with the revelation that nofol pets was a bug I think its time the imms sat down and really looked at how agressive both goode and evil servitors are and the options to deal with them.

My first suggestion would be to make dismissal also like disruption in that it deals damage if it fails to banish. More mana means more damage so while your still gonna die everytime to that transplendant or LID you might survive those lower level servitors by killing them off.

change the moral ability from tracking and casting speed to echos you get with detect charm up. this not only increases the value of detect charm but stops what I call the evil spirla.

the evil spiral is when you have unhappy servitors that require being moved around or participating in fighting a lot to regain morale. As it stands you hit a breaking point where your just not able to counteract their unhappiness cause they are just never in the room or doing things. this is especially annoying as a non scion using LID's. Flee once or twice while fighting a gank and suddenly they stop casting then 1 minute later kill you.

goodie servitors need to get harder to please, I don't see them turning on goodie conjies but being less helpful if they are not being used constantly like an evils. and maybe just outright returning to the heavens if your being too unproductive.

devils need looked at, fleeing needs to play a much smaller role in their get mad equation. They are essentially shaman/necros and most fighting styles with those involve hit and run tactics, your forcing a shaman to fight like a warrior and non scions without super fly gear will have to be super duper picky about battles. I honestly think its suicide to ever use a devil without murderous reputation and still a huge crapshoot after that if your not fighting someone you can steam roll.


on a slightly different topic, familiar death. any chance the minus con side of this can be removed. replace it with a long term severe minus morale affect and no calling of familiar for 24 ticks. since the folks using their familiars a lot are likely the ones getting con drained by their servitors I think its fair to close one con tap of the class. plus you can also really enhance the bond cause nobody cares about con till their almost out, conjies should always worry about bit morale hits.

Having played an evil conjurer pre-edges... they're amazingly tough. There almost isn't anything that can rack up kills as fast at mid-high levels.

I'd be seriously afraid of making them significantly tougher.

nt

"New payment options w/ Iron Realms"

Dude. You're not kidding.

Dunno where this guy is coming from, Demons are kinda hard to please but thats an ethos thing I think. Devils are a cake walk, Though he's got a psuedo point on the shamanthing its just unlike a shaman you also do big melee damage, so its a moot point in my opinion.

Aren't evil conjurers, like so many other classes, slanted toward ending their fights in 20~ rounds or less?

Because that's what it seems like to me, otherwise there is just no way to influence the servitor's morale long enough. But in my experience against conjurers all they have to do is ensure they are attacking people below their level and the opponent just absolutely cannot tank the servitors in melee. So then they usually are already losing HP by the time the oblits roll around out of the blue. You either need to be an assassin, a large angry damage spec warrior or just plain lucky to kill the conjurer outright because no conjurer worth their salt can be forced to be caught without servitors and trying to influence the servitor's morale directly is a wash because you're just starting a new fight with flash or not targetting the conjurer.

Also here's another thought, shouldn't it be possible to kill the servitors outright, including at hero, without needing to be an uber tank, an invoker, an empowerment class or a conjurer yourself? Most of the time you're not even going to manage that even if you pick your fights but don't use any damage reduction.

>Aren't evil conjurers, like so many other classes, slanted
>toward ending their fights in 20~ rounds or less?

I don't understand the point of the question. Doesn't everything end its fights in 20 rounds or less, rope-a-dope style PK healer possibly excepted?

I'm curious as well about the other parts he brought and care to here IMM comments on them.

Edit: Well specifically the part about familiars. I've played a conjurer into the mid-40s before and the most annoying/frustrating part for me was eating a point of con for every time my familiar was killed. I mean, conjurers already have tend to have low life expectancy due to servitors and bad binding/conjuring. Familiar death taking away 1/3 con is like adding insult to injury. Especially to those who enjoy using their familiars. Which like the original posted said, is the group of conjie players who take the biggest loss from the familiar death. I mean, not even APs take a 1/3 con loss when their unholy is sacced. Unless they have low health or hella charges in it. And we can all agree that a unholy weapon is lot more dangerous than a familiar.

