Carnifex

Mastema

Thanks for the quick reply. I think if the drain was reduced so it was not such a huge uphill battle it would go a long way for a bandaid.

Moirean

I've already expressed this in the liaison thread on the topic but I *REALLY* think the penetration change needs to be scrapped. You can still have shifting limiters on soul acquisition rate, but tying it to weapon stats is implementing an artificial complexity - inventory management is NOT engaging, it's NOT elegant and it's NOT fun. It requires coding (wield bardiche1234 for bashing, wield bardiche5678 for this part of the fight, wield bardiche91011 for this part of the fight) without offering any sort of actual tactical choice. There is a reason AB VISION LISTS exists as a baseline skill - people don't enjoy juggling 5-6 different weapon### just to use their basic skills. The same choice - trading speed or damage or both for soul gain - can be implemented far more elegantly without making things a headache to those playing the class, eg something like auras (x aura for speed, y aura for damage, z aura for soul gain), weapon empowers, soul stone activation, weapon types, or etc etc, AND you can control the rates a lot better if it's a more overarching skill, letting things get tweaked far more easily for balancing.

Toz

I suppose I'm more annoyed at how the change doesn't actually do much except what Moirean mentioned above - results from a quick test I did, for any interested (dex, 19str vs a 45% cut audit)

Damage: 101  Penetration: 72  Speed: 168  Arcana: 0

Swings to 2s: 9

Damage(max) 652

Damage: 70  Penetration: 101  Speed: 166  Arcana: 0

Swings to 2s: 8

Damage(max) 470

Even with the change, I find it better overall to keep pen as the third stat - I'd rather have that 200 damage difference at 2s, with only 1 swing extra required to get to that point. I also tried with a halberd scaled highly for pen, and secondary for speed, the results:

Damage: 71  Penetration: 168  Speed: 102  Arcana: 0

Swings to 2s:

16

Damage(max) 593

So, in conclusion, it was a band-aid fix that kind of stings since it is supposed to be a 'nerf' - it wasn't an 'adjustment'. It was an attempt at nerfing the already brutalized class - a metaphorical kick in the balls, even if it was not intended to be. And, at the end of the day, it actually didn't change anything much so far as I can tell. Additionally, these numbers are different than the last time I tested, because it was actually WORSE to go for pen over speed before, in terms of swings it took to reach that lovely 2s SSL.

Moirean

Oh, I take back what I said about barrage. I had forgotten that it costs souls to use, and our resource gathering mechanic (consumption) kills new players.

Mastema

Yeah consumption is nasty in general, and even worse on novices. It is one of those skills that really was badly overlooked I think.

Macavity

I like consumption personally, but with one minor tweak...the longer the culling goes for the stronger the wraiths become over time.  Could also bump up the souls it gives to the stronger it gets....that way it would be easy for novices and not so many would die first dealing with it, but still give endgame users something to have fun with.  I could see a good contest come from this in the Guild where you give prizes for those that last the longest within the culling.  Or even give a fame line for a set time to last the culling.  lots of possibilities 

Mastema

Or they could make it so we can put souls in the main crystal, then remove as required. Oh wait we asked for that two years ago and nothing came of it.   :-\"

 

Macavity

main crystal??  I thought all souls went  into the soulstone..what other crystal is there??

Moirean

We got a report approved for that. It's being implemented with the revamp. \o/

Mastema

^ Epic news.

This one, it is the main crystallised soulstone that all the others come from. At one point we were looking at "forcing" souls into it much like folding pearls. Yet it never went ahead sadly, which is a real pity as it would have allowed us to assist novices with gaining easy soul and encouraged guild hunts/rp. Who knows maybe it can be revisited again?

The inert core of an enormous soulstone is suspended here in midair, its shape imperfect and irregular, cut in innumerable facets in a structure similar to a crystalline quartz. Its surface is perfectly black, unnatural in that it neither reflects nor refracts light, its depth obscured so as to appear a void in fabric from every angle were it not solid. Upon closer inspection, hairline veins of deep cerulean form a web across its surface, outlining each facet and chunk as if to isolate it. The soulstone is impossibly cold to the touch, and occasionally it pulses with an inner glow that sends blue motes skittering beneath the surface, each wave seeming to sharpen the heavy and malevolent aura that surrounds it.
It weighs about 4062 pound(s).
It bears the distinctive mark of the Carnifex.

Elyni

I got 3900 souls in one sitting on my first consumption, and I was like level 50

Denser

I have yet to go into carnifex pk but just for hunting, it is really really slow. The hammers only do semi-decent damage but are soooo slow even with the best hammer attack. The defence isn't anything to brag about so you basically get minced a lot. That is unless you are really high level and score loads of criticals

Denser

Oh and the arties look really cool but seeing how the skills don't match up to it. Probably better to quickly master and change class or something.

