Artifact ideas

Moirean

Different type of track.

Illikaal

We were talking about Wyvern track. Get out of here youngster. 

Macavity

Any artifact that would help to boost Teradrim!  I know its a new class but still would love something specific to the class itself!  

Illikaal

Macavity said:

Any artifact that would help to boost Teradrim!  I know its a new class but still would love something specific to the class itself!  

This kind of logic is what's wrong with combat now. No. Just no. 

They're designing classes to be affected by artifacts as little as possible for balancing purposes. If you create a class based on the assumption that A. The person using it should be able to kill their target, whether the target is artifacted or not. and B. This class is strong without the use of artifacts, then adding artifacts into the mix is only going to imbalance it, if anything. 

I'm fine with artifacts that help for hunting purposes, which Teradrim, and every other class already have. Be thankful for it. 

Aarbrok

The help class artifacts for tread run don't say anything about the clay jar being useful in hunting since it boosted the old sand hunting attack which is why I haven't purchased it myself I'm more for utility anyway but I would like to see something for teradrim as well also sorry on phone

Moirean

its ok aarbrok iforgive u <#

Phoenecia

Sooo, I don't know if this would be doable or even something that could be considered, but it'd be nice if there was an artifact that would expand the stockroom of shops the owner has. This would be especially handy for people who have a ton of things they might want to sell, but don't have space in their stockroom for it, and it'd be especially handy for people who own shops in Delos or (lol) the Refugee Camp since those shops aren't affected by the stockroom expansions offered by city research trees. Shops are kind of difficult to get a hold of, and it's kind of inconvenient to have to own two or three shops to be able to sell everything you want to if you have a crap ton of designs. Just a thought.

Zun

Gem of the Fancy Changeling

• By rubbing the gem on a piece of clothing, RUB GEM ON <ITEM>, the owner of this gem may render said item invisible on a simple LOOK AT <FANCY CHANGELING>.
• If the item houses artifact powers the effect will perform a lackluster fizzle and little else. 
• When the Fancy Changeling is feeling a little Fancy, they may TAP GEM to activate or deactivate the gem's fancy powers.

Edit:

• When the item is removed, the fancy juice will run out and should be reapplied as needed.
• INV and II will continue to work unobstructed, as will LOOK AT <CLOTHING> ON <FANCY CHANGELING>.
• Just to be comprehensive, the gem will only work on the clothing you are already wearing.
• Alternate name: Gem of Emperor Abhorash's Tailor.
• On second thought, hiding armor would be half the point.

Moirean

Would love this. I dislike having 50 lines of "RESIST RING BASHING AMULET BLAARG"

Arbre

Not that it helps, but I have this, thanks to Kiyotan's nakeytime.

#AL {stuffon} {wear gauntlet22024;wear goggles188207;wear eclipse;wear purity;wear ring105310;wear ring120722;wear ring121246;wear ring121388;wear armor;wear mask;wear amulet}
#AL {stuffoff} {remove gauntlet22024;remove goggles188207;remove eclipse;remove purity;remove ring105310;remove ring120722;remove ring121246;remove ring121388;remove armor;remove mask;remove amulet}

Areka

That's nice, but it doesn't address the spam of items be it in mutated form or simply redundant utility items that don't necessarily go along with the image you wish to portray, or the length of items when someone looks at you. 

Kiyotan

Who told you about nakeytime?!

Rivas

...the forums.

Mephistoles

Illidan said:

Macavity said:

Any artifact that would help to boost Teradrim!  I know its a new class but still would love something specific to the class itself!  

This kind of logic is what's wrong with combat now. No. Just no. 

They're designing classes to be affected by artifacts as little as possible for balancing purposes. If you create a class based on the assumption that A. The person using it should be able to kill their target, whether the target is artifacted or not. and B. This class is strong without the use of artifacts, then adding artifacts into the mix is only going to imbalance it, if anything. 

I'm fine with artifacts that help for hunting purposes, which Teradrim, and every other class already have. Be thankful for it. 

One thing your class gets, and a lot of others as well, is artifacts that let you speed up your primary offense.  Templars, Carnifex, Luminaries, and Syssin get them in the form of runes of empowerment and the dstab artifact.  Shamans, Ascendril, Sciomancers, Cabalists and Luminaries benefit from equilibrium recovery, and Daru and the Sentaari get a little out of it too.  

The classes that don't get anything that can speed them up at all are the lycans, indorani (I know the eq recovery would speed up decay but that's not what Indorani use in combat), sentinels, and teradrim.   Teradrim don't benefit greatly from the runes very much either since the only stat you're really looking for on a flail is damage, and because of diminishing returns the difference between a flail with 182 damage and one boosted all the way to 200 with a rune isn't too huge.

