Keepers, Battle Mystics, & Thief Pry, Oh My!

[lionSpyre]

Just opening this up to keep the conversation going from Peemo's GY post.

Looks like a couple of things were brought up:

- Non-rare gem availability seems to be a sticking point for people
- New thief pry stinks (@Scrynor)
- Keeper's 'all-or-nothing' playstyle with their gear doesn't seem to be working for anybody (n = 3).
- Neutral PK spellcasters have only one cabal option (Keepers). PK-oriented mystics... is/was that a thing?

On the third point, I'd love to hear some input from the recent crop of Keepers that just deleted (Fenlorn and Peemo). I've rolled one Keeper that I played with any degree of seriousness. They weren't long-lived and I found the gameplay so toxic and frustrating that I quit the game for almost a year after I rage deleted.

My recommendation for changes to Keeper gear (that no one asked for) is to implement purge rules, remove rot-death, and reward players for killing keepers (key to the vault) or sacrificing their gear (lots of gold).

[Dogran]

Only thing I have to contribute at the moment is neutral pk spellcasters can be justices.

[Davairus]

I think the people who want to play them / still do play them (i.e. not inactives) could best explain what they're trying to get out of it so that we can get a better focus on what they're doing and then the rest of us could argue on whether its still worth doing. I dont want to just speculate what the appeal is. It is the only cabal that has auto-induct though. I dont see how to fix or update this cabal at all without properly understanding the appeal. hopefully that appeal is better than an excuse to go trash pk'ing and full looting, which is what it sometimes looks like.

[lionSpyre]

I can at least speak as someone who has been interested in playing a Keeper, and one who often thinks about fun Keeper characters to roll. Although I'll admit here other people's input would be more valuable here.

For me, the appeal was being a sort of 'arbiter' of cabal strength. At any given time, one cabal tends to get really strong and dominate. We as the player base are lucky when two cabals get strong and then they duke it out. I liked the idea that if there wasn't a second cabal to come and challenge the dominant cabal, that is where the Keepers would step in. They can keep the fun cabal drama going between some of the more 'classic' cabal wars.

Another appeal was just challenging the people with the strongest equipment in the game, but not to gain it for yourself... just to put that gear back into circulation. Since ganks are rare these days, we tend to see one or two players get all of the top-tier slots and then hold them forever. I liked the idea that Keepers would fight those people under a kind of Robinhood principle.

Plus, there are so many race/class combos that can be Keepers. So there's always this versatility aspect that I liked a lot about them.

I'll go so far as to make another suggestion: rather than Keeper equipment being an 'all-or-nothing' playstyle, I think it should be relatively easy as a Keeper to re-equip. But their gear should be tuned in such a way that they should never be able to compete with those who have best in slot. So being deemed a threat by Keepers means that they'll constantly hunt you, even if you manage to kill and full-loot one. As a top tier PKer, you may be able to beat them back for a while. But eventually, one may get the upperhand on you. Or two might jump you for being a threat.

I think this kind of style would appeal to me if I were to consider rolling a Keeper. I roll a stone giant warrior to try to go toe-to-toe with Kryton. He'll beat me blow-for-blow, but maybe I get a good round in on him and manage to snag a kill. Or maybe I have a Keeper buddy with me to help take him down. Or maybe he kills me and loots me, but I'll re-equip in relatively short order and come at him again... that's kind of the appeal. I rolled this character knowing that I might not have the best equipment and best strength, but I could re-equip and get back to cabal warfare in short order.

[Xerties]

I'll share my thoughts on my time in Keepers. I'd like to preface this by saying they're my personal reflections and may not be shared by everyone.

First, I'd like to clear up one misconception about Keepers that many people seem to have. If this is against the rules somehow, admins can delete this portion or edit it such that it's in better compliance. Keepers are not the rares police, rather they just don't use rares themselves. This is much the same as Warlords (the modern version anyway) are not aggressive to magic users, they just don't use advantageous magic themselves. I've seen several posts in the forums complaining about how Keepers will come after you if you have too many rares. This was the case many years ago (I even had a character get targeted for having too many high-quality gambled pieces), but not anymore. Now the calculus is much more strongly skewed towards PK rating and cabal numbers. Keepers will sac the rares of someone they are after to reduce their overall power, not because they were after the rares specifically. This should absolutely not be rolled back. The purely rare hunting focus of old Keepers felt really bad. Like you'd drag some noob through Winter and get them geared up only for them to get ganked and full looted by a Keeper.

