Short COMBAT Questions

Xiuhcoatl

Technically, in aetolia the biggest delay between commands is between the first and second command sent. That's why it's a good idea to ATTEMPT to eat a herb before outcing it. It's a slow down of around .1 seconds if you do it the other way around or put anything in front of the attempt to cure. Like what I do with eating random organs and pressing jecis to random body parts and the like. 

Haven

I'm...not sure how to replicate this bug but this is the second time it's happened to me when fighting an Indorani. First time was against Moirean with the game not giving me the line that focus balance has returned. Second time, just now, was against Xiuhcoatl with the game not telling me salve balance has returned.

Is anyone else having this experience at all where the game just doesn't send the "You can now" line for various skill balances? I'm not sure if the bug is related to Indorani or what but in my experience it has only been against that class.

Saybre

@Haven
I haven't noticed it. Are you utilizing GMCP for your balances, or just the game lines? Maybe one of your GAGs is hiding it, or parsing it incorrectly due to the process load?

Or Indos are suddenly buffer than we thought.

Haven

Saybre said:

@Haven
I haven't noticed it. Are you utilizing GMCP for your balances, or just the game lines? Maybe one of your GAGs is hiding it, or parsing it incorrectly due to the process load?

Or Indos are suddenly buffer than we thought.

The game lines. Looking over the log, I cannot see what could possibly cause the line to never show. It seems pretty random in both occurrences that I fought them. And it's not something that happens every fight against them so it makes finding the problem very difficult. I thought it might've just been a fluke/freak incident since it happened so long ago against Moirean but the bug just reared its head at me against Xiuhcoatl.

Game works just fine throughout the fight, getting balance messages as normal and what not, and then... I apply restoration to my leg and I never get the salve recovery line. Got myself noobvivisected. :-/

Toz

How does learning weaponry impact things now, with the change to how accuracy works?

Draiman

How do you peeps handle hidden affs? They've pretty much kicked my ass since I started playing. The only one I ever really got right was recklessness from old Lumies.

These things are giving me a hella hard time.

Ezalor

Lots of hidden checks. Symptom messages. Sometimes you have to just assume and get rid of the most dangerous possible options, even if it opens you up for wasting herb balances - for example, against a Luminary when I come out of blackout I will check HP/mana and if both are at 100% assume recklessness, otherwise assume hypochondria. Sure they can sneak in other things instead and I'll waste an herb balance eating for those but it ensures that the most dangerous option is accounted for.

Irruel

Send commands that will hopefully cause a secondary effect message to fire. I'm not sure how many of them still work, but things like attempting to concentrate will show confusion up.

Figure out what the possible affs from the attack are, and how many of those are detectable those ways. Run the checks, and if nothing shows up, guess-cure the remaining pool of affs.

Just put the guess-cures at the bottom of the priority list so they don't interfere with curing known affs.

Draiman

They fixed/removed concentrating unless you're knocked off eq. But thanks for the tips.

Ishin

[spoiler]
Like a deadly whirlwind, Vimi begins to rapidly spin a bardiche in a circle around her, turning with
it as she does so.
The polearm slashes through you as Vimi continues her rapid whirlwind attack, tearing open a bloody
wound.
Health Lost: 372, cutting.
H:93% M:100% E:100% W:100% BL:150 XP:20.59% [ eb]
Your boar tattoo tingles as it regenerates your health.
Health Gain: 365
H:99% M:100% E:100% W:100% BL:125 XP:20.59% [ eb]
The polearm slashes through you as Vimi continues her rapid whirlwind attack, tearing open a bloody
wound.
Health Lost: 372, cutting.
H:93% M:100% E:100% W:100% BL:225 XP:20.59% [ eb]
You bleed 225 health.
clot 10
Health Lost: 225
H:90% M:100% E:100% W:100% BL:215 XP:20.59% [ eb]
You exert your superior mental control over your body and will your wounds to clot before your eyes.
Mana Lost: 800
H:90% M:83% E:100% W:99% BL:15 XP:20.59% [ eb]
The polearm slashes through you as Vimi continues her rapid whirlwind attack, tearing open a bloody
wound.
Health Lost: 372, cutting.
H:83% M:83% E:100% W:99% BL:165 XP:20.59% [ eb]
Input: drink health
You take a drink of an elixir of health from an aphotic vial.
Health Gain: 976
The elixir heals and soothes you.
H:100% M:83% E:100% W:99% BL:165 XP:20.59% [ eb]
The constant exertion taking its toll, Vimi ceases the spinning of her weapon and body.
H:100% M:83% E:100% W:99% BL:165 XP:20.59% [ eb]
You begin feeling slightly flushed.
H:100% M:83% E:100% W:99% BL:165 XP:20.59% [ eb]
[/spoiler]

How the shit did I get voyria from that? Didn't have it before, didn't see anything hit me either.

