Retardation Vibe

Seir

Chiming in to say that there's a reason that Retardation, in any incarnation it spawns across IRE, is universally regarded as one of the worst abilities to deal with and to balance. It is usually the culprit why Mages tend to suffer balance wise for long periods of time because Mages can't really be given any upgrades without sending their potential within Retardation through the roof and becoming utterly overbearing. Not to mention, the amount of coding required to tailor a system EFFECTIVELY around Retardation is pretty obscene. 

In short, it's better for the health and balance of Magi in the long run to allow Retardation to be given a downgrade and I personally think the one suggested is a good step forward while being relatively original and creative. The intent behind Retardation, at least as far as I've always been aware, was for it to be a finisher for Magi, not the current 'set it and forget it' that it is and has been for ages now.

In any event, another IRE game where the original incarnation of Retardation dies. I will celebrate when it no longer exists across IRE.

Edit: Ironically, I say this as someone who used a version of Retardation on steroids in another game. Yes, it needs to die.

Moirean

Regarding the shatter/dismember discussion. Shatter was increased in channel time (though that should only be in retardation) due to a report I put in last round, so that's probably the discrepancy you are noting @Toz. Shatter's benefit is that you can forge a pure speed mace and use a shield for an audit boost while wielding it - with a well-forged mace, your damage knock becomes shorter than the shatter time, which means less penalty if you are interrupted and it means you can instantly start a new shatter as soon as one finishes. Dismemberment's benefit is that it can beyond basic breaks to advance a bleed route (barely, more of a cool theory than something you can use in practice) and that it steals soul, although it does not benefit from a speedup from stolen soul. It also requires both hands (so lower audit) and you need a pure speed bardiche to get the same benefit of a speed mace as described above.

Xiuhcoatl

@Seir having tailored my system for retardation and likewise to negate aeon, amnesia, warding and many other things. The actual numerical lines added is like 25-35 lines for retardation another 10-30 could be added for redundancy. However, my system was set up to be extremely modular, ie I can change a lot with a little bit of work. I'm not saying that it's not a lot of work, but my parrying is roughly 350 lines and it's only a third/halfway done. So in consideration, it's not hard to do by any stretch of the imagination. You just need to have a good level of understanding.

I'd also add to $Moirean that while it does give you soul, the amount is minimal. I believe the amount of a singular halberd strike from PSS. 

Moirean

Yeah the soul gain is absurdly low and if you miss a single hit you basically have reset soul to 100%. That's why I just use shatter.

Haven

@Xavin: I thought so too but it doesn't seem to be the case anymore for reasons I'm unsure of. As an Infernal or Carnifex back in the day, I had no problem in retardation vibe and my curing was generally worse off then. Like I said I'm pretty stumped.

I've recently added a timer to extend my limiters by a second or so while in retardation before trying a cure again. Should I have my system assume it'll be cured and move down the tree? I'm reluctant to do so cause it seems abusable and inefficient, even more so with the idea of stupidity and the like.

I'm thinking as a Luminary I might be better off going the limb route in the vibe until our rebounding issues are cleared this round. That two aff cure skill + rebound in retardation kills momentum like woah. Or I guess I could toy with hidden affs some.

Haven

Ah, I think I see what's happening to disrupt my momentum in retardation. It's the shadeling bug. Shadeling is supposed to strip caloric if the defense is up on its first attack, otherwise it'll give shivering. Then on its next attack if caloric hasn't been applied, it's supposed to give shivering. Then on its next attack if shivering has not been cured, it'll give frozen. It apparently is not doing that. If the target does not have caloric, it gives both shivering and frozen in the same attack. And that's what appears to be causing my sudden issues. Because shadeling gives both shivering and frozen at the same time, when I attack I am suffering from the balance increase frozen gives.

AFFLICT FROZEN

Description:

Delays movement between locations by 2 seconds and prevents you from being able to stand. Additionally increases blunt damage by 15% and balance recovery by two seconds. This affliction counts as being prone to abilities that require it.

So I'm hindered incredibly on top of the already slowing of retardation. It's throwing my synergy way out of whack. On top of this, if the Magi happens to hinder me with paralysis or the other vibes tick with confusion, epilepsy, or prone me via dual broken legs or stupidity tick or whatever during this period, I'm boned to the 33rd degree. Fixing shadeling might help drastically reduce the issues retardation vibe currently cause.

