Legacy Class Discussion

Ezrax

cabalists

Haven

Exodus said:

Ezalor said:

Its complexity comes from you -needing- a proper aff tracker and at least a partially automated offense to get anywhere. Purely momentum based so spamming macros and/or overlapping afflictions and/or delivering the wrong ones will completely erase all progress made. There's not much variety in what you do - jab/claw/frenzy and dwhisper, repeat infinitely - but working that combo is indeed very complex.

Weaponry has become a completely integrated part of Praenomen offense. It doesn't reveal how broken it is - take away the ability to use a weapon and you'll see Praenomen become the most inept/weakest class in the game. It might not have been what the developers originally intended but its how the class has been shaped and based off entirely for the past...I dunno, almost decade? 

Exactly which class isn't momentum based, that you seem to think is easier to play than Praenomen because of it? You can't in good faith say there's not much variety in what Praenomen does, and still call it complex. Variety is the basis for complexity, and so I put it to you that Praenomen are one of the least complex classes to play, being on the same level as Indorani and Cabalists. (ouch).

Regarding weaponry, the administration has been fine with their using weaponry since they started doing it. It's a different style of combat - one that they weren't envisioned as adopting, due to how strong frenzy use to be. A frenzy and a single whisper, plus a minion, didn't leave you long to do all the curing you needed before the next one came. If the ghast paralysed, then you'd get behind. The fact that weaponry is now a better option, and has been for some time, just shows the lack of interest from everyone to see Praenomen fixed up.

I really feel like this needs echoing. Weaponry should be a bonus to the class, not a requirement. Anyone know why frenzy was downgraded in the first place? I'd really like to see the skill upgraded to something more competitively appropriate so that the class isn't left gimped without Weaponry. Even if it means frenzy gains a 'hands free' requirement of some kind.

Haven

Ezrax said:

cabalists

Considering the fact that I've never played with the Cabalist class to be sure of the issues myself, I have to ask: What do you guys actually think the problem with the class is?

Illikaal

In my personal experience vs the class, they don't have any realistically viable kill methods. The BIGGEST threat a cabalist poses is spamming nothing but tweaks, infirmity, and madness. Even then, as long as you diagnose every second or third tweak, you shouldn't have any problems vs cabalists. From what I've seen of the skillsets, its just a bunch of crap thrown together - and each individual piece doesn't synergize with the next. Indorani are incredibly similar in their newbie killing capabilities, though they sometimes get lucky because a lot of Indorani skills just incredibly gimmicky. Still, if you know what you're doing, and Indorani shouldn't ever kill you either. 

Translation: Cabalists are nothing but a newbie killer class. The skillsets were horribly designed. The class makes about as much sense as a Templar with Naturalism, Domination, and Elemancy. 

Ezrax

Pretty much what Illidan said. Synergy is important. Cabalists were born of the old era when 'Give some guys 1 new skillset with 2 old ones' was the norm, without any effort to make them work together.

Ezrax

Also, I hate hate HATE fire-and-forget skillsets, like Domination. There's so many cool things that can be done with Domination that doesn't require fifteen ents that you just order to attack and then promptly ignore. IRE games preach on about their complex combat, but there's no tactics in shotgun-spreading some monsters at someone's face then tweak-spamming.

Alexina

Have I misunderstood the term 'legacy classes'? I assumed these were the classes with skillsets that carried over from Achaea (infernal, paladins, monks, druids, sentinels, mage, syssin and to a lesser extent daru/cabalists/indorani/luminaries). I thought the point of the class revamps were primarily to get rid of these skillsets - especially focusing on classes with tradeskills - rather than to change classes for the sake of changing (although all of the old classes would obviously do well with a facelift, too).

Did I get it wrong?

Illikaal

Ezrax said:

Pretty much what Illidan said. Synergy is important. Cabalists were born of the old era when 'Give some guys 1 new skillset with 2 old ones' was the norm, without any effort to make them work together.

And that's why Indorani share the EXACT same problem. 

They are both due for a rework, but they're likely a long ways off. I more faith in our current producer/administrative staff than I ever have before, and so, I can promise you that when the day comes for Cabalists and Indorani to be reworked, you won't be let down. Unless of course, you're hoping for them to release a Spam-two-skills-and-win class. That won't happen. Hopefully >_>.

