running ideas thread for murder counters

[Davairus]

murder i.e. when another player attacks you with the murder command, getting a free round of hits. note that this is currently a 1 round lag skill, or 1.5 round against flying (unless also flying)

[Xerties]

what about increasing the lag time? Or making it so your second, third, and fourth attacks on murder only have a 50% chance of firing besides general skill rolls.

[Davairus]

I guess I'm going to need to warm this up a bit more.

Insom and some other guy brought up a valid point that flee/murder is really a very effective and kinda thoughtless tactic. When an opponent is just running away from you taking murders constantly, that's his fault. It is necessary for a class like a healer to be able to murder well in situations like that, at the end of the day, otherwise how are you supposed to kill guys.

When considering possible murder counters you've got to assume that it isn't at that point yet. We can probably assume that mages are already decently protected well by the lag generaed by their flying spells. Although they're also the classes most susceptible to flee/murder (having only one defense) so we might be wrong about it.

Other classes need some means of lag to slow the flee/murdering down. Maybe something like you set a tripwire (with a thief) so that when he walks out and back in, he's the one who ends up lagged by his attempt to flee murder. An aerial form of tripwire would be required to complete thief defense. A ranger has his bear to jump in front of him when he's attacked. A warrior has little defense against flee/murder, but big deal, switch/hobble and then they stop fleeing. If we really want, we could have an "entrench" ability that a warrior uses - it would be preventing him from moving, but does that thing Xerties said to incoming murder. Maybe give rangers an "ambush" command that does the same thing to the next person in pk to walk in. I would think it probably inappropriate to lag someone for wielding after theyve been attacked by somebody who just flee/switched too.

^^ Thats the kind of stuff I want to read in this thread. You should be able to do better than that since you outnumber me by quite a bit.

[Olyn]

One concern I have is the balance of flee murder against a target with ward, protective shield, and fly. Basically any nerfing of murder is going to hurt warrior vs prepared mages/clerics.

[Adebaldi]

Umm, can't you just murder them back? Or rend or whatever else nasty thing you have. This is what I have always done. I didn't even know that there was extra lag for them if I was flying. Had I known that I would have used flight more.

[Davairus]

dual wield flail murder > mage murder/rend

[Insom]

"Insom and some other guy brought up a valid point that flee/murder is really a very effective and kinda thoughtless tactic." - quote from Davairus.

I'm printing this out and framing it. Yes! After 15 years, Dav finally agrees with me on one albeit minor point. Yes!!

[bassball]

He actually remembered your name too. Poor day for "some other guy"

I'm with Olyn on this one. Mages don't need any fetching help with flee murder. That's how you are SUPPOSED to kill a mage. Flee murder, that's the only possible way to manage it, and it still sucks because they can just recall whenever they fetching want to. They don't need to murder, even if you made it better for mages to murder, none of them would, they'd still rend or hellstream you instead.

Also, that 1.5 round lag for murdering a flying target, is .5 of that lag BEFORE you actually murder? Because I've had alot of times where I'm fighting a mage. I walk in the room they're in and instantly input murder $$, then I see that same mage "scan all" then I see that same mage hellstream me, then I see my murder input come up as "you try your best" So unless I'm missing something it seems like trying to murder a flying target is so gay to begin with we don't need to make it anymore gay, right?

[Ashr]

You could also make some sort of player flag for the bonus round. Your bonus round flag is set on if you haven't fought in a while, or any time an opponent flees from you.

That doesn't really introduce any strategy though, it just lowers some rote.

Another mud I played on had a skill called "backstrike", that would punish fleeing. It wasn't overly effective, but it was kind of entertaining. It had a really short duration (7 rounds, which is something like 35% of a tick). And it wasn't particularly laggy, but did have some lag. It also only affected one target, which was nice for larger combats. The effect also stripped when triggered, making it a one-shot attack that fired on flee if the specified target fled before the effect lapsed. The end result was that you spammed it to try to punish fleers, it wasted time/energy you could have spent elsewhere. Likewise you had to specify a particular target, so it wasn't blanket flee punishment. Given that AR uses tick-based durations, I'm not sure it would work so well here, at least not in that arrangement. I'd feel most tempted to use it near the changing of the tick and hope sanc dropped or something, but I suppose if you gave it a duration of 0 ticks, it would drop before anyone would flee from sanc dropping.

[edit: I should add that it's really not effective for pursuing, since you have to reuse the skill every time it fires, reincurring the small, but not negligible lag. It's great for situations where people are going to flee once or where you know they're not going far, or you have a lot of time to spare and don't mind resetting it. Can be effective when a group is pursuing a target, though, since others can harass the target while you reset it.]

The skill also didn't do that much damage, but it was still always fun to use, and when people are panicking at low hp, it can be quite effective. I'm also fond of any skill that makes me think about what my opponent is going to do.

[Insom]

it would be interesting if fleeing took you 2 spaces away from where the combat took place. Then there is a risk involved with fleeing. I.e. you flee South, South but the 2nd south hit a wall so you were lagged. I wonder what this would do....what if the second space took you to a no exit room or worse yet, no exit no recall. Are there any classes that depend solely on flee/murder as a technique?