With the way that the game has changed it might not be unreasonable to actually make a balance recovery artifact.  Skills can always have a cap somewhere if it's found to be really problematic for some things, but a balance recovery artifact could really be a big boon, especially for people who are interested in doing things like playing 'powerful or herculean' characters in balance based classes.

Plus, it would be great revenue for the game.  For 850 credits how many people do you think would end up buying a balance recovery artifact? My guess would be quite a few.

Daskalos

Runes barely affect smite damage and speed and aren't worth buying at all for a Luminary. Our best boost for physical strength is in the form of stat modifiers, which I believe everyone gets.

Mephistoles

Daskalos said:

Runes barely affect smite damage and speed and aren't worth buying at all for a Luminary. Our best boost for physical strength is in the form of stat modifiers, which I believe everyone gets.

I would be interested to see how much they do effect speed, but you also have several skills that require equilibrium, which are sped up by the crown.  I'm not saying that your level of benefit is the same as a sciomancer, ascendril or shaman getting a crown, but you do get some advantage from it and you are able to use these things to speed up your offense to some degree

Toz

The problem with making a balance recovery artifact is that it won't help those who are herc or powerful - they'll still be slower than someone who is dex with the artifact. And that person will be fast enough to likely merit a speed nerf, moving...things pretty much back to where they were. Or the artifact will be so useless as to not be worth buying at all (if it doesn't impact your offense significantly, not worth buying it), so it seems a waste either way. I'd rather certain things not be impacted by racial balance, or some kind of bonus given to people who aren't dex/wise to make it more viable.

Mephistoles

Toz said:

The problem with making a balance recovery artifact is that it won't help those who are herc or powerful - they'll still be slower than someone who is dex with the artifact. And that person will be fast enough to likely merit a speed nerf, moving...things pretty much back to where they were. Or the artifact will be so useless as to not be worth buying at all (if it doesn't impact your offense significantly, not worth buying it), so it seems a waste either way. I'd rather certain things not be impacted by racial balance, or some kind of bonus given to people who aren't dex/wise to make it more viable.

Saying that a balance recovery artifact won't help those who are herc or powerful is just silly.

Clearly, it will help them.  It would make them fast.  Would it make them faster than a dexterous character or a dexterous character with the artifact? No, I doubt it.  Lets actually start with sentinels as the test case for what I'm talking about.

At neutral balance a sentinel doing your classic slash stab combo is going to be hitting at 2.75.  Now, multiply this by .93, level one balance, and we get 2.5575, which would be rounded to 2.56.  If memory serves, herb balance is 1.25 seconds or something along those lines.  That extra level of balance recovery would go a long way to letting a herculean or powerful sentinel stack afflictions on a player.

As I said before, the speed of skills can be capped if it's a problem, but this would be a pretty significant difference to someone playing a neutral balance character, so I reject any argument starting from the premise of "balance recovery artifact...won't help those who are herc or powerful" as uninformed.  In this case it's making a pretty significant difference

EDIT - I'm clearly wrong about the time on herb balance after some testing (guess it's 1.75), but it's still a fair point.  That difference in speed is going to mean a lot to a herculean or powerful character, especially when having to deal with the tree tattoo, focus, and any class related curing skills.

Moirean

While I like the idea of being able to stack on balance recovery (and would probably buy that), I think speeding combat up even MORE would be pretty rough. It's already too quick and spammy. Tossing quicker attacks into the equation will just make it worse. 

Maybe if we ever saw that across-the-board slowdown that was mentioned, then I could see this being useful from a relative, affliction-potential standpoint.

Mephistoles

@Toz, we could probably give herculean some advantage by making some things, like perhaps limb damage, scale to strength.  Depending on how this worked a herculean character might actually be able to break limbs quicker than a dexterous one.  That's probably something for a balance related thread.

@Moirean, yeah, it could potentially be a problem with some classes, which is why I proposed capping attacks that might get a little overpowered with it.  Still, the game and combat balance survives with lots of level 3 equilibrium characters, so it doesn't seem like it's something that would be impossible to make work.

Ilyon

+balance artifacts would be extremely powerful, much more than +eq ones.

Sarita

If you want some sort of Teradrim artifacts that are useful but won't affect combat, I'd suggest something like the runed bits for mounts, only that would work for golems. When placed on the golem, the artifact would work once (or more, depending on the cost) after it dies to keep it from actually dying and losing exp. Instead, the golem would go to the sanctuary and there would be a cooldown period before it could be called back out again.

