Also there was a lot of cat and mouse moving around. But mostly it was splashing off wards then trying to lure him into a Zephyr'd area so the zephyr would knock down his big one.

Mazrian

>> But mostly it was splashing off wards then trying to lure him into a Zephyr'd area so the zephyr would knock down his big one.

I think it was mostly your fire rain stacked with BG that destroyed my wards and left me completely void of inner fire. And there was plenty of time, in that fight, for EE to have progressed, if it had existed.

>My main gripe is just that it doesn't seem to be interacting properly with wards, specifically Toad and Turtle, because of the buggy nature of cyclics as a whole.

Ahh, I think the issue here is I'm approaching it from the perspective of a magic tert. We don't typically have any cyclical debils. Quick anecdote... Truffenyi's Rally (paladin spell) was made to be a cyclical, pulsing dispel that drained spirit with each dispel at an increasing rate. I would find TR most effective against clerics because of the quality and quantity of debils they can cast, but the deal was their cyclics would cause TR to trigger like crazy, sapping spirit FAST. Because the spirit drain increased very rapidly, it'd often lead to a stun followed by a spirit death because you couldn't release the spell in time. This could easily happen with other spells, too, and basically any guild with a lot of magical debilitation. I'm just singling out clerics for this story because it was fastest with them due to the cyclic pulses combined with the sheer number of their debils. Plus, there's something funny to me about a cleric being able to give me a quick spirit death even without targeting my spirit.

Anyway, that feeds my opinion that cyclics should stop pulsing when someone is immobilized, or maybe they should be made dispellable, although dispel isn't a great countermeasure against any spell (for me). There's also the issue of cyclical debilitation rendering self-dispel worthless since the next pulse will just reapply it. Cyclics seem to complicate things, although I do love them as an MU.

>Was I casting Fire Rain? Why would I have done that. O.o

Why not? Seems like the number of strikes would make quick work of wards.

>said thread also confirms a 20% defense de-buff, for those that were denying.

Said thread confirms 20% de-buff is misleading because of what it doesn't stack with, and the GM who said that thought nerve damage should probably do more that it does currently.

>Hydra Hex running Malediction on Defense

Not even remotely, again because of what nerve damage doesn't stack with.

>adding a hefty stealth penalty

Before the investigation we did when we released EE, the penalty to stealth for being wounded (not just nerve damage) was uncapped. Do enough damage to a player's eyes, legs, head, and nerves, and they had zero effective ranks. None of those locations even had to be bleeding, if the damage was spread out evenly amongst them.

>(I believe, unconfirmed) a penalty to perception

There is no penalty to perception for nerve damage that I can find.

Javac
That one guy

If you have questions or comments in regard to this post please email me at DR-JAVAC@play.net.

>>It was clearly referenced as not to interact with Toad, which is an elemental damage ward, simply because of the systems it was chosen to run through when it was coded.

Toad wouldn't interact with it because Toad reduces the amount of Elemental Damage you take. This is probably a confusing point, but EE is not damaging you(That is, you do not lose health when hit with EE, there is no Elemental Damage component such as Fire, Ice or Electricity to EE). I know that's weird, but it is not the same as being hit with say, an electric lance. EE is giving you Nerve Wounds and nothing else. Toad is not the ward you'd want here.

I can't say how well Turtle would interact, as a potency barrier. But have you tried Badger or Swan? Badger specifically helps against Magic SvS attacks, which EE is. Swan being an integrity barrier may be more helpful.

I assume you're combining these with Serenity.

Elemental damage is specifically three attributes on weapons and damaging spells - fire damage, electrical damage, and cold damage.

Mazrian

The expectation that a combination of wards should make you reliably functionally immune to any incoming magic is maybe the thing we should be unpacking. That seems pretty OP in the current paradigm.

Mazrian

>>The expectation that a combination of wards should make you reliably functionally immune to any incoming magic is maybe the thing we should be unpacking. That seems pretty OP in the current paradigm.


Wards are the one thing barbarians are supposed to excel at in current design, for one.

Second- no-one is making that claim. What you're arguing is that an end game top tier ward DESIGNED to make contests manageable as it is broken, with more effective warding than the EE caster's debilitation (and on par stats across the board to the caster's mentals) should be worthless and not matter in that contest.

I could see if my stats on the defensive end of the contest were below, and turtle just wasn't making up the difference. As a barbarian, my warding is 20 ranks behind my primary weapon, at over 150th circle. All stats are trained equally, and all on par (even or within a few points) of the caster's mentals.

It seems the expectation here is in the potency of your own abilities. I understand it gets a bit uncomfortable when someone tries to take away your toys, but we're just talking about making things more reasonable. The topic of spells of this type not playing well with other systems, including wards, is not a new topic, nor an unfounded discussion. EE is just, as I said, a particularly nasty violator. If you have a problem with the balance of other guild abilities, including barbarian, feel free to take it to the appropriate forum and plead your case and present your evidence and/or feelings on the matter.

>>The expectation that a combination of wards should make you reliably functionally immune to any incoming magic is maybe the thing we should be unpacking. That seems pretty OP in the current paradigm.