Moirean

Don't leave us! *cling Denser*

Denser

Moirean said:

Don't leave us! *cling Denser*

Well I probably won't. Just a little disheartening when even the majority of people I see on GWHO aren't even carnifex most of the time

Moirean

This is mostly a post at this thread in general, as I've been slowly getting really frustrated and kinda upset about the Carnifex discussion on forums.

First, @denser: Well, as I said the other day, we're in an odd spot. We're currently waiting for some pretty needed changes to come down the pipeline, and it sounds like they are nearly here! 

As a novice, I think it's important for you to take the forum rage with a grain of salt, and I kinda get very frustrated seeing players come here and repeatedly bash on the class. Yes, it has issues - at top-level 1v1 combat. For a newbie in a team fight? Carni is just fine. You can pump out pretty awesome utility through basic trip, you can impale, you can dish out some stupid damage with a decent hammer, you can do ranged attacks, you can even ninja a kill through reave (ahem, see: @Toz in like every team fight ever before he discovered hammer and +3 str). Carnifex can even stack attacks together for a pretty awesome insta when fighting as a team. The bashing is not top-tier for a new player, but there are worse options. The intro skills could stand to be improved, and I personally think some band-aid fixes could help this: make summoned stones come fully charged, add in a soul hammer skill, up the base damage for non-transed savagery attacks. Other fixes will take longer and that's what the revamps are for, but these additions will make the class just fine for new players.

Regarding the other classes in GWHO, well, I personally joined the guild with a pretty mercenary viewpoint: I didn't like the skills, didn't expect to like the skills, I just wanted a way to hop to the shadow side of the game and a guild I could take GM of within a month. To my surprise, not only did the skills grow on me (I adore Carnifex bashing at level 100+, it's great), I found that the guild had some great seeds for developing into a really militant and fun culture and I've aimed to expand on that while also providing ideas for skill changes through the liaison system.

I think the frustration of looking at GWHO is partially a larger issue with multiclass in general. I remember when multiclass first came out here, I was rather resistant to the idea, partially because I was playing Achaea right when guilds converted into houses - the shift was jarring and abrupt. I remember being one of the only jesters chilling in CIJ trying to help newbies who were confused over where all the jesters were. 

I think that feeling of being alone in a class, even if you are in a guild for it, does happen here as well, albeit to a much lesser extent. I think it's partially mitigated by our heavy focus on RP - I've made a huge effort with the Carnifex, for example, to have the guild's RP and atmosphere open to all classes. You're here for the bootcamp and the training and to be a soldier - you don't even need to learn a single guildskill to progress, as long as you can RP out why you fit into the guild (and we've had members join simply to be part of the guild, despite not having credits or interest in the actual skills). Without revealing too many spoilers about what awaits you, we have a special trial members go through later on which is absolutely my favorite part of being Carni - everyone displays their own unique spin on what being a Carnifex means to them, with members integrating their various other classes and areas of interest into the interaction, while still being fundamentally dark, soul-stealing knights. I love that RP can help smooth out the oddness that is multiclass, by letting guilds focus on their identity and outlooks, instead of just being defined by skills.

However, looking at things that way isn't natural for new players, and I am sure things could be improved both at the game level and the player level, to make it less jarring to be the only Carnifex in a guild of....Carnifex. Or Sciomancer in the Sciomancers. So on, so forth. One thing to remember is that it's not just members avoiding the class - lots of us have been playing for a while and it's kinda just FUN to try out new classes. Toz, for example, just picked up Syssin and has been playing around with that. I am often in Scio so I can handle stocking the various shops I run, or Indorani for dissection and the ease of leading team fights (empress and lust are pretty great for helping control a fight). That being said, I would absolutely love to hear ideas for what I can do as a GM to help make this less frustrating, and I'm sure brainstorming in general couldn't hurt: it's in the game's interest to ensure that multiclass is integrated well with the guild system and if it's offputting to new players, that's something worth discussing, perhaps in a thread of its own. The current admin have not only made it clear that they are focused on providing a quality experience for newbies - they are following through with these goals really impressively.

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On a more general note, I think threads like these are really detrimental to the guild and also a bit unfair. Our membership has plummeted since the rants started in earnest: our newbie intake and retention rate has dramatically dropped off, despite nothing changing on our end IG, and older members have started vanishing, lamenting the changes that are not here. 

