How balance would've been fixed better for lower levels.

[Fireballe2]

We all know that spells like poison and weaken and curse have very low negative penalties, and usually low timing as well.

There was a time when rend necros were power ganking with red dragon and blind.

There's the usual ganking with enhanced damage third attack niche ranks, mostly from the physical attacks, but DKs spamming the libo and to a lesser extent paladins are also very capable of this, too.

Balance was attempted to fix with luck penalty for armor and weapons too high level. This was a problem due to the fact that it essentially means penalizing someone heavily just for being a few levels lower, which is nice synergy with rank disadvantage that ruins offense and defense skills as well, in addition to whatever other advantages might be incurred by offending party with vuln weapons or good niche spells/skills.

Balance of races and classes are by exp penalty. The idea of exp penalty is that you spend more time getting raped like a red headed stepchild in order to revel in some advantage in future at 50. The idea sounds to me like it is you give up many lives in low ranks as people feed freely on you with no defense ability against it but quitting out (a thing not roleplay like at all and just makes the game empty and not fun), or letting people get free easy kills on you until you rank up past them.

In the past this was less obvious because of less powers and abilities for all classes and races, especially legacies and whatnot. Additional point is given to classes like hybrids. I don't like to harp more on them, but they are the best litmus test due to all their changes. Dodge and trance were removed because they were "too good" compared to warriors, which is where exp penalties came from, right? Extra power at 50 = extra exp penalty? So then these OP things were removed to balance them, but the classes themselves didn't have their exp penalty changed at all, which is the penalty that is meant to suck more lives from you if you want the extra power the class gets at 50. Notice here that fire giant warriors of doom haven't had anything taken from them, because the class itself cant be nerfed without affecting all other races that can be warriors.

to summarize: If you take a 750+ exp penalty combo, and you tried to get equivalent armor to compete against someone who is 5 ranks above you, it grants with high luck penalties, so you can't actually have the same EQ Power vs someone, even though you are also disadvantaged for defense skills or hitting them through their defense skills by 5 ranks.

Additionally, this was not good enough. Many "base level" "trash" armors were also limited by character level. You cannot put on red dragon if below 25, not to mention it is very hard to get red dragon or even just black-tear. It feels like a breeze to get black-tear with a warrior, ranger, or berserker of rank 20-21 or more, but any other class has a terrible long time to kill them and get armor, if at all, and potions of monster resistance are needed.

Weapons also were distorted based on the rank of weapon to the rank of the character. They have changed this somehow so it is more fair and things like claymore dont jump from average 12 weapon at one rank to average 15 weapon 1 rank higher. This was very unfair but went unnoticed by the population, I suppose because maybe the average population was overwhelmingly using low exp penalty/fighter combos like warriors or berserkers or rangers, obscuring the problem behind numbers that look better than reality?

so in previous AR we have this:
Less rank = worse skill success or attack success.
Less rank = luck penalty for having good armors.
Less rank = lower weapon damage average from weapon itself, discounting the negative effects of low rank bad armor.
Less rank = unable to wear or bid on the same armor that someone is killing you with.

That's a lot of unfairness. Not only that, but the ones who suffer most by this are high exp penalty races or classes, because they are the ones who will always be continually fighting people higher rank, which means invoking these limitations actually IMPROVED the ganking capabilities of rare/gamble whoring higher level people, despite the concept it was meant to protect lower rank people from decked gankers. In essence, it changes the nature of the ganker/gankee relationship from one of equal ranks feeding on weaker people of equal ranks, to people of higher ranks being able to feed on lower ranks with far more impunity than before.


What does this have to do with necros, blind, and such?

Well blind itself has a very static -10 to hit penalty, which sucks for all levels, but it clearly is what we can consider a "rank 50" disability spell, in that -10 to hitroll is a very large chunk. Any necro, shaman, or now dk, can cast -10 hitroll on someone at low levels and gank easily. This hasn't changed, despite the other anti-ganking measures placed in with luck penalty, then limiting gear by rank, in addition to the original design of lower ranked characters having massive penalties to defenses and attacking the defenses of an enemy.

The point is that blind itself, while limiting the ability to get in a "initiative round" which is basically = free round of attacks, also has far too much affect on negative hitroll.

I think that the rend life necros spamming blind were a part of the reason red dragon and other armors got level restricted in the first place, although at such low rank necros were still no match at all for a decent warrior or ranger. I believe it was more the blind that was the issue but it appeared to be a gear issue.