Haven

Ah, yeah. I know what you mean about the importance of synergy. It's a problem quite a few classes face. As for the problem with the disturbs, would these solutions be too much of an issue to allow?

Solution 1: Allow disturbs to work in a similar vein as Vampiric temptations where they cannot properly fade unless you're not in the same room as the Cabalist.

Solution 2: Allow disturb timer to stand and remain until previous disturb fades. An example would be if Ezrax manages to stick 3 disturbs on Illidan then the second disturb applied cannot fade until the third disturb expires and the first disturb applied cannot fade until the second disturb expires. So on and so forth.

Iosyne

Eventually, the goal is to have all of Aetolia's classes unique to Aetolia, with no holdovers from Achaea.

The Carnifex(Infernals), Templars(Paladins), and Shamans(Druids) are what we would consider complete legacy class overhauls. As you might have seen in the Aetolian Development subforum, the Sentinels, Sciomancers, and Ascendril are the next three classes targeted. The Sentinels have already received part of their revamp and the remaining two skills are currently in the coding phase. Classes with tradeskills occupying a guildskill slot have been given priority attention due to the desire to have all Tradeskills available to all (like Forging, Concoctions, and Reanimation currently are).

Naturally, it is a very hefty amount of work to completely re-write classes from the ground up, especially while continuing to evolve and improve Aetolia in the numerous other ways.

Illikaal

Those are both terrible solutions, because: 

Solution 1: If I walk out, then tada, there goes that disturb they tweaked so hard for to get. 

Solution 2: I -believe- that getting a new disturb resets the timers of the any previous ones you might have gotten. The only reason I think this is because I vaguely recall all of the Disturbs fading simultaneously when I was fighting with Clouser constantly 2-someodd years ago. I could be wrong though. Still, even if they didn't, you have to think about it this way. If they could get the first disturb off to begin with, then how much easier does it need to become to land the other two? Assuming that you want the disturbs to still fade 2 minutes after they were landed, Disturb 1 could stay on the target for quite a long time provided they kept on landing Disturb 2 to reset the timer for Disturb 1. IF they were able to keep on doing that, then Disturb 3 would be incredibly easy to get. 

Haven

Illidan said:

Those are both terrible solutions, because: 

Solution 1: If I walk out, then tada, there goes that disturb they tweaked so hard for to get. 

Solution 2: I -believe- that getting a new disturb resets the timers of the any previous ones you might have gotten. The only reason I think this is because I vaguely recall all of the Disturbs fading simultaneously when I was fighting with Clouser constantly 2-someodd years ago. I could be wrong though. Still, even if they didn't, you have to think about it this way. If they could get the first disturb off to begin with, then how much easier does it need to become to land the other two? Assuming that you want the disturbs to still fade 2 minutes after they were landed, Disturb 1 could stay on the target for quite a long time provided they kept on landing Disturb 2 to reset the timer for Disturb 1. IF they were able to keep on doing that, then Disturb 3 would be incredibly easy to get. 

Doesn't each disturb require the same amount of work? I don't know the class well at all. I just know that if you diagnose you should never die. xD

I'm under the impression that each disturb is the same in that you stick 4 afflictions then land the disturb. The only difference being which afflictions you have to stick. If that's the case then I don't see how it gets any easy? It just seems to me that you're one step closer to landing your instakill.

Illikaal

Each disturb you have slows focus balance by 2 seconds. So in theory, the next one should be easier to get. 

Moirean

Iosyne said:

Eventually, the goal is to have all of Aetolia's classes unique to Aetolia, with no holdovers from Achaea.

The Carnifex(Infernals), Templars(Paladins), and Shamans(Druids) are what we would consider complete legacy class overhauls. 

While I adore the new flavour and lore of Carnifex, the overhaul still needs tweaking, since the main viable combat route is basically reskinned Infernal combat.

Luna

Yeah I would have to disagree with the notion that Carnifex is a "complete overhaul" of Infernal.

All disturbs fade simultaneously 120 seconds after the last disturb has been landed, for the record.

