Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 3.7K All Categories
- 3K The Midnight Age
- 757 Announce posts
- 125 Newbies
- 6 Class Guides
- 804 Harpy's Head Tavern
- 57 Echo Canyon
- 310 Self-Affirmations
- 163 Town Crier
- 135 The Exchange
- 167 Sparring Grounds
- Combat Guides
- 30 Combat Logs
- 188 Idea Box
- 9 Classleads
- 581 Roleplay Logs
- 107 Aetolia Development
- 5 The Void
- 744 Miscellaneous
- 9 Announcements
- 417 OOC Chat
- 217 Tech Talk
- 47 Scripts
Looking for more active discussion? Join our Discord at https://discord.gg/x2s7fY6
River
Hey. I want to talk about a specific, reoccurring situation that I've been seeing cropping up playing against the Spirit tether. For easier reference, I'll be speaking of something that just happened very recently in the Orrery.
I lead my group to the Orrery. I look inside the observatory and see Czcibor camping on top of a glyph of clarity. Immediately, most of us know what this means.
"We go in, we get trapped, glyphed, rivered and our group gets split up and picked off by their superior entrenchment. Our only reasonable option is to charge in and hope for the best (to be able to regroup fast enough), or to not play."
So I make the call, we go into the room, and sure enough. Trap procs, killing my command stack to move past into an adjacent room, some of my team gets rivered up into Spirit's team within 0.02 seconds to die. I just don't see the counterplay to this, am I missing something? Here are some of the options we considered.
- I could have phased in and hypno'd Czc, but I don't have the snapping arti.
- Traps interrupt command stacks to bypass.
- I could have used a sect ghost arrow to try and sneak in before he got the chance, but he could have been shielded and I didn't have any anyways.
- We couldn't prism or track in. Different area, indoors.
- I could have phased in and they could have portaled to me, but nobody had a wand.
- We could have left.
Obviously, I'm hoping river gets addressed this classlead round. I don't have any reasonable solutions to tune it without making it useless at the moment though, so I opened this thread for ideas so that when classleads come, we can have a direction of what to ask for and what people would find reasonable on both sides of the fence.
I'm not opening this thread to talk about the imbalances between Spirit and Shadow, labyrinth vs river, etc. The game is imperfect, this is just something that struck me as particularly powerful for one person to be able to do, given Pit was nerfed for the same reason (and yes, I agree Pit was too powerful in that state).
I lead my group to the Orrery. I look inside the observatory and see Czcibor camping on top of a glyph of clarity. Immediately, most of us know what this means.
"We go in, we get trapped, glyphed, rivered and our group gets split up and picked off by their superior entrenchment. Our only reasonable option is to charge in and hope for the best (to be able to regroup fast enough), or to not play."
So I make the call, we go into the room, and sure enough. Trap procs, killing my command stack to move past into an adjacent room, some of my team gets rivered up into Spirit's team within 0.02 seconds to die. I just don't see the counterplay to this, am I missing something? Here are some of the options we considered.
- I could have phased in and hypno'd Czc, but I don't have the snapping arti.
- Traps interrupt command stacks to bypass.
- I could have used a sect ghost arrow to try and sneak in before he got the chance, but he could have been shielded and I didn't have any anyways.
- We couldn't prism or track in. Different area, indoors.
- I could have phased in and they could have portaled to me, but nobody had a wand.
- We could have left.
Obviously, I'm hoping river gets addressed this classlead round. I don't have any reasonable solutions to tune it without making it useless at the moment though, so I opened this thread for ideas so that when classleads come, we can have a direction of what to ask for and what people would find reasonable on both sides of the fence.
I'm not opening this thread to talk about the imbalances between Spirit and Shadow, labyrinth vs river, etc. The game is imperfect, this is just something that struck me as particularly powerful for one person to be able to do, given Pit was nerfed for the same reason (and yes, I agree Pit was too powerful in that state).
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
1. You guys were pretty outnumbered so it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
2. He was adjacent (and alone for that matter) and subject to a number of related abilities you had at your disposal and didn't use.
3. I don't know what the chance is, but River has a chance to bypass your mass. It's not guaranteed.
Now this isn't to say that River is a perfectly balanced ability because I can't say it is or isn't in either case. However there were a lot of things you didn't take into account in your post.
If a solution was to be submitted or at least an option, have River be blocked by cube sigil if it's in the room as the targets. We already have these same counters in place for Telepathy, Lightform/phase/blackwind, and a veritable bunch of other skills. I see no reason why a cube sigil can't be used as a means of blocking being pulled by River.
Maybe you know something more about my team comp I didn't at the time. I didn't list out every single possibility and avenue, sure, but I still feel it's pretty darn powerful for one person to be able to swing a fight so entirely like that.
The fact that it has a chance to go through mass is part of the problem. It means some people get pulled. Some don't.