Yes, it's frustrating that the issues exist, but this is not productive - should the upcoming changes have been announced? Probably not. I know that coding got massively backlogged right after the first post saying they were coming was made, and that has led to a frustration and anger from the people waiting for new skills. While the post did some initial good and gave people excitement and hope that the class was getting attention, the subsequent delay has driven a lot of people to deeper levels of frustration. The slowdown wasn't foreseeable, but the result has been pretty painful for us - we went from being #1-4 in topguilds pretty much every day to persistently being in the bottom 3. Yes, topguilds isn't an ideal reflection of comparative activity, but it is an accurate gauge for your own guild's activity over time, and I check it every day. There was a huge dip directly in conjunction with the forum rage starting over the delayed changes; we went from a consistent 500-600+ activity points, down to 200-100. That's a massive drop. We're picking back up now, but it's still problematic.

From a development standpoint - and I am not speaking for Aetolia, merely the game industry in general from my years of QA - there has long been a struggle between teasing upcoming content and meeting release timelines, one of the reasons the "fix it in the patch" attitude is so prevalent these days. I get slightly concerned with that; while I understand the desire for devs to get content out quickly, rushing it too much can lead to errors, design flaws, bugs and issues of OP/UP which can linger and hinder gameplay. 

On a somewhat tangential note, I've seen firsthand how attempted after-the-fact fixing can just turn into a horrid mess: I worked on post-production for PSP's SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3 (affectionately termed "Fireteam Broken" by the patch team) and the repeated number of patches after release (it ended up dragging out over a year. For a handheld!) completely bogged the company down and was a direct cause for the temporary layoff pattern and financial struggles that eventually put them out of business. The communication with the devs on that project went from optimistic to downright hostile, and we were working for them as their QA team - and their team eventually dwindled down to a single coder handling the project. It was pretty sad to watch happen.

In any case, somewhat hyperbolic (although real) example of how trying to push stuff out before it's ready can backfire terribly. Do I think the current situation with Carnifex could be in a better place? Of course I do. However, I think the forum pressure has exacerbated the issues - changes were already on the way, established in the liaison round. For those curious, see reports 1304, 1305, 1306, 1308, 1349, 1350, 1364, 1365, 1111 - basically enough that the admin wisely sat back and realized a cohesive change needs to be made, which takes time to do right. That being said, I think things could have been handled better - both from the class's very inception and at multiple spots along the way, and maybe the admin will take away some useful ideas about timelines, releasing and announcing content. There is now a liaison server and a paid coder, and from a very long talk over LT the other day, it's clear that both Oleis and Valdus have a solidly-envisioned overview for what they want with the PK system and implementation - so, past issues aside, the future is looking very good, not just for Carnifex, but for the PK system in general, imho.

Xenia

@Denser

Hey, to be honest, Carnifex is my favorite class. I have Syssin, which I've started using because I like the idea of spying and kidnapping people, but beyond that, I feel somewhat at a loss when not in Carnifex class. 

Speaking from a relatively new player point of view, the hunting is not only doable, but fun. It's not one of those classes that you can put on cruise control while you hunt (at least not when you're under 100, heck maybe 110), but it's not a completely uphill battle either. Carnifex is a hit and run hunting class for the pre-endgame hunting. This can be augmented with artifacts, but on its own, it's a hit and run situation. For me, that was challenging and fun. I liked it. I developed grudges against certain hunting grounds (Fengard Keep, Arbothia), and studied, practiced and spent many weeks (and many more deaths) just trying to figure out how to run through those areas before I got to a point where I'd outgrown the area. Currently my grudge match is with the Abyss in Tiyen, Xaanhal (less so), and Arbothia is still right up there. 

When it comes to fighting, I think that all 1v1 combat is sort of skewed because of the nature of how artifacts work in tandem to combat along with a heavy reliance on AI systems. Sure there may be issues with Carnifex combat, but when I lose a 1v1 fight, it's not because Carnifex class is is broken, it's usually because of something I need to fix about how my combat system handling something.  

To me, where the Carnifex really shine is the group fights, because its there that I see the most ingenuity and creativity. Carnifex is -great- in a group fight. Personally I enjoy the versatility I get in a team fight, be it acting as a utility player, enabling others to do damage or reacting off of other people's enabling tactics. Furthermore, nothing feels better than returning to a team fight, that over the web sounded like it was going bad, and being able to adapt to the situation as needed to turn the tides. 

Macavity

@denser  The Teradrim guild is open and accepting new people anytime!  Just saying...  

Denser

@Macavity Ha. You are going to get @Moirean killing me

@Xenia, @Moirean: Indeed, my time in the Carnifex has been really awesome so far and even if the class has gaps that needs plugged, the guild definitely shines