Discernment

Angwe

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Herb balance is far too fast for most people to PvP without some kind of AI system handling envenoming for them. Add to this the myriad ways of curing, and the problem is only compounded. Now, building an AI system for a venom class is dependent on one single ability. Discernment. Discernment happens to be the transcendent ability in the skill of Vision. My idea is to move Discernment way, WAY down, giving it access to people who haven't played the game long enough to trans everything and those without the financial means or the time to procure enough credits to do so. This would open up the combat scene to the wider playerbase instead of the current situation, where only endgame and heavily transed/artied people can compete in any meaningful way.

Discuss.

Haven

I think discernment is fine where it is.

The problem in my opinion is the 1243545432432412346454341232134534234324 curing abilities in the game. Nuke endgame curing and call for a reduction in passive curing across the board but above all slow down combat.

Ezrax

slower curing is good because its become an arms race with the bottom rung being raised. the objective should be to broaden the median latency-wise so those in other countries can more easily affect top-tier combat and stand a chance

Illikaal

Yos was da best knight. He didn't have an AI. You also don't necessarily need an AI. You could just write a smart envenomer and affliction tracker.

I'm personally opposed slowing down combat. Fights take long enough as it is.

Ezalor

I only Transed Vision for Discernment. Everything else there is unnecessary/in another one of my skillsets already.

Yeah it sucks when you have to dump 1736 lessons essentially just for 1 ability but hey, Aetolia is the freest game around .

Illikaal

League of Legends is freer and better!

Mastema

Ezrax said:

..... the objective should be to broaden the median latency-wise so those in other countries can more easily affect top-tier combat and stand a chance

I often wondered about this as I have heard that in the US my speeds for stuff would be way faster compared to here in Australia, or compared to when I was in the UK. Why is this and what is needed to fix it?

 

Azton

I have a system which works without having the need to use discernment.. so I dont see why this topic is an issue...

Discernment is only meant to catch stuff like tree/recon/angel curing/necklace purity/purity and any other hidden healing skills..

the herb/salve/focusing/smoking everyone has a system to track.. so moving discernment down in vision seems silly considering IF you want to be a 'good' combat then you would have to invest into being it...   otherwise in my books its just like picking a class you can bash people to death in.. pointless and not really combat.

Ezalor

Mastema said:

Ezrax said:

..... the objective should be to broaden the median latency-wise so those in other countries can more easily affect top-tier combat and stand a chance

I often wondered about this as I have heard that in the US my speeds for stuff would be way faster compared to here in Australia, or compared to when I was in the UK. Why is this and what is needed to fix it?

 

Aetolia's servers are in the US, hence being in the US = less ping. 

Illidan said:

League of Legends is freer and better!

I play both . My poor, poor wallet.

Ezrax

im no analyst so i couldnt say how best to resolve the issue of a latency advantage coupled with aetolias speed = victory approach to combat (at the end of the day combat is about shaving milliseconds off your opponents curing speed using tactical application of afflictions at your command versus the time spent application) but it could definitely do with an across-the-board slowing down. unfortunately theres no way that i can think of that can fix this

Noon

Didn't Imperian increase all balance times?

Alastair

Yes. Imperian did increase all healing balances, but Imperian also has serverside curing, which operates on an insanely fast tick that was put in place to give some feel of pseudo latency instead of just instantly curing anything the moment you receive it. It auto-redefs general defenses (insomnia, speed, fangbarrier, etc), and now has custom priority options. It has a weak left, a few flaws, and anyone running it stock will die really fast to anyone who knows what they are doing, because if you know the curing order, (and everyone does for factory autocuring), you can exploit it.

But Imperian also has no ability, ever, for anyone, that is even comparable to discernment. I saw that at trans vision here and my jaw literally dropped. It essentially reduces any sort of affliction based offense down to nothing more than having a dedicated lock priority. I have no idea why lesser healing systems that are slower and do not do things like, you know, automatically clear amnesia, or automatically know when stupidity has successfully outcached and eaten for the cure, are not just utterly destroyed by any sort of affliction based offense from a player that knows #IF (%ismember("slickness",@targetafflictions)) {envenom rapier with asthma;slash target;dwhisper anorexia impatience target} {}. I guess I'm going to figure that out, once I bash a bunch and trans vision and survival.

It also shocked me that you guys don't have purge blood at trans Antidotes, which in Imperian, does more than make you not drunk or not high, and is another active healing balance that cures physical afflictions. Then I realized you get super special endgame curing that is even better than just physical affs from purge blood. That's just sickening. Discernment might be offense necessary to a game that has the old school fast healing balances, and a truckload of random passive aff curing.

teal deers - Imperian did increase healing balance times. Imperian also has better curing than you'll ever be able to code for, because it is infallible, and faster than you are. Imperian does not have tons of passive curing, only a few skills in a few places, and so our offenses have all been coded around the inability to know exactly what your target is curing.

