Conjurer elementals when stacked with the right edges and familiar is just way too overpowered right now.

Just one example :

civilized <762hp 700m 654mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 2 PM>
Ruknubuk attempts to fall back to a safer position, but fails!

civilized <762hp 700m 654mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 2 PM>
A water elemental's drowning *** DEMOLISHES *** Ruknubuk!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEMOLISHES *** Ruknubuk!
A frost giant sentry's cleave devastates a water elemental!

civilized <762hp 700m 654mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 2 PM>
Ruknubuk retreats from the heart of combat and falls back to a safer position!

civilized <762hp 700m 654mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 2 PM>
A water elemental's drowning misses a frost giant sentry.
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A blast of water expands from a water elemental!
A water elemental creates a geyser aimed at a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's geyser *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's geyser MUTILATES Ruknubuk!

civilized <762hp 700m 654mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 2 PM>
The white aura around your body fades.
Ruknubuk continues to bleed from his wounds.
Ruknubuk's bleeding maims him!

civilized <797hp 755m 678mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 3 PM>
A frost giant sentry fails to rescue Ruknubuk.

civilized <797hp 755m 678mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 3 PM>
A frost giant sentry rescues Ruknubuk from a water elemental!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A blast of water expands from a water elemental!
A water elemental creates a geyser aimed at a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's geyser *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's geyser *** DEMOLISHES *** Ruknubuk!
A water elemental is unaffected by Ruknubuk's poisonous bite!
A water elemental is unaffected by Ruknubuk's poisonous bite!

civilized <797hp 755m 678mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 3 PM>
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!

civilized <797hp 755m 678mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 3 PM>
A frost giant sentry rescues Ruknubuk from a water elemental!

civilized <797hp 755m 678mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 3 PM>
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A frost giant sentry's cleave devastates a water elemental!

civilized <797hp 755m 678mv 21600tnl (-30.91%) 3 PM>
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** a frost giant sentry!
A frost giant sentry is DEAD!!
You receive 0 experience points (35% bonus).
A frost giant sentry's eye pops out of its socket.

---------------------

That's way too much burst for just an elemental. They should be topping out at mangles for damage. It did like 2500 hp of damage to that sentry in 5 rounds. That's on par with if not greater than what an invoker could do while hitting a vuln AND the sentry missing saves AND having to be indoors for nova.

As far as I know, nothing in this game can tank that. It's a stacking of 2 edges + familiar that results in an elemental that cannot be tanked.

Let's ignore that transplendant archons do non-trivial amounts of damage themselves with wrath and god forbid the dude has the guts to conjure an angel (why he doesn't with 2-3 healers I don't understand).

It's too good, it's beyond the scope of what an elemental should be capable of. Devils and to a lesser extent archons are meant to maledict tanky classes. There's no need for that at all with elementals this strong.

I say this coming from the era before edges, where you could actually sit there and tank a LG conjie with an archon for quite a while. Edges were introduced as ways to tweak or supplement your gameplay, not drastic power boosts to core class abilities like conjure elemental.

To me, it seems only that the gap has closed somewhat.

You could certainly tank them a lot better than now. No you can't really tank demons, but you could certainly burst down a conjurer using a demon or get the demon to track onto something that isn't you.

I'm not expecting to tank an angel or demon, I do expect to tank an elemental.

n/t

The elementals aren't any more powerful then they were. I think there's one, (the svirf-earth elemental) maybe two (arial-air elemental?) edges that will actually make an elemental stronger. The others just make it so you can call a stronger elemental with less mana, and have them come out with a lesser chance of being pissed off.

You could always get elementals this strong, you just had to throw on some mana gear (and not even necessarily that at hero) and put all of your mana into the elemental conjuring. The edges save you from time having to sleep, and that's about it.

Players are just playing smarter and beefing their elementals up with a haste talisman and a big mana conjuration.

