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Well. To be fair, the Admin are pushing -content- out, not just combat. There's all that stuff you mentioned (though the Liaisons have been around for several RL years now, and are for more than just combat-related stuff), but they've also released the Epicurean cooking event thing, a slew of new gods have appeared and changed and whatnot, there've been city events and random idle RP with mobs and crazy world events all over the place. They're putting out combat-related stuff, yes, but that's just because combat is a major part of this game. It's not the only part of this game, not by a longshot...but that's why Admin have been giving us other things, too. Stuff for the combat-oriented players, and stuff for the non-combat-oriented players. One big giant giftbasket of awesome.
I'm just starting to get into combat, myself, and I'd hardly consider myself near "top-tier". Maybe lower-middle tier. The important (and fair) thing to point out is that each and every combatant, be they newbie or lower-middle tier or top tier or level 80s or endgames or poor or artifacted or whatever...everyone from me to Daskalos, we ALL started at the very bottom. Seriously. The curve may be steeper or more shallow for others depending on how good they are at coding or what friends help them or what they're given or what their characters already have in place beforehand...but we all started at the bottom, and we all got stomped (and still do, no matter who we are) by people of all shapes and sizes.
I'm singling this out because I can say, with absolute certainty, that this isn't true at all, and it's not fair to our admin. They don't just slap stuff in the game cause a few dudes say "lol gimme this", they do EXTENSIVE testing, research and consulting (liaisons, forums, admin from other IRE games, etc) before anything is put in. Yes they rely on Liaisons for major skill changes...but that's because the Liaisons are people (appointed by Admin) who absolutely know the skills of the game the absolute best, and are the best authorities on the subject beyond the Admin themselves.
I get that things can get frustrating, especially where combat is concerned...but let's not shortsheet the one group of people consistently busting their collective asses for us.
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(The Front Line): Daskalos says, "<-- artifacts."
Good times.
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(The Front Line): Daskalos says, "<-- artifacts."
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
Your scythe slash was doing around 20% of my health. If I didn't clot, your damage would've gone up. I died against you without a single affliction, just to give you an idea at how effortless your pressure is right now.
People are presenting a legitimate concern about how much damage you're producing mostly because your artifacts are creating an outlier situation. It's a sensitive thing to balance, but considering that Bloodborn are not a "damage" class at their core, it seems a bit overwhelming when you're dishing out 1.3k damage a scythe slash on top of a venom, bleeding, and two other afflictions that will take away 150 mana per whisper due to a Bloodborn ritual.
Though in reality, it doesn't matter. Sentinels were downgraded due to their damage awhile back due to how much damage they were doing to Monks, Lycanthropes, and Mages. Same logic should apply. Too much damage without even utilizing the bulk of Mentis nor using Sensitivity on the scythe. I didn't have Temptation or Seduction on me, for example. Ilyon could've been doing more damage if Ilyon chose to.
After wping my scythe it is a 150 dmg, 50 pen, 84 speed. Hacking myself I did 1497 damage to myself but I also was completely defenseless with a 10% cutting audit. With both trans weaponry and Hema.
In the past, the +Int artifact combined with magic potence created some ridiculous scaling because of +Int. I wouldn't be surprised if +stat was the culprit again.
Edit: I think two solutions would be for one to check to make sure +str isn't scaling out of control with weapon runes. Also, it's probably time we consider buffing the damage mitigation of Monk, Mage, and Lycan. This issue seems to be cropping up nearly -all- the time with them and it would resolve a lot of issues if they were buffed up to a reasonable audit level.
17 str is what you get with the Powerful statpack, Potence, and blessing. That's what you'd use if you had no artifacts.
16 str is the same, except Wise statpack.
19 str and Wise statpack is what I have.
17 Strength, regular scythe:
You extend into a lunging arc, assaulting yourself with a gruesome crescent scythe etched with
the name of $NAME.
Health Lost: 946, cutting.
Balance Used: 3.84 seconds
16 Strength, regular scythe:
You extend into a lunging arc, assaulting yourself with a gruesome crescent scythe etched with
the name of $NAME.
