running ideas thread for murder counters

[Davairus]

[_Clifton_]

The murder from flee/murder doesn't actually start until the round of combat starts.

So..

[RebornShadows]

I have been playing alot of warriors lately and yeah flee murder is something that i do only against mage classes because it is a cheese way to kill them i would love to see some changes that help those classes cause well frankly if you play one it sucks to get hit by flee murder all the damn time and if you are attacking them you can see how simple and easy it is to do.

P.S. I like clif's idea

[bassball]

I apologize for missing the point. I have never played a gnome invoker. IN fact I've basically never played any mage class. I do, however, have a lot of experience with warriors and the flee murder tactic is their tactic, when I first started playing this game years ago I was told specifically that flee murder was how you kill mages and clerics. I always assumed it was supposed to be that way, because your other choice is sit in combat and eat hellstreams all day, and while you fellows might think the skirmish tactic is cheese, try and not flee against an invoker one of these days, especially Alzuur in those treant thews, because he's going to do more combat damage then you(because he's in thews you're in saves) and he's going to hellstream you, he'll splatter your roasted flesh all over Thera if you try that.

As for skirmishing against other warriors or rangers or paladins, you're not going to get any kills that way because they can run away whenever they want, AND they can skirmish right back, right? Skirmishing takes two skills, murder and flee, everyone has those skills, therefore everyone can skirmish, not just warriors. Skirmishing isn't even effective against other warriors because they'll just switch weapons when you flee all the same, look at some of the logs, there's a lot less fleeing going on then there used to be. As for paladins, I haven't fought one in forever but I remember fighting Ardroedous(or however you spelt it) back when he was first a footman and getting my butt handed to me with a skirmishing warrior. So skirmishing doesn't make us unbeatable, not even close.

That being said

Give the mages and/or clerics some type of force push, vampire thrust move where they can knock back/knock down the charging flee murder warrior when he initiates, making him trip over himself and eliminating the entire free round but he still suffers the lag, of course this couldn't work EVERY time, because, well that'd be ridiculous

Give the rangers a volley attack, so the murder isn't a free round, because the ranger gets three javelins in there while the warrior runs him down

Make the paladins dig in their polearms and wait for the warrior to shred himself on it while he closes in. Make it somewhat like a charge attack except lag the paladin alittle less and probably a tiny bit less damage too.

Make the berserker tackle the warrior AFTER the free round and get in his own ground and pound round, where he just throws his fists and head at the guys face for a round.


I still haven't quite caught on to why or what exactly we're doing here, but there are a few of my quickly thought up and not thought out ideas for you.

<EDIT>

And just for kicks, here is three examples, albeit the same two people
http://www.invokation.net/logs/view.php?id=3905
That warrior never once fled, not just didn't flee murdered, never once fled in all three duels

[_Clifton_]

I think bassball makes a good point in the sense that if warriors are kinda forced to stay in combat, why let mages get a free walk out of combat? If it comes down to melee + saves vs afflictives, it's effectively RNG isn't it? Chicken until someone pulls out?

-- don't mean to threadjack.

Edit: as for the log, it's pretty obvious that one person outgears that other significantly. Ebony kris + mace of disruption vs... well, decimates/mutilates vs wounds.

[Insom]

anybody using flee/murder is cheesy regardless of which class that does it. It's cheesy for invokers that flee/hellstream, its cheesy for illusionists that flee/prismatic spray while his dupes tank, its cheesy for necros that flee/acid blast while zombies tank, its cheesy for rangers flee/murder while pet tanks. Why put in a bunch of cool stuff like combat modules, skills, and such just to have flee/murder as the tactic used 99% of the time? It's super cheesy.

Flee/murder allowed for the creation of this set of triggers.

flee
scan all <direction of target equals "direction">
go direction
murder

[_Clifton_]

Pets flee when master flees.

[Erlwith]

[Ashr]

I'm pretty sure I've never been spam "skirmished" on AR, but I've seen it/done it/received it on a number of other muds, and I always loathed it.

But that's beside the point.

I was just thinking, as a variant to the "backstrike" idea, it might be fun (probably for rogues or something) to have something that works the same, but hits the murderer. Sort of like a temporarilly activatable "counter" (I'm guessing, haven't been on the receiving end of that either). It'd share the same weaknesses, it'd be a pain/waste of time to use if you weren't sure you were going to be attacked soon, and the best time to know that is if someone is flee/murdering you. Possibly "lure" or something.