Toz

Voyria has no delivery line and whirlwind gives a venom per hit.

Haven

Are illusions meant to still be viable in combat? And if not... Can we please change illusions so that they're colored to match whatever emotes are set to?

Daskalos

Some illusions are helpful, though not many. If you make ANSI coloring possible with illusions, however, you immediately return them to their prior form since it would then be possible to illusion AffView messages

Haven

Daskalos said:

Some illusions are helpful, though not many. If you make ANSI coloring possible with illusions, however, you immediately return them to their prior form since it would then be possible to illusion AffView messages

When I said emote coloring, I meant that all illusions would be colored to what you have in your CONFIG COLOR EMOTE setting. I just... don't really like the idea that they're primarily used to trick an out-of-game source for an in-game advantage. I thought we were passed this stage in Aetolian combat already. u_u

Nalor

Haven said:

Are illusions meant to still be viable in combat? And if not... Can we please change illusions so that they're colored to match whatever emotes are set to?

You can still use illusions for combat.. just now. instead of illusions using illuson balance (syssin) it uses EQ... but I guess your meaning Mages Illusions... those have ALWAYS been able just no one but 1 person (no not xiuh) ever uses them

Daingean

He may be talking about Valingar, who uses illusions via telepathy.

If they take away telepathy illusions, they'll just make it harder to pk in zealot, and it's already hard to do that.

Valingar has straight out said at this point that it's nearly impossible to beat a competent opponent in zealot without 'playing dirty' - using a lot of blackout, illusions, etc.

Toz

Limb classes in general have it the worst right now - parry is an entire unknown that can actually end up punishing you if your AI isn't good enough to deal with it. Pair that with your inability to tell exactly how much limb damage you're doing half the time due to...a series of oddities, and it kind of sucks. Plus you don't get the on-demand hinder unless you're lycan or willing to sacrifice your limb damage per second to spam telepathy or whatever - just a sucky place at the moment.

Veovis

Haven said:

Saybre said:

@Haven
I haven't noticed it. Are you utilizing GMCP for your balances, or just the game lines? Maybe one of your GAGs is hiding it, or parsing it incorrectly due to the process load?

Or Indos are suddenly buffer than we thought.

The game lines. Looking over the log, I cannot see what could possibly cause the line to never show. It seems pretty random in both occurrences that I fought them. And it's not something that happens every fight against them so it makes finding the problem very difficult. I thought it might've just been a fluke/freak incident since it happened so long ago against Moirean but the bug just reared its head at me against Xiuhcoatl.

Game works just fine throughout the fight, getting balance messages as normal and what not, and then... I apply restoration to my leg and I never get the salve recovery line. Got myself noobvivisected. :-/

This happens with the Corpus skill Mend too. The line "You may mend your body once again" sometimes just doesn't show up. I bugged it years ago, but I don't think it ever got looked at. Maybe I'll write a report so @Oleis or @Razmael can look at it. I know it's not gags/highlights, as I've had it happen across multiple systems, including Nexus with no triggers at all.

Ishin

Since nobody answered me in the other thread..

Your form is granting you an innate resistance to magic.

^ does nothing for my audit. Does it do nothing if your skills are past a certain amount or is it a bug??

Nalor

Daingean said:

He may be talking about Valingar, who uses illusions via telepathy.

If they take away telepathy illusions, they'll just make it harder to pk in zealot, and it's already hard to do that.

Valingar has straight out said at this point that it's nearly impossible to beat a competent opponent in zealot without 'playing dirty' - using a lot of blackout, illusions, etc.

Daingean which is completely different

Ezalor

Illusions aren't really reliable "in the heat of combat." You might break someone's system completely but once they've coded failsafes for that you won't accomplish much by using them, it's more of a coding annoyance than anything that's an actual strategy. The way I've seen Valingar use them is more for ranged stuff and tricking you to come to him.

As far as limb classes go they are rather overshadowed by aff classes at the moment, however with nerfs coming to nearly every hindering aff I think limb classes will be making a resurgence in a big way after this liaison round.

Saybre

I will continue to fight the good fight for Limb classes everywhere until I finally get a venom rag! HOOAH!