Also, any thought to adding a few more random choices in the mix? Such as amphibious familiars like a toad, newt, or salamander? Could just pluck some from D&D. I think there's a list somewhere about.

>I'm curious as well about the other parts he brought and care
>to here IMM comments on them.

I generally post on everything I find interesting at first pass. If I'm in the middle of something it may not be all of that.

>Edit: Well specifically the part about familiars. I've played
>a conjurer into the mid-40s before and the most
>annoying/frustrating part for me was eating a point of con for
>every time my familiar was killed. I mean, conjurers already
>have tend to have low life expectancy due to servitors and bad
>binding/conjuring. Familiar death taking away 1/3 con is like
>adding insult to injury. Especially to those who enjoy using
>their familiars. Which like the original posted said, is the
>group of conjie players who take the biggest loss from the
>familiar death. I mean, not even APs take a 1/3 con loss when
>their unholy is sacced. Unless they have low health or hella
>charges in it. And we can all agree that a unholy weapon is
>lot more dangerous than a familiar.

The con loss gives you a real incentive to be careful with your familiar at all times. If you can think of a better one I'd be willing to consider it, but I'm pretty happy with the way it sits. I doubt I've lost a full con total from familiar deaths across ALL conjurers I've ever played; if you're losing more than that, you possibly should be more careful with your familiar.

I assume you haven't really played an A-P. Across many A-Ps, I think I've survived a weapon saccing (while not a ghost) exactly once, and that mostly because it happened to catch me at full health and prepped to the gills because I was about to try to fight 3-4 people for my cabal item back.

>Also, any thought to adding a few more random choices in the
>mix? Such as amphibious familiars like a toad, newt, or
>salamander? Could just pluck some from D&D. I think there's a
>list somewhere about.

I'm not necessarily opposed to more familiars, but there's at least twenty things I personally would find higher priority to work on. That being said, I would have said the same thing about adding more shifter forms or a hundred other projects that other imms have taken on that players have loved.

No offense to you as a person who does amazing jobs with game balance. But I think you see the conjurer class differently then most players do. Your personal strengths sit very well in overcoming the harder parts of being a conjurer.

If you want to look at data look at the number of evil conjie heros vs good conjie heros. take away any conjie that had access to despoil or transform because honestly conjies are just fancy shifters 95% of the time and hp is king.


the fact that since the fall of masters I think there has only been 3 hero evil conjies outside of scion says something.

true conjies have the potential to be scary up through the ranks but thats only capitilized on by either getting scion powers or super choice pieces of gear. I would challenge you to do an uncabaled evil conjie but you are one of likely the top 3 players in the game at gearing so its a wash.

and the morale idea is better then con, jesus christ as an evil your expected in a long lived character to die to servitors 30+ times thats more then most peoples mob deaths why the hell do you need to #### on them more by making fam death cause con loss. Give the no use timer and major minus morale morale seems to have a big affect on servitors so it could be more interesting.

I would have posted specific numbers but the qhcf is down and you guys need a more useful graveyard search like they have where you can search based on class, align, race, ethos, sphere, cabal, rather then just scopin keywords.

>the fact that since the fall of masters I think there has only
>been 3 hero evil conjies outside of scion says something.

Um.

Like 'evil conjurers don't really have any other cabal choices?'

I mean, yes, technically you can join Empire and be a permanent second class citizen. Not a lot of people make Empire transmuter, shifter, or invokers either.

Technically you can join Tribunal, but unless you're very, very good and very, very careful, your servitors are going to break the law and get you in trouble.

Ijkiela's weapon only had 49 charges, he was prepped to the teeth and just a bit injured and he still ate an unspeak death.

I don't think they should be able to get lagged with bash. I don't mind the conloss but when I found out that could happen and they could get easily permalagged by even an elf who was bashing them I stopped using my familiar in PK entirely.