Could also lead up to some nasty surprises when someone knows they're about to be hit.

And now I should probably stop coming up with gameplay ideas and go back to n00bdeaths on explorer chars so I can figure out what all this "eq" nonsense is about. It might also help if I stopped trying to turn my mudclient into vim, but I digress.

[Viggs]

I like Insoms fleeing more then one room away thing ,, hell It should be a possibliliy of fleeing four rooms or something ,, Fleeing to me means run away ,, if you want to have a different command for the "flee Murder" thing it should be like disingage and you move to the other side of the room the fight stops and you remurder in the same room

[Davairus]

Lets summarise what we know so far:

warriors - seem flee murder each other too much, but maybe ok because they're a tank class, its just a struggle for combat advantage. can dirt
paladins - dogfood for a flee murder
berserkers - slightly inferior to warriors in a flee/murder exchange, but better regen on ticks than *everyone*, somethings probably worth having but at a price of coming along with something done to the additional regen on ticks
rangers - have a noticeably stronger "flee" and "murder" than warrior in two styles, but nothing else available for dual wield beyond enhanced damage. something seems missing there, but only *slightly*
dark-knights - almost same boat as pally , does have dirt, but its the 1 round type
thief - long duration dirts can shut the tactic down, though hobble is pretty horrendous to have flee/murder on top
ninja - dust/dirt and caltraps is a bit scary for flee/murder users
bard - dogfood, but do we even care?
healers - can fly. can cure through this. tactic really helpful for burning healers mana
shamans - same as healer,
invoker - these guys just need ice/fire shield damage returned when they get murdererd so that people arent using that to work around their shields, otherwise class is busy enough itself with flee/attacking that it might end up benefiingt from warriors fleeing
illusionist - a good defence is a strong offence in this case. perhaps mirrors could provide protection on RNG, but we'd have to be very careful with this. something like mirrors take up duplicate spots, for example,,
necromancer - same as illusionist, they shouldnt be worrying about getting flee/murdered because rend life is a 1 round lag, and their charmies are stupid


The only classes with the issues is arguably warrior , berserker, ranger, invoker because of shield choices, and definitely pally, dk, bards

[_Clifton_]

Going to debunk and comment.

warriors - agreed. could implement extra attacks as a skill.
paladins - divine might + heroism + cures probably makes up for being dogfood vs evils. see: Adroredus
berserkers - talked about this point before. they're gimpy warriors with rage. regen doesn't make up for extra damage taken or damage lost (shield vs dual wield). don't like the idea of berserkers having to tickwhore and play like a wannabee warrior. always seemed like more of a go in guns blazing type class.
rangers - snap shot, quick volley, quick draw + pets seem to make them pretty alright with murder/flee. they've also got dual wield as well as nice dirt kick in forest. Plenty strong class right now, see: Razza, Hrimoyan, etc.
dark-knights - charmie to rescue if they're fast enough as well as extra damage. but like everything they have, it can be a double edged sword.
thief - always seemed like 3 rounds of hobbled resulted in a ton more damage taken vs 3 rounds of dirt kick. shitty parry (highest strength thief is duerg at 22), and meh counterbalance. weapon skills might be nice for counters. but they'll lose on health.
ninja - same hobble thing as thieves. same weapon skills thing. blindness dust is killer.
bard - give them eye gouge. problem fixed. :-\
healers - pretty good at surviving anything. divine ret for return damage if you want to be more offensive. just flee/word/gate if things get too hot.
shamans - attrition wins out. see: Quar.
invoker - see alzuur vs jaxt. also fire/ice/mana shield do not conflict with prot shield so they don't give up anything defensively. free offense.
illusionist - mirrors should mean that illusionists should always have the advantage. pets > flee/murder. adegraoch was pretty good at this.
necromancer - get torn apart by flee murder if successful. rescue lag > murder/flee. missed spells also result in taking hits.

[Davairus]

Alzuur vs jaxt was an awful fight on the berserkers side. Please don't attempt to strawman that. I think high level play logs are often good for illustration purposes but sometimes they're just cack.

[_Clifton_]

Not going to disagree on shitty fight from the berserker. But, Jaxt probably got outdamaged 3 to 1 (so 3 to 2 with sanctuary). Point being that it means berserkers are forced to skirmish like warriors/rangers.