If I am a Barbarian I don't see how this needs to be unpacked. If I am skilled enough and use 3-4 of my limited active ability slots to ward myself against magic, why does it seem unfair that I am functionally immune to incoming magic?

It's a lot like Shear. I am giving up a lot to get that immunity. Barbarians just happen to specialize in it.

Immunity is definitely a bad word, and as I repeatedly outlined the statistics in the contests involved, it is balance I was looking for, not immunity. If I'm a magic tert warding from higher ranks than the caster of the debilitation, with all stats equal (or close to), it bears looking at. By design, the spell should be weakened when breaking through turtle, and by ranks/stat contests, that should be to a resistible range. It is far from that.

Also, the notion that the only thing wrong with how cyclics interact with the rest of the game currently being mana cost is hilarious. That said, if the imbalance is by design, then I'll go ahead and check out of this thread.

>>The expectation that a combination of wards should make you reliably functionally immune to any incoming magic is maybe the thing we should be unpacking. That seems pretty OP in the current paradigm.

>>If I am a Barbarian I don't see how this needs to be unpacked. If I am skilled enough and use 3-4 of my limited active ability slots to ward myself against magic, why does it seem unfair that I am functionally immune to incoming magic?<<

If you're playing a Barbarian it can make for a great experience sometimes. But there are two big problems from a balance pov:

1. It trivializes all PvE threats from magic. You just pop your wards and autoattack to victory. This is kind of theoretical because PvE DR doesn't really throw a lot of magic a you, but if the game did then immunity the way Barbs can do it now would make a lot of the game boring.

2. DR is a multiplayer game with PvP, and most of the abilities other players have to throw at you are magic. It's horribly imba and unfun for them if a Barbarian can turn off most of their options and keep them off for a whole fight.

>>It's a lot like Shear. I am giving up a lot to get that immunity. Barbarians just happen to specialize in it.<<

Ask some PvPing Moon Mages why they don's use Shear all the time. It's not balanced the same way at all.

Mazrian

I think "monster spell" (loosely defined originally and here) is a poor model to attach to the cyclic framework.

Largely because the original cyclic abilities were designed to be relatively low output steady state abilities. Augmentation and Utility primarily.

I don't think that makes TM and Debil invalid avenues for cyclics; I actually think cyclic TM is quite good right now, although probably not expensive enough in slots/attunement maintenance. But I think there definitely needs to be a disadvantage to using HyH or EE compared to casting Malediction or, uh, Tingle directly.

Off the top of my head, cyclic Debil should absolutely be working at a huge rank penalty to penetrate wards within the current paradigm. Whether that paradigm survives given what appears to be insurmountable inconsistencies in ward behavior is obviously another question.

The more you guys talk the more it sounds like magic/supernatural system simply needs another rewrite or at the very least the design document does. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to bring Thieves and Barbs onto the same backend as everyone else...

Cyclics emerged out of held mana spells, which were kind of all over the place. In the WM suite there were three.

1. Fire Rain, which created a literal pyroplastic cloud object that rained balls of fire down on everyone in the room (and occasionally the caster) unless it was shaped to avoid friendlies - which you could always fail to do. Generally higher damage than now but unreliable and dangerous to everyone around you.

2. Ring of Spears, which (though it went through several iterations) would spear anything entering melee with you and block engagement if the thing got hit. Every time something bounced against the spears, iirc, it drained some held mana or drained charges off the spell or something like that. It has been a long time and I may be blurring some versions together.

3. Aether Cloak, which more or less worked like it does today except it also blocked familiars and locates (which I think might have been a bug?).

The various magic rewrites put everything on more or less the same cost model but also stripped out the things that made Fire Rain and Ring of Spears fun and unique. I'd like to see for instance Ring of Spears and Fire Rain get some of that back and become more expensive, while Aether Cloak is probably fine given its downside (the WM can't cast TM spells with AC up).

EE I think could go either way, either picking up a flashy effect and becoming more costly or staying more or less as it is with a relatively low cost. Right now it's a really good training spell but not a really good TO BATTLE kind of spell.


Mazrian

Like, EE is good in the same way Tremor is good - because both nerve damage and balance hits put the things fighting you at a disadvantage without hurting them or stopping them from attacking. Tremor is more front-loaded while EE has to build up but you'd use them the same way, preferring Tremor if waiting for EE to do its thing would make you too vulnerable. Of course, you can be running EE and also use Tremor. It would be nifty to know if penalties from bad balance and nerve damage stack.




Mazrian

>>Uh huh. We're just going to gloss over Enchantes?

I don't know a lot about the history of Enchantes so there's not much I could usefully say about them.

>>But Tremor is not a cyclic spell. I don't think anyone would be nearly as irritated with EE if it was a regular cast debilitation spell.

I'm pretty sure they would be pretty damn salty. Regular cast debil EE would have to either put a DOT on anyone hit that caused nerve damage and potential reveal on each pulse, or cause a lot more nerve damage on a single cast with no DOT and either a short stun or a guaranteed reveal or something. Either way the spell would be worse for PvE but way more powerful for PvP.

