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On the subject of Clouser and to be fair, he exploited the combat rankings and fought a bunch of people repeatedly that threw in the towel against him to basically farm his ranking. His achievement isn't an accurate depiction of the Cabalist class and its current state. If you want to name a good, successful Cabalist: Sintor.
However, Xavin is a liaison and has access to the liaison arena where they are capable of testing all classes and playing all classes to identify strengths and weaknesses. Xavin CAN play as a Cabalist and fight in said arena with any set of parameters he needs to test. I tested with Cabalist way back when too and I can also state as to what is good and what is wrong with the class as they've not changed much save for the necessary downgrades to elicit return when it worked despite monoliths. Granted, a lot of escape abilities got the stick at that time as well.
No one is saying that you're not very strong offensively. That's commonly accepted, actually. However, you will find that people will not support granting Cabalist buffs if they don't take a hit in their defensive utility/survivability, which is presently through the roof with pathfinder, elicit return, direcall for escapes. Oneness provides a passive curing of mental affs every 15 seconds, you can "level" your afflictions with an opponent, you have Link as a sort of psuedo-tanking ability, an incredibly potent passive entourage, a great way to keep people from running with Gravehands, decent ranged capabilities for group fights with Doppleganger, and the best group displacement ability in the game: Pit.
It's precisely for the above mentioned reasons that people have reservations for buffing Cabalists. You have to make a trade somewhere. The other problem is that since Cabalists have a lot of potential in their abilities that the act of buffing something in Numerology or Domination will likely push something over the top.
So basically, I don't disagree that Cabalists have problems offensively against top-tier combatants. People just can't justify buffing a Cabalist when they have all the defensive utility and survivability that they currently have.
Clouser was plenty dangerous with the new disturb-based unravel. Easily one of my toughest at that time. Thing is, even if tweak spam won't kill you quickly, cabalists force you to fight aggressively to have a chance to beat them. Not diagnosing for tweak in turn makes it more likely they'll land a disturb, which makes the next one much easier. This basically means you had to be at least a little defensive when fighting them, which in turn means you're pretty unlikely to ever get close to killing them.
I assume a lot must've changed in the game if there's consensus on their offense sucking.
No one said anything remotely like that.
We said that Domination is strong passive skillset, which it is regardless of your hatred of the mechanics behind it.
Here are some other mechanics that are considered "unfair" for lessers, but we generally dont bitch about them.
Rites: Not all rites can be banished (god knows why) but if a luminary just places a displacement rite down in the lesser, then they can pop extractors one at a time to them.
Radiance: even with a shield to place telepathy, it drains like crazy to maintain it, so you are probably not going to have it up beforehand. 1 telepath walks in the area, locks and begins radiance on the extractor, and then the extractor needs to leave the area and return to a long ass waiting period of Refining Control.
Staying on topic though as far as 'Legacy Class Discussion' goes, speaking of the Pit, I've always thought that skill is pretty dumb anyways. Noone likes to use it, noone likes it used on them, and it's just blah. I always thought it'd be far more interesting to have an entirely new entity that did something new and useful and interesting than have a hole open up in the ground that noone can really avoid. I had this idea some time ago that it'd be neat to get an entity like a 'demon lord' or some such, and what he does is randomly each tick try to resummon a demon that you may not already have summoned(it being destroyed by rites or otherwise), that way you could catch up if you're behind on resummoning them.
Just a thought.
It was, in general, overpowered.
Edit: Your idea is neat, though. Might be workable.
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."
This is a thread where proponents from either side are competing to show that some classes, sometimes their own classes, are worse off than others. It's a fight among those that have played more, fought more, experienced more, against anyone that has done less than they have. It's the the eternal struggle for extra benefits and developer attention: do too well, and you're either nerfed, or get no attention. Do too badly, and your play time sucks, but eventually something changes. Welcome to another liaisons thread.
I am by no means innocent of this myself, having produced various topics on Syssin/Shadowsnakes over the last decade (that's elitism for you), but consider that only now do I bring Syssin up in this thread. Consider that this post is the first mention of Syssin in this topic - a class that's as much a candidate for the title of 'legacy class' as any other.
So why, then, has it not been mentioned? Is it their impending doom by way of disbanding and the reduction of total classes available? I think every game needs to maintain a rogue class, so that's not it. Go ahead and reread some of the posts in this thread, and you'll likely come to the same conclusion that I did - this is about the problems that some classes face, who just happen to also be among the oldest classes.
Syssin however, buck the trend. As a class that's old as any other you might mention, they're apparently in such a good place right now, that they don't need to be mentioned. They don't need the attention that other legacy classes do, because skill wise, team fight wise, 1v1 wise, 5v1, 1v9, cooking, origami, and population wise - they're fine, in every respect.