[Davairus]

Okay... here's a better illustration of flee murder usage:

http://www.network54.com/Forum/109789/message/1162427971/Worvaz+vs+Lonova

as you'll see in this log, the warrior (considered to be one of the best warrior players of all time) is just trying to work a simple flee/murder on hobbled target. It fails somewhat because of preparation - the DK happens to be using a fully charged unholy frenzy resulting in about 75 damroll, and has a lot of other pimp things going for it like justice shield rebuking wild attacks, and flail-based water vuln, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg. The response to the flee murdering is to try spamming damage spells to return the damage.. hopefully even outdamage.. and that's what you roll a dark-knight for. You may not comprehend the amount of thought and planning the dark-knightplayer had done to get the better off this warrior who is pretty much going yeehaw spam murders with my nice shit, ignoring barrage and shield disarm *completely*, but , for instance, the dkn is chickening behind a shield so that he wont be sideswipe-lagged to be able to cast those spells later on in the fight, he starts off with a dagger knowing that a shield is going to bait the warrior into axe, which is the dwarf favored anyways, and its counter (segment) is going to be answerable with the water flail on the dwarf vuln (not a weapon advantage in that case, but vulns are tight and segments dont parry that well, and hopefully he doesnt return to axe because he doesn't realise the disadvantage since its not in his prompt in red lettering). Also a charmie with a spear is chosen for its weapon adv against segment and bonus against dodge, and thats another small factor that helped tip this fight. He is a drow instead of human so that the warrior is less likely to succeed a dirt, which otherwise would be pwnage. That's basically the thinking that won the fight. Don't bother to dirt, let the warrior resort to simple minded tactics because he can see, let him think he is safe against his vuln because he has high hp and its not a weapon "disadvantage" - blind fighting means dirt makes little difference anyway, thats one reason why you see vamp touch instead, another reason is correctly expecting a lack of saves on the target - and finally punishing the error with an all-in spell damage spam. Just look at the amount of stuff there, just to prevail over hobble -> flee/murder flee/murder flee/murder , and if it wasn't for the cabal confinement involvement, he couldve picked his moment to just flee and try again later, and hope for better RNG

And I think with the advent of wield lags, the flee/murder on dk has got a lot stronger, and you need some better anti-fleeing spell, like those harms and fireballs at the end were intended for at the end there, but stronger and only firing once on a flee (the dwarf doesnt even start doing that until pretty hurt, and almost wins from there). Its a spell to cast when you notice a warrior is brainlessly flee murdering you. Probably a water-based spell, like an avalanche of water falling, since dwarf warrior is a dkn's worst problem, and otherwise just a regular harm damage. Its not there to stop the flee-murders, its there to keep the dk damage output over par with the warrior damage output. It needs to be decent because of the starting hp - 1050 vs 740. Maybe something more is needed to use against enemies while dirt kicked too, since dirt is really nasty on that class.


Lets talk about logs like that for the other class examples, if we want to dispute them. We have a massive resource of logs to draw on to help us make the right decisions. They needn't be the most recent ones. Also, no more heads in the sand. We have wield lags now. Thank you.

[Erlwith]

I always wondered why he never barraged.

Oh and don't forget vamp touch working on afflictive break

[Mandor]

easy.

give hybrids and rogues the ability to use a skill that takes some mana and move, but fortifies them against a murder, so they take one or two hits out of a possible eight.

Isn't the point that a person is supposed to attack first anyway? that stops a flee murder..

[Dispater]

Old thread but just wanna give my few ideas incase SOMEONE actually bothers reading. (srsly Dav, i have had few great ideas, stop discriminating me because i'm black!)

Firstly, it takes a bit of coding BUT you COULD implement a passive speed factor for weapons for initation atleast.

I mean, if you are using a slow weapon, like two-hander or heavy axe or shit, your 'initation' delay is a bit bigger. If you use weapons like daggers your initation delay would be basically non-excistant coz you're such a fucking ninja who does the slice'n'dice shit like a monkey on a crack, right?

How about implementing a delay to each weapon group which kicks in at initation, just like Clifton the Turtle-Eye suggested.

[divsky]

Make the lag for fleeing 1 round. Whether you succeed or not.

Would make combat more interesting around the board as you're somewhat more locked into combat. I've always thought it was stupid that there was so much fleeing in combat in general.

Also, why does murder give a free round of combat in the first place? What's the point of that? Make it so that the first round of combat after a murder is an even round: Both players exchange blows.

That way the charge skill might actually become useful.

[Mandor]