Secondly, the fact of the matter is that he did not. He was in that room, by himself, not shielded. You could have lured, serenaded, neckdragged, for starters. I'm not sure how/if Teradrim sand abilities work when you're standing in a room adjacent to a different area, but i'm about 75% sure they work the same as shaman abilities, meaning that people standing in your sand/OG can be hit by certain abilities. Don't take my word as gospel on this last bit because I'm not wholly sure it would work, but I believe if you just had your Teradrim cast sand in the adjacent room and strip him, that also would have dealt with his shield if it even existed in the first place.
Now, the other thing in this case is that River only can push you in one direction. In other words, all your team would have had to do was go in and just move one southwest, because that's as far as the river would carry them. You did have a group of inexperienced people with you, but that doesn't excuse not using the tools available.
Now assuming he was actually shielded, if you had the numbers you could have just hard rushed the entire group, but you didn't and therefore had to resort to trying other tactics. Even for spirit, trying to break or siege a fort when the enemy has superior numbers is just a difficult thing to do. But outside of this, there was definitely a lack of experience/tools being utilized.
River lasts 8-12 seconds, costing 3.01 modified equilibrium to put back up. Icewall blocks it. It isn't guaranteed to pull anyone on each individual tick. It doesn't even work on massed people unless clarity is also up in the room.
Don't see why River is always seen as this Ascendril/Spirit bogeyman when it's actually more of a gotcha that requires the Ascendril to put themselves in the open to even attempt.
Edit: Disclaimer, yes I'm aware it can bypass mass with Clarity, but the people who got pulled were among the number of inexperienced people you had.
"Just walk sw lmao", 40% of my team was dead within 8 seconds of me finishing my writhe.
"Just use the other exit", considered, but this isn't applicable to all situations and coordinating a juke like that wasn't guaranteed, esp if czc was running alertness.
Like I said. I assumed the worst, that Czc knew what he was doing. Lure would have worked. That doesn't mean it should have.
It also doesn't discount the point that it's a skill with very limited counterplay in many situations.
I -need- Spirit tether to start showing better sportsmanship in discussing these things OOCly. I totally understand IC vitriol, but arguing in bad faith on OOC mediums is just inviting spiteful responses, bad blood, and shitty classleads.
Flame tattoo also works.
The protective shield around Irys dissipates.
Borminchia, Chassity, Irys, Xai, Xarian, and a ghostly apparition follow you to the in.
Approaching gates of thick metal.
A fiery efreeti spins madly here. Surrounded in an aura of hostility, Czcibor Svin is here, giving
off a truly ghastly stench. He is riding on a crystalline arachnid. He wields a jewel-encrusted
buckler in his left hand and a long wooden staff in his right. This area has been overgrown with a
swathe of seething plantlife. The air ripples around the nearly imperceptible form of a fulcrum of
power floating here. Thunderheads boom and winds wail between the lightning that lances from a
glimpse of Air.
A glyph of clarity hangs in the air. A glyph of entrapment hangs in the air.
You see exits leading southeast, south, southwest, and out.
You spring a trap!!
A loop of rope entwines around your neck, pulling you off your feet.
I was talking about that trap.
edit: clarity/flame would have been a good option too, you're right. I didn't have my flame up, though, and I don't know that absolutely requiring a flame and clarity for every single member of a group to be able to PVP is a wise stance.
edit2: combustion + river also would have countered the icewall strat. So I'm still not sold.
In this scenario - with the expectation of a trap present to interrupt commands - the solution is to send someone in to fire the trap, wait for them to do it, and then walk the group in. Traps only fire once!
in this case, had you a flame tattoo you would have been able to do exactly what you wanted to do in your original post - move the group past the mage and into the main room.
ftfy. Yes, everyone, because what if I was left unenemied and someone following triggered the trap instead to be left behind.
Yeah, if this is the meta, I think the meta should change.
Alternatively, they shouldn't be required at all because there's already a butt-ton of moving parts in group PVP for someone to get into.
edit: which loops back to the point of the thread; River probably needs a change.
1.) River is short lived. Average was about 15-30 seconds.
2.) Rivers can be overlapped, meaning that it is possible to have two Ascendril setting up a system of push and pull through stuff.
3.)
The average proc/check time for River w/Clarity in the room was 4 seconds, but it functions on a global timer which means that this timer is always going.(Edit: It's possible that the mass check procs faster and on a different timer. Someone should probably check this.) (Edit 2: Turns out I'm getting conflicting/inconsistent information on this one now. My only thought is that there is a separate timer for constant mass checks that can force a movement versus the normal tick.)4.) The Clarity glyph must be in the victim's room for it to have a chance of going through mass.
4.) River will fire when strengthened by Clarity regardless of whether or not the victim has the Clarity defense up.
