Outstanding issues

[Davairus]

Please help us to make a list of issues that are negatively affecting the gameplay. Examples: Skills that are too bad, too good, or just poorly implemented, exploity stuff we haven't fixed and you guys want fixed (things that involve doing the same activity over and over). These can be both general, class, or cabal-specific. We may break off into multiple threads if anything merits a deeper discussion.

FYI unholy strength has been taken care of already.

[Ergorion]

Off the top of my head, the know alignment spell. I don't know anyone who practices it and can't think of a practical application since you can just consider someone. Not so much negatively affecting gameplay more just completely useless.

[Vertas]

Throw is relatively useless.

[Olyn]

[Fireballe2]

detect good and detect evil. low mileage spells like know alignment. Even a total newbie will figure out things' alignment by trial and error or the good old appraise skill. same as know alignment.

infravision- I don't recall the last time I've had my light stolen and needed the spell. Sure it's useful for other things, but there's consumables for it too.

disarm and shield disarm. We never see these in fights. They have some surprising ability, but nothing a nonspamming person with their finger on the flee button cant fix. The alternatives are just better. Clobber is disarm and a huge damage at the same time. Can't beat that with a skill that's primary function is disarm. P.S. the nice looking ring bandits suck. They can take out anyone with their sidestep or clobber or uncanny spam. I think I mentioned in the other thread how these skills are so great because they cause effects but are also at-will nukes, unlike the design of the rogue classes, which was a nuke with limitations that mean it can only be used once in any given fight to equalize things. We all saw ygin.

Riposte. some clarification needed in the helpfile. Some people think it's a fourth attack. I think it's an attack that procs off a successful parry, as it talks about blocking an attack and striking at an opening. If it's truly a "fourth defense", the model of defenses is broken on that point..


Argument for throw. It isn't useless because it allows rogues and ninjas to counterbalance while having a method of damage. It' is useless because you should rather be using weapon type skills or maintaining combat style advantage, and is nullified against casters via protective shield. It appears to be useful, but there are better things to do which eclipse it. Kind of like disarm.

spells like armor, stone skin. They could scale with levels to provide better protection for mages. 20-60 for Armor seems fair over the course of rank 5 to 50. I read that post regarding percentage of damage reduction is why I suggest this.

Shield being changed to damage immunity is really unusual. It provides a generic "ohshit" button or turnaround ability for any class that can use wands or scrolls. Not sure about this.

Kick only has special effects for warriors I believe. For everyone else, it is lacking in that again, there are better things to do. Semi-useful for ranking though.

magic missile. we all know it. terrible damage, terrible scale. Not sure how to make it worthwhile without making other things obsolete. Maybe it's a good circumstantial weapon, as it checks against magic AC rather than afflictive or something, and isn't blocked by mana shield.

Chill touch. Another spell eclipsed by the need to do more useful things than spam it all day. you can theoretically get -30 str or more out of this spell, but at the cost of damage. Only dks use it , so you're talking about a slow acting spell on a class that can't go prolonged fight distance.

scaling damage adjustment needed for rogues' weapon type skills I think. It should either be an at-will nuke that performs some very minor secondary service that's easy to recover from, or it proforms a major service that hampers the enemy greatly, with a minor damage punch. Doing both is unpleasant and feels like too fragile of a gamestyle. A successful double disarm with a rogue nuke attack while dirt kicked by the uber dirt of rogues is totally balls.

That's about it for me. I'm satisfied ending here.

[Olyn]

[Ceridwel]

For paladins:
- Get rid of the Stake skill and replace it with something useful.
- Have lay on hands do extra mega healing if cast immediately after Divine Sacrifice. Maybe tie the degree of mega with the caster's proficiency in it.


For invokers:
- Remove create water.
- Make create spring a level 8 spell instead of level 14.

[Ozaru]

Ranking lvl 0 to 22.

1. Armor class makes such a difference dkns paladins and generally any high dex race with dirt make this much easier. For the rest of the classes it is brutal. Perhaps make the ac on lowbie equipment much higher so people take less damage a lot of deaths occur when a freaking farmer hits you with decimates and you are barely dealing wounds and injures.