So really, what are you reading here? Yet another post where Exodus plays devil's advocate on the state of Syssin? Perhaps a thread that focuses on how older classes haven't been brought up to the level of newer ones yet (lol carnifex)? How about the simple fact that the squeaky wheel continues to be a pain in the arse, but still works just fine.
Fairly sure they're not actually getting the axe as a class? I think some godperson mentioned that somewhere. I don't think they're reducing the number of classes at all.
And lots of old classes are balanced very nicely. They've been worked at and polished for so long, tested for so long, they're naturally in a much better place. The exceptions are the ones where the concept itself was flawed, such as druid. Paladins and monks were some of the best balanced classes in the game. Syssin too are pretty awesome.
I think there's a real issue with design though. The old classes have already beaten the path and at this point people are much more conservative than they would have been at the start of the game. Venom stacks/affliction stacks are such a complicated, heavy system, but it was essentially a thing only shadowsnakes used to play around with at the very start. Limb damage is also complicated and difficult to manage and it was the domain of monks, almost exclusively, at the start of the game. Now those two things are how we think of 'combat' in the game and every new class has to use them, because making a THIRD system like them would make things too complicated. Is it really a surprise that eventually all classes get molded down to herb or salve based combat?
So I'm thinking how it's really hard to actually design a unique class now. It's like people's thinking is so warped by the herb/salve game that they have a hard time thinking outside of it.
I love that Imperian implemented autocuring, pretty much for that reason.
Granted, I haven't tried it, but it's working out for them apparently.
Why cabalists haven't received any love yet:
The short answer is, because there are bigger fish to fry. One thing we've been really trying to do in our latest revamps is really instill a lot of love and flavor into the skills, and ensure that the mechanical issues of old classes (such as having a single outdated kill route, or having bottleneck skills that we have to balance around instead of with) aren't present. This is why Shaman and Teradrim were slow out of the gates, and also why I think they've had some measure of success. Cabalists have always been known for their deep, immersive roleplay and the last thing we want to do is ruin that with a poorly conceptualized set of bandaids. We DO have concepts and skills in mind and we are working on them - but the classes that we've already started work on take priority, particularly due to where we want to take mercantile skills after they're all detached from their former classes.
On diversifying mechanics:
It's true that in the past, it's been possible for classes to subsist on a single set of mechanics and an overreaching goal - venomlocks, beating salve pressure, softlocks, mana pressure. The problem is that these mechanics leave very little for us to work with unless we increase the depth that these individual routes go, and in the process, complicate any class that uses them. Rather than trying to introduce new components to locks, we have seen more success in employing hybrid, momentum-based approaches that force players to switch priorities and adapt to their opponent's tactics. I think that there are still plenty of bugs to work out for these approaches, but in the long run we'll see balancing be a much more feasible process; instead of having to worry about how a blanket venom/salve/curative change affects classes altogether, we can focus on how individual changes impact the class in their given route.
As an addendum to this, this is why new afflictions have crept into the curing trees. We're happy with what we're using for a lot of the trees and the effects the afflictions have, but a lot of those same afflictions are actually fairly debilitating and contribute to hindering a person as well as stacking a cure. Most of the newer afflictions have a more minor or cumulative effect and serve to help clog down a curative route so that momentum can be achieved.
But what about autocuring?
This is not really my domain - FirstAid is a project that we have to be careful with. It has seen plenty of success in other games, but in doing so the classes deeply impacted had to be retooled. We're already in the process of revamping - I would have to stop in the middle and have to go back to fix everything to form the basis for a new curing baseline. There are always tradeoffs; classes with affliction heavy outputs that rely on sheer stacking momentum would be unfairly burdened unless their affliction rates and tactics were adjusted, just due to the effect that 'perfect', server-side curing would have. There's tons of ways to postulate how this would affect combat, but the simplest answer is that while we may improve FirstAid down the line, it's a sensitive subject and we have to take a measure of care to ensure we don't shoot ourselves in the feet.
But what about (class X)? They had a proposed revamp thrown up forever ago! I want my toys.
You'll get your toys! We haven't forgotten about any of the projects we've mentioned. One downside to being transparent in our implementation efforts is that it looks like there's a lot that goes announced and then isn't released. The timelines for these projects always change as volunteers' lives change, but being on the backburner does not mean they've been forgotten about. Hopefully we will have exciting news in that regard soon.
oh god you're deleting my class aren't you
We have no plans to remove any classes at this point. The guild shuffle is a separate issue - if there are problems with a current class, we would much rather rework it than outright delete it.