>>I'm aware Tingle is not a direct analogue, that was part of my point.

I guess I don't get your point, then? If the idea wasn't that someone would not cast Tingle because they had EE then idgi.


Mazrian

>Ramp those mana maintenance costs slower than MG of course.

I like your suggestion of ramping the mana costs, but why ramp them slower than MG? If anything I think they should ramp faster.

Well, perhaps it would help to clarify by certain categories. I think offensive cyclicals (disablers and TM specifically) should have ramping mana costs, and I think they should ramp similarly to MG. Like MG, I don't think Fire rain is something you should be able to set and forget, regardless of skill level. They should represent worthwhile bursts of damage or pulsing disable that allow you to also prep other spells in the meanwhile for a short period of time.

>>A Magic 3.5, if you will? And sorry, didn't mean to imply or suggest we need an entirely new system design. I think the core thesis of Magic 3 is really good on the whole. But I think NMUs in particular are staring at gaps that are only going to grow.

(Warning, this turns into stream-of-consciousness game design rambling after the first paragraph.)

Sort of a Magic 3.5 over time. Things like the barrier review (which we had a vigorous talk about behind the scenes this morning, prompted by this thread), Cyclic offensive spells, and the Integrity stat in general are things that need to be revisited and pretty substantially changed in time. There's just a matter of DR's ever-moving priority bullseye and fitting system refurbishing in with creating new content.

The NMU thing is sort of yes sort of no in my mind, I'll explain why.

On one hand, we have and will continue to move toward standardizing the mechanics behind the scenes. The Thief Khri rewrite we've been on lately is designed in large part with this in mind, and as time goes on both Barb and Thief abilities are becoming more and more magic-like in terms of the balance expectations and backend mechanics. In many ways, the request I've heard lately that all guilds function on the same backend is already a reality.

Then there's guild diversity, which is this hideous tightrope walk over a pool with sharks and the sharks have laser beams on their heads. Particularly with the current development direction being to encourage interdependence, I'm returning to the notion of asymmetrical buffs. There is absolutely a delicate line here and the more asymmetrical we go the harder balance becomes, but to unify everything is clearly not what anyone wants and at that point we're going to merely be arguing matters of degrees.

Bringing this around to NMUs -- I don't mind, and in fact I enjoy, that Thieves and Barbarians access their powers outside of the magic system as a general thing. Does this swing too heavily on the side of punitive right now? I'd say yes with mild reservations. And that reservation is called the Empath Guild experience.

Empaths are a pretty good example, I think, of how things are going to go in the abstract. They started with a drastically hard lock out of an incredibly important and large portion of the game, and over the years we steadily dialed that back to their current level of participation in combat (which we are currently happy with). It took time, it was done in steps, and there was no magic bullet. Empaths in combat is now a fairly involved Thing that both allows them to participate with restrictions but also still honors the fact that Empaths murdering the stuffing out of things is still not something that is good or pleasant.

What this means, particularly for Barbarians? I imagine we will continue to scale back MD and sorcery-access restrictions as time goes on until we get somewhere we're comfortable, but that the Barbarian Thing of taking a stinkeye to magic is never going to be entirely paved over and erased. Yes, that will mean in my universe there is still going to be a guild-defining disadvnatage there; but they will not be unique in having one, and honestly I'm more inclined to take a chunk out the guilds without noticeable gameplay quirks than to homogenize the ones that have unique quirks.

This is not to say everything is okay as it is now. This is not to say that we're anywhere near a good balance point for Barbarians and Thieves. But it is in the broad terms where I'd like to see us head towards in the months and years to come.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

>>:worms emoji that expands forever:

Pretty much. I mean, it should be clear to everyone that absolute homogenization (essentially making no guilds) and absolute diversity (essentially making 11 different video games) are both not worthwhile goals. Thus there's somewhere on the spectrum of "homogenized in important ways but diverse where it benefits the game" that is the right and proper place to stake our place.

We're not gonna all agree on where that spot is, but it's not doing any favors to refuse to ask the question.

-Armifer
"Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong ... or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters." - Italo Calvino

In my ideal DR several different approaches to combat would all be viable. Like...

1. Tank with your face.
2. Tank by murdering everything before it can attack you.
3. Tank by being unseen until you alpha strike something.
4. Tank by summoning things and manipulating creatures to do your bidding.

Would all yield the exp we need and the tdps we crave.

Ideally...

A Warrior Mage could be REALLY GOOD at using magic to manage engagement and CC things while burning them down, keeping himself safe by killing things before they can hurt him but not having the physical defenses to stand toe to toe and slug it out. A Thief could be REALLY GOOD at slipping in and out of hiding to alpha strike targets but really squishy when caught out. A Paladin could be REALLY GOOD at tanking and have some support abilities but less overall offense. A Barbarian could be more flexible and able to fulfill several roles but not as strong as a specialist, etc. Or those could be tendencies with some different possible builds within each guild.

But right now everyone has to be able to tank, everyone has to be able to train a ton of weapons, everyone has to train all the magic skills, etc, and it just makes that sort of thing impossible.



Mazrian