Xavin

Haven said:

Ah, I think I see what's happening to disrupt my momentum in retardation. It's the shadeling bug. Shadeling is supposed to strip caloric if the defense is up on its first attack, otherwise it'll give shivering. Then on its next attack if caloric hasn't been applied, it's supposed to give shivering. Then on its next attack if shivering has not been cured, it'll give frozen. It apparently is not doing that. If the target does not have caloric, it gives both shivering and frozen in the same attack. And that's what appears to be causing my sudden issues. Because shadeling gives both shivering and frozen at the same time, when I attack I am suffering from the balance increase frozen gives.

AFFLICT FROZEN

Description:

Delays movement between locations by 2 seconds and prevents you from being able to stand. Additionally increases blunt damage by 15% and balance recovery by two seconds. This affliction counts as being prone to abilities that require it.

So I'm hindered incredibly on top of the already slowing of retardation. It's throwing my synergy way out of whack. On top of this, if the Magi happens to hinder me with paralysis or the other vibes tick with confusion, epilepsy, or prone me via dual broken legs or stupidity tick or whatever during this period, I'm boned to the 33rd degree. Fixing shadeling might help drastically reduce the issues retardation vibe currently cause.

Yeah, that makes sense. The shadeling issue, if it isn't a bug, is at the very least unintended. Not sure how to go about fixing that that, though if I recall there's been some discussion about it but I can't remember if any conclusions were achieved.

Xiuhcoatl

@Haven that's not the bug. The bug is that it's suppose to have a balance time. It will attack passively, but if you order it to freeze the target instead it should not attack passively. IE, you used the balance time on it. Currently it is possible for it to attack passively and then for you to order it to attack. That will cause it to double freeze a target. The ordered attack is what will cause it to give both shivering+frozen, so that's not the bug. It's the fact that ordering it to attack will not cause it to pause it's passive attack. 

Xiuhcoatl

@Xavin, I was going to let it slide, but your comment about the benefit of retardation curing was wrong. And It's bugging the unicorn out of me.

The benefit of retardation curing doesn't include and shouldn't include predictions of their afflictions. That would be nice, but there's too many manual people and far too many people that just randomly switch things in their systems. There could be a benefit to trying that, but the accuracy would be the biggest problem. In your method you'd be penalized for making a mistake. Granted it would prove to be the fastest method, it would also prove to to be the most hazardous. One change up in their swing balance would force you to be off herb balance or salve balance for a round of their attacks. Which can turn up very badly. Furthermore because of retardation and their own variable lag, you couldn't know when the command they send knew you had what afflictions on you. 1.5 seconds before their attack came would require you to constantly keep a track of your affliction states and the time. Then you'd have to guess at the time table. While it is a novel ideal, the implementation becomes too hazardous. That does however work for parrying because if you miss a parry, you're not really penalized, you just haven't penalized them. So while fast, it is not accurate for their attacks. For passives, it does work perfectly well and would be incredibly simple to implement.

The best method is just to calculate your balance times and go through that instead of the balances shown to me. I know that all commands are input by 1.5 seconds. So if I'm afflicted by multiple things, I can use a system calculated balance time to know when to cure. This method accounts for my balance time and retardation fudging things up. This produces a curing time of 1.5 plus the a slightly higher curing balance times x-1. In a calculation, for hit with two afflictions both herbs at once, you'd cure in 2.9-3.0 seconds. Eat the first one, then wait the system's balance time and cure for the second one. The benefit of this is that many afflictions at once get cured a lot faster. Since most classes have you constantly afflicted, this proves to be a very good method of curing. If I used trigger/gmcp balance times in retardation without calculating them on the system time and I was hit for x amount of afflictions. The time to cure would be 1.5 times x plus the balance time of cure times x-1. So for two herb afflictions the cure time would be 4.9.

The real problem in retardation curing is hidden afflictions. These produce the highest degree of difficulty. Shamans to be the most specific, but anyone who can give hidden hindering afflictions proves lethal if you can't diagnose the problems quickly. Shamans are the most lethal because all they really do is spam loki actively and passively. You need to try to figure out what loki afflictions they give you. This takes 1.5 seconds. Then you need to cure the affliction. This takes another 1.5 seconds. So for hidden curing without calculating balance times, it's 3.0 times x plus the curing balance times x minus one. Where x is the number of afflictions. This is also true if you track your balance times. That causes hidden offenses to become extremely lethal in retardation. 

Seir

@Xiuhcoatl: While that's fine and dandy, most of the game acknowledges that Retardation in its current incarnation is a problem and the administration is taking steps to fix it while allowing Mages to receive some slight upgrades. Not only that, a downgrade to Retardation's current mechanics will allow Mages to receive upgrades in other respects because Retardation is no longer keeping them back. I'm sure you'll ultimately have no trouble adapting to Oleis' proposed solution. Honestly, it sounds pretty good to me in theory.

