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BB as a class is certainly not in a weak spot, they simply suffer from turtling like most of the classes in Aetolia do.
@Haven because that makes the artifacted version OP. And while in a perfect combat world artifacts don't even exist, Raz gotta eat.
If artifacts are making core classes overpowered then it seems the artifacts in question need tweaking so that they're both worthwhile and still provide a reasonable advantage without pushing the core over the top.
Edit: If you don't ever balance or make the core work, how do you ever expect to know how to properly address/tweak the branches off the core?
Edit: Be careful what you wish for, if Kheoss can't turtle against you, he just won't try and fight you 1v1 and then you'll have to play XCom or LoL or something. I am always wary of ideas like "let's take out [entire strategy here]" ideas.
Original aeon was taken out like 2-3 years ago and Indorani are still considered struggling apparently and the only fix recently was to make Indorani-DSL, that should be seen as a red flag.
Classleads are great for coming up with new ideas but terrible for balancing the game. Just because players are annoyed by something doesn't mean that it's necessarily a bad thing. The movement that comes up now and then to get rid of turtling is a great example of this, if you get rid of it, there will be far less 1v1 and that type of gameplay should be something that people do because they want to do it, not something that exists to cater towards people's egos and biased senses of game balance.
Message #17059 Sent By: Oleis Received On: 1/03/2014/17:24
"If it makes you feel better, just checking your artifact list threatens to crash my mudlet."
@Strung that's a fair point about DSL and that's something that has actually been receiving discussion over liaisons; all aff classes more or less fall into the category of lockers, and while there's variety in how they get there, the endgame is the same for all of them. You do see some variety now with Shamans and Bloodborn but given Aetolia's current affliction system it's pretty hard to conceivably escape that mold without making something either OP or crap.
I don't think people will magically stop 1v1ing once they aren't able to turtle to infinity anymore, I haven't met a single 1v1er that enjoys playing/playing against infinite turtling.
The underlying problem is: clearly he wants to fight if he's here to spam shield in the first place, so why does he keep turtling? This is why I have been saying that the games need more "double-edged sword" mechanics.
To tie that all together: imagine that consecutively breaking someone's shield gives them a buff to their next attack's damage and/or afflictions, but also gives them a debuff where they can't shield and their movement is slowed for X amount of time. This would create an ebb and flow that might get one party killed without actually removing turtling from the game, removing it would be bad in the long run because people will just opt not to fight against people who can put them into a turtling position, but adding a new dimension to turtling would partially remove the problem without getting rid of as much 1v1 activity.
@Riluo thanks, I'm glad that people agree with me in a sense
Since I'm editing, and if it already does this or something feel free to LOL at me, but let's say that the shield buff makes shapeshifter flurry also cause bruising on each limb hit. This gives the shapeshifter a bonus for coming out of their shell but with a shield and movement debuff, they now have to commit and actually fight some more.
I do agree that this discussion points to something about turtling as a whole. I don't like the idea of moving Fitness to survival - it already seems too prolific to me, and there's not really a counter to it. Even with the increase in balance time, the difference in locking someone with it and locking someone without it is huge, and with confusion moving up the priority someone can effectively be unlockable between Fitness, shielding of any kind, or any escape mechanism. I think this goes double for Shrug and Shed - no cooldown, short balance and no afflictions to stop its use means Syssin and Lycanthropes are effectively unlockable, barring either insanely lucky timing or someone having static curing.
tl;dr is the disparity between artifacted Bloodborn and unartifacted Bloodborn is very, very wide, and I agree on the point of lockbreakers, active cures, and general turtling being worth looking at. Think of all the cool creative shit we can do with it!
the way she tells me I'm hers and she is mine
open hand or closed fist would be fine
blood as rare and sweet as cherry wine
Also in general I love the concept of shielding acting like fitness in terms of it taking longer each time if use within a set period. This overall is a fantastic concept that is fair for all parties.
Abhorash says, "Ve'kahi has proved that even bastards can earn their place."
Abhorash says, "Ve'kahi has proved that even bastards can earn their place."
On the subject of Indorani Aeon, they were struggling before then. Aeon (by which I mean its old mechanics) by itself is massively easy to counter these days by systems but stupidly powerful in groups, which is largely the only place it saw effective use. I only ever lost to Indoranis because of hunger tactics when they had old Aeon. The changes you're getting now are for the better since they were fairly pointless previously save Aeon, Wheel, and Hangedman in groups.