Now, my first issue with Keepers follows the above clarification. Keepers are essentially tasked with trying to kill the best players in the game. If you're not at or near that PK skill level you're going to have a bad time. Some people may like the uphill battle, but I found it very frustrating. This was exacerbated by the Keeper eq situation. You're expected to go after the best of the best, then when you die all your gear poofs and you have to start from square one. For any other player this isn't a huge problem necessarily. You can get a few things together, then kill someone else and quickly upgrade your gear from their corpse. Keepers can't do that. You have to spend quite a bit of time gathering gold and/or ores, reforging and gambling and then charge against that brick wall again. I found the whole scenario frustrating.

The trouble is, I don't have a good solution for this. Because anything you do to buff the Keeper who is having trouble against the top tiers is going to backfire when you get someone of a very high skill level in there. They'll just steamroll everyone because you've buffed them according to someone with a lower skill level. However, as I'm writing this, I had a bit of an idea. You might be able to tune the Keeper buff in accordance with the differential in PK rating. That is, if there's a large rating differential there's a bigger buff, but that buff diminishes if the ratings are closer. That could be abused I guess if the Keeper is willing to purposely tank their rating. I don't know, just a thought.

The second issue I had was there's no clear goal/task if there's no immediate issue to deal with. This could be a function of lower membership I suppose, and not necessarily restricted to Keepers. I did feel it was a bit worse though because nobody trusts you really. And it seemed hypocritical to be going on Winter trips or something when there's a good chance you'd be sacc'ing those same pieces of eq in a fight later on. There were some recent moves to allow Keepers to aid Cabals that were lowest on the totem pole, but I don't think those have been well communicated or fleshed out. Also those cabals on the bottom typically don't have many (or any) members to lend aid to. It might be interesting to allow Keepers to temporarily assume the duties of an empty Cabal if there's nothing else to attend to. Probably a big can of worms there, but just a thought.

Regarding the arbiter of cabal strength bit, I found this to be fairly inconsistent most of the time. I think there's been some changes made more recently, but most of the time the Pendulum would swing solely on number of cabal members online. So you could be sitting chatting with one Knight, then a second one logs on and suddenly you have to fight them both, regardless of what their individual PK rating is or what gear they're sporting. Again, I think this has been addressed somewhat, but it was an issue for me.

I don't generally like criticizing without having at least some idea of solutions, but I don't have many good ones for what I found to be fundamental problems. I'd be interested to brainstorm anything that other people have to contribute.

[Davairus]

We have a VERY EASY solution in my opinion. if Olyn wants, he can take up the Warlord imm spot, just put the pendulum on Warlords so that they have an arbitrary reason to have wars. I saw when we had alliance between Keeper/Warlord for a while that those players were much more effective than the Keepers and more willing to meet the challenges that the pendulum gave them. They're also already supposed to fight the best of the best, especially the highest PK rating. They do that already and don't need any encouragement in that regard. If anything, you end up asking Warlords to wait a bit and try to prepare first before they run balls-out into Kryton. That is up to Olyn of course. I do think he'd be well liked as the Warlord imm especially since he posts pk stats every month already and its a good vantage point to view the balance of the game from.

Not saying that should happen, but if it DID, that means that then for Keepers, while I think there is not consensus that our current status quo is not working (I disagree but obviously not everybody does), there is nevertheless opportunity to capitalize - there's a wide-open niche for an earth defending / "wild" cabal or we could just call it a civilization disliking cabal. we have rangers, druids, stone giants, hermit psionicists, even thieves, who can all be about living sustainably without screwing up the habitat. then we also have the natural prey which would be a mix of too orderly or too chaotic. dwarves, duergars, minotaurs (races that screw nature up by mining it or fireballing it, or totally using an axe to chop down all the trees to build strongholds), paladins who erect grandiose marble and concrete cities that block sunlight from the earth, dark-knights chucking fireballs into emerald and necromancers raising abominations. if it has a footprint, that's the enemy. This cabal would be allowed to act pretty free spirited and low maintenance, just broadly unfriendly.. also then that kind of cabal doesnt have to be just a cookie cutter "true neutral", in fact it should accept any alignments, so that almost anyone will have a second option, and just use the ethos/alignment to form a basis for how to RP out unfriendly. That broadness would help ensure they are not bored. It would be interesting to see a cabal like that fighting Justices as well. That might be their main foe.

[lionSpyre]

Queue the “yes, yes, a 1000 times yes” GIF

[Scrynor]

Way to collect all that stuff from the Peemo GY Lion!

This feels like a Keepers discussion but I'll still just cross post my pry comment from the GY and let it rot while everybody stays focused.