Health Lost: 889, cutting.
Balance Used: 3.84 seconds
16 Strength, runed scythe:
You extend into a lunging arc, assaulting yourself with a gruesome crescent scythe.
Health Lost: 950, cutting.
Balance Used: 3.44 seconds
19 Strength, regular scythe:
Raising a gruesome crescent scythe etched with the name of $NAME over your shoulder, you
viciously slice at yourself.
Health Lost: 1059, cutting.
Balance Used: 3.84 seconds
19 Strength, runed scythe:
Spinning a gruesome crescent scythe around you, you gash open yourself.
Health Lost: 1130, cutting.
Balance Used: 3.44 seconds
Which gives me a total of 19% damage gain and 11% speed gain over an unartifacted Bloodborn, which translates to a total of 32% gain in DPS. Not anything to scoff at, but within the line of what I'd expect from the artifacts to do.
Edit: Which is fine then. I can largely justify creating reports for Thickhide/Toughness respectively given the recent downgrades to Miasma and comparing the audits of other classes to put them at a competitive level.
Edit: Although, when I get home today, I'll likely see if I can grab a Bloodborn and Praenomen both to get an accurate assessment of their pressure for future reference.
That said, there may be some issues with the way artifacts scale to damage with the scythe, considering they're a fairly durable class with some good unique effects...I don't know. More analysis would be nice, maybe some logs and such?
Edit: I can tell you right now, though - unless there has been some steepish downgrades to their defense since I last played bloodborn, they're going to be some tanky unicorns.
IRE combat has a huge barrier to entry. I'm pretty sure nobody actually disagrees with that. Yeah, it cost lots of time or money to get the needed credits to compete against top tier guys without getting instagibbed and it takes a TON more know-how to code up a system that prevents getting face-rolled.
Yeah, there's a lot of power-creep. The top PKers of today are collectively are way more artied out than the top PKers of yesteryear (collectively.) I say collectively, because in individual terms you still had people like Bilexius who would splurge 3200cr on just a pair of rapiers. Or people like Dourif who literally staffcasted most plebs for 60% of their health, but that was ok, he had so many arties.
Now we want everything to be nice and cozy and level, but the fact is, there are going to be tons of people who will kick your ass, no questions asked if you don't invest massively. And if you're not investing absolutely massively and are just learning PK at sort of a leisurely pace, they'll still be kicking your ass 5 real years from now. But do you really have an argument as to why these people should be denied an edge they've been cultivating over half a decade and thousands of dollars worth of credits?
And as much as power has crept, learning combat in the olden days was much harder. You didn't have forums, you didn't have free systems, you didn't have affliction view, you didn't have stable clients, you didn't have this sort of 'I'll help you learn so we can make the PK pool bigger' altruism. When I started learning, people would be hush-hush over affliction messages and over what herbs cured what or over what herb balance even meant.
The reality of IRE combat is that a ton of people have spent a ton of time and money to get really, really good at it. A fix that flattens the learning curve means flattening their investment as well, which is an obviously bad thing. They also tend to be the game's biggest-paying customers. But the brighter side of it is that it isn't really that hard to get started, thanks to the massive support and resources offered to new combat enthusiasts, so long as you're being realistic about what you want to achieve and in what timeframe. If you want quick gratification, I'm afraid you're SOL.
This has completely turned around in the past IRL month or so, but even in Duiran, I couldn't even get basic questions about afflictions answered when I started. There was no one who taught combat for my class around, and the few people who did understand Sentinel combat couldn't be assed to help. I had a similar experience with my first character.
Every other IRE game has at least one decent, usable system around. If not for free, it'll cost about 25USD because Vadi set the precedent. This hasn't happened here. There is no Vadi here. So people charge w/e for utter crap systems and straight-up overcharge for decent stuff.
Look, I know many people spent years becoming 31337 c0d3rz and all that, but if you're going to make it a requirement to either learn C+++ or spend half your paycheck on software, you can't really complain about the lack of new combatants coming around. Shit is unreasonable.