Just out of curiosity, why is it ABS are non-dispellable? I can understand why it should be hard, but the fact that it's some of the biggest portion of combined damage reduction, and you can't even get it off someone makes me sad.

Why allow protection from X and stoneskin, among other protective abilities, to be so easily dispelled by the mages who already have the huge ABS advantage? Melee classes have to work quite a bit harder to get decent protections (or pay for them). Seems like, at hero, they shouldn't have to deal with the easy dispelling, considering what they face.


Just my opinion.

If you dispel stoneskin, protection, etc., a warrior still has dodge, good parrying, and possibly other defenses to make it away from a gang.

A mage typically goes down like a sack of bricks.

Considering there are probably 10 PK-successful warriors at hero for every mage, I'm not convinced this should work the other way around.

I don't agree with the original posts but as a tangent:

Is there a way to find out what the relative % of all hero characters are from each class for a given time period?

I am just curious how much of the fact that warriors tend to dominate the list of best PKers at any given time is at least partially due to the fact that they tend to be the most popular class as well.

Also, do other people consider raw PK totals a poor choice of stat for judging one class verse another given that some class skills lend themselves to easier racking up of kills, i.e. warrior lagging skills tend to make it easier to rack up high numbers then other classes IMO.

>Also, do other people consider raw PK totals a poor choice of
>stat for judging one class verse another given that some class
>skills lend themselves to easier racking up of kills, i.e.
>warrior lagging skills tend to make it easier to rack up high
>numbers then other classes IMO.

Isn't that an argument *for* pk totals as choice of stat? If warriors have skills that make it easier to rack up high numbers, doesn't that sort of say that warriors are at a competitive advantage? Or are you more concerned with ability to make other people flee? Most people consider ability to seal a kill part of balance. I.e. some classes (Paladins or shapeshifters) don't have much kill sealing ability, but have a lot of defensive and/or offensive power otherwise. Then there are other classes that have more lagging/sealing options (pole or whip warriors, thug thieves) but aren't as gifted in the raw power department.

First I agree with you on how kill sealing works into overall balance.

But, that does not mean total PKs are a good choice for cross class comparisons. If the concern is determining relative class balance then total accumulated PKs cannot be used solely if one class or group of classes has a competitive advantage over another class or group of classes in terms of accumulating PKs. In that case total PKs must be coupled with at least one other variable to balance out the competitive advantage of the one group over the other. Or, a conversion rate could be established (I know this is a bit ridiculous with regards to this discussion), something like 1 healer PK = 10 warrior PK, so a healer with 30 PKs could be deemed on equal footing with a warrior with 300 PKs, so that appropriate comparisons could be made .

Anyway, the only reason I asked is at first reading of Daevryn’s post it seemed like he was making a statement based on total PKs, I realize now he was not; though I feel like this comparison has been made reasonably frequently in other posts though again not necessarily by him, just in general and I wanted to see what other people thought.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not talking about raw PK totals.

But it's telling, that, for example, there's currently only two transmuters even managing killing more than they die, and that most high level transmuters have atrociously high gank-o-meters and still can't run a positive ratio.

On paper, I'd be the first to say that the transmuter class is fantastically hard to kill if the player is any good and should, while not racking up the absolute kill numbers a warrior does, certainly die a lot less -- but in practice, it's extremely rare to see more than one or two people at a time making the class look good.

Necromancer, conjurer, invoker, similar story.

It should be noted that these numbers will be skewed by the types of people they face.

That is to say,

A transmuter who is a scion with a easy abs source,

Will probably get a ton of kills if battle is weak and say, fort is filled with people who can't dispel.

BUT that SAME transmuter will have a craptastic ratio if battle is filled with Knacnars and Fort has umptenbillion dispel+bash combos lurking.

Not really leaning one way or another in the argument, just stating. The numbers are a little janky depending on how everything matches up.

>I'm not talking about raw PK totals.
>
>But it's telling, that, for example, there's currently only
>two transmuters even managing killing more than they die, and
>that most high level transmuters have atrociously high
>gank-o-meters and still can't run a positive ratio.
>

Ok gotcha. This was probably a poor post to ask that question on since your post on re-reading doesn’t say what I initially read. Thanks for clarifying!

How about the other part? Is there an easy way to determine the total number of heros from each class?

Thanks again.

Did you ever consider loosening up the con/XP penalties for classes that have a higher affinity for dying? Just a thought.