2. Surges are great, but it sucks when you miss one. Maybe have a surge bank that only applies to the day it happens. For example unless u are in a wacky time zone you miss the surge at 2am or u just don't need sleep. If people could use this surge only on wednesday at any time you would get more people playing. I know this is the purpose of a guild reward but at the same time I look forward to the friday surge and sunday surge but I can't play if my wife wants to go the movies on both of those days. And I am stuck with just 1 guild reward per week usually.

3. Werebeast effect make the same for male and female wolf tiger get rid of boar. You really lose a lot of potential rp here because no one ever makes a werebeast female because the effect is not as good as the male. Also with boar most people just delete if they get that one and try again. One thing I have always wondered with this and this would make boars more viable is if u rank while in beast form as a boar you should have the chance to get higher hp because ur form gives u what 22 con. Also are the bonus's of the increased dex and strength taken into affect for defense say with added parry with strength and added dodge with dex and the increase in ability to land dirt with the added dex?

[Fireballe2]

Not sure if surges should be in this thread, however..

Surges were a double edged sword. On the one hand it migrated people to strict times to find players. On the other hand it means that players play less and less at non-premium hours, meaning people who can't hit surges are stuck with 2 or less players on. I watched the average day cycle of AR and I can tell you that theres one chunk where people all congregate at usual U.S. evening timezones, and from there it drops precipitously for about 11 hours. There is a slight rise at about 13 hours, and then it stabilizes until about 20 hours, drops again, and then goes back up for evening times. Add bonus players for surge happening in any of these instances at a rate of maybe 1.5x the normal amount of players.

What it did was ensure that people wouldn't play at random times, meaning less people on for a large portion of the time instead of a steady average. less people means less newbies ranking means less future players.

hp vs mana vs moves. Shallowness in gameplay. It's almost universally better to put most, if not all trains, into hp.


nightmare stallion is some sort of catch-all fix for dks specifically that doesn't address the core issues surrounding hybrids and the uselessness of unholy armor and overpotency of rogue or fighter skills. Being the only class in the game with a mount sounds fun and all, and you can stroke your e-peen in seringale in front of noobs with it, but it was a fundamental change to a class to skirt fixing a fundamentally flawed relationship between skills and hybrids. Prior to the nightmare stallion hybrids got nothing similar to mages to protect against combat skills, and had some power revoked via trance, dodge, blindness, etc. Dodge was a major game changer in itself, I would've advised caution to remove it first, then trance and blind if the numbers still favored hybrids.

Unlike Blizzard Entertainment's M.O. of changing things until they're useless and then simply removing them, it is actually possible to revert changes back to an older design, or reintroduce powers or abilities that have been nerfed/removed. It's all about what makes the game better or worse. That's one of my major gripes with Blizzard, something works too well, nerf it to hell, now it doesn't work, remove it instead of incrementing it back up til it works but isn't "too good".

[Ergorion]

I would definitely say disarm/shield disarm have practical applications. Sure if you just disarm like a n00b your opponent is going to re-wield and you've just lagged yourself two rounds. However, there are times when disarm would be worth a go, namely when your opponent lags himself. Say your opponent misses a bash or dirt kick, you hit a disarm immediately and that's two rounds with minimal time you are vulnerable to their other skills.

Disarm can also be used to catch hobble-happy warriors. If you maintain weapon advantage and bait a warrior to dual wield by staying defensive, you could disarm them while they jump at the chance to hobble. Although, this raises a point about barrage. When you wield your new weapon, supposedly combat style is neutral so the chance of hobble is decreased, but if you wield you can insta-barrage/sideswipe, so if you don't catch your opponent lagged/trick them into lagging themselves, you can be screwing yourself.

Also, a blind/disarm combo can also be lethal. While warriors, rogues, and berserkers have better options at their disposal, rangers especially, with their dual disarm can make full use of this. Paladins to a lesser extent could capitalize on it with a flamestrike/disarm combo.

[Esivole]

[Ceridwel]

[Esivole]

cast 'locate object' spring

[Davairus]

The know alignment spell

There's actually an "evil rating" on mobs, same with their "good rating". It goes from -1000 to +1000. The know alignment should be able to tell you more specifically what this rating is, although that has no bearing on gameplay besides interest, and never will. This would be more useful if players could do stuff that modified their alignment, but again, we're not going there.

