Looking at this skill, when assassins get it and what it does, I think it should be moved up to rank 20-25. Ragers and mystic thieves have to wait until way later to detect invis. Being able to see invis should be a fairly advanced ability. It involves using a non-magical ability to detect something magically invisible. I would imagine this ability to initially work like piercing gaze, allowing the assassin to only vaguely ascertain someone's presence. As time passed and their skill in it went up they would be able to see more and more detail until seeing invis perfectly. When the assassins class was built I do not think piercing gaze existed, so it was not considered to design the ability this way.

Assassins can see everything at low levels. This means invis has extremely limited use at the moment, but this change would give it some purpose for a few ranks in the mid-teens. It would also require assassins use a bit more skill in stalking prey with the powerful invis spell.

I completely agree, I don't know why assassins are special amongst warrior-type classes like this at all. It used to be that assassins got enhanced damage at a lower level, but that was tweeked a long time ago. Heightened awareness with hide is way more powerful than a warrior with enhanced damage at lvl 15.

Nowadays I think assassins should have to wait until lvl 25 to get heightened awareness if not lose it altogether. I say this as an experienced assassin player who will play one again soon.

It makes invisible a strong spell this way. And i am not against it.

Clerics(etc) can quaff it, after purchasing it(yay economy. Helping those potions brewers out so they can feed their families.)


Battle ragers can d-invis at 25. Boohoo I cant see the mages early.. well, now you have more anger towards them to help fuel your hatred in the hut. Those cowards.

though I'd still let mystic thieves and animist rangers see invis as current.

I always hated that invis meant so little in CF.

HA is not the thing in a App Assassin's toolkit that will get him kills.

Hide is the thing that will get him kills.

It is much, much easier to get lowbie mage kills with a Thug pre truesight than it is to get lowbie mage kills with an Assasin.

In both cases, the tactic is to wait until the mage is busy and jump them, but whereas the Assassin may get one buying pies in Galadon, both of them are much more likely to get you when you're ranking and being invisible isn't a factor then.

It really isn't much of a change. Throw in mark of the prey and any assassin with half a brain isn't going to lose their prey because they invis. It does make that skill more important, which could be seen as a plus.

Every combo in the game has a perfect counter at every level range. Hiding ragers are no match for many many other combos. Lol watch a heavy shaman work mid level ragers over a few times. It's sort of comical. HA is fine.

I honestly do not think this would make as much a difference as you think it would.
A vet will still get the kill 95% of thr time if they would get the kill normally.
This just really hinders noob v noob battles. And it might help mages to some degree.
I'm not opposed to it. I just do not think it will do much good.

Such a cheap build

Village assassin is truly not that scary once you know how they work. My current has been chased _everywhere_ by the majority of these apps, and not once have they landed a kill. Also, if they are silly enough to pick human to have a 'better' pk range. You can negate their effectiveness by going to places that require you to fly to rank.

Also, almost every mage has 2 things at their disposal (1 at low ranks) and 1 in the 20's that should make them able to escape these dudes with ease

Teleport

and

Word of Recall


Seriously, you see battle app assassin nearby...teleport. Don't think twice, teleport

and hell...switch continents to rank even. Anyways, these guys are not that hard to avoid.

The majority of villagers aren't willing to leave their "Comfort zone" especially at a lower level

Comfort zone = Huge loop from Hamsah-Voralia-Udgaard-Galadon and the connecting roads.

Most times they will be lingering near the village - Avoid eastern by teleporting.

No you don't. You see a battle warrior nearby. The assassin is hidden.

Then they grow up to be battle berserkers with resist and deathblow. Hiding classes have a huge advantage in being able to catch foes unprepped, assassins get an outright instakill, and I've been killed by berserker assassins when I had full abs up. A class with the luxury of hide shouldn't be able to go to to toe with an ABS'd mage and win. And yet they can/do, having had it easy their whole lives even with detect invis from 11-25.

I must have done my assassin berserker wrong, because I got face stomped by the large majority of ABS'd shifters at hero.

...and I've been the one doing the stomping, too, as the ABS'd mage.

Rager assassin berserker just isn't really near the top things to be scared of at any level. Respect, yes. Fear? Not compared to so many other things out there.

I'm entitled to my opinion

"Rager assassin berserker just isn't really near the top things to be scared of at any level."

They're pretty scary at low levels (under 39 or so)- like all/most ragers.

They get rocked at hero - generally.