Aishia

I think it might be a little easier to take the arguments seriously if I didn't think at the core of them was a desire to keep a lame mechanic, that you enjoy using to bother others with.

Xiuhcoatl

@Aishia that's a strawman argument. I said before and I'll say it again, I'm not defending the skill. I'm correcting where people are wrong. If you post wrong information in front of me, I'll correct it. I'm OCD like that. Yeah, it gets annoying if you're constantly wrong, but I view it as doing you a favor. There's nothing you can do to stop me from viewing it as doing you a favor.

@Seir Honestly, as soon as I heard they had major changes in the works for sciomancer, I kinda gave up on the class and moved to my other two. The chances of them doing an overhaul on magi offense to be viable or even usable is very slim given their recent changes. I'll grant you that I'm using binary logic with and gates to do my predictions and I'm being very critical of the last few changes. However, if the shoe was on the other foot and one of your classes was about to be drastically changed with no input from the people who understand the class, I'm fairly certain you would feel very much the same. Regardless of the class. 

Irruel

The sentinel revamp is very cautious. The state and viability of the class seems okay but I don't believe it fights the way it was described/presented to us on this forum.

I also look at all of our classes, and most of them at their core are just spinoffs of the original Achaean classes. Back then, each class was wildly different. Some weren't so well thought out (mostly the damage-oriented ones like druids) and these have fallen on the way.

Most of our new/revamped classes are just slightly modified versions of those original mechanics. Several of the 'new mechanics' we've seen added are just expanded versions of existing mechanics (limb damage, for example).

I've said this too many times in the past, so saying it again now sounds like beating a dead horse, but I really do think that new stuff in the future needs to be actually new.

Valdus

I have to step in and defend the work of the admin/liaisons/players who have been involved in the class revamp and release process, because I think it's important to explain what exactly is involved in releasing 'new' classes.

Whenever we are designing concept mechanics and ideas to implement, we have to consider a lot of different aspects that are oftentimes directly oppositional:

- If we're adding new mechanics, how do they interplay with what's in place?
- How do we reduce the coding burden and lessen the learning curve?
- How can we introduce complexity and tactical decision making?
- How will players respond to a new design (e.g., what will be the coding response?)

In light of those considerations, oftentimes when 'new' ideas are brought to the forefront, the novelty of the concept becomes overshadowed by technical complications or conflicts that exist as part of the game's framework. We do not have the manpower, let alone the design team, to start from scratch - so the majority of the work done is in an attempt to address flaws that have sprung up just due to the evolution of the combat metagame.

I think it's unfair to characterize these releases as being rehashed or expanded from existing mechanics, because it skips past a critical point - the game's design has inherent limitations from conception. There are only so many ways to reimagine action balances, cure balances, afflictions and tactical exchange before you start to seem like a broken record. The fact that coding power evolves at such a rapid pace also means that shallow mechanics will simply be coded against.

Oftentimes we hear calls for new material, but the ideas that come in are subject to the same scrutiny as our own design process, and generally falter as a result. In fact, of the last three revamp releases, two were near completely redone in the alpha phase due to critical issues - Teradrim alone have certainly seen more redesigns than have ever been visible to the game.

In summary, we're always open to new ideas, and at least from my own perspective I know that several admin love to discuss and brainstorm these concepts. But these need to be taken with a grain of salt, because ideas that sound novel and new at conception rarely make it all the way through the pipeline.

Irruel

Hi Valdus
I can see why a reader from the dev team might feel a bit disheartened or unappreciated from my post. Please don't take it that way! Carnifex aside, I think your revamps have been good ones (you've probably read posts with me banging on about how great shamans are).

Even the carnifex are great in theory, and did in fact (of all the new things we've seen) arrive with some truly unique mechanics. They were flawed, the class was OP to begin with, and nerfed later on, but ultimately an interesting class with promise - if you can just figure out how to make the soul-momentum thing work.

My comments about not seeing much new, are IRE wide. And I do get that the more classes we have, the harder it is for them to be all completely unique because there are more things interacting. That is a problem, but is is clear that you (Aet devs) do actually make a pretty good effort at including those new mechanics. So my previous post ought to be taken as both a positive AND a negative one, however badly written.

As for Xiuh, I believe Xiuhcoatl is disappointed that 'fixing' them was and is being left for a future re-re-vamp. I remember that Belakai's strategy for new classes was to work with several reps from the guild at release until the class was in a balanced position - I remember long discussions with him during both the original teradrim release and then the lycan one. I think that was the best way to go about it.

Moirean

Multiple liaisons have the mage class and have experience fighting as magi, so I don't know where this "no input from those who know the class" thing is coming from.