"The no hands pry change just fundamentally alters the risk reward ratio. You're trying a thing that lags you with no weapons, down two defense skills (parry and counterbalance). So when you fail you immediately get thumped so hard it's a full flee and reset not an exchange of damage. If you catch a bash like that it's tragic. And that's assuming you even get to try to pry. If they are poisoning themselves they might tick and catch you empty handed while you unequip.

It's just so risky now that to me it kind of feels like a do it for giggles option rather than a tactical "if I can take their potion sack I might have a shot" option. Unless you have nothing to lose I guess and the consequence of dying doesn't matter."

Ok Keepers, I posted my silly ideas and I'll stay out of it and let the more informed hash it out.

[Mogu]

I love the idea of placing the Keeper pendulum with Warlords. It fits quite nicely. Warlords starting wars.

I also love the defending nature theme for a reimagined Keepers. And yes, why not just open it up to all alignments? I imagine the only requirement would be neutral ethos and a desire to PK. Good stuff.

[Scrynor]

Why require neutral? An evil and a good druid each defend nature in their own way and would differences in approach would create nice internal drama. If there is going to be an alignment restriction I would think it would be on ethos rather than good / evil similar to how Justice requires lawful.

[lionSpyre]

That’s what @Mogu was saying Scrynor totally agree with what everyone is saying here.

Another question is how the rare restriction plays into this. Do Keepers see rare items as a product of civilization in some way? Or maybe they are restricted to only using certain keeper gambled items because they are forged properly, in alignment with their values?

If there’s no good RP reason for the rare restriction anymore, then Keepers as a cabal fall more into a category with Justice/Knight/Legion, and their powers may have to be rescaled or redesigned. Which…. Sounds like a ton of work. So it might be easier just to find a good RP reason for this?

[Scrynor]

Oopsies! Although if Justice is their natural enemy I think it should be open to be neutral and chaotic ethos to cover all 3.

The obvious nature related RP reason to ban rares is the simple fact that they are rare. AKA made of a limited resource. AKA unsustainable harvesting of the natural world. Mining it for magic and dumping it into gear.

[lionSpyre]

Ah, the lack of sustainability angle.. I like it!

Man, I’m already coming up with fun induction and promotion ceremonies. Make two candidates duke it out in nothing but goblin gear and see who comes out on top.

[Mogu]

I think it's fine to limit it to neutral ethos and have Justice be a natural enemy. Justice is the only cabal that requires a specific ethos.

[lionSpyre]

I still vote for no rotdeath but purge rules on Keeper armor, now with just better RP and purpose

[BlackWidow]

If we're thinking along those lines with the reimagined Keepers (sustainability/nature focus), this also means forged armour is unacceptable, and I'd take it as implicit that necromancers as a class and dwarves as a race would be explicit targets...

Also, I would see them as naturally opposed to Legion and the Knights in addition to Justice. Knights because of the fact that they're a bastion of civilization, and Legion because they're power-obsessed and seek to conquer Serin and subjugate others.

[deioped]

Why not give them a cabal skill that allows equipping Treant Thews for all alignments and strengthens it based on cabal rank or cabal currency? This solves the issue of powerful items being against nature by being one with nature.

And instead of killing treants, all members can just outfit at the treants to regain the armor and strenghten it with cabal currency or something. This also solves the issue of having to content with rotdeath to an extent, perhaps buffing the armor would get exponentially expensive but the first couple upgrades would be relatively cheap and the Keeper could put out a reasonably good lvl 50 Treant Thews set if they had been gathering cabal currency instead of sitting around.

This is my 2 cents based on the one or two Keepers I've tried playing some time ago where I spent a long time mucking around in Thews while waiting to be inducted and much of pre-lvl 50 until I dropped cabal currency on the good stuff.

[Arunore]

Mystics use to be a cabal and were mainly the enemies of Warlords. The times have shifted now and the idea of Warlords upholding the balance is a very intriguing one. I would likely be inclined to create a Warlord if that were the case (only ever had 1 or 2 Warlords like 18 years ago).

However for Keepers, it's obvious that they are in a vague position. They have their edicts, but seeing them transition into a "wild" cabal as Dav described, now that.. that is precisely what my idea would be. Pitted against Justice and civilization, there is a lot of potential matchups across the board there between warlords, the balance, and a wild cabal runnin amuck. I agree with this a thousand percent. I don't know what the Keepers think, but this sounds feasible - do they still shun rares being protectors of the lands? Is there a limit? Lot of kinks need to be worked out but it sounds badass