Since it departs from the cyclicals discussion here are some responses to Krooner's understandings and question. If this is too much from PAFO it will probably get removed.

>As I understand it, with the 3.0 shock mechanics, it's no longer a death-sentence either. You can remove shock with some reasonable mechanics, rather than 'takes 40000 people 4000 hours to heal you and then you're still scared forever you terrible pitiful thing we should all hate' like in 2.0

My first run to ESN 100 (complete lack of sensitivity) was just shy of 400 hits and included 26 kills. You can hit ESN 100 from ESN 0 in less than 90 minutes.

In 2.0 the shortest stun I ever had was 60 seconds, which was the very first one. If you continued to attack as fast as you could the stun time kept increasing and was normally multi-minute each time. Kill stun lengths ranged from 8 to 12 minutes. Every shock inducing action resulted in a stun no matter how shocked you were. Each kill re-set the IG timer. Anti-Stun and Awaken would mitigate the stun to a degree with AS being far and above the better of the two.

In 3.0 stun length started at 8 seconds and, once a bug was squashed, decreased as ESN increased until at ESN 100 you no longer suffer a stun. I haven't tried using AS yet in 3.0 but a combination of Awaken and AD helps minimize or eliminate the negative effect of the stun. Even Awaken by itself goes a long way.

Versus a 2.0 kill, in 3.0 at ESN 100 and unaided by another, an Empath can recover the use of all abilities and spells in less than 0.034% of the 2.0 IG time. It requires doing the shock quest. Abilities and spell casting are dampened. If only doing the quest once, full recovery can be accomplished in less than 1.766% of the 2.0 IG time. This presumes no shock inducing actions are taken while recovering and no outside aid is received.

>So, empaths can, conceptually, attack, and still function reasonably well, up to a certain shock-point?

Up until you hit ESN 100 you still have use of all abilities and spells albeit dampened. There is no direct IG gauge in Plat, or Prime as I understand it, for where ESN is at any given moment. The flowers in Test were only accurate to the whole number. An early 3.0 GM post stated that the first shock action resulted in 2 hours of IG recovery time and each ensuing action added a half hour. Feel free to PAFO.

Asbhuan