! Through a haze of uncertainty and loss, you realize that something you just said was very wrong.

70-80% max stanced parry for missile and 70-80% max stanced shield for melee. A bit more enticing now that there are abilities to lock folks at melee.

Sorry for double post.

> Players are just BEGGING to need only 1 defense

Its not that players are begging to need only 1 defense, you added shield as a second mandatory defense in order to survive in pvp, for 3.0 shield and evasion are BOTH required to have any sort of chance in pvp, this lack of options or choice is what upsets players so much. parry is virtually useless in pvp right now, something im hoping will change with the update of auto-defending.

Shield is FAR more than necessary in 3.0, its shield or die. If you even survive not using shield long enough to parry, the first time you successfully parried an attack your opponent would switch to ranged or magic after laughing at you for using parry like a n00b.

>Players are just BEGGING to need only 1 defense.

I most certainly am, because it allows guilds to play to their strengths, which is their primary skillset.

Respectfully, all the current system does is force almost everyone to train tertiary skills to huge amounts over their circle requirements to remain effective at circle, and I'll never be on board with that. As an interesting aside this is also what causes a large portion of the rampant amount of underhunting, but maybe 3.1 has that back to acceptable levels.

Yes, a possible formula to allow parry to help against ranged attacks could help somewhat on the surface for guilds that have weapons as a prime or secondary, but the intention is to make people continue to need to train with and wear a shield. So, I can't really say I'm the biggest fan of that either.

I honestly believe that parry should just straight up be able to parry everything. There's already systems in place where Z defense is not as good against X attack and better against Y attack and better for multiple engagement and so on, it would certainly need tweaking and those systems would need to be applied to things like arrows and spells as well...

I not pretending to have any great, complete, magic answers, but I don't see why a 1 defense system has to be ZOMG EVASION IS GOD or nothing else, I'd like to think there's more options in the universe than that.

Or Maybe there's something we could do with the way the game uses the 2 defense system, like a weighted formula based on guild, or skillset placement, or circle.

In the end I guess I'm not begging for a 1 defense system. I'm begging to be allowed to stop training tertiary skills, at a point, without completely destroying that character's effectiveness.

That said, maybe the parry-ranged-helper-formula will be awesome and I'll love it to the ends of the earth and I'll never have anything to ever complain about ever again.

:)

I'm kind of curious if anyone has ever used a shield/parry setup with evasion at 0%. Just wondering if it would even be a viable option.

Abison/Rystien

I'd like to just get rid of stances, use all your defense skills at all times. Most guilds would be pretty equal skillset wise and you wouldn't worry about having to balance shield and parry, they'd both be useful for defending since all your skill is used.

>Since there are no attacks that require Evasion/Parry and disallow shield,

Not Yet, anyway. In an ideal world, Evasion, Shield and Parry would be unique and tactically interesting, instead of Evasion, Improved Evasion, Situational Evasion skills we have now. I think really solving this issue requires those 10 coders and a redesign of how combat works in DR. On the other hand, I think the last, pseudo-stanceless system Kodius proposed last sounded like the best-fit idea I've heard.

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>Forgive my snark, but welcome to the life of a warrior mage.

It'd be nice if there were options for not using shield, such as training offhand and dual wielding a light edge for parrying melee weapons or the like. That said, there's a reason historically shields have been used by... everyone and every culture.

<What if you want to use only shield because your shield is enchanted to do something fun when the arrow hits it? Removing stances prevents this.

It'd already generally be suicide to do that now since evasion helps so much. Parry can't block arrows anyway so it'd be just like using 100 evasion / 80 shield stance right now that people do when they wanna block something.

<What if you want to train only shield skill because you are backtraining? Removing stances prevents backtraining from being possible.

Why would it prevent backtraining? You'd basically just be at 100% shield stance at all times and it would train just like it would right now if you were backtraining.

<What if you want to stance down to die in a RP scenario.... nope!

Like others said you could just have a general defense stance for that.

I really don't think everyone with shield in a lower skill-set would throw it away even if parry came up to parity with shield against ranged. This game is still a role-playing game. Even the people that don't do much of it still probably like this game for the character creation depth that it has. For my part, I don't like the shield requirement because I don't like the idea of my mage character with a shield--simple as that. If parry worked against ranged, I would use it a lot of the time and I would train it even if parry were tert for me and shield were secondary. Training both of them is smart, and would continue to be done by most people, for the same reason training a couple weapons and armors is smart--the game changes and you never know what you're going to wish you trained. Diversify your text risk and whatnot.

