Vanish. Used to be a "Duh" choice for ass/flee assassins. Now it's a "Duh" choice in the sense that there are very few situations where it's actually the best option.

If the goal of the nerfing was to make it risky to assassinate, why not just make it impossible (or work crappily) for some duration after a failed assassination?

This would address the issue of riskless-assassination without making vanish {mostly} useless.

>Now it's a "Duh" choice in the sense that there are very few
>situations where it's actually the best option.

I'd disagree with that statement.

Ultimately, if you find it doesn't work for what you're trying to do with it, you can try to use it in a different way, or you can just choose to pretend you don't have the skill... but I claim it is still worthwhile, even in some of the situations you probably think it isn't.

>Ultimately, if you find it doesn't work for what you're trying
>to do with it, you can try to use it in a different way, or
>you can just choose to pretend you don't have the skill... but
>I claim it is still worthwhile, even in some of the situations
>you probably think it isn't.

I'm not trying to imply vanish is a "useless" skill. I'm just saying that it's now useless in some circumstances where it was formerly useful...possibly more than was intended.

It was my assumption that the change was made primarily to prevent ass;vanish, but I'm realizing that's probably incorrect.

Ways to use neo-vanish:

1. Jumping ahead of someone on a road to cut them off.
2. Jumping across an area to save movement points.
3. Jumping across an area to avoid a mazey or cursed patch.
4. Jumping into part of an area that would otherwise require a key.
5. Desperation move when summoned into a locked room and attacked.
6. Desperation move when losing to a pole spec or thief w/ cutoff.
7. Desperation move when stuck in quicksand.
8. Vanishing to throw a tracking mob off your trail.

Basically, imho, vanish isn't wise to attempt in combat outside the desperation scenarios described above, and maybe a few other similar ones I've forgotten. If I'm fighting a warrior on Eastern Road, even if it's a rager with deathblow parting blows, I'm going with flee;quaff over vanish.

>It was my assumption that the change was made primarily to
>prevent ass;vanish, but I'm realizing that's probably
>incorrect.

Sort of. ass; vanish might have called to our attention the previous state of the skill; I forget.

Basically, once upon a time vanish worked half the time in combat.

Sometime later, I think around when assassins got their last big revamp, Cador talked to me about that, and he got me to agree that in the light of various changes that had taken place, it should be a little more reliable than that.

Sometime later I noticed that 'a little more reliable' had become 'never fails' and redressed it.

It now works somewhere between half the time and all the time in combat.

Gah. My luck sucks then. Or else there are other factors at work. (Number of exits, etc.)

I checked with someone involved with assassin design a little while back, and Vanish was never designed to work as often as it did. It sort of slipped through, and never got fixed until much later, when people took a fresh look at the class and pinpointed some of the reasons why skilled players basically don't die playing them.

An unstoppable skill (short of lag/paralysis, which stops nearly anything) that removes you from combat and does it in a confusing way for your opponent... shouldn't work often. If there were more counters to it (the way Curse and other abilities take out Word, or needing to get out of combat (and risk accidentally casting it after being re-engaged) for Teleport, etc., I'd feel more sorry for them. But as of now, I really don't.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

The fact that you can throw down a globe and end up like 50 rooms away (eastern road) seems highly suspicious to me and very unrealistic. I would be all for vanish working as often as it used to but only taking the assassin perhaps a room or two in a random viable direction. Furthermore, vanishing out of rooms with closed doors also seems highly suspect.

Vanish is sorta s'posed to be a 'How the heck did he do that?' kind of skill, FYI.

>Vanish is sorta s'posed to be a 'How the heck did he do
>that?' kind of skill, FYI.

Many of us have seen how vanish works in ninja movies. So I will agree with Phaitus's point of view and suggestions because there's a big difference between unrealistic and 'How the heck did he do that?'.

I guess the real question is 'Would it be too much work, in term of programming, to make vanish more realistic?'
I surely cannot answer this and I cannot consider it as a bad reason for Imms to leave vanish as it is : we, players, should never forget they are doing the job of keeping this game up for free...

nt

No kidding. When I saw this my first thought was, "Huh, I don't remember posting that." Now I understand why. It was six years ago.

Also: I retract my original complaint about vanish being over-nerfed. I think I posted this immediately after dying to some warrior in a fight where I failed vanish four times in a row.

Nep's post is nov 03 this is march 11, thats 7+ years wow

Math is hard.

Wish I was as good summoner as you are.

I'm not able to find the thread... It would be nice if someone could reply to this post with a copy of it.

Thank you.

1. It's a comment on the fact that this thread is ancient, more than 7 years old.

2. Vanish isn't broken.

3. CF isn't meant to be realistic. Vault is a skill which allows an anti-paladin to jump high into the air and impale a victim on the ground, with only an echo of "with demonic strength" as explanation. Will Vault be next on your list of skills to nerf? (Sorry for the strawman, but I find this particular one entertaining)