Valdus

I think at this point we can readily admit that Carnifex have lacked some key components in their design that have left the class crippled; after removing the epseth/epteth spamming issues, it was pretty clear that the timebomb nature of soulthirst was really a major design flaw. Their update addresses this by removing the problematic balance time scaling while letting the Carnifex 'use' the stolen soul to big effect.

I agree that seeing something 'new' is rare, given the game's history and the constraints of the setup. We're never above trying new things, though. New paradigms for combat are really hard to establish just from theory crafting, but the pieces tend to fall into place if you have a solid idea and can fully test it. I am always open to this sort of input, because even if concepts fall apart before being fully implemented, there's usually ideas to take away from it and a better understanding of why certain things work or do not work will follow.

We are certainly not attempting to 'fix' mages this round - we have planned, and are still working on, eventual revamps for the individual mage guilds into separate classes. In the interim, however, we thought it would be prudent to do exactly what I described above: we're taking concepts and ideas we hope to apply to the eventual redesign, and testing them in the form of updates to the current class. Whether or not these ideas will pan out remains to be seen; some ideas have really taken off and become a core asset to the class (brands, which we'll be improving upon), while others have not been quite as successful (for instance, aquasphere). Tweaking these new ideas and learning from the results will help us design a much stronger and refined class in the end.

Toz

One thing that's interesting about mages, at least in the IRE-wide sense? I've found that they're easier to balance if retardation kills off/disables vibes. You can make them have a viable stand-alone offense within vibes, then give them the fight finishing option of dropping retardation to slow the pacing down when someone's already locked up, and finish them off. Retardation is very potent if you are the only one able to fight back in it, so by changing retardation to slowly disable vibes (similar to how Achaea's works), you open up the potential for a viable 1v1 offense balanced around that concept, while retaining the purpose of the retardation skill.

Lots of people in Achaea, for instance, would do some kind of prep (limb damage in their case) and then drop retardation and their next balance would break a limb - this, paired with retardation setting in, means you have whole lot of curing to do and not nearly enough time to do it. For here, I'd imagine it'd be more viable to use affs since limb classes are all in a weird spot (being able to easily automate aff offense vs the more complex limb automation, plus pre-restore), then drop retardation to slow their curing speed. One thing that makes retardation so dangerous is that there are TWO ways to cure in it, each with their own pros and cons, and each with their own way to be abused. The first is, obviously, cure as you're given things - this puts you 1.5 seconds minimum behind the fight. The other is to try to cure what you have 1.5s in the future - the downside being maybe you cure the asthma you have, then get paralysis 1s later. Now you're stuck with paralysis instead of asthma, so the cure really wasn't worth it.

Xavin

Oh my god aquasphere. It sort of made sense at the time that it was implemented, when holocaust was split into three different abilities (though I don't know why singularity wasn't given the same treatment), water was made the damage over time ability and fire was made random affs. But god, it is such a problematic ability.

Irruel

@toz
What @xiuhcoatl has tried to explain, is that curing in retardation, if done right, only puts you 1.5s behind at the beginning. After that, you can cure at the same speed as normal, assuming the opponent keeps afflicting you quickly.

There is no possible reason to try and predict-cure everything. There might be(??)  specific situations where you know without any doubt what it coming, but in this case you just trick your system into curing it by manually adding that aff into your curing system.

The process to set it up is roughly something like:

1. In retardation mode, forget setting balances with gmcp
GMCP has this annoying feature, where it is updated very frequently, making it really accurate. This makes it harder to trick your system into behaving differently when in retardation, blackout or any other time you need to tell your system to believe code ahead of game output.

2. Adjust your herb-eat failsafe/limiter times to be:

herb balance + latency factor

This means your system believes that it regains herb balance before you actually do. You can send the command for the next cure and it will make it through the retardation delay just after you really regain herb balance.

3. Adjust your affliction-cure limiter to be:

retardation delay + herb balance + latency factor

This will stop your system from trying to cure the same affliction when it runs a second time. You don't need to remove the aff you just need to use limiters everywhere. You all do use separate limiters/failsafes for each cure attempt, specific to that affliction, right?

Xiuhcoatl

@Irruel almost. That method of curing will prevent retardation from getting you really far behind. The problem is just people spamming paralysis. So you have to spam paralysis harder than them. There's a few classes they fight extremely well in retardation because of the paralysis spamming nature of it. None of them are what you'd really expect. 