As I said earlier, or in a separate thread..I don't remember.. Fighting as a limb class -is- rough, my scripting is easily 4x more checks than any of my aff/venom scripts. I can still wail and kill people, but getting to that point took a LONG time and a LOT of hours of coding and testing. I'm still refining it and testing new combinations. My Blade + Mace experiment was absolutely terribad, so that's gone the way of the dodo. I really wish Moi's limb damage report had been approved, and even my report for Bruising/Rupture was flat out denied stating that 'it is already powerful'. Except when I have to maintain a critical and rupture someone 3x because I can't get freezing to stick. Blugh.

For Illusions, so many people have put in checks for them over the years they're nearly phased out, especially with affview and whatnot. It'd be nice to see Zealot/Monks get something more concrete to let them get ahead. The flat limb damage report should help a bit I think, will make the tracking at least a little less painful, the scaling to health part has always been awful to work around.

Moirean

The trouble with limb damage is that it's really annoyingly variable. Weapon stats, your own stats (which of course vary daily thanks to astronomy), your target's stats, etc, can all affect certain skills, while some do static amounts of damage, with no real rhyme or reason to it all meaning you have to sit and test everything on a willing friend to gather lines. It's tiring to do all that before even getting to dive into an accurate offense. 

The work involved for limb tracking is probably why I've never really bothered with limb classes, as I have number dyslexia, so juggling counting to 3 on each limb like with warrior tarot is the most I can handle, and even doing that gets stupid and confused sometimes. Some day I'll sit and code something, but that sort of coding is really tiring for me. Yay inability to do basic arithmetic.

Toz

And my classlead attempts to make it better only partially succeeded - when I tried to get a way for limb damage to get shown to the person using it (so like you could see, 'You deal 100% damage to <name>'s left arm') to save everyone ever a ton of scripting and drastically simplify, the rejection basically stated it was fine as-is because limb classes were easy. But...no, no they're not.

Ezalor

While I certainly wouldn't mind seeing that information given outright, it's also much less punishing for a limb class to misjudge their tracking than it is for an aff class to do so.

The only attacks that are actually affected by variables are Weaponry ones and Lycan attacks, the latter of which is being fixed. It's not that hard to track limb damage. And while it's much harder to fully automate, it's also much easier to manual effectively.

Ishin

@Toz whoever said limb classes are easy needs to be popped in the mouth and then made to fight as a monk for six months unable to change to any other class or use anything but Tekura.

Daingean

Nalor said:

Daingean said:

He may be talking about Valingar, who uses illusions via telepathy.

If they take away telepathy illusions, they'll just make it harder to pk in zealot, and it's already hard to do that.

Valingar has straight out said at this point that it's nearly impossible to beat a competent opponent in zealot without 'playing dirty' - using a lot of blackout, illusions, etc.

Daingean which is completely different

Mind hallucinate == illusions. The ability to give the hallucinations affliction is what you're thinking of, maybe.

Haven

I had the infamous Xiuhcoatl in mind truthfully. He's a very, very clever opponent. Frustrating as all hell and I actually rather like some of his tricks because they force me to make a tactical decision that might change the pace of the fight. The others though... I don't know. Maybe it's just me but I cannot help but think that they're tacky and shouldn't be possible/allowed at all. Hence why I'd like to see illusions completely changed to just be an RP element and colored to match the CONFIG COLOR EMOTE option. And then for the combat uses illusions are used for, I want to see people liaison new skills/artifacts to fit that niche or whatever. That way if they're viable and balanced, they might be implemented into the game for regular and intended use.

The following illusions(not to say that Xiuhcoatl does all these things):

You begin to wrestle the webs clinging to your limbs.

You begin to struggle free of your entanglement.

You howl out in physical pain as your flesh begins to remold. Within moments you take on the shape of chittering bat.

You strengthen your ties to the light and close your eyes briefly in concentration, only to realize moments later that you are now one with the motes of light.

You discern that (insert target name here) has cured the effects of (recently given affliction here).

You concentrate and are once again Azudim.

A nearly invisible magical shield forms around (target name).

The wisp around the head of (target name) glows a dark red momentarily before forming a hardened shield around (him|her).

(target name) takes a long drag off (his|her) pipe filled with skullcap.

(target name) quickly injects (herself|himself) with a syringe filled with sudorific.

Horror overcomes (target name)'s face as (her|his) body stiffens into paralysis.

(target name) eats (herb/slice name here).

(target name)'s broken legs cause (her|him) to fall to the ground in a heap.