Haven

Illidan said:

Each disturb you have slows focus balance by 2 seconds. So in theory, the next one should be easier to get. 

...Ohhh. That's pretty awesome. Also, Luna has confirmed for me that the timers do reset. They all fade 120 seconds after the last disturb is applied.

Despite this, it sounds like the disturbs might need a little buff anyway to address the issue of the Cabalists not having a reliable kill method for the time being until their class gets revamped. Perhaps with each subsequent disturb, they get something in addition to the increased focus balance since that's apparent that isn't enough?

Illikaal

Disturbs aren't the problem. The problem is getting TO the disturb in the first place. 

Illikaal

Moirean said:

Iosyne said:

Eventually, the goal is to have all of Aetolia's classes unique to Aetolia, with no holdovers from Achaea.

The Carnifex(Infernals), Templars(Paladins), and Shamans(Druids) are what we would consider complete legacy class overhauls. 

While I adore the new flavour and lore of Carnifex, the overhaul still needs tweaking, since the main viable combat route is basically reskinned Infernal combat.

I mean. Its incredibly painful to say, but Carnifex -may- need to be rewritten again almost from the ground up. They can still use the same concepts of savagery, warhounds, deathlore, etc. But as far as skill mechanics, synergy, and how to kill your target goals are concerned, the skills are crapola. 

Who knows though. They might be able to salvage what's there and just do HEAVY alterations to how the skills work, similar to what they did with Sentinel Dhurivs and traps. 

Riluo

Illidan said:

I mean. Its incredibly painful to say, but Carnifex -may- need to be rewritten again almost from the ground up. They can still use the same concepts of savagery, warhounds, deathlore, etc. But as far as skill mechanics, synergy, and how to kill your target goals are concerned, the skills are crapola. 

Who knows though. They might be able to salvage what's there and just do HEAVY alterations to how the skills work, similar to what they did with Sentinel Dhurivs and traps. 

The class needs deathlore reworked as it has no synergy, hounds reworked as the tran skill is nearly as bad as "control" in deathlore and a dual hammer attack in savagery. Otherwise its a nice class on paper.

Luna

Riluo said:

Illidan said:

I mean. Its incredibly painful to say, but Carnifex -may- need to be rewritten again almost from the ground up. They can still use the same concepts of savagery, warhounds, deathlore, etc. But as far as skill mechanics, synergy, and how to kill your target goals are concerned, the skills are crapola. 

Who knows though. They might be able to salvage what's there and just do HEAVY alterations to how the skills work, similar to what they did with Sentinel Dhurivs and traps. 

The class needs deathlore reworked as it has no synergy, hounds reworked as the tran skill is nearly as bad as "control" in deathlore and a dual hammer attack in savagery. Otherwise its a nice class on paper.

If only it was so well. Carnifex has problems that run far deeper than broken transcendent abilities and lack of proper hammer attacks. The sad truth is that the majority of the skills are simple copypasta from the Infernal skillsets, and the parts that don't tend to be badly designed, buggy, heavily pre-nerfed or some combination of the aforementioned. It's falcons with paws and new flavour text for necromancy, with the class' combat viability completely dependent on the derpy soulthirst mechanic. To be blunt, whomever did the flavour did a good job, but whomever designed the class mechanics itself definitely didn't.

Illikaal

I was trying to be as nice as I could without saying "Whoever designed the mechanics of Carnifex was moron." >.>

But that works too. 

Calipso

We obviously need a legacy remade with some pixie dust.

the glittering wonder!!

Macavity

From an RP mind set I would really like it if the Sire Childe relationship was expanded out, like all the Praenomen abilities they have over their Childe should be granted to ALL Vampires regardless what class they have.  This would allow the Sire to control or summon their Childe to them, I would argue that the Affinity would be kept to the Praenomen class as it would be OP for other classes to have and just unfair.  But the rest should be open to them!  

What do all the Vamps or non-Vamps feel about this??