[Mr. Forgotten]

-Warriors

-Rangers

-Berserkers

-Paladins

-Aggressive healers (?)

I'm sure there are more, but I don't think they DEPEND on flee/murder,
although it does play a good part of their fighting style.

[Insom]

I don't really think warriors, zerkers, paladins would have a problem standing toe to toe and fight without fleeing. Rangers are different in that they do get dirt in the forest and need that weapon/combat advantage. Paladins may want to flee and charge at some point. Healers...I don't really care about healers in the sense that it is suppose to be hard to pk with healers and in turn healers are hard to kill. I believe fleeing randomly for 2-3 spaces at a time would be viable if there is not a class that completely depend on flee/murder. And I believe it actually will reward the better players that know their areas really well. You can still flee murder, it's just that you have to run 2-3 spaces to get back to the prey.

[Davairus]

Actually I like that Ashr. You ready a spell or skill, and if they flee before it expires (I guess it should last a couple rounds) they'll take it in the arse. It wouldn't be a huge problem if they don't plan coming back into the battle. I think a skill like that would have to be visible when prepared, so that the attacking player sees it and knows fleeing is going to put him in a bad position. Too strong for warriors, really, but maybe a dk or a raged berserker would need it because of bad tanking (then again, a raged berserker could easily be re-programmed to autoattack when his rage target walks into the room, to deal with that particular flee-murder issue). .

[Insom]

Zerker butt slap. It slaps a fleeing opponent thirty spaces into the next area....hahaha would be hilarious.

[bassball]

Why are we talking about making it easier for healers to kill people? Healers aren't supposed to kill people, they're healers.

[Davairus]

perhaps instead of fleeing two rooms have player able to charge-chase two or more rooms (maybe hit wall =lag) to catchup and get fighting going when a target flees. This works for warrior and pally since charge isnt affected that much by combat style (shield block hurts it a bit, but who flee/murders wearing a shield), wouldnt be interesting for berserkers to also do that with weapons, but maybe they can do a running headbutt

I would love to see some javelin-based murder counter skills for rangers, since that requires a shield (defensive style)? Thoughts on how?

Come on guys... those ideas are out there to be thought of.

[Insom]

Toss javelin up in the air when combat begins, and the javelins stay mid flight for an undisclosed amount of time. When opponent re-enters room it must make a save against javelin landing on its head. If the javelin hits, it also knocks the player out of fly mode if he is flying.

[Stephen2_Aust]

Although cool, I don't see why these ideas have to be so complex.

If the thing you want to change is that flee/murder gives a free round of attacks and that is deemed too powerful, the 2 obvious solutions are:

1) Nerf the attacks done during the free round - lower damage/chance to hit

2) Remove the free round altogether - make the murder still hold the target in place, but no hits take place until the ACTUAL round

You guys can come up with whatever MUD echo sentences/logic make sense to make those mechanics work, but if the problem is the free round for flee/murder is too powerful, pick (1) or (2) above.

[Davairus]

Uh. I already explained this in the post below Xerties post...


We don't want to just nerf chasing-murdering, but we do want to give players more tools to use against *flee* murdering, i.e. when they're expecting an incoming attack. But we lose something *required* if we just nerf murder, and we certainly don't need something so powerful that you can just flee/setup and let your aggressor walk into your ambush over and over, rinse and repeat. Its very harsh to flee/murder a paladin after he is hobbled, for instance, since there's nothing he can do about it. Rogues, while really vulnerable to murder after hobbled, at least have dirt and can switch to weapon advantage, maybe lag you with that or just dirt you while you're busy doing the same flee/attack spam. That's why its best to be a "bit" more cautious, like requiring combat styles or requiring some use of mana resources, and other class-specific things.

Also, for the record, mage-murder is a viable tactic. If you had say a gnome invoker with 40-50 damroll, and especially if you put a vuln on that, you can definitely murder targets for nice damage and save your mana that way. That's not something I intend to prevent.

[bassball]

I don't know why we're trying to change this. It's a part of AR. It isn't really that over powered, I mean sheesh how many people have whined about getting "murdered" do death(heh)? EVERYONE can do it, it's not an overpowered skill, it isn't even a skill. And what sense does it make to have murders do anything less then they do? I mean you can't block incoming attacks while you're resting at south square until you know they're coming, murders are kind of like mini backstabs, in that they're a surprise attack.

As for the murders that you know are coming, a little less surprisy, sure, but it doesn't need to be toned down, and it doesn't need to be changed. Unless I'm COMPLETELY missing something HUGE then I don't know why this conversation is even happening.

All these minor tweaks keep getting made and while it is cool to have changes happening, and while maybe some of them actually needed to be done, I don't know how important or monumental any of them actually are. It's kinda like trying to fix something that isn't broken. Or, better yet, like when you just doodle a picture of something and it looks pretty good, then you keep adding crap to it until it's so danged busy it looks like shiz.

I think we're making AR "too busy"