(target name) appears confused for a moment. (This is just plain mean against a hypnosising Syssin.)

(target name) shuffles his feet in boredom.

The (bone marrow|sileris) coating (target name)'s body sloughs off, unable to stick to (her|his) unnaturally slick skin.

You have been slain by Ivoln.

and many more are what I feel to be tacky and should not be possible to illusion. They're designed to screw with an out-of-game source (scripts, clients, etc) for an in-game advantage. What's worse is that most of these become obsolete and ineffective once they're noticed and have been coded to be accounted for. (Check if I actually sent the command that would actually do that effect, etc) So all you're really doing is trolling and forcing extra coding on people that haven't encountered it before and banking on their system spazz. I mean really... Aetolia forces us to code enough as is.

Haven said:

...
You're using in-game elements to break an outside source in hopes of an in-game advantage. This might be a bad example but off the top of my head: it'd be like playing Street Fighter with your friend, except you know that when you press left-left-down-X it makes your character do something that triggers your friend's seizure if he hasn't taken his meds. You're intentionally banking on your friend not taking his meds so he can have that seizure for you to take advantage of for the win.
...

Despite this... I do like the spirit of some of these illusion but the mechanics for some of them already are a part of the game. For the ones that screw up trackers by pretending you got x affliction, it seems to me that the spirit of the illusion is so that your opponent doesn't afflict you with it and instead proceeds onto something else. So essentially it is a delaying tactic and a means to potentially catch up in curing or unravel their offense until they notice. There are already skills in the game that utilize this idea (galeward, reflection, shielding, rebounding, etc) and if your class lacks them, liaison a new skill/artifact or play those classes. 

I also like the spirit behind this illusion as well:

(target name) begins to tumble towards the (north|northwest|west|southwest|south|southeast|east|northeast|up|down|in|out).

This idea of feigning escape... I dunno. It sounds attractive to me cause it begs the intelligent tactical question/decision: Is he really vulnerable and trying to escape? If so, do I -want- to capitalize on this right now with impale/overwhelm/whatever or do I want to continue my offense as I am and just summon him back when he leaves the room?

Not sure how practical or balanced a skill like that would be though in the grand scheme of things. But it certainly is interesting!

Moirean

In Avalon there was no balance on emotes and no stigma to use them in combat, so I would do emotes that basically illusioned stripping defs, running away, giving afflictions, etc around attacks and stuff like touching shield. They were horribly effective, but also horribly unfair, now that I think back. For example, I had a little script that randomly picked a counter emote when I either shielded or fullparried and changed the order of the emote and the skill at random - fullparry basically was an alternative to shield that couldn't be razeslashed and stopped all knight attacks, so it forced them to switch to spells or range. Being able to completely force a change in attack (and kill momentum) without any cost? That's nuts. At the time, I giggled, but these days I am less enamored with the idea.

Valingar does something like this with mind hallucinate, illusioning a shield touch, and it kinda makes me go ehhh - I really don't want to sit and code an entire tracker for if my enemy is off balance or not just to illusionproof things. I agree that it does seem gimmicky...but I'll probably use that myself, too. I kinda feel the same about illusions as I do about complex AI - it's work you do before the fight, at the coding level, and good use (and reaction to them) isn't about tactical choices or smart responses to the situation, really, when it comes down to it. I'd rather do other stuff with my combat...but I'm not going to gimp myself and refuse to use them.

I definitely had fun back when I was a Syssin years ago building an illusion system, but it was a frustrating sort of fun - the illusions either worked and you wrecked someone or you didn't and you kinda dstabbed away not getting very far, hoping that hypochondria would stick (it used to be waaaaay more potent). You also couldn't really do much midfight to adjust tactics unless you had a really forgiving setup, since illusion offense was primarily something you build ahead of time (the only illusions I called manually were ones that stymied rebounding aura). I'm not really a huge fan of the replacement, since sleights are basically just something you build into your system, making them effectively the same as illusions (without the creativity involved) and it kinda makes me that something more flexible and creative wasn't given instead.

/illusion rambling

Toz

I've always been the illusion anarchist. If you blow their system up and crash their computer, that's awesome. No rules, whatever goes, only limit is your own creativity. If you're smart enough to solve someone's entire system to the point that you can cause a fatal run-time error, you're pretty clever - an easy win is your reward. But I realize that my thoughts aren't shared by most people, so I'd actually suggest illusions be phased out ENTIRELY from combat like they were originally supposed to be, since they're in this weird half-state currently.