>>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.

In principle I like the barrier functionality. In practice it's incredibly underwhelming. I cannot recall the last time I noticed a Warding contest I did not completely outclass the opposition in or vice versa. I think that's largely a function of how broad the skill range is, although I can't say that with any real certainty.

There is something to be said for consistent behavior from barriers that players can see (and exploit) the drivers of. Serenity being able to tank IF is one. Shear potentially preventing the Moon Mage from casting their own spells is another. These are mechanics that generate particular reactions. Unfortunately right now with Serenity that just means spam min prep snaps until the Barb is tanked and avoid the Moon Mage relying on their tertiary weapons skills. Bad outcomes to what should be interesting mechanics.

>>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.

I'm not saying this is the wrong approach to take, but it's magnitudes more difficult to balance apples and oranges than it is to balance a couple of oranges. Even if you think you can quantify them you may not be able to surmise all of the possible variations.

I think there's a lot to be said for making things less samey, but that's a total about face from the last decade of development with the game. People are here, in the main, for the combat systems. That the combat system has become less complex, less deep, and less interesting in the last decade has probably significantly hurt customer retention. But the danger, to my mind, lies in conflating the combat system with abilities that interact with the combat system.

Upthread I pointed out that NMUs currently and in particular are locked out several key interactions with the combat system and, conversely, have seen a lot of their key interactions with the combat system farmed out to other guilds. If you're going to consider asymmetrical buffs you also need to look at the bigger picture. That involves skill set placement and perks. If you're not going to devote time to delivering significant mechanical interactions with the combat system to Weapons primary guild and you're not going to take anything away from the Weapons tertiary guilds, asymmetrical buffs would have to heavily favor that guild. Which I think takes us right back to Dragon Dance and BMR, doesn't it?

>>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.

I'm not sure anyone's asked for that. Some of us would like to see the guild's "flavor text" and mechanics updated to meet the actual lore about strategists, military scholars, ascetics, and mercenaries as well as the caricature raging beasts of 1996. But I'm aware, at least, that single-guild development is unlikely in the near term unless it's, as you noted, designed to bring the guild's mechanical underpinnings closer to the core mechanics engines. Because that saves developer time.

(Also, as an aside, the Barb-specific stuff should proooobably move over to Barb folders. I don't know how many Barbs read the WM folders.)

>>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).

Two thumbs up on that model for integration into core systems.

Thanks for talking about this.

>>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.

You're not wrong, but I think there's two divergent issues at play here: one is that people desire parity and the other is that people abhor getting the same thing as their neighbor. One of my favorite parables is the Russian one about the magic fish: A magical fish offers to grant one wish to a Russian peasant. He is wondering which treasures he should request from the fish. Then, the fish explains that whatever the peasant wishes for and receives himself, his neighbor will receive double. The peasant says, "Ok, then I want you to poke out one of my eyes."

If you do move forward with asymmetrical development I hope you'll share your theses on how every guild should be interacting with the core systems (i.e. combat, supernatural/magic, stealth) so we have some idea of where things would ideally end up.

>>There's a reason cyclical TMs are considered premier perks for PvP,<<

Uhh... they're not, though. Except Soul Attrition, maybe, because Clerics are op hax.

If anything, I think it would be more exciting if cyclics like Fire Rain had escalating effects and escalating cost, so pulse after pulse this giant fire storm is growing in power and become more wild until it's all you can do to just hang on and keep it going..

Mazrian

>>Uhh... they're not, though. Except Soul Attrition, maybe, because Clerics are op hax.
While I think a majority of people would agree with the premise that Soul Attrition is one of the less balanced abilities in the game...

Why wouldn't you use Fire Rain in PvP (since you can CAST ENGAGED)? You can keep it up and cast other targeted spells and shoot at people with bows/xbows/slings and/or throw with blades/axes/hammers. I mean, assuming EE wasn't ludicrously overpowered and thus an obvious choice for cyclic use in PvP.

One of the abiding problems NMUs have is they are unable to emulate the secondary damage output that MUs can thanks to plain old TM. Magic primary and secondary guilds have cyclic TM that can be maintained while casting other TM while still also using weapons. i.e. an even greater damage output advantage. It also, aggravatingly, represents a clear skill set placement advantage in ability that, you know, the Weapons skill set doesn't. Because "every guild interacts with combat." (Seriously, if skill set division were applied consistently Weapons tert guilds wouldn't have combat maneuvers like FEINT, DRAW, LUNGE, THRUST, etc. It would be outside their level of training in the skill set. I'm not necessarily arguing for that, but I would like to see consistency in how skill set division is applied.)

