I've played a LOT of shifters recently and hope to make a more comprehensive post with some feedback in the near future. But, wanted to address this issue as it really stands out to me.

A shifters final form is the pinnacle of their power. They can gear for HP/saves, maybe quaff a frenzy potion, but that's essentially their peak.

So, can you please remove the vulnerabilities of top tier forms? This is especially frustrating when every mob that can will hit you with iceneedles/shards/etc. as often as they can because they seem to know your vuln.

I recently had a defensive final form with a cold vuln and regen before I deleted. I get destroyed by every invoker mob. Put shields up so I can last long enough to do any damage and don't regen worth anything. It was one of the worst tanking final forms I've had including non-defensive ones. And resist potions get dispelled very quickly.

Final forms should not have an achillies heel so easy to exploit. And, no, a resistance to counter balance it is nowhere near worth the trade-off.

Or, perhaps allow eq that grants resistances to work in form.

Thanks for reading.

I wouldn't take away vulns although I certainly exploited cold vuln when fighting lizard types.

I wouldn't give them armor vs ice needles in general but if it is a thick skinned form I would give good armor, if that's possible.

For example, I'm not sure you should be able to headshot the ram.

Some thoughts on this:

1. Your defensive form with regen may be best suited to pairing with an amphibious water form, utility form, or offense form to do the actual fighting. Then you use your defensive form to heal up super-quick and get back into action.

2. If you know your form is vulnerable to cold, couldn't you invest in some resist cold preps? Does every mob that has cold attacks also dispel?

3. Isn't ice needles physical damage? Could be wrong on that, but I thought there was at least one cold path spell that was physical.

Which is why it bypasses frostshield. Maybe he had pierce vulnerable.

If you couple with dispel magic, you can one shot forms that have no inherent damage reduction.

There is actually a decent way to offset said cold vuln based on race choice and utilization of EP for shifters. Iceneedles also owns all shifters because of the lack of armor.

Its also, to a point, by design that your final defensive form has a hard time killing things.

I mean yeah, in a lot of situations it just isn't enough damage, but yeah.

...by design that your final defensive form has a hard time killing things.

Sure, but that's supposed to be because they can't dish it out, not because they can't take it.

While I agree that you should not be able to kill much with a defensive form without some grunt work, but to me who plays shapeshifters quite a bit; they seem to be lacking a bit these days in the actual defense department unless you end up one of the thick hide spec defenders.

>I've played a LOT of shifters recently and hope to make a
>more comprehensive post with some feedback in the near future.
>But, wanted to address this issue as it really stands out to
>me.
>
>A shifters final form is the pinnacle of their power. They can
>gear for HP/saves, maybe quaff a frenzy potion, but that's
>essentially their peak.

They can also quaff/zap/brandish resist element preps.

>So, can you please remove the vulnerabilities of top tier
>forms? This is especially frustrating when every mob that can
>will hit you with iceneedles/shards/etc. as often as they can
>because they seem to know your vuln.

They (almost always) don't.

>I recently had a defensive final form with a cold vuln and
>regen before I deleted. I get destroyed by every invoker mob.
>Put shields up so I can last long enough to do any damage and
>don't regen worth anything. It was one of the worst tanking
>final forms I've had including non-defensive ones. And resist
>potions get dispelled very quickly.

There's nothing you couldn't do here that a felar warrior could've done, and you had access to a lot more general purpose DR than a warrior does.

Also, how were your saves?

>Final forms should not have an achillies heel so easy to
>exploit. And, no, a resistance to counter balance it is
>nowhere near worth the trade-off.
>
>Or, perhaps allow eq that grants resistances to work in form.
>
>
>Thanks for reading.

I had crocodile and against fairly easy to kill mobs on my conjurers it got destroyed simply because they hamstringed. Iceneedles is also a maladict so would reduce your regen by a huge amount I would assume. This is why, for the most part, people want dodge/evade defense forms now as their final ones unless they just use them for healing out of combat before switching to their offense. Even against ranking mobs I couldn't cut it as a thick skin regen defense like I used to previously.

As to your topic, I don't think ALL final forms should be free of vulns but perhaps the thick skin defensive ones you have a point, either that or change how their regen nerfing happens from maladictions to not be so drastic. Maybe make it so you can gear stat overages so they don't get any nerfing until the stats get reduced enough and then only reduce it by x amount per stat reduced. Not really sure the best answer to this but regen forms can't really compete even for leveling areas compared to dodge ones now.

Either way, I don't think you'll see any changes to this anytime soon until/if more coders get on board, and want to change this, since we're kinda dry atm and this probably isn't a big enough issue for Scar to focus on even if he wanted to.

Well, it depends on how you address the issue. I like some of your ideas, but a lot of code to implement.

Removing a vuln from a form could be done in a matter of minutes.