We know that almost all other mals are particularly useless at low levels: poison = bad. Plague = bad. Basically all spells that have detrimental effects carry a very low benefit of -1 or -2. Something so inconsequential compared to rank (dis)advantage that it's almost meaningless to have, not to mention when gamble gear or rares or Set Items can provide with protective measures against such paltry disabling effects, in addition to supporting a more powerful suit of armor than normally achieved prior to Sets and Gambles.


What doesn't make sense is this:

These were attempts to balance the game and curb some atrocious behaviors. These attempts simply made lower exp penalty combos more ideal to use. Gank lower ranks with impunity, can't be ganked. The loss of certain abilities of hybrids was another balancing point to bring the game more to some idea form of "real balance", however hybrids have not lost their exp penalty despite losing very serious abilities. This leads them to be more easily attacked and harder to defend themselves, which I believe is where the Nightmare stallion was inserted for dks, and finally the bonuses of it were transferred to the very annoying armor skill itself, which relies on heavy armor that is something only a human dk of 21 str can do well.

If the route of balance had gone with reducing the hitroll penalties to blind in order for it to scale like the worthless level 12 poison and plague spells, maybe we wouldnt have had to hardlimit armor by levels.

If the route of balance had gone with reducing the exp penalty for hybrids losing a very large chunk of their defensive abilities in dodge and trance, maybe we wouldnt have introduced the nightmare stallion to solve "foreverbrokenTM" issues that arose from combat and weapon skills (which were still a mistake btw, 3 actions of very real and dangerous skills like disarm, trip, and dirt, for ONE action breaks the original claim of the mud of "one input, one action", and totally disrupts balance), maybe nightmare stallion wouldn't been the needed deus ex machina it was intended to be for dks.

If the route of balance had gone with tweaking when classes get their power skills in comparison to each other (rend life at 25, third attacks very late and fourth attack for warriors only at 50), then there would've been a fairer progression, no need to nerf the crap out of gathering and having armor parts and weapons, and therefore would've built the foundation of AR on a much firmer platform.

To put it in visual perspective, AR starts to feel more like this




or this



instead of this




In the first two, there is an inherent weakness of structure that makes further building exaggerate past problems, while in the last you see a firmer foundation that has more room to grow.

Just as visual example of what it looks like. Fixes that were designed to solve some issues, but didn't affect the root causes, leading to more and more convoluted problems down the road (like NS and holy/unholy armor taking over for NS).

tl:dr

lower the hitroll penalty for blind at low levels so it's not -10 to hit at rank 4 (necros spamming rend after blind with red dragon insert here for gank potential that makes imps level cap and luck penalize armor and rare armor), raise the required level for skills that are fundamental to the power of specific classes, as all these balance factors have been made, reduce EXP penalties for classes if we can say they are no longer imbalanced in their old ways.

[Davairus]

I'll be honest, I have more important priorities on the game right now, but I'll acknowledge your issues and get back to them when I have time. Eq restrictions have been an annoyance for a very long time, but fixing them is secondary to some other things we need to do, and the upshot is less multi-charactering, which was playing much more havoc on PK range back at the time than a level advantage allowing a 0 xp character to wear eq. We have been trying to make progress toward you can just get better eq yourself, like with black-tear, so that if someone had a red dragon suit and you couldn't wear it yet, you would basically have a disadvantage of a few damroll points at most, not enough to conclusively decide the fight. That's why there have been additions of black-tear eq, new stuff like the silver bracelet on the orc mountains having +1 dam, and so forth. In these levels, hitroll and armor really very useful for the miss defense, so look out for that stuff as well. Its a complicated issue. Its not as simple as you can just red dragon up and win everyone. That armor has low magic AC for the same reason that winter eq does.

Thanks for bringing the blindness issue up. I am not too concerned about it being OP at level 4 because it would only be casted by players on mobs, so its benefitting you guys if anything. That's not a big issue. Its where you enter PK that we need to make sure the numbers are ok, and I think that's definitely way too high. I had not noticed it was this high. I declare that a game bug, because there is NO WAY I would have ever signed off on a spell that strong at that rank. If you want to drop a bug in game about that, it'll allow you to track it on your mort.

[Fireballe2]

thanks for the response. I also don't imagine it's a problem below pk range, but I do or did think it was one which exaggerated the pwnage ability of shaman and necros in red dragon at low ranks prior to the rank restriction on gear.

I'd really like to see poison, weakness, and other mals more viable at low ranks, to counteract the higher hp and damage output of fighter classes. A minimum of -3 to affected stats or abilities from rank 10 might be okay.