I've had two hero range conjurers and fought many, many over the years, hasted ones and all. I really don't think sympathetic conjuring just improves your mana input, but even if it did, these elementals are out of line with basic game balance.

I'm not saying they are balanced, but given how utterly broken every other class is and/or can be made to be, the downsides of a conjurer are non-trivial. Every other class in the game can just get up and throw down with just a bit of rest and some preps, conjurers are all but useless once those timers are up and the servitors are dead or dismissed.



What elementals are doing is no different than what RBW's do (Jerrokrar is not the only player unwilling and/or incapable of playing anything else at hero range due to the learning curve and time constraints) no different than what most Paladins/good-aligned warriors and thieves aspire to by stacking progging gear (Defiance and Heartseeker make you far more frightening than anything that stupid elemental is doing and the elemental is infinitely more likely to get the conjurer killed) and it is no different than what invokers, transmuters can do, and the chances of the conjurer having that servitor are about equal to the Orc Chieftan having his horde.

You have a lot of other classes to nerf before you start in on conjurers my friend, and empowerment class survivability ought to be the first on the chopping block after shamans get evaluated. Since neither village nor empowerment nor air forms have been touched in light of similar arguments you're making here (substitute 'untankable level 60 mobs' with 'RNG damage against foes with no access to a/b/s' or 'uncounterable dispels on top of progging gear and progged class/item lag' or addressing duo dimension causing transmuters to be the de-facto most difficult class to catch and kill in the game topping even rangers and healers...

It stands to reason that elementals are perfectly balanced, particularly since the factors that can turn that hooded elemental back into a lucky blows sack of crap are only loosely controllable by the conjurer.

My conjurers felt like easy mode *as it was* without any of this. What is playing more of them going to do other than reinforce that opinion?

c plague elemental
flee

Elementals still bleed and suffer from various other physical maladictions too in spite of the demi-elemental transcendance edge, it's hilarious.

That sentry is much lower level than the conjurer, but yes, conjurers can do more single-target damage in a round than invokers. So do offense shapeshifters. Transmuters can too (if you count softened/decalcified targets). A necromancer with an army can as well. As can a well-geared warrior, or a lucky RBW. Invokers do more AOE damage than anyone else, that's one of their niches. They also have better innate dam redux and lagging ability than a conjurer.

A conjurer has drawbacks. For example, in this log, the elemental did that 2500 hp of damage to the wrong target because it's not smart enough to redirect. And there are all the other drawbacks of conjuring. It's powerful, for sure, but I don't think it's overpowered.

...when you hit like a lucky RBW
...when you can AoE fight with ease
...when you have defenses of a healer
...when you can heal better than any healer (since you don't waste commands or mana on it and they have to fight a crazy archon if they want it to stop)
...when your archon can dispel, wrath, holy light, colour spray, healing curse and more
...when your archon blocks blackjacks/assassinates/etc

You get the best of a lot of classes, all in one nice package.

You act as if the conjurer has a downside, when you're talking about not even half of his ability shown in that fight. This doesn't includes all the commands and abilities he gets to put to play (like lagging you, while you're getting dispelled/demolished).... and not to mention they are curb stomping one of the most deadly Orcs in the game without a care in the world.

A competent conjurer is insanely good.... arguably more than a necromancer because you can easily separate a necromancer from his army (including summoning his zombies) and you can't easily separate a conjurer from his pets. Conjurer also takes a whole lot less work (easier to level, no failures on animates, etc) and auto-pilot a lot easier. One of the scariest points of a necromancer is getting slept but serious prep and top PKers won't get slept much, since you can take things to stop it and/or have mobs chasing you or friends to wake up.

The reason most people don't complain about goodie conjurers is because most of them are complete idiots. You get a strong pker behind one and it's scary as hell. On the flipside, Zhenyen has been soloing for a long time and still scary (but not that bad considering he's one guy and archons > devils in my opinion).

Hopefully this didn't come across as some big rant, but hearing someone downplay an elemental that hits for DEMO/DEVAS harder than almost any shifter/warrior/etc plus archon and more... it's pretty sick.