(Imperian also has inline envenoming. And yes, it's fantastic.)

Ezrax

AFAIK Imperian doesn't have a stock curing order either for their trees. They have one for focus and purge blood and that's it.

Edit: And tree tat, right.

Alastair

No, they don't. For any of the above. We code affliction based offenses on slower healing balances, but without ANY method of detecting what is cured aside from the contextual and obvious, and tree, purge blood, and focus, all cure randomly. I just tested. Discernment is OP imho, but my opinion, (honest as it may be), is pretty much worthless seeing as I don't have the skills to feel comfortable pk'ing yet and thus no empirical evidence to draw on. Discernment, as long as it exists here, will be a mandatory requirement for me as praenom. I wouldn't even think of labeling myself a pk'er here without it.

E: grammar

Xavin

Eh, it's pretty needed in Aetolian combat. If you're going to get anywhere as an affliction class you basically need it.

Alastair

I think that it is comparing apples to oranges, too many things are different. All of your herb/slice cures cure in a certain order, you have a plethora of passive/active multiple aff heals on short cools, and there's endgame passive curing. On top of that, the afflictions themselves function differently in several cases. I should have amended my statement to read 'discernment in the pk environment I'm used to would be ridiculously OP'. Maybe it is required here. I do willingly accept credit donations so that I have to spend less time bashing and start spending time pk'ing, for the record.

Xavin

Endgame curing is active.

Alastair

Oh well at least there's a sacrifice to momentum. What are eq/bal times like on it?

Haven

Reconstitute/Erase/Renew use up 500 mana while requiring that you have both balance and equilibrium available when used.

I still maintain that endgame curing needs to be removed from Aetolia while scaling back ALL passive curing across the board to a small but set standard available to all classes. I think one of the Admin said they were working on changing that but we'll see how it goes down the line.

To hop back on topic though, as I've said before, I believe discernment is fine where it is. Discernment is a booster skill that is supposed to essentially help elevate you to one of the higher tiers if not the highest tier of combat by drastically increasing your output efficiency/potential with information on what your opponent cures.

The problems I find with Aetolia's combat community are that the tiers aren't evenly spread out populace wise nor are they transparent. There are few combatants in the game in comparison to the other type of players so when a new player joins the combatant ranks they're usually faced with a relatively high entry point of moderate to expert levels of combat where they're facing opponents like say: myself, @Jeromy, @Xavin, @Dato, @Angwe, @Arbre, @Edhain, @Valingar, @Tina, @Belgarion, @Borscin, @Luna, @Serrice, @Dourif, @Mazzion, @Illidan, @Tralendar, @Xarian, @Daskalos, @Tyrak, etc. Which is a pretty staggering entry point in my opinion.

This is why I think more people should take up combat and that there should be more programs introduced to help with the entry point and make the tiers of combat more transparent so as to know whom to look for / challenge without having to guess who the beginner/moderate/expert fighters are. Aside from word of mouth or examining player might, both of which are unreliable sources of information, there isn't really a way to quickly tell/compare where the tiers begin and end.

Tza

Haven said:

This is why I think more people should take up combat and that there should be more programs introduced to help with the entry point and make the tiers of combat more transparent so as to know whom to look for / challenge without having to guess who the beginner/moderate/expert fighters are. Aside from word of mouth or examining player might, both of which are unreliable sources of information, there isn't really a way to quickly tell/compare where the tiers begin and end.

I would totally welcome that! I've been wondering whether there's some (ooc) clan or something where you can just quickly toss combat related questions at people that can't really be asked IC and/or ask people for a quick spar (and with that I mean people <> @Daskalos who would probably one-shot me).

Edhain

Regarding the set curing queues, I really like them because I like the idea of strategy over luck. Also, automated offense is not a win button anyway, because you have to deal with your opponent's defense and the decisions your mind makes are frequently better than the machine (although maybe I'm just a bad coder) so it's always best to have at least some degree of manual control. Automated offense is more of a crutch, in my opinion, for someone who makes decisions too slowly or types too slowly or something. It's not wrong to be on crutches, it just means you can't fight as flexibly as someone who has everything under their own mind's control to adapt quickly to changing context. I could be wrong, this is just my personal perception of the issue as it pertains to myself.

@Haven, I agree with you about the problem of having too few combatants and too elite a range of them. But I think it would be hard to set up a tier system. The best way to understand your opponent is word of mouth, and then experience. There's nothing wrong with losing a few spars. When I was a newbie I used to fight some really big names that would pulverize me, but each time I drew some lesson or other from the match anyway. When it got to the point that I just didn't have enough skills, or just didn't have enough artifacts, but otherwise had done everything correctly - I would move on and fight someone else until I got some more skills or artifacts. However, that point was few and far between. Far more often the other person got tired of sparring me and moved on first.

Another difficulty in setting up a system like that is the movement of players through tiers. For instance, as you pointed out, once I might have been considered a "staggering" prospect for a low tier combatant to fight. But now I'm so rusty that I basically am a low/mid tier combatant. It's frustrating when I spar and lose to have people send me tells like 'why' or even when I win like 'you've still got it'. That could be purely my own preference, but I much prefer fighting anonymously without any recognition or reputation added to my name. It would be even more frustrating if absolutely everyone could tell my supposed 'tier', because then there's a stigma attached where if you win it's for granted and if you lose it's a shameful surprise. That stigma makes it harder to stick your neck out sometimes. I have seen this happen a lot with "famous players" who never wanted to solo fight strong "new" combatants because they were too worried to lose and face the shame from allies and enemies alike. Though I try to keep away from this attitude myself, it's still awkward sometimes.

Lastly, I think there is a fair amount of "low tier" combatants, but their upward mobility tends to make it seem like there aren't as many. Pretty much everyone started out low tier at some point or another, and often higher tiers drop in prowess when they play less or return from dormancy. 

For the OP topic: On discernment, I think it's okay where it is. You don't need an automated offense right away, it's actually better if you don't have it. I didn't have discernment for the longest time, tracked what I could with my eyes, manually fought with aliases, and got through with a solid understanding of the essentials. That's the phase that makes you memorize names and tactics and curing orders without needing any automation. Once you've graduated to the degree that you know you're doing the absolute best you can and you simply need to know what random curing is curing in order to become any better, you should be able to work on transing vision anyway because you have the skills to build up credits in game. It's like... in middle school, you add, subtract, multiply, and divide by hand on paper or in your head. In high school, you get to use the calculator. I don't know if that is understandable or a valid analogy. But my main point is, you build an understanding of the system from the ground up, not the top down, or it's very fragile. Someone who pays several hundred bucks to trans all their abilities and buy artifacts as a newbie doesn't know what to do with half those skills and probably will never learn to utilize them to their full extent. This is my main problem with coming back from dormancy and/or switching class. I don't know what to do with everything I have, where to start, etc. I have to start with one thing and learn it through and through before moving on, but that's hard to regulate on my own side when I have so many options - some of which are more powerful than others.

Hadoryu

To sort of echo @Edhain here...

Don't go with an auto offense unless you're sure there's nothing more you can do manually.

You're going to lose flexibility, you're going to have it malfunction, but worst of all? You're going to start blaming your class when your auto-offense isn't killing someone. Keep your mind open, because there are many, many ways to beat what may seem like pretty straight numbers.

I never went with an auto-offense. I wrote a half-succesful auto-offense for someone else in a class I never used, but I never wrote one for myself. It wasn't for lack of ability.

Angwe

Since when am I mid-tier? Since when am I IN a tier?!
0_o

Angwe

Hadoryu said:

To sort of echo @Edhain here...

You're going to lose flexibility, you're going to have it malfunction, but worst of all? You're going to start blaming your class when your auto-offense isn't killing someone. Keep your mind open, because there are many, many ways to beat what may seem like pretty straight numbers.

Ugh, I'm totally guilty of this and I used to hate those kinds of people.

Arbre

One time Seir didn't realize skullwhack did head damage, so I unconlocked him to death, and now people think I can PK.

Lin

I'm fondly remembering the time you tried that on me, so I tripblock --> bbt-chained you to death.

Illikaal

Lin said:

I'm fondly remembering the time you tried that on me, so I tripblock --> bbt-chained you to death.

Report 1186 OP.

But yes, I've always manualed combat EXCEPT old school Druid because there was literally nothing to except autobashing. I've always manualed lycan 100%, Monk 100%, and Shaman 100%. I also feel like having an automatic offense is a crutch (unless you're Haedyn), because like it's been said, there's not enough flexibility there. If my auto offense goes vinelashx4, scourge, quicken, overload, staticburst, naturaltide release, etc. in that order, it's not going to be as effective or even useful in a situation where I need to slam/effuse/chainlightning (which I really need to play with.) The Seir and Arbre situation is a grade A example as to why you shouldn't automate, because then you'll eventually forget all of the skills that you have at your disposal, and what purpose they serve. 

I do have to say I have MAD respect for anyone who manuals a venom class like syssin or Templar with no aff tracker whatsoever. I can't keep up with people eating herbs/focusing/treeing/renewing/other class affliction curing abilities during all the spam. Limb classes are definitely my forte, and a lot easier to manual imo because you don't have to keep up with 100,000 herbs, and know which affliction in the stack they cured first immediately. All you have in limb combat is mending, and restoration. 

I really love the concept of Shaman though, because you're predominantly doing a lot of herb affliction attacks, but the afflictions do not exist for the purpose of stacking with the intent to venomlock. It's new to me, and I really feel like continuing to use/manual Shaman as my primary PK class will help me keep track herbs a bit better.