All and all, here is my judgment of River:
I think it's situationally good, much like Labyrinth, when the opportunity presents itself. After playing with it via Classmod, I'm not convinced that it's overly powerful. Of the opinion now that it's overly powerful when used in conjunction with additional abilities. While Classmod is bugged now and I couldn't test it again like I did with Xav a few months ago, my memory makes me think that river currents and Arcanism River + Clarity Glyph functions like river currents given the information and inconsistency. You can argue that one main drawback for it is that it requires a Sciomancer to dispel the Clarity glyph in the room. Spirit can probably argue that Labyrinth everywhere is obnoxious without a Zealot towing a monolith.If you want my honest opinion, I look forward to the day when Shadow has a means of disarming traps, really.
I have been victim, many times, to firewalls+catapult+aegis, and especially when the environment is indoors Shadow has little recourse to this particular combination. Shadow has very little in the 'set and forget' way that can force movement, which I think is where River starts feeling overwhelming.
If Syssin had an ability to disarm traps then I would be all right with how it is currently. But as stated, River itself is not overpowered, it is the synergy with other room effects that Spirit brings that leaves it feeling that way in my opinion.
Edit: See what I said above about Synergy.
Edit 2: This kind of synergy between abilities, namely an implanted Aegis with labs into a standing aegis with slumber and entangle into Pit is why Pit got leaded and changed.
And again, I point to synergy and Pit. Had anyone taken the time to, as stated: then the attuned aegis into an ensorcelled aegis with pit building would have been a non-issue. Yet, here we are.
The whole meta feels kind of backwards. Entrenchment abilities should be fairly lackluster because of how easy they are to set up (AB DESICCATION INSTABILITY comes to mind...). The whole point is that you have a position to defend and are freely able to set up your entrenchment stuff pre-fight. If you have great group splitting abilities then those entrenchment abilities should be diminished even more because of how valuable those group split abilities are, and how they add to the complexity of trying to move around an entrenched enemy. Entrenchment busting abilities/defenses should be valuable counters and it should be fairly easy to side step the group split abilities because of how valuable the abilities are (or not easy to side step but the value of group split abilities be lower).
Instead entreching yourself is incredibly strong, makes attacking into entrenchment incredibly complex, which is going to lead to errors being made which is going to lead to easy group split abilities being used on you, all while having most counterplay tools available to you be fairly complex to use and easy to counter themselves.
We actually were just going to rush, since a goal for Orrery is to try and pick off the globe holder to slow down ticks, not necessarily wipe out the enemy team. We just never got the opportunity to do so.
And that (along with my other points) is kind of my problem with all the entrenchment/force player movement abilities that exist right now. Fights are over before they start, and it's super unfun to not be able to play the game. Don't get me wrong, I don't think 'enter room, roll face across keyboard, find out if you win at the end' slug fest are necessarily the best either, but at least there's some sense of doing stuff. Being able to straight up stop fights from happening by completely splitting up groups is definitely not better.
I'd much, MUCH rather see interesting in room mechanics/player controlling abilities for when the fight actually does start, vs the immense advantage entrenched groups get along with whatever group split abilities they have. I think about an old Tera ability like Earthenmaw (AoE impale), and I look at how easy it is for abilities like Beckon and River to split up groups allowing for easy wins, and actual passive aoe entangles on room entry exists, and how abilities like Refining Disperse and Dhuriv Nimble exist and honestly.. aoe impale seems almost tame in comparison. (this is just an example don't yell at me for thinking earthenmaw could exist in today's meta that's not what this post is about)
I honestly had other points to make but i got lazy at the end especially when i realized this post is an organizational mess so glhf reading nerds
I planned on classleading that this round, allowing Simoon/Surge to work if the OG/Sand owner is not in the room.
As for all the rest, I agree trenches have have been a longstanding issue in giving a huge advantage to defenders, especially where Spirit is concerned. But it's a lot to tackle and rebalance from the ground up. Group combat just becomes increasingly stupid the more people/abilities/combos you have readily available. Just imagine how much more insane it will become when mirrors get released.
Some of the arguments put forth here sound more and more like the narrative that got Erode implemented into the game re: "Spirit has a 'reliable' force strip, and we don't." It's objective that you had no means to deal with aegis until then, but the implementation of Erode as a raze while force having literally 'hundreds' of answers available to it in the game, caused a major point of imbalance in the group combat on its own.
I'm not saying @Savas's frustration is unjustified, while dealing with entrenchment or facing higher numbers. I try and rally the troops even with very slim odds on a pretty consistent basis myself, so I can relate to that. Sometimes I just hit a brickwall where I've no answer to the trick up the sleeve of my competition. Sometimes, I just accept that the mechanics I'm facing are superior to what I've at that given moment, but it's just a game. And despite, I think Aet balance overall is very admirable, it's not an equal playfield like chess. But for fairness to the admins overseeing balance, even 'if' it was... Even after, mirror classes were implemented, we'd still have similar issues and frustrations. Because, group combat is always going to be volatile with some classes being represented in it at a scenario for one side, while some others are not. So the tools available in each skirmish will always be fluid.