>You act as if the conjurer has a downside, when you're talking
>about not even half of his ability shown in that fight.

They do have downsides. They have downtime if they want their servitors to be powerful, and sometimes they get unlucky and have weak servitors for 50 hours. They can't heal their servitors very well, so even if you can't outfight them in a straight fight you can hit and run the servitor and then the conjie is out of play for 25 realtime minutes. The biggest downside is keeping those servitors happy, which can be really hard to do. And the fact that you can't control them gives all sorts of issues. Most people say an evil conjurer should just expect to die to their own servitors some. I don't actually agree, but it gives you a sense of how not-easy-mode it is.

In this log the frost giant sentry is weak, but you can neutralize an elemental pretty effectively by hanging around strong mobs. This goodie conjurer you're worried about has a particular vulnerability there because you can make them kill goodie mobs, which should be a problem for them if it keeps happening.

>doesn't includes all the commands and abilities he gets to put
>to play (like lagging you, while you're getting
>dispelled/demolished)

A warrior can do a much better job of lagging you while you get demolished. If you're scared of conjie lag options I don't know what to tell you, because a conjie very weak lag and kill-sealing abilities. An archon/elemental conjie is like a paladin that way. Lots of defense, pretty good offense, but a lot of trouble nailing the kill.

>.... and not to mention they are curb
>stomping one of the most deadly Orcs in the game without a
>care in the world.
>A competent conjurer is insanely good.... arguably more than a
>necromancer

And is this not one of the deadliest conjies in the game? What's wrong with them being scary? You're looking at one lopsided log here.

Would an Archon do anything similar?

n/t

sdf

.

Certainly the conjurer in the log didn't noarea. Most conjurers don't think to do it because most people aren't going to make you pay for it. And if you do convince your conjie enemy to routinely noarea then you've nerfed their elementals a bit. I probably overstated the case originally.

The cabal is simultaneously loved and hated for pretty much making you close to invulnerable with minimum interference from the near constant presence of a handful of paladins and healers.

That means by definition (and people wanted Ragers or Tribunal to be thrown out of the cabal for their very first ####up) Fortress is going to be more forgiving of mistakes than any other cabal OOCly even killing goodie mobs.

No one expects a Fortress conjurer to know to noarea an elemental around random elf mobs until the first time they screw up and they probably won't get booted, or even lose full Maran powers, till they murder the 10th elf on accident.

If you said, "conjurer with demon + elemental" would be on par/slightly better than an offense major or invoker - that'd be one thing. This is *just an elemental*. Should *just an elemental* outdamage an offense shift or invoker? No way.

At this point, the archon/devil/demon/angel is actually totally unnecessary. He could run around lashing people with some success just with ABS and an elemental and no arcon/angel at all.

There's something wrong with that.

This does kinda make me wish invokers were slightly more powerful though. ^_^ I really like invokers though.

Although, you are right. My invoker did 700+ damage with a nova on a vuln target once. The difference is, the nova might hit everyone in the room. So you could potentially to better if both failed their saves...

svevqwr

Yeah, the follow up :

1122/1122hp 320/414m 982mv (5 AM) wilderness  22280tnl Along the Eastern Road 
 

     A sign points north towards the Grove.
A cascading column of bubbling water moves along fluidly here.
(White Aura) A transplendant ring of sparkling wings and brilliant light is here.
(Body of Stone) Pamalynn is here.
An enormous giant has arrived.
Pamalynn lashes at your feet with a gleaming whip of flattened mithril!
Pamalynn's lash misses you.
You yell 'Help! Pamalynn is lashing me!'
Pamalynn is in perfect health.

1122/1122hp 320/414m 981mv (5 AM) civilized 22280tnl whe
People near you:
(PK) Ruknubuk                     Along the Eastern Road
(PK) Pamalynn                     Along the Eastern Road
  Ogun                         Along the Eastern Road
Pamalynn is in perfect health.