Your third point is incorrect. That would result in a slow down of ~3-17 seconds on a failed 

The ideal would be:

retardation delay+latency factor

The proof goes as follows: If you miss a cure, it'll take you exactly 1.5+latency factor to figure out you missed it. For extremely long balances(tree/focus/reconstitute), you'd be shafting yourself for using their balance. IE, you only tree once every 10 seconds. However, you assume the tree went through so the affliction gets set to being attempted to be cured for the entire balance cost. What if your renew attempt was for paralysis? Now for 15 seconds, you're stuck with paralysis and unabled to do anything but twerk of telepathy/dwhisper.

@Moirean there's only 3 liaisons I trust to know their left from their right in terms of actual combat, That's you, Ilyon, and Feichin. IMO, none of the others are really combatants at least in my mind. I'm still kinda iffy on Ilyon knowing his stuff, but he's not disappointing me so far. That's a bit more than I can say for the other liaisons, but I'm an OCD perfectionist. If you unicorn up on something, I'm going to ride your unicorn into the ground and stake it there. No offense to you all, but some of you still seem a little wet behind the ears. Again, no offense but it's like being given a choice between having the input of Andrew Grove or Rory Reed. You're obviously going to pick Mr Grove.

@Xavin aquaresphere never made sense. It still doesn't make sense. The one useful thing it did was make it so that ascendril could bash fire elementals afk with no tanking artifacts. The question I still have is, who the hell thought it was a good idea to split the damage type between singularity and holocaust. If you dropped a holocaust on every class in the game and then a singularity on every class in the game. The holocaust will do more damage on average by a significant amount. This is because it deals bonus damage to vampires and there's very few fire damage resistance bonuses. Now on the other hand, for cold damage there's a skill called weathering/warmth/hardiness/(vampire/bb) get it passively. It's only purpose is to shaft cold damage with 15%-10% extra reduction from.

Irruel

@xiuhcoatl
Re: timings - yeah, good point on the third. Not really sure what I was thinking there.

I also meant to add, as a 4th point, that for salve affs people should just spam apply salves as much as they want. It is another reason why lycans should never, ever fight in retardation. The main reason of course being that neckdrag trumps vibes every time, so they never actually have to.

Xiuhcoatl

Nah, you'd use the standard balance+latency on salve balance time. What you're forgetting about lycans is the berserk skill. Through it you're immune to paralysis, through shed you're immune to venomlocks. Through howls you have hidden means to deliver hidden paralysis, hidden anorexia, hidden confusion. In reality, lycans are incredibly potent inside of retardation. General rule of thumb is hamstring/rend until they pre-restore and then double break their legs. Since they're off balance from restoring, you can just mangle+destroy both of their legs very quickly. Then go for the brainsmash, the best method of killing as a lycan. 

Xavin

I don't have the answer to the question about holocaust and singularity. Likely it had a lot to do with the fact that it thematically doesn't make much sense for sciomancers to be throwing around massive amounts of fire damage aside from staffcast, as they don't have access to the fire channel. That said, it is more likely a way to differentiate between the two classes.

Aquasphere, watersprite, and the creation of different types of holocaust for ascendril were all reports by zynti, if I remember correctly. And they weren't the most well-thought-out reports in the world, I can tell you that. I have to admit that the DoT style water holocaust was nice. I feel like it was a bit easier to use, though it was more difficult to spike damage with it.

Moirean

That aff holocaust is laughably bad.

Xavin

It was worse when it was fire holo.

Daskalos

Hasn't this thread run it's course? I mean, it's on one hand everyone saying 'retardation is bad' and then Xiuhcoatl saying it's just because people don't know how to cure in it and then insulting half the liaisons. Perhaps time for a close?

Xiuhcoatl

@Daskalos that's a strawman argument. I'm pointing out where people are wrong. I'm saying you're not curing in retardation correctly. This leads to instead of a fight happening, the person gets noob checked out of a fight and dying very quickly. Also, I never insulted half the liaisons. If you wished to construe what I said as an insult it was directed at almost all of them besides 2, and I was being lenient on those two which in reality I shouldn't have. As Ezalor pointed at me earlier. The liaisons and administration are just people and people make mistakes. Therefor, you can't trust any of them.

Also @Valdus you're saying that systems have evolved over time to be better than they were/still are evolving. I'd have to say this is wrong on the ground of high end systems. In the last 5 years, systems on the high end have advanced little to at all. What has boomed is the great amount of mid tier systems/combatants since the sale of pre-built stems. People who were once very very low tier combatants can now advance to be mid tier combatants due to the sale of systems. So while there are till only a few A grade systems out there, the C and B grade are much more present today, when 5+ years ago most people didn't have a system at all. However, there were still a few A grade systems. 

Valdus

I think that's enough sparring over semantics. Let's see how the retardation changes play out!