I know there are people who say pre-40 ragers berserkers are balanced as is but both as playing them and as fighting them I've always found them very strong. I've made even really otherwise dumb combos work as a villager under 40. Resist and spellbane go a long way and if the veil is right, so does DB.

I think mages should get their DR spells at level 10(I'm only talking about scales of the dragon, weave of elements, etc). The sheer amount of damage I can see a lelvel 20 warrior do is insane sometimes. Mages do not get that opportunity at lower leveks with a few exceptions. There are better ways to "balance" the lower levels. Then again I've seen level 20 transmuters rock lowbies. But they would still die if a really well geared warrior came along. I think it would also be good for leveling damage reduction too.

Think I might agree, but I've only played a few mages. Even with gnome and training bunches of hp, I just can't stand up to the damage output of melee classes. I have no idea how people do those lowbie killer mages. Maybe just takes more work than I am willing to put in.

I know with very little, to no effort, I can have a melee class hitting with 25 dam roll in a basic set by 15. Higher if higher strength and definitely after scavenging a couple of kills.

But I do think they should get word of recall at level 11.

Yes, we all get around this by farming gold for recall potions but that is the defining "safe escape mechanism" of a mage. It always struck me as odd that people get trip/bash at low levels and word of recall at a much higher level.

I think it really stems from 1st/2nd edition D&D where magi were garbage until mid to high levels when they suddenly became ridiculously more powerful than their peers. IE, you deal with the hard knocks and enjoy extreme power at the other side...but that doesn't really work for normal automated games.

And skilled players get around this but in CF with enough prep/area knowledge you can out-survive almost anything anyway so I don't think that should factor into the class balance equation.

It has been stated a few times by the staff that the game does not start at hero. And if I recall correctly one of the imps did say that the "always the first to die" mechanic (that they are weak at low levels and powerful at hero) is not the intended way it works. There are a few preps that you can use but at the lower levels there are few without serious drawbacks. Just because there might be a way does not mean it is balanced.

Not that classes were meant to be balanced. More like balanced by eachother. Each class has its own weaknesses and strengths. As it is, mages are substantially harmed by svs. There is really no way to overcome that(that i am aware of). So you have a class with low hp thats spells can be significantly lowered in damage. And nothing you can do but add more hp and maybe find some preps. There are many who do not use svs at lower levels as well becaise they can overcome with sheer damage.

It is more of a matter if someone even wants to address this "problem" or if they see it as a problem at all.

Also, I would rather not see word of recall at lower levels. Running away is a lot less exciting than standing a chance. A good solution would be to lower the level of the shield spell and reduce its duration for that lower level range. Making sure ot is useful but cannot be kept up all the time. The current duration would not be OP, imo.
Edit: it sucks replying from a smartphone. Bleh.

Saves don't help as much as you think at low levels. Unless you have a hero set a lowbie necro will still knock you out. A conjurer will still out damage you. A transmuter will out melee you. An invoker as long you can't lag it will run through you. A shifter depending on forms will tear through people like nothing. (Elk,Caiman, Zebra, Wombat, Bull) Even out of form they will do some massive damage. Fangs of the serpent plus a decent weapon plus wands would do wonders.

My advice is to spend time playing these and figure their ins and outs. I just killed a group of three. 2 warriors and 1 assassin with just magic missles as a conjurer. No dam redux.

Deathblow doesn't care about the veil, fyi.

You wield the Death_Claw.

Ugh. I hate myself.

I know RNGs are always streaky but deathblow seems even more streaky than normal - like 4 bouts without it firing at all (blocked or otherwise) then a handful of fights where it fires once or more every single round.

I don't know what voodoo goes into that so I always assumed it was some veil voodoo but I guess whatever it is doesn't really matter.

But if it didn't have streaks then it wouldn't be really random, would it?

Experiments have been done where people were asked to give a string of 20 random numbers. Inevitably the numbers given were *not* random because they were too precisely different from each other (not streaky enough).

People are generally poor at perceiving randomness because we are built to do the opposite, to see patterns even when there are none. Also there are other psych issues, such as:

If I give you a gun that has an 80% chance to hit, and a monster that requires 4 hits to be killed, and then only give you 4 bullets, do you think you have a 1) good, 2) fair, 3) poor chance of killing the monster? Psychologically, you might think the answer is 1, 80% seems pretty good, and each individual shot seems pretty likely it should hit, so you're good, right? But statistically the answer is 3, poor, you only have a 40% of killing the monster. So when you fail more often than win, you feel the RNG must be wonky!!

