Does predator's eye work with hurling? IE: do I get the bonus if I hurl a dagger rather than stab with it?

Kerl

>>Does predator's eye work with hurling? IE: do I get the bonus if I hurl a dagger rather than stab with it?

Yes. It also works while hidden or in the open. It does not work with any Ranged weapons.

>>Will this push a rogues chance of hitting the aim location up to 100% or will it hit the same threshold that is placed on training? And am I misremembering or do a rogues chances to hit where they aiming diminish against targets that are higher in level?

For some body locations, it's possible to hit them with a max of 95% chance. The aiming formula works like this: First, there's a roll to check for a fumble with a 5% chance (where you either can't find an opening, or you just hit a random area), then it takes skills and stats into account and caps success at 95% if over it, then it applies a location penalty based on body location and whether the target was sitting, standing or prone. The Predator's Eye bonus occurs at the same computational moment as the body location penalty. The Predator's Eye bonus will always be useful (not applying to an already capped value) for head, neck and eye shots. In some circumstances, aiming at other locations would already receive a 95% chance of hitting (100% minus that initial fumble roll).

GameMaster Oscuro

>>The Predator's Eye bonus will always be useful (not applying to an already capped value) for head, neck and eye shots.

Does that mean, even with maxed out training that you won't have a 95%(or capped out value) chance of hitting these locations?

Would it be possible to make duck and weave a fully passive skill? Right now as a rogue, even with that, there is no reason to not be in full plate, it is simply an exercise is masochism to not be. The CvA bonus and the pure ability to stop damage just makes plate too good to not be in. We need some more incentive, Oscuro.

~James
Player of Septimius

>>Does that mean, even with maxed out training that you won't have a 95%(or capped out value) chance of hitting these locations?

Yes.

GameMaster Oscuro

I've had a good week to play with duck and weave and I gotta say. Great skill. Absolutely hilarious in warcamps. Aaaaaand enter the incoming 'but'.

But... the duration is disappointing and a 5 minute cool down is just plain harsh. I don't know how long it takes most rogues to fry up in 'swarm' situations, where duck and weave becomes useful, but I am going to go out on a limb and say it is a lot faster than five minutes... basically mitigating it to a 'once a hunt' skill. Because I'd have to be in a pretty bad situation to drop 90 stamina for a 30 second burst to evade.

Bringing us to the next grievance. 30 seconds? That's it? 30 seconds in a swarm is when things just start to get interesting!

A 60 second duration with a 2 minute cool down seems much more reasonable.

As a Rogue of the Cloth(tm) I feel like I need to bring up investment vs. reward. CMPs are at a premium and with a pre-requisite of Evade Mastery at rank 2 (12 CMPs) and 24 CMPs to master Duck and Weave... you now have a light armor rogue (and his brother monks) dropping 36 CMps into a 30 second boost that only finds usefulness under one very specific circumstance: swarms.

That is a hard sale.

.jaired
>LIKE A BOSS
Please rephrase that command.

>>Out of curiosity, what's your CM training, Jaired?

Skill name Mnemonic Ranks
Quickstrike qstrike 4
Shadow Mastery smastery 5
Silent Strike silentstrike 5
Combat Mobility mobility 2
Surge of Strength surge 1
Evade Mastery emastery 3
Divert divert 3
Vanish vanish 3
Duck and Weave weave 3
Slippery Mind slipperymind 3

But I wear robes so obviously have no idea what I'm doing. I mean have you seen my CvA? There can't be any other reason than sheer masochism, amiright?

>>We tossed around the idea of lowering CMP costs for active, targeted maneuvers (e.g. Hamstring, Sweep, etc.) to make them more attractive a while ago, but that project was put on the back-burner for Monks. This is something I'd like to revisit.

I'd say in today's game you have to. Looking at a post-cap rogue does not properly represent a class that, although technically a square, rarely trains more than 1x in Combat Maneuvers. Those 'choices' are a lot easier to make when one marginally useful skill requires more than a third of your entire CMP pool. In fact it isn't a choice at all. You simply train in something else. A 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cost structure for most if not all offensive, non-passive CMans is hardly unreasonable.

My hat is off to you all for putting a whole lot of shine on light armor over the past years. I love the fact that with armored stealth in robes my character has become a veritable ghost. That with evade mastery I see my DS so rarely that I sometimes forget what it is, and when I do it is nice and beefy. I love eating a massive end roll from a charge and only getting a pittance of RT and a minor. I love dancing on the teeth of rift crawlers and jumping to safety every time. I can stand up without getting RT. Spell hindrance? Nope. I feel like I am cheating. But... as is evident... most of my rogue brethren still stick to their redux and heavy armor. And you know what? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Why does that last paragraph exist? Because although light armor has become more viable as a rogue, you have to invest in it and train for it. A lot. Better be 3x Dodge. Better have Evade Mastery. Better have Vanish (and Shadow Mastery so you can even have Vanish) so you can dip back into the shadows if you get RT stacked. Heck, better have Slippery Mind. Better train in magic because you're gonna need that DS for when you mess up.

Or you can just 2x armor and wear plate.

Doesn't it seem just a tad counter productive to have to do 'so much' to make something on par with the Plate Standard?

Doesn't it seem more odd yet that considering all of that... Duck and Weave only has a 30 second duration?

Cost vs. Reward.

It is a hard sale.

.jaired
>LIKE A BOSS
Please rephrase that command.

>>You activate it for a 30 second duration with a 5 minute cooldown period (which begins upon activation). It is not a Martial Stance like the other two CMs.
Not sure how I had a question in the first place, now that I re-read it. Maybe I was just tired. Thanks.

Are you going to give us any indication of the chances that CM WEAVE has to trigger for given training plans?

I like all of the concepts. There has been a long-standing request to have some way to offset CvA, slippery mind is a step towards that. Many will probably find predator's eye to be interesting. I like that it factors into hurled weapons.

On to CM WEAVE... I think one issue is that these duration-based cooldown maneuvers can be exceedingly annoying as a concept. It's a very tedious concept. Power-wise it's obviously a balance: in its current state you can make it much more likely to trigger than if it was passive. There are so many factors to consider (as a player) when determining which model you'd ACTUALLY prefer when playing the numbers (I'm not here to write a book so I won't go on enumerating). I'm honestly not sure which I'd prefer, especially not having a clue about how likely it is to go off. I can see that this idea is to, while hidden in a room full of creatures, CM WEAVE right before delivering an attack. It will obviously have great value there.

To me, the main issue with maneuvers like duck and weave is that it has to be compared to 410. That's the crowd-control gold standard for light-armored rogues. Obviously the power scales with the cost but as a player I always weigh it against 410. It is practically a 100% evasion maneuver that gives you a relative offensive boost as well. 410 costs less than double the cost of duck and weave in TPs. Without even seeing the percentages on duck and weave, I'd put 410 in the "at least ten times as effective" category.

I think there's a big issue with releasing CMs is the fact that we have to spend hard points to try it all out. This really does set you up for knee-jerk armchair analyses of new releases. If we got a 30-day CMP migration period, it would be great. We could try them out, give feedback based on experience, and everyone would be less prone to giving sour responses to new dev. If we want to test slippery mind or duck and weave out with 2 ranks, we're looking at 240,000 post-cap exp each just to play around (pre-cap players might have a greater disadvantage since they have the load of primary training goals). That's a good month of work just to try one out if you are a pretty solid and continuous player (>50k exp/week). If it doesn't work out for the player, that's several months of migration.

>>I seem to remember a GM ( might have been you ) floating and idea for feedback concerning making shadow mastery and surge of strength martial stances. Is this still being considered a possibility? I was intrigued with the idea.

You can only have one martial stance active at a time, putting the idea into "Careful what you wish for" territory.

.jaired
>LIKE A BOSS
Please rephrase that command.

<<You can only have one martial stance active at a time, putting the idea into "Careful what you wish for" territory.>>

It is a fair point to bring up and upon reflection I believe your assessment is correct.

I understood you can only have one martial stance active at a time. Shadow mastery and surge of strength both have cool down times and increased stamina costs that at best make it difficult to use both at the same time. Neither predator's eye or slippery mind appeal to me so there would not be any great loss for me personally if those were made into martial stances and the extra stamina improve silent strike.

However, I can see where a majority of rogues will use at least one of the martial stances in tandem with either shadow mastery or surge of strength. Making the latter two martial stances would limit the options for most rogues and that is not something I want to be an advocate of. Better to leave it as it is.

Wolfloner

If making shadow mastery a martial stance would necessitate watering it down why not split it into two stances. Shadow mastery for the flat bonus to hide and RT reduction to hide and Stealth Mastery for the sneaking RT reduction (and moving with camo up for rangers). As for other martial stances for stealth:

Sink Into Shadows: X/Y/Z% chance when attacked to automatically slip into hiding.

Asassin's Advantage: +X/Y/Z AS when attacking from hiding.

Obfuscation: Factor Stalking and Hiding ranks into DS and/or TD.

Shadow Hopping: X/Y/Z% chance to slip back into the shadows after an ambush.

Uncanny Evasion: 50/100% chance to ignore AOE spells while hidden.

Keith/Brinret

Five Jewish men who influenced the history of Wester Civilization:
Moses said the law is everything.
Jesus said love is everything.
Marx said capital is everything.
Freud said sex is everything.
Einstein said everything is relative.

>>E-wave has been in the "too good" column for a long time.

:;sigh;:

The depressing things I see from time to time when reading all the boards. . .

Ahh, well. :)

Doug

>>Personally, I don't see myself getting duck and weave. Not when I already have smastery and surge, which I rarely get to use as I like since the length of time they're active vrs in cooldown means its more benificial to get wizard strength and only use smastery sparingly.

I think the smastery/surge cooldown changes happened when my main rogue was around level 40. I've taken him to 97 since. It's pretty clear to me that the way the cooldowns work pretty much just had capped characters in mind.

Pre-cooldown: At low levels you could use both at all times (I think durations were longer) but they consumed almost all of your stamina. At cap, I'd speculate that they were always on and you had plenty of stamina left for everything else you wanted to do.

Post-cooldown: At low levels you can keep them both up, waiting out cooldowns, and still have a little stamina left over for odd maneuvers. At cap, you can keep them up, waiting out cooldowns, have tons of stamina left over (enough to use some maneuvers and use sigils of mending, power, and so on whenever you want if you're GoS). Or, you can keep them up, fire one off occasionally during cooldown a couple times and just be more frugal with CMs/sigils.

These new CMs seem interesting, but they fall into my post-post-post-post-post-cap goals.

I see that my bid not to use the term [Martial] 'stance' (since we already have, you know... stances [i.e. attack/defense %ages, for offensive through defensive]) was not taken.

I also see that many of the posters here have been extremely consistent about typing out 'martial stance', so I find myself in the position of having to eat a little crow.
(I was doom-saying that the extra word would get dropped from all usage approximately 2.793 seconds after the release of the systems.)

Then again, the systems are only four days old.

.

I would encourage everyone to use something else when talking about them, though. Some suggested wording that cropped up over in the Monks' topic--when I made the request to the GMs to change the name pre-emptively before release--thought that either [Martial] 'Form' or [Martial] 'Style' would make sense.
(Personally, I like 'Form', because I find that 'style' is frequently used to refer to weapon type [1HEdged, 2Hand, whatever].)

Because, well, we do still have those pesky 'stances' already in existence that everyone is still going to be talking about, don't we just?

And I still think that it's a poor decision. Hence my hope that the players would themselves use a particular nomenclature, regardless of what the official name is. (How long did everyone refer to 'Alkar' and 'WoR', after we deICEd? I was hearing it for a decade and more.)

- Stance (also Form, Posture) tends to have the connotation of being static; something that you ARE.
- Style (also Form) tends to have the connotation of being fluid; something that you DO.
* Yes, Form actually could be both. To allow for both passive/always running and deliberate/activated-at-need possibilities, use such a term as encompasses both.
+ Neither Form nor Style nor Posture are already in use with a completely different definition within the existing game-mechanics. Stance? Is.

It's a text game. Be more creative with, uhhh, words. Particularly and specifically to avoid confusion.

.>>(How long did everyone refer to 'Alkar' and 'WoR', after we deICEd? I was hearing it for a decade and more.)

> Wait, they aren't alkars anymore?

They aren't, although you'll still here some people refer to them as such.

<<They aren't, although you'll still here some people refer to them as such.>>

Count me in!


~
From behind the cell door, a giantman's gruff voice shouts, "You should have killed me when you could have!"