Toz

Yeah,  uh, I've been back (kinda) and playing around with numbers/abilities/etc. I forgot just how...awkward Carnifex is. It's basically a for-loop of ssl until they quit moving, or you try something crazy and it doesn't work...or it crashes the game. Less of that now, but still a risk - when the class was first released we were told it was 'unpolished' and that we'd be given priority for fixes etc. but that never quiiiiite happened. I'd love them to be written from the ground-up again. Warhounds/Savagery/Deathlore are awesome concepts and I'd hate to lose them, but the lack of variety/synergy between pretty much anything is frustrating. Halberd offense is boring, but it can work - 80% done, if you're aiming for being able to kill most people eventually. Hammer offense is like 30-40% done, in that the finisher is awesome but really obnoxious to get to at all using just hammer. Warhounds are, like Luna said, falcons that can give affs instead of balance knocks, and Deathlore has some nice concepts (like soul drain) but awful execution (again, like soul drain - a channeled attack that doesn't even go through shield. When do you use that, exactly?)

/end 2-cents

Mastema

Yep all the above and more. We were told it would get fixed straight away and that was stated within a week of us getting the release. It is another Soon™ moment and one that has left the guild with some very subpar skills in some cases. I see no reason as to why it has took this long, surely it could be fixed instead of seeing new class reworks. Do not get me wrong, the class concept is amazing and opens brillant avenues of RP for players, but its skills feel like a carbon copy of when I was an Infernal with new messages. 

Toz

Current goal for me is to assemble all the numbers I can on the class and drag in some people who use it/fight to try and figure out what it'd take to fix it. That's going a little slowly right now, however, since my teachers insist on scheduling tests every day the week after spring break.

Moirean

Regarding Carnifex, there is also an OOC clan that the guild runs for everyone with Carnifex class to discuss the skills and stuff. I *think* we have most everyone, but if you missed getting an invite, shoot me a tell.

Malok

Macavity said:

From an RP mind set I would really like it if the Sire Childe relationship was expanded out, like all the Praenomen abilities they have over their Childe should be granted to ALL Vampires regardless what class they have.  This would allow the Sire to control or summon their Childe to them, I would argue that the Affinity would be kept to the Praenomen class as it would be OP for other classes to have and just unfair.  But the rest should be open to them!  

What do all the Vamps or non-Vamps feel about this??

I don't like the idea of the 1 unique thing Praenomen have being given to every Vampire. It's bad enough that its not that great anyways. The only way I'd personally be on board with this is if they took the fluff/RP stuff out of Sanguis, gave it to all Vampires, then redid Sanguis. It needs it anyways.

Seir

Vampire is a sub-race now so the mechanic likely should be given to every vampire.

Calipso

hmm, while thinking over cabalist class, a thought occurred to me: It isnt really even a class.

As a friend of mine put it: It is just an Indorani specialization.

Take their skills for example. Both necromancy and domination are much more tailored to Indorani in almost every way, most skills in necromancy almost having no purpose for the Cabalist. Domination is no exception, even just now I was discussing chaos hound with someone and how its attacks are rather weak,  I was told its main priority  is breaking shields which is an advantage for Indorani with tarot-linking a doppelganger, other than that, no real use.

Now let's look at Numerology. Numerology is perhaps one of the most untouched and messiest skills in the game, with several abilities that generally make no sense to exist or have no use (elicit feelings? switch? weakening?), it is perhaps equal to Hematurgy in skills abandoned and left somewhere on a shelf to collect dust.  Also tweak is just horribly annoying -.-

So in conclusion, the Cabalist class has 2 skills that werent even created for it and do not mesh well together, and 1 skill that is ancient and almost unusable. Dare I ask, why leave the class? Should it just be deleted and focus be placed upon other things?

Edit: To further explain upon Necromancy's ill-use with a Cabalist, here are some examples. Vivisect is an instantkill of a cabalist, yet the cabalist has no possible setup to lock someone down to break all 4 limbs to Vivisect, the only things are their disposal is Shrivel and Crone, Indorani have other abilities such as warrior (even so vivisect is still very hard). Bone Helm and Bone Dagger are inaccessible to the cabalist, being Indorani only. Putrefaction, the only defensive ability in Necromancy, was removed  from cabalists and given to indorani only, the reason being (it is too much defense with their current kit), meaning it didnt fit in with the current crazy puzzle that was their skills.