People make non-mix-maxing decisions like my example above all the time. They do it for guilds, they do it for weapons, and they do it for spells. Not everyone uses 2HE despite the unavoidable truth that it is more powerful than SE right now. Even if everyone were allowed the option of switching weapons right now, a great many people would stick with the less powerful choice that they just liked for their character.

> If I did that, I'd never ever train shield again. As a tertiary skill, shield will always lag behind by as much as 20%. Far easier to train parry a little bit harder or make use of my parry buffs to even things out....

Someone who learned shield and parry the same speed would have to pick between the 2, its only natural that a weapons secondary would focus more on parry because they can do it better and learn it more efficiently. This is something built into the guild, not a failure on shield or parry. Thats like making shield weaker because paladins learn it too fast.

The goal here is to make parry an option while still keeping shield on peoples mind, if the rollover cost of parry is too steep, shield will still be mandatory for pvp. If you want to tempt more people into using shield, i would suggest incorporating a "pick yer own secondaries" feature into character creation, and just have circle requirements mold to those. One of the biggest drawbacks of shield is that the majority of guilds are armor tert.

>>How about if against missle attacks parry only used like 75-80% of your current stanced parry skill percentage

>If I did that, I'd never ever train shield again.

By that logic, no weapon terts should train parry since it's inferior to evasion/shield. I don't see why giving people flexibility in their defenses is a bad thing. We're not asking for shield to be bad, just for all defenses to be equally viable.

>Really liking the idea of making Parry an exceptional defense when overwhelmed. It does give it a better niche.

Parry is already fine for most PVE, as long as you're not fighting something with ranged or spells. Please don't make parry a niche skill, or something that people just train for TDPs until they switch back to evasion/shield for PVP. IMO the best system would make all three defenses important at all times for both PVP and PVE, but second best would allow people to choose their best two based on the situation.

I would also like to point out that this is not entirely a PVP issue. As far as i know there is eventually no way around hunting either assassins or armadillos and i don't even know what happens after that. So, unless you want to be forever stuck in a web or become a human pincushion, you need to have a shield for PVE.

I like the idea of shield and parry co-existing in a complementary manner. I suppose this would allow training both parry and shield on ranged attacks?

100 evasion/ 90 shield for walking around, bow hunting/shield training
100 eva/90 parry for pvp or invasions unless I swap it over to shield(sometimes I go back and forth a few times in a minute depending)
100 parry/ 90 eva for training parry

90 eva /100 shield is my custom that I never use since it gets me killed(few hundred rank gap between shield and evasion)

>>hunting without using a shield

You Could milk resuscitants or sky giants to lava drakes and be able to ignore assassins and dillos, but that wont' help you any against the drakes ash attacks, or the cabalists fire shards that come after them, or if you're a cleric you can hunt souls since they flex to infinity

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An agonizing pain fills you as you feel your tongue turn to powder in your mouth! Through a haze of uncertainty and loss, you realize that something you just said was very wrong.

>The thing is, if all defenses are equally viable and we stay in a "you need 2 defenses" situation, then there's no reason to ever train the 3rd defense (other than TDPs). The goal seems to be to make training all 3 defenses necessary.

Ya! Just like we have to train every weapon, and every armor, and every magic, and every survival, to be viable!

I don't, really, see the issue with allowing a 2 defense system, even if it means we 'don't have' to train the one we regard as crap.

I stick with parry since it's 250 ranks higher than my shield, if they pull out a thrown weapon or bow and I swap to shield I'm going to be taking damage either way, AC protects me from TM, if they put their missle away I move back to parry - usually the other person doesn't notice the defense swap, and could easily catch me off guard stuck in parry if they just swapped back real quick or threw their melee weapon.

Really depends on what the other person uses - most people use missle weapons but will stop if they miss too much, empaths tend to brawl, not many people use exclusively melee weapons either.

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An agonizing pain fills you as you feel your tongue turn to powder in your mouth! Through a haze of uncertainty and loss, you realize that something you just said was very wrong.

From the numbers and the code, it appears to me that DR's inventors didn't feel it was logical, even in a fantasy universe, for players to parry arrows, bolts, slingstones and fireballs with a dagger. I tend to agree in principle.

It is also my opinion that Evasion was always intended to be the most versatile defense at the expense of potency. Pre-100 ranks, evasion was crippled by armor hindrance. Evasion was also most affected by status effects and balance, and as % increase its effects were not felt much at low ranks.

Unfortunately the inventors failed to write code with math that worked properly above about 100 ranks. As people advanced past circle 30, evasion became better and better, and shield became a handicap. Parry... well, poor parry!

We can likely accept that parry should be useful in some way against incoming ranged attacks. But honestly, I do not see messaging for parrying ranged attacks ever happening. We'd probably just default it to use evade messaging.

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"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes