Back when my halfling sorcerer was the right level to hunt the basement of the Marsh Keep, I quickly learned to hate tomb trolls and their shield. I think my sorcerer died more in a month than in more than a year (one before, and one after, summed), so I basically avoided it. I'm not opposed to difficulty, but the kind of tactics I had to devise don't even work now (since Quake was moved to Arcane). Obviously, not every creature and hunting ground will be suitable for all types of professions.

But now I'm over the level of tomb trolls with a halfling paladin. He's level 55, which is nominally 3 levels above a tomb troll. Here's today:

A tomb troll lunges forward at you with his wooden shield and attempts a shield bash!
[Roll result: 186 (open d100: 87)]
A tomb troll lashes at you with a terrific shield bash and you find yourself crashing into the ground!
... 10 points of damage!
Mighty blow cracks several of your ribs.
You are stunned!
Roundtime: 9 sec.

Between actual ranks of CMans and 1611, he has 88 ranks of Combat Manuevers. 1x PT, 1x Dodge. Not sure what stats would play into this, but besides Logic (derp) his are mostly okay. Getting blasted by bolt spells and ranged as a THW user, and various other magical attacks I definitely understand. But the tomb troll having nearly 100% chance to shield-bash my melee-trained semi who is actually higher level seems to indicate more clearly the level of absurdity going on here.

I understand being in full plate might not help for avoiding something like this. And fortunately getting shield bash from a tomb troll is no longer a death sentence like it was for my sorcerer trying walk past the room after peering.

I am very fond of this Scribes quote, naturally:

You think we're going to design the care bear equivalent of walking through clouds of marshmallows and hanging out with lumpy space princesses?! Hunting grounds in the Rest are not designed to allow Resters to keep going up in levels or gain experience, they are designed to kill, kill and kill. If you die, you can't leave, and like ghosts, remain to repeat the process, over and over, dying and dying, at the hands of creatures and monsters designed by those who love you most.

Still, I need to ask: What, exactly, is going on with this maneuver? Is the size v. size just really killing me? Am I severely lacking in some staple skill (2x in one of the physical skills I mentioned)? Does anyone else think this is a bit of a strong advantage for the troll to have against my paladin?

I feel like a paladin should have any chance to avoid a CMan from an opposing creature, without the requirement that the creature gets a negative open roll.

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>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

>Still, I need to ask: What, exactly, is going on with this maneuver? Is the size v. size just really killing me? Am I severely lacking in some staple skill (2x in one of the physical skills I mentioned)? Does anyone else think this is a bit of a strong advantage for the troll to have against my paladin?

The skill you are severely lacking in is shield bash. If you were holding a shield with full focus and full bash trained, it might well need an open roll to hit you.

Thanks for both your replies. The idea to get one or two ranks by shield use is pretty clever.

But from a design perspective I'm lost, and maybe I just don't know enough about CMans so there's no point in complaining fundamentally about something that's very old.

To defend against Mana Disruption, you don't need to know Mana Disruption. To defend against a claidhomore, you don't need to know two-handed weapons, much less specialize in them with WSPEC.

I'm okay that knowing shield bash grants defense against it, don't get me wrong. But it seems that I need to know it to avoid it. Seems absurd to me.

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>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

>To defend against a claidhomore, you don't need to know two-handed weapons, much less specialize in them with WSPEC.

Weapons are far too easy to defend against, and if CMans were defendable the same way, the whole game would be the sort of farce that the contest between manoeverless characters in the Festival of the Fallen was. The game requires set ups that can't be defended against as easily as claidhs to be playable as a weapon using character.

Shield bash is only just good enough for player use. Take 10 away from its endroll and its niche only, take 20 away and its RP only. And thats the way manovers are supposed to work, you are supposed to need all the ranks in it for it to be genuinely effective mush of the time. Take the equivalent of the equivalent of the 4th and 5th rank away by making its defensive contribution covered by generic training and its pretty useless. Take the equivalent of that away from all CMans by allowing all CMans to be defended against by generic training and they'd all be pretty useless and warriors would have to learn hiding and become seoond rate ambushers in order to advance past level 50. How's your paladin going to do with only buff spells and passive CMans? Thats what you turn the game into if you give any more generic defense to CMans than there is already.

<<Take the equivalent of that away from all CMans by allowing all CMans to be defended against by generic training and they'd all be pretty useless and warriors would have to learn hiding and become seoond rate ambushers in order to advance past level 50. How's your paladin going to do with only buff spells and passive CMans? Thats what you turn the game into if you give any more generic defense to CMans than there is already.>>

How does this enter into the discussion at all? I can't tell if you are using CvC as your foundation or fighting against creatures. As we saw at the recent tournament, in CvC, CMANs are extremely powerful. Why does players getting some extra help against CMANs, so its not a 80% chance for a mob 10 levels below me to <enter CMAN here> me, somehow mean that warrior will be broken? The logic just doesn't follow for me.

It take crazy amount of training points to max out even one CMAN for a pure. There is no way to get a decent defense against them without training in that specific CMAN. There is no other system like that. You don't have to know or train in spells to benefit from them (except spellburst areas). Yes, spells cost a lot for squares but they don't have to train them to get their benefit.

You don't have to nerf or even change the system at all. All you have to do is bump the creatures knowledge of the skill down a rank or 2 (if that's even how mobs CMAN works).

To sum up, CMAN defense needs to have more to it than ranks in that skill.

Drauz

>How does this enter into the discussion at all? I can't tell if you are using CvC as your foundation or fighting against creatures. As we saw at the recent tournament, in CvC, CMANs are extremely powerful.

CMans are a shared system. There is essentially no difference between using them against a critter and a against a player. If you couldn't take down a player effectively with them, you couldn't take down a critter either.

Replying very late...

I had a number of instances of PEERing, seeing a tomb troll, trying to run past (two movements in row sent to the game) and SPLAT dead.

I know my connection to the game from Japan isn't the best but, it was sufficiently annoying to make me hate it (or you know, generally not hunt there).

Maybe I'll dig out some logs later today just for amusement, and to actually confirm how often (and how) this happened.

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>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

The worst part about how deadly the tomb troll shield bash is is that if you use a major loot boost against them, you're too encumbered to hunt before you even reach muddled =/