I've suggested the idea for diminishing returns on Shield for ages in that it should have a chance of outright failing while taking eq. with the chance of it failing the more you try to use it in a span of time (unless you're getting hit by multiple people in a group.) This would be easy to set up since we already have flags for multiple people hitting one person. It was shot down, unfortunately, since apparently DR concepts are frowned upon.
Edit: Lastly, I'd like to make my opinion known on one last thing. If a class is balanced around having an artifact such as the EQ crown, that is poor class design. We removed things like Quickfoot and Reflexes for a reason and keeping the crown around and justifying its existence because it makes IRE money is a horrible reason for keeping it around and it's pretty piss poor to have most other classes be perfectly combat viable with what they have and then tell another class: Oh, well, you need to go spend 850 credits to get the afflict rate that you should have.
Just get rid of the crown already. Or, as a joke, we can create an 850 credit artifact for balance to level the playing field with everyone else.
Strategically, it's sort of always been that a good fighter knows when to shield or something similar in order to break your offensive progress and killing them has always been when they choose not to do it anyway to press their own attack. This is why I want to see something more complicated with shielding than just nerfing it, I think nerfing it will only serve to discourage 1v1 play or even worse, show us a shift to classes with active healing skills. For example, you could just bloodboil instead of shield and then we'll have to nerf bloodboil next. Then after that we'll nerf lay hands and purify blood and so-on. Shielding and defensive skills are a very fundamental part of the game.
Now certainly we could just nerf every active defensive skill in the game... Imperian is on the way to doing that and probably has like 35 people online right now, IMHO it would be a bad decision because it would transition the game towards a slugfest where you can calculate who will win a fight without having the fight. Variation leads to replayability and defensive skills provide players with agency, or the ability to make relevant decisions mid-fight.
the way she tells me I'm hers and she is mine
open hand or closed fist would be fine
blood as rare and sweet as cherry wine
Another simple idea would be to let people SHIELD WITH BODY or SHIELD WITH MIND. When you shield with body, you lose like 5% health and when you shield with mind, you get a hidden mental aff.
Using the Trager and Riluo fight as an example, okay Trager shields every time he's around 33% mana. In return Riluo can shield every time he gets clumsiness and limp veins stuck on him. Result is a neverending stalemate until one of them runs out of something. Not fun PK.
The other difference (as I already mentioned) is that one shield can get you out of a kelp stack but it takes multiple shields to get you out of a damage buildup.
You're fond of saying that every choice can be scripted into your AI
@Strung commented that Indorani are yet another homogenised class (i.e. either dual-aff or limb damage - all classes that work, barring shaman, are like this currently)
The weakness of herb classes, and very specifically in this example, kelp vlocks, is that even a mediocre scripter can manage the if statement to interrupt a vlock attempt with hinder_X (be that shield or whatever else).
Given that weakness, why are so many of our classes slowly turning into Achaea's rapier knights of 2001-2002?
Edit: I think it's pretty clear that everyone agrees shield spamming is still a problem. There also seems to be a consensus on vamps being too powerful thus that's why people are falling back on shield spam, which I agree with on some points but not all.
As Irruel touched upon, if we nerf shield, then do we also have to nerf web, lay hands, tarot heals, blood boil, etc. too? Don't you guys see where that is headed? Imperian is (IMHO) nearly dead as a result of that mentality.
If I had to say anything about IRE's games:
Aetolia is the example of what roleplay should be.
Imperian is the example of what balance should be.
Lusternia is the example of what artifacts should be.
Achaea is the example to everyone else of what not to be.
Midkemia Online... We don't know what he's really doing.
Edit: I'd also say Lusternia is the prime example of what conflict mechanics should look like too. However, the fact that artifacts there don't substitute for skill at all unlike most other places, they're pretty good in that regard.
When I brought this up on the Imperian forums, people acknowledged a lack of variety but wouldn't attribute Imperian's decline to it. Hmmm.
Getting back to Aetolia, if people start using abilities or classes that don't need shield tattoo to slow or hinder, would you just go through and nerf every ability and strategy which has that effect?