1122/1122hp 320/414m 981mv (5 AM) civilized 22280tnl 
Pamalynn deflects your poisonous bite with her shield.
Your poisonous bite maims Pamalynn!
An enormous giant screams and attacks Pamalynn!
The axe glows green as your muscles respond with an enhanced strength.
Pamalynn's flogging maims you!
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

1086/1122hp 320/414m 981mv (5 AM) civilized 22280tnl 
The sun rises above the horizon.
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

1122/1122hp 326/414m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl 
A transplendant archon sings praises to the light, blessing Pamalynn.
Pamalynn is surrounded by a white aura.
You yell 'Help! I'm being attacked by a water elemental!'
You dodge a water elemental's drowning.
You parry a water elemental's drowning.
An enormous giant makes a wide, slicing blow at Pamalynn, but she backs out of range.
An enormous giant's slice misses Pamalynn.
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

1122/1122hp 326/414m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl spine
You attempt to break Pamalynn's spine over your knee, but you fail!
You recover more quickly from your failed maneuver.
Your spinebreaker misses Pamalynn.
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

1122/1122hp 326/414m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl 
You parry a water elemental's drowning.
A harmless splash of water sprays you as a suit of darkened platemail deflects a water elemental's drowning.
Pamalynn parries your poisonous bite.
Pamalynn deflects your frigid chop with her shield.
Pamalynn deflects your poisonous bite with her shield.
Pamalynn's flogging maims you!
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

1089/1122hp 326/414m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl 
Pamalynn entangles your feet and sends you to the ground!
Pamalynn's lash grazes you.
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

1084/1122hp 326/414m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl 
A transplendant archon sings praises to the light, blessing Pamalynn.
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

1084/1122hp 326/414m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl 
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** you!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** you!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** you!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** you!
An enormous giant's stab injures Pamalynn.
An enormous giant's stab injures Pamalynn.
Pamalynn parries your poisonous bite.
Pamalynn parries your frigid chop.
Pamalynn deflects your frigid chop with her shield.
You dodge Pamalynn's flogging.
Pamalynn has a few scratches.

447/1122hp 326/414m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl o all rescue rukn

A transplendant archon sings praises to the light, condemning you.
The magic of your puissance spell unravels.
The magic of your protection from good spell unravels.
An enormous giant executes a controlled overhead attack with a large, crimson-stained halberd.
An enormous giant's chop wounds Pamalynn.
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** you!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** you!
A water elemental's drowning *** DEVASTATES *** you!
You have been KILLED!!


You have died, but the Carrion Fields are not finished with you yet!
Your soul is returned to the realms in the form of a ghost.
You will return to your corporeal state in a short while.
Be careful, for even a ghost should fear some dangers!

1/952hp 1/344m 1055mv (6 AM) civilized 22280tnl You have no followers here.

Totally legit, 1100 hp in 1.5 rounds. So either get voker shields or pop aura, shield and stoneskin...or just don't bother fighting any conjies until they fix this. FWIW, this has been brutal for 3 hero range conjurers in as many months - Zhenyen, Cel and now Pamalynn. This needs a nerf in a bad way.

Orcs basically have almost no built in dam redux and very little in the way of tanking ability. So when they go up against a conjurer which is one of if not THE pinnacle of raw damage output then you should expect there to be a lot of orc splatter.

If you flipped the conjurer into a thief/assassin/paladin/ranger and replaced elemental with bash you would make a great case for orcs needing to be toned down.

That elemental also had to be hasted to get 4 attacks a round. I could see a very legit argument for making servitors (and PC pets in general) unable to be hasted because it gets really nasty really fast when you are facing hasted groups.

Elementals can't be directly hasted, only through staves. The fact that staves work but casting haste directly on them causes them to attack you is probably a bug.

Anyone who doesn't view this, in light of the fact that he has an archon with him providing sanc, shield, full healing of all maledictions, wrath, healing curse, sanctify room, protection from assassinate, protection from all forms of sleep, so on and so forth...as overpowered, doesn't understand game balance.

This is broken in the sense like, "I may as well never play anything else."

Why would you ever play any other class in the game if you could drop incredible burst, while having your own personal paladin + healer + utilities like familiars, clairvoyance, clairaudience, tesseract to gate anywhere in the game, phase door to skip over stuff you don't want to fight...I mean he's getting the stoneform amulet solo...

And there's plenty of logs of assassins getting wrecked in the face by these same elementals.

It's just blatantly, obviously overpowered, not sure what else it needs to do to convince some of you guys lol. Should it also have the slay command? Would that be proof enough that it's a little bit overkill? I haven't seen anything this obviously broken in years. In your orc example, there's 100 ways I can obliterate an orc through maledictions and if I can't maledict I can almost always outtank because non-malediction classes typically have more direct damage with damage reduction (invokers, shifters) or tons of damage reduction and tanking (paladins). What you're seeing here is a class that has the best offensive and defensive capabilities at the same time.

You said Invoker was the class that "you may as well never play anything else."

I guess the class that fits that mold is whichever class just had a log posted of it creaming someone.

But even an invoker can't avoid assassinate, getting slept, all maledictions, plus a buddy to spam rejuv on them. Ironically an invoker would have the best chance other than another conjurer of dealing with a conjurer.

On the broken scale, right now its :

#1 : Conjurer
#2 : Invoker
------------------
#3 : Everyone else


Don't confuse me saying that conjurers are broken with me saying that "no other class is broken". Until I saw these logs and fought Zhenyen/Cel/Pamalynn in game I didn't realize the full extent to how badly broken this class is now.

And while I know you have some weird obsession with me that borders on creepy, I find it odd that anyone that has an IQ over 70 can't think this is overpowered.

I thought Scrimbul would forever remain champion of people I don't want to ever have any affect on game balance or mechanics. You've taken the cake.

I'm not sure why you worry about game balance or mechanics. It's like a mentally retarded person worry about the selection process for a Nobel prize in science.

Stick to what you're good at, like trolling and providing gear to the rest of the game.

Not really, but even the lowest dogs need a little encouraging now and then.

I'm not usually lacking in social grace enough to insult people on officials to their face, even in their Battlefield threads. The number of exceptions to that rule in ten years are in the single digits. That behavior is strictly reserved for Dio's.

(and yes, I am both calling you out on insulting me and DC to his face as well as having no clue about game mechanics outside of rangers which I also top you on but have no reason to comment)

Give me a break.

Because he's angry that someone (I wasn't even the first person to mention it) called him out when he said "insects wasn't going to kill him" by saying, "you died like 70 times, everything kills you".

Stevers used to stalk my threads too, which is his hero for whatever reason, so I guess it is what it is.

You likely would never even bring up an archon using conjurer :P

An archon conjurer is really not much different than a paladin, lots of damage, lots of survivability, little kill sealing. I didn't check but I don't think there have been more than 1 or 2 goodie conjurers that have broken 100 kills. And on the evil side there may be more super high kill count conjurers but if you look at the absolute number which manage to reach level 51 you realize something must be going on that makes them very scarce in spite of their PK potential.

would require contemplating data that can't be found in a log of someone being creamed by something I can't figure out how to beat or counter.

Therefore irrelevant.

It's actually not very complicated to a reasonably intelligent person.

The reason why there haven't been "more than 1 or 2" goodie conjurers to break 100pks is that there haven't been "more than 1 or 2" goodie conjurers in the post-Neps-conjurer world who have been doing this particular trick while also being hyper-aggressive. Pamalynn is on that track, as are Cel and Zhenyen (obviously last two aren't goodies). Combined with that is the fact that LG conjurers generally have a much more limited array of targets...I can tell you that, for instance, no one has any incentive to fight Pamalynn right now given how many healers and paladins are in the Fortress. So if she gets 1 pk per day that's probably 50% of her enemy base on any given login because she's being actively avoided.

There's 30-50 people who play this game so there's going to be permutations of combos and aggression that aren't immediately available for regressive statistical analysis on a day by day basis.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a judgement call like :

"Archon's massive defensive capabilities are balanced by weak elemental damage output."

and

"Elemental damage output is actually tremendous."

and see that A and B don't add up. See that's called critical thinking, combined with this thing called common sense.

If a paladin could spit out 1100 hp damage in 1.5 rounds, on a defensive build they'd be overpowered too. They're much less defensive than an LG conjurer with a transplendant archon, logic would say the LG conjurer should actually under-perform a shield paladin on damage output...they actually drastically outperform them. Your lethality should be inversely proportional to your survivability, with some tweaks for special circumstances.

For this archon combo to be "non-lethal enough" to warrant their defenses, they cannot be able to "two round" people solo. If within the context of a single lash, one elemental can drop 1k+ damage, that's always going to be overpowered in any reasonable sense of game balance. Paladins fall into this spectrum, they have lagging moves but they lack the ability to permalag and they cannot on their own take you from full health to zero in one lag cycle. If you're on a wimpy 50% you can always, always flee a solo paladin under normal situations (not a locked room, etc) and this *should* be the case for devil/archon conjurers as well.

I can't get past the part where you are trying to role play a reasonably intelligent person.

Your inability to count players shows such a lack of math skills, it's hard to justify the effort required to read the rest of the nonsense you posted.

You yourself claim to have played a few conjurers. What was it that stopped you from steam rolling the entire game if they can simply do 1k damage in a round to anyone they meet while also being invincible?

Was it because you didn't have insects?

From my last evil conjurer...

"Mon Feb 19 09:41:43 2007 by 'Daevryn' at level 41 (76 hrs):
Not too sure what we're about from the brief minutes here and there I've been able to watch this guy but he sure seems to be beating some ass all over the place."

That's without abusing sympathetic conjuring and battle mage.

Honestly dude you're barking up the wrong tree if you're thinking I can't achieve something straight forward like "take x,y,z edges, conjure water elementals on floor of lake, lash". I'm not having any problem running 85%+ ratios on anything I run.

Seems to me the game must be pretty balanced if you can win with any race/class you play.

A large part of it is understanding what fights are impossible to win and avoiding those fights. If I had a hero evil conjurer right now, it'd be a dismiss game vs a Pamalynn or a Cel or a Zhenyen and everyone else would be pretty heavily ####ed.

What keeps me from rolling an LG Conjie is that evil is getting kicked in the teeth so hard right now I don't find any fair sense of competition in that so I'm not playing my good aligned characters. Instead I've been playing evils and picking off whoever I can in between the massive heal fests.

What I haven't been doing is trying my best to exploit every flavor of the moment combo...because I really don't feel like now, being probably a thousand or so kills in over various characters, that there's any fun in stomping people who can't do anything back to you. I'm honestly annoyed that people like you don't understand balance without me having to burn 200 hours just to prove a point to you. And even if I did, you'd never learn.

You avoid bad matchups and kill the people you can. Like every class/race combination out there. Got it.

"I'm honestly annoyed that people like you don't understand balance without me having to burn 200 hours just to prove a point to you. And even if I did, you'd never learn."

Back at ya.

>"Archon's massive defensive capabilities are balanced by weak
>elemental damage output."
>
>and
>
>"Elemental damage output is actually tremendous."

That's really not so. Archons conjies are not more defensive than shield pals. They have an advantage in longevity, but a pally has far, far better melee defense plus the ability to heal himself any time he's not lagged. There are plenty of logs of people dirting an archon and bursting down the conjie in that tick. Their healing can also be simply overwhelmed. I've definitely had it happen to me vs axe ragers.

In that log, ruknubuk got very unlucky and was also poorly prepped. Conjurers are not routinely dropping 1000 hp in lash lag.