Then there is gambler's fallacy, where people are convinced that if you just had a bunch of bad numbers come up, then you must be "due" a bunch of good numbers, right? But that's not true either. The past has no possibility of changing future probability. I can't take a coin, flip it until I get 10 tails in a row, then hand it to you and say "this coin is now charged with luck and will give you heads more often than tails."

Even when we know this to be true logically, it doesn't 'feel' right.

And then when it comes to CF, there are so many dice rolls, of different probabilities, with different variables, that goes even into a single strike, it'd be darn near impossible to do a statistical analysis of it to see what the actual probabilities are but I think the chances of it matching what our 'gut' tells it should be are close to zero.

nt

Yeah, I get that. I've done a bit of game programming myself (2d overhead stuff back in the DOS days). I totally get that real randomness is "clumpy"...but DB is the only one that to me doesn't feel like a straight die roll. Is there really nothing more to it than your % and whether or not you are thirsting?

I'm pretty sure thirst doesn't affect deathblow chances either, except in the sense that if you're high enough level to be hasted by thirst yhou're less likely to have attacks parried or dodged and thus you might get more deathblows that connect.

If you need to be a certain level to get hasted and have your debuffs cleared by thirsting, what exactly does it do at 35?

Everything else, but the abeyance thing.

It's probably because I'm not thirsting generally unless I'm getting ganged. That to me explains it completely. I haven't found many occasions where I'd need to or want to thirst in a 1vs1.

I peeked at the code and the things that affect deathblow are:
Whether or not your fighting a mage.
Being in hero range.
Whether or not your ganging, or being ganged.
Your gank-o-meter.

There you go.

Aha! Thank you.

Two deathblow checks that look sequential to you (as in, they occurred in consecutive blows) are not remotely sequential checks of the RNG. In between those two blows there may have been dozens or hundreds of random numbers generated to both player's skills, defenses, etc. being checked.

For example, it's not uncommon for the code to do calls like "Generate a number between 1 and 6 ten times and add the results." That's 10 separate RNG checks that are probably under the hood for you.

All the RNG is doing is returning strings of 0s and 1s, and various other functions are combining these strings per instructions. The two deathblow checks might have involved String #1 and String #148 as far as the RNG "knows", and there's no reason to think those are any more connected than #1 and #1000.

What RNGs generally don't have is systematic bias, as in "Picks more high numbers than low ones over time." That's easy to guard against.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

The studies I mentioned in my "Hot Hand" post from several years ago. Put simply, you're supposing that Ragers have 'hot streaks' and 'cold streaks' out of a sea of random numbers, for many of the reasons Tversky covered.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

n/t

You are not spamming

'Who pk'

and

'Where'

often enough. I'd wager you'd be surprised at how many assassins I actually notice in an area before they make it to me. Also, ranking in woods so you can literally spam where (and catch them moving rooms if you are spamming) is key

Not only that, but when I do things like my suggestion of moving continents...I am spamming "who pk" often enough...that if I catch them visible for what I consider "Long enough to cross the ocean" then, I ramp up my 'wheres'

I'm just saying...few and far between are the 'getting caught off guard' by battle assassin if you know how to spot them

Let's say I don't have an area attack. I can go rack up hours sitting on water. Maybe I can log off. That's the very BEST way not to get killed, even better that wording or teleporting.

You don't need an area attack. Sit at forest/hill/mountain/anything but plains/civilized terrain that is also the edge of an area. Spam "bash assassin" or whatever you want.

Teleport/word like he said. Go somewhere he can't easily sneak up to you. Spam where.

I've played for a long time and never been assassinated. I did recently have like 5 attempts on me though, which blew my mind. I'm getting rusty and weak. More than I've always been :(

Age softens us all.

.

Play an assassin up to assassinate for a while and see how hard it is to land one. Learn the shortcomings to assassin hide, there are a ton of places that you can punk an assassin that's following you. There are a lot if builds that will straight up ruin an assassins day, a lot. Super skilled players aside, it's not hard to beat assassinate for the most part.

Stalks start to degrade pretty much immediately. If you can lose them for even a few hours you can start to wreck their chances of landing a successful assassination on you.

It's one of those things where the easiest way to get a good feel for it is to try to play a 100% assassinate assassin and see what scenarios make life difficult (usually involves passing through areas that force a step out...to delay their stalks and passively degrade them...or bounce around with teleport/word or duck into obscure areas to degrade stalks).