I can't remember killing a lot of familiars with anything BUT bash. Maybe if they kept something like an adrenaline timer and you couldn't release them while it was up.

Well, the thing is I had a familiar whose benefit was supposed to be what it could do in pk only I never did it because anyone who actually knew you could do that was pretty much guaranteed to kill my familiar.

There are other things you can do to kill familiars but I just thought it was lame that they could get permalagged by an elf spamming bash.

The only reason why you don't have your familiars die more often is that before I posted this I'm betting 90%+ people didn't know you could do that to them.

Eh. I mean, a full weight giant could get permalagged by a felar spamming bash. There's always a chance.

I think a warrior has a good chance of hitting a familiar with bash, but the odds of it being lagged out for long aren't great, as they're not great for any one on one bashing. Obviously if it only takes 2 rounds to kill the familiar all bets are off.

FWIW I had my familiar get permalagged by a bashing drow for easily 11 rounds or so straight til it died. Is it broken maybe? I could email you the familiar.

Eh, not necessarily. I mean, I've been bashed for 11+ rounds straight as a PC.

Bash lag is generally random and doesn't care what size or strength you are, assuming the bash hits. If I had to guess, I'd say most familiars are size small, so a normal size character bashing a small familiar would be about on the scale of a giant bashing a normal sized character.

I figured it was coded separately since giants can also bash the familiar.

I've never even come close to having someone kill my familiar. I have keypad #5 bound to familiar release. All of the keys around it are bound to it's movement. - does a fam who pk. + checks where for everyone my familiar saw on who pk.

Familiar release as soon as it gets bashed. It'll get away.

>Having played an evil conjurer pre-edges... they're amazingly
>tough. There almost isn't anything that can rack up kills as
>fast at mid-high levels.
>
>I'd be seriously afraid of making them significantly tougher.

Everything you've said I disagree with. They're not "tough". They're physically one of the weakest classes in the game. They have low hps which is compounded by the fact that most of their servitors turn on them at a certain hp %. They're not good at racking up kills either. All they do is a lot of damage to an immobile target. They can't lag. They can't do much damage to a character who can tank. They can't even come close to the damage output of many classes.

First and foremost, an evil conjurer can't even do as much damage as a good conjurer. Good conjurers don't have to worry about their servitors turning on them when they flee!

Everything you've said I disagree with. They're not "tough". They're physically one of the weakest classes in the game. They have low hps which is compounded by the fact that most of their servitors turn on them at a certain hp %. They're not good at racking up kills either. All they do is a lot of damage to an immobile target. They can't lag. They can't do much damage to a character who can tank. They can't even come close to the damage output of many classes.

Not for nothing, but you haven't been having a great deal of success with any of your characters, in the PK department. You've also played a couple dozen characters over the last month, which I wouldn't advise to a newer player-- you'll learn a lot more picking something and staying with it, so you can better appreciate the strengths and weaknesses. Posting 3 rants about the class in one day is just going to further convince people that you aren't a reliable source of information.

When you say things like "They can't even come close to the damage output of many classes."... well, I can believe you or I can believe my eyes. Dealing damage is one of the things they do exceptionally well-- Daevryn's assessment of the class matches everything I've seen from it.

For what it's worth, of late, evil conjurers and good conjurers are roughly equally popular, going by the numbers starting at familiars (level 17+). Neutral conjurers are generally more scarce, and we're seeing how some Edges play out in practice before revisiting that issue.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

You've thrown a lot of red herrings at this arguement, instead of considering it.

All I know is that it's wierd that angels do more damage + lag more reliably than demons. I thought it was wierd. Sorry for saying anything.. Jesus

What it really comes down to, if we're being honest, is that you can disagree with me, but:

- I can see the code and you can't, so I'm much more likely to be correct on matters of pure fact, such as what does more damage than something else or what might or might not have drawbacks.

- I've played more successful evil conjurers than you have, so I'm more likely to be correct on matters of what's tactically possible/easy/hard with the class.

and

- I have the responsibility of making game design/balance changes and decisions, and you don't. The burden of proof is always on you. If I think your argument is wrong, dumb, or ignores the bigger picture, that's basically it.