Mephistoles

@Sarita Not bad.  I've worried about the golem a decent amount to be honest.  After all, getting a golem to level 100 requires just as much experiences as taking a player character from level 50 to 100.  The idea that you can lose something that gets that level of work put into it never sat quite right with me.

Toz

It can retreat when it reaches a % hp, can't it? And I don't think they can be critted, plus you can restore their health off-balance.

Xavin

As Ilyon said, a +bal artifact would be almost absurdly powerful. Consider: There really aren't any classes that heavily afflict via equilibrium, whereas the vast majority of classes afflict or attack via balance. Suddenly we would have lycans and tekura users attacking limbs with level 3 balance (a reduction of 21% in recovery time), and we would see syssin, carnifex and templars using the same level 3 balance recovery to great effect.

Now, consider the impact that level 3 eq has, and you'll see that, really, the only classes that run much of an eq aff route at all are cabalists and shaman. And both of those use hidden affs on eq, and it's rough trying to balance them as a result. The only other primary-eq classes are mages, and they are pretty much pure dps machines.

As it stands, only bloodborn can hit level 3 balance recovery right now, but they're throttled by moderately high eq times from mentis.

tl;dr, no-one wants to see people running around with level 3 balance recovery without having to worry about eq throttling their speed.

Daskalos

@Mephistoles - I pretty much only use the mace for smite. My shields are what control my attack speed and runes don't affect them

Mephistoles

@Xavin I don't think it would be a problem with monks or daru, it certainly would not be a problem with teradrim (you can technically get to level 3 balance there by having level 3 eq and using the gold runes on your crozier), if it were not for the dstab artifact (which at level 3 reduces dstab by a lot more than 7%) it would not be a problem with syssin.  It wouldn't be a problem with consanguine, bloodborn, carnifex (the problems with that class would remain the same but they wouldn't be caused by an artifact like this, plus speed caps at 2 seconds already).  The only problem with Indorani might be with hanged man and you could cap the speed of that skill somewhere

So basically we might end up with problems with templars, lycans, syssin (if the dstab artifact remains), and perhaps sentinels.

The solution to problem skills? Cap the speed of skills that would be overpowered by this.

I feel like the 'cap the speed' thing keeps getting passed over.

Serrice

Tangent: I'm almost certain the dstab arty has a <.05s affect on the stab time nowadays. Will need to test this.

Toz

Mephistoles said:

@Xavin I don't think it would be a problem with monks or daru, it certainly would not be a problem with teradrim (you can technically get to level 3 balance there by having level 3 eq and using the gold runes on your crozier), if it were not for the dstab artifact (which at level 3 reduces dstab by a lot more than 7%) it would not be a problem with syssin.  It wouldn't be a problem with consanguine, bloodborn, carnifex (the problems with that class would remain the same but they wouldn't be caused by an artifact like this, plus speed caps at 2 seconds already).  The only problem with Indorani might be with hanged man and you could cap the speed of that skill somewhere

So basically we might end up with problems with templars, lycans, syssin (if the dstab artifact remains), and perhaps sentinels.

The solution to problem skills? Cap the speed of skills that would be overpowered by this.

I feel like the 'cap the speed' thing keeps getting passed over.

A lot of things would get crazy with this, is the thing. Monks already have a solid limb damage rate, and bumping that up further just gets even crazier, period. Combat seems to be balanced around dex aff rate/attack rate, so in order for this to be viable it seems (to me at least) that you'd need to cap everything at dex, or re-balance; if something is viable currently, speeding it up makes it stronger, thus potentially needing a debuff to bring it back in line. Also worth mentioning, Carnifex ssl caps at 1.5, not 2.0, and you do not want me swinging at 1.5s when I have my 20 str setup going.

Xavin

@Toz has it exactly. Current combat is balanced around the max of level 2 balance regain, with the outlier being Bloodborn, though it's not really all that viable for them due to the equilibrium limiter.

You mention Teradrim and yes, it's -possible-, but you're forgoing some other good effects to get it if you go for eq instead, which means you're not really what the class is balanced for anyway.. All in all, there are far, far too many things that would have to be scaled back to accommodate a  the widespread appearance of level 3 balance regain and the occasional level 4 balance regain bloodborn (which would be a 28% reduction in balance time - holy crap, that's absurd).

Edit: And 'just cap the speed' isn't really a good solution. Basically, what you're saying is 'give us the ability to have level 3 balance regain but neuter the effect', and that's just....not worth it.