I Have been thinking a little bit about how to encourage and spice up raid interactions and the rewards for doing so.

Obviously as it stands now you have your enemy without their cabal powers (Which may or may not be beneficial depending on who your enemy is) But what if holding a cabal item invigorated the cabal who held the item?

For Example:
Obviously it would semi-correlate to the enemy you were raiding.

As you place the X cabal item to your inner, there is a global echo to symbolize your army or cabal being strengthened by holding such an item. It is permanent until the item is reclaimed.

You are affected by:

Clan Power: 'Fortress' modifies Saves vs Spells by -5 for -1 hours.
Clan Power: 'Fortress' modifies hit roll by 3 for -1 hours.
Clan Power: 'Fortress' modifies damage roll by 3 for -1 hours.
Clan Power: 'Fortress' modifies health by 80 for -1 hours.

Now obviously each gain for raiding a cabal would be different, but it would give a lot of motivation to stress holding your enemies items, and the advantages of potentially starting new wars as well.

I think that the biggest driving force behind raiding is that there is little point raiding a cabal if the item can be easily retreived.

As an example 4 level 50's raid only to have the item taken back by 2 level 30's. I feel trying to get the balance right here is the way to go. IE find a way where regardless of level you can help defend raids.

So as an example when inside a Cabal you pk range opens right out so that you can attack anyone within that cabal regardless of level and visa versa. I know that this opens up a political minefield and creates all kinds of grief so the exact logistics of how to balance this would be the toughest part:

I am just throwing this out there and have put all but 5 minutes of thought into this so I conceed that it may be more flawed than good.

1. As a starting point the "higher" level gets gimped to only be able to use abilities that would match the same race and class combination that would be in PK range of the "lower" level. So a level 51 invoker cannot use pillar a level 30 warrior.
2. When fighting out of pk if you cannot get killed but you do get severly hobbled. If you drop below 50% a timer is added to your affects, firstly protecting you from out of PK, but reducing your effectiveness against inner/outer guardians harder to tank/less damage this allows you to keep raiding but at a reduced capacity. Perhaps you could be severely demoralized from the beating and have the restless sleep thing etc. Obviously being at 50% this will leave you vulnerable to in pk.
3. If the odds go way out of scale and you are figing against the super ganktastic cabal eg lone scion raiding against 12 fortress people to get the item back, other levels of rebalancing may need to go on.
4. I would also probably prefer to see the outer guardians be a little stronger but the ability to give them buffs (Haste,Shields,Sanc,Healing) get removed. Perhaps rather than this you would have the ability to buy "medipacks" which any cabal member could use to keep the outer trucking.

Disclaimer: In no way shape or form am I claiming Fortress is "Ganktastic" I just really wanted to use that word.

Medipacks though....

Maybe out of range defenders could buy/trade/give outers items to beef them up. Maybe you can make outers drink potions/preps their own cabal gives them.

I really don't think people hesitate to raid an enemy cabal given a reasonable chance to succeed, and I don't think this proposal makes people more likely to raid when they have a high chance to die.

So it heaps more power on whoever's already winning and does so in a way that I don't think is particularly interesting.

Rager ranger.

Resist + that edge.

Sure. I can't even really remember a particularly successful hero-range rager ranger so that's only so terrifying to me.

Yea - when I think of what is requisite to create one damage reduction isn't what comes to mind. My comment was more to say that such an edge would give a boon to a rarely played, perhaps outgunned class/cabal combo.

It kind of feels like you two are having a completely separate conversation from what this thread is about.

What edge are you talking about?

barkskin dam reduction edge on a rager?
Otherwise, yeah, I'm as lost as you.

What if you could give weapons/shields to your outer guard to equip to fight against those who cannot be harmed?

giving them the fighter attributions to that type of weapon being used

nt

I've got a single #### to give...and it's just for you.

They quit and play something else.


What if you could give weapons/shields to your outer guard to
>equip to fight against those who cannot be harmed?
>
>giving them the fighter attributions to that type of weapon
>being used

Yeah, *repeat subject line* I challenge you!

To make cabal inners more numbers orientated in raids.

What I mean by this is the inner should act on the number of aggressive raiders in a sliding scale type manner. One single character should not have to rest more than once while raiding an undefended cabal (if even resting once, I dare say). While 2, 3, 4 or more raiders should have a slightly more responsive inner guardian while trying to take a cabal (defense or not).

In other words, instead of making the Maran drop dispels and holy words/wraith whatever... or the Archmage knocking down blackfire nova's every round or ever other round they should scale back for less numbers.

1 person raiding? An inner could act once every 6-10 rounds...
2,3,4 etc... people raiding, the inner would ramp up how often it would cause damage/maledictions. This would create a more interesting raid environment for one on one's and may even increase incentive to push the inner to take out a sworn enemy.

The other thing to suggest, would be to look through the code and make sure that even when the inner is at it's most active the skills/spells/sups go along with the normal round lag for those activities if a normal character was doing them.

Hope you consider this,

n/t

I like the idea of using the inner to balance cabal numbers so that it's more appealing to raid against a larger opposing force. Couple points though...

One, it shouldn't be any easier to solo-raid an undefended cabal. That just makes it so people log on without their item having had no chance to defend it, which is lame. A solo-raid should be harder rather than easier, in my opinion, since you're just kicking a cabal when it's down.

Two, it would be really hard to balance that, I think. What counts as people raiding? I.e. is that everyone in the enemy cabal area, or just fighting at once? Is everyone counted equally, or is there some balance based on PK record? In other words, if you have 3 flunkies raiding against Volker, does Volker get the raid assistance?