I'm obviously not the right person to attempt to get this point across. I think it's plain as day that angel melee does more damage than any demon melee. It's also pretty clear to me that angels are doing UNSPEAKABLE damage vs OBLITERATES. I could go on about crappy demon abilities {lol confuse}, but I've already said my piece.

PS: Awesome class, that's why I play it so much.

>PS: Awesome class, that's why I play it so much.

It's a pity you don't play them well.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

>>PS: Awesome class, that's why I play it so much.
>
>It's a pity you don't play them well.
>


OOOhhhhhhh Ssnnnaaaappp!!!

For the record, I have played evil conjurers all the way up to hero and felt like they were tedious to play but on the verge of overpowered in terms of how easily I could beat the hell out of people.

Yeah, strangely, in a lot of ways I think a lot of the skill to playing a conjurer is knowing all the little tricks to take bits of tedium out of the class.

I mean, thinking about my last conjurer, sure I had to sleep some, but not more than average for me, and the exchange on that was a lot of ass beating the rest of the time. I especially can't think of a lot of characters that are as dangerous only on the gear you can get during your (non-servitor) ghost period.

Although I suck at regearing melee characters from nada, so maybe that's partially me.

Well, the tedium is that every now and then bad luck causes you to have to kill off a servitor and assuming it doesn't kill you, you're still stuck watching grass grow for another 40 hours before you can get another one.

I mean, its tedious. You can't go afk as a conjurer like you can as an assassin, because you might come back from a smoke break at the pit thanks to your demon getting pissy at you. Its just one of the realities of the class.

I still think its a very strong class though, all in all said, and I'd play it again if I had the energy to join a cabal.

>Well, the tedium is that every now and then bad luck causes
>you to have to kill off a servitor and assuming it doesn't
>kill you, you're still stuck watching grass grow for another
>40 hours before you can get another one.

I can't remember ever having to kill one, FWIW, although I certainly miscalculated and had one kill me a time or three.

Its usually easier to kill them then try to dismiss them. FWIW we have much less insight into things than you do, however. If there's some l33t way of getting around that entirely then I'm at a loss.

>They're physically one of the weakest classes in the game.

So are necromancers. I consider lvl47 necromancers to be "tough". Did you ever fight Kanaev? Trust me, it was a humiliating experience. Admittedly he had Scion powers and probably a crap load of edges, but when he fought a similarly tricked out version of himself in the warrior class (i.e. Hunsobo) it was pretty much a draw. With wands and his cabal powers he had 1) more dam redux than me, 2) more hp than me, 3) more damage output than me, and 4) potentially more crippling maledictions than me. Ouch.

>They have low hps which is compounded by the fact that most of
>their servitors turn on them at a certain hp %.

Considering that Scion is one of two cabals open to evil conjurers, that takes care of the hp problem for most of them. That and wands.

>They're not good at racking up kills either.

Depends on the player. I could probably rack up more kills with another class, but in the right hands evil conjurers can clearly be effective. Kanaev had 281 kills.

>All they do is a lot of damage to an immobile target. They can't lag.

They can do a lot of damage and simultaneously maledict. While they're not great at lagging, they're not totally without options. For instance, I remember Kanaev using some exotic skill from the net of living spiders that would lag me like trip. Trip plus all that damage plus the ability to gaunt me back when I teleport away? Some demons also bash.

>First and foremost, an evil conjurer can't even do as much
>damage as a good conjurer. Good conjurers don't have to worry
>about their servitors turning on them when they flee!

True. That's one luxury goodie conjurers have. Unfortunately, they can't conjure devils that slap lvl60 damnation and rot on you. Or demons that fear you, making you 100% useless. They typically can't gaunt you either. Am I going to beat a wanded up goodie conjurer with lesser archangel? Probably not. But I'm probably less likely to die to him than I am to a Kanaev.