I think the obvious problem is you can consider things to figure out alignment. That's something we can just remove and let you think about it. There'd be some issues with players getting damnation that might actually work. Then you can always fall back on know alignment if you don't want to risk killing something, but as a lightwalker you'd respond to that by just exercising some mediation. So that is what is up with know alignment. Just meant for a more thoughtful game.

Same argument goes for detect good/evil. We don't need them because of consider command, but without that, these would become invaluable spells. The questions which we'd rather remove - its an easy decision for me, but I'm not sure how you players will prefer it.

Throw

Obviously that isn't useless, as other people have refuted. Throw also varies in function between classes. Maybe you should let us know which throw you are talking about? Because its definitely not useless in the case of say, bards, that can throw really strong playing cards. Berserkers throwing while raged (if that still exists) is the only way to remove weapons once in that situation. As a damge tool while levelling, well yeah, it requires material input, so probably isn't that good for that, but I'm sure we have other abilities to compensate you.

Infravision

This actually comes into play through thieves and the like. If you have infravision, you can sneak around in the dark much easier. Otherwise, a player will spot you because of a light entering his room. If the other player has a light, this effect will not occur. But if you try to sneak up on someone with infravision, with light in use, they will still see you walk in.

I think we could probably increase this penalty further and make you literally "step out of the shadows" if you disturb other players in this way. Right now its just not punished besides you gave yourself away.

The other main use of infravision is thief pry.. they can steal your light source and leave you lost in the night.. but if you have infravision then you're not affected. I'm honestly not sure why this is not being exploited by thief players. It sets up some really cheap kills. (also a good reason why being able to make lights is a good skill... and another reason why that is good is because you can give lights to newbies or make one after you die instead of walking for shamans staff and wasting time)

disarm/shield disarm

These skills have plenty uses, not least because you can use them to soften up mobs. Maybe some classes get more use out of them than others, because they have better things to do. I'm pretty sure that rangers are incentivized to use the traditional dirt/disarm route, rather than the new toys thieves and warriors have. In fact these are signature moves of rangers.

Riposte

Figure that one out.

Shield

I think we could just make it protect other spells from dispel magic, which is what I originally thought it was for (I didn't realise until later that you can't cast spells on top of one another to protect your oldest affects). That's something we'll have to try out because its very intuitive. It'd be like weapon ward duration of course. I was smoking crack if I made this absorb damage. That'd make invokers a bit too tanky.

Armor / Stoneskin

These spells aren't going to change in the near future. Armor is useful enough to be worth casting them if you have them.


... you have a lot so I will come back to that post later

Stake skill

I on the other hand think it should be available to everybody instead of a paladin only thing. This isnt something you get to use very often.

Create water

Required because in pvp other people locate for your magic springs and this allows you to sustain your hunger without giving away your location.


I'm tired of writing now, sorry.

[Ceridwel]

[Olyn]

Don't believe everything that you hear unless it's from an immortal.

[Ceridwel]

Believe me, I don't. Sometimes I don't even believe Immortals

Kidding aside, I've played a number of paladins when there were active Vampires, and not once did I have the opportunity to Stake. That could have been because I wasn't a good enough PK'er to track them down while they were sleeping, and I'd welcome feedback from others who have used Stake. But ya...to me it just seems like a wasted skill spot.

[Ergorion]

I think that rumor came from Othrolg's character, but I heard a rumor that you only get 1 quest class per player ever.

[Frostburns]

[Vertas]

For throw, I haven't tried to throw a weapon or shield while raged I'll give that a shot next time I get on but that's a good point.


Thief throw is pretty useless, its not bad damage but the weapon skills are going to be used instead. Unless you come upon someone who is flying and has weapon ward (not prot shield) up, and for whatever reason you can't murder flee, then I would not use throw for thief.

I would say make thief/ninja throw like quick volley, so that if they initiate with murder or they or their opponent flees they can do a quick toss, but that sounds a bit op. Maybe if you scaled the damage down a bit that would seem fair-ish. I had been thinking that we haven't seen a good thief in a while but Aexolt seems to be doing pretty well.