I don't think anyone believes that there's a way for WMs and Clerics to come out of any real examination of cyclics without losing something, mostly because there isn't anyone familiar with the guilds and their cyclics who considers them to be well-balanced. Please note this isn't meant to be an insult to the hard work of our devs, but as Armifer noted upthread some of the assumptions they've worked developing spells with are clearly not the reality we live with.

Agitating for actively ignoring problems is not constructive.

Finally, Armifer et al, it occurred to me that changing the way nerve damage is acquired from secondary sources and how significantly it interacts with systems could solve this without changing anything about how EE functions from a training/PvE perspective. If you gained nerve damage from secondary sources say, 1/4 as fast as you would from your own backlashes (as an example), I doubt anyone would consider EE a problem.

Similarly, if nerve damage penalties couldn't stack with other penalties from Debilitation (i.e. the system just takes whichever penalty is higher) that would probably solve this as well.

Of course Occam's razor would tell us to simply have EE stop inflicting nerve damage entirely and function as an AoE, pulsing Arc Light analogous to how HyH functions.

>>Why wouldn't you use Fire Rain in PvP (since you can CAST ENGAGED)? You can keep it up and cast other targeted spells and shoot at people with bows/xbows/slings and/or throw with blades/axes/hammers. I mean, assuming EE wasn't ludicrously overpowered and thus an obvious choice for cyclic use in PvP.

Because most of the cyclics aren't primo options for a variety of reasons. Pro-tip: If you were going to use a cyclic, it'd be Rimefang, but the problem there is it requires you to be melee.

Fire Rain has a small build up time, so its not instant. On top of that, if you cast Fire Rain at me, then I'm going to leave the room ASAP. I will refuse to fight you in said space. Thus forcing you to prep it again if you desire to use it. Which I will then again leave. You can easily counter Fire Rain because it is room based, not character based. You could also room dodge the pulses, like EE.

The long and short of it is that a WM spends his time more wisely by trying to disable his opponent and use options that apply damage quickly rather than pulsing. BG and LB being common ones. DB is great but has 2 min cooldown, so its always worth a shot but its a one time thing.

BTW, If a WM needs to the nerve damage from EE, he has a bigger problem: You are more skilled than him and will likely lay him out in the minute it takes him to get your nerves fully fried.

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

I appreciate the transparency more than I could probably convey here, even if nothing's carved in stone yet. Sometimes I'll feel things are off in terms of abilities, combat, whatever, and it's hard to know whether it's me or that's how the game's supposed to be.

My unsolicited thoughts...

>1) Immunity is a bad word. Preferably there's an exponential curve on the cost to effectiveness graph that reaches infinity before it reaches 100%.

>2) Stacking wards just didn't work out how I wanted it to and probably needs to outright go away or be harshly restricted, with each ward redesigned as a total magic-defense package.

>3) Immunity is still a bad word, and abilities that grant it in some minor fashion (WD, Elision, etc) should have some sort of Achilles' heel to exploit by the perceptive and quick thinking.

>Mana cost is the most egregious issue with Cyclics, without closing the door on there being other problems with them. "Big boom ability" is not a fundamentally bad idea, "big boom ability that's up 24/7 because we did not balance costs appropriately" kind of is.

Happy to read these. It sounds like you guys have a great digest of the whole long thread.

>Empaths are a pretty good example, I think, of how things are going to go in the abstract.

On the MU side, if empaths are the epitome of what a magic secondary guild should be with respect to abilities, the future is brilliant.

>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.

I can see the hideous tightrope. The biggest issue I have is I'm not really sure what each guild's practical strengths and weaknesses are supposed to be, and I've sparred with enough people to know nerfing wards won't necessarily fix that. Sometimes, I wish we had one of those charts in some old school Japanese RPGs where they plot out the strengths and weaknesses of classes based on some key attributes (e.g. ranged attack, melee, shield, health, etc.). In some cases, the strengths are apparent, but in many cases the weaknesses are either non-existent due to easy to set compensating abilities/spells or dismissible. Theme doesn't seem to assign many limitations as to what guilds are good at. I can be really good at debilitation and still be great at defensive skill buffs and warding. I can have amazing offensive abilities and still be very good at wards, debilitation and defensive skill buffs.

That's not necessarily a bad thing unless not everyone has fair access to... Everything? It seems like an impossible balancing act.