Mostly since you are serial pincersvirf rager and partially because of your die lots but kill lots attitude.

Look at the top playerkillers on the list. How many of them were mages who didn't use abs.

The only stat that matters is :

% of time 5 rounded or less without ABS versus % of the time surviving or killing enemies with ABS.

And that really boils down to summon/pincer, RBW's in raids, etc.

If you don't think ABS is mandatory show everyone else the error of their ways but I'll tell you that outside of maybe a transmuter you're going to be way more successful with just about any non-mage than a caballed mage without any ABS.

ABS are undispellable. Sorry.

so in the end we will have two numbers. If the average dam reduction is 50% and the average HP when killing is 70% then we see that in general people are over prepping and a lot of this we need ABS talk is in reality unfounded. If we however see average dam redux at like 40% and average HP at 15% then it will substantiate the "we need ABS to compete" argument.

I don't follow that line of logic. With dam redux, I'm more likely to put out moves that can help me land PK than if I don't. Example, you use, I'd be at 20 percent when I completed that PK, but my strategy would have already began changing at say 60 from reckless abandon to cautious abandon.

I get what you're saying, but it's the age old issue of what is on paper and what is practical are two diff. things.

I don't think mages need ABS for most one on ones, but I can't see a mage taking on two people without it unless they're crap. And if those two people can lag it's probably a death sentence.

I can't see most low-prepped warriors taking on two decent enemies with much success, either (even a RBW has issues if the two people are decent), but at least the warrior can probably last long enough to flee if it gets ugly.

When you add ABS (from sleeks) to the equation, mages just become superheroes capable of doing things a melée class can only dream about. Having played melée types the last .. 8 or so years, I recently played an ABS Mage and I could not believe the sheer amount of power I had at my disposal and the kind of incredible feats I could pull off. And one on one, I don't see anything standing up to that power other than another ABS Mage or maybe a strong RBW that can retreat into the village without fear of you killing the giant. That was my main point above - you can't give mages unfettered access to that kind of raw power. At least the search for wands weeds some of them out.

So yeah, as long as the player is remotely aggressive, I think it's axiomatic that ABS = more deadly.

There's a lot of things I'd never, ever fight 1-vs-1 without any ABS at all as most mages. RBW, evil conjurer with demon, goodie conjurer with angel, some offense shifters, some types of rangers, etc. Bottom line is that without killer gear and damage reduction there's just a lot of things that can kill you before you leave opening lag of a pincer or snare/bearcharge or whatever.

I've died to a conjie + angel without coming out of the lag from when I used MURDER against him. And I think I had aura and protection from good up too.

And it didn't even pillar me.

>There's a lot of things I'd never, ever fight 1-vs-1 without
>any ABS at all as most mages. RBW, evil conjurer with demon,
>goodie conjurer with angel, some offense shifters, some types
>of rangers, etc. Bottom line is that without killer gear and
>damage reduction there's just a lot of things that can kill
>you before you leave opening lag of a pincer or
>snare/bearcharge or whatever.

No ABS at all is tough. But shield is an inherent class ability and you can buy stoneskin and protection so I assume we're talking at least shield and stoneskin. Or protection.

So my experience with the "new" system is an ABS invoker. With shield plus sskin or protection an invoker is one of those things that can kill you before you leave the opening lag of pincer or whatever. The only things I'd be extremely wary of are neutral RBWs if my cabal is not at war with battle and ABS mages, which I'd have very little chance against unless I have ABS myself. I honestly think almost everything else you mentioned or that I can think of offhand is a decent match up 1 vs 1 - assuming they're not prepped out the ass themselves.

Regarding RBWs, it makes a HUGE difference if your cabal can war with them because you can take the head and/or kill the giant to get them when they're resting off battle fatigue or immolation/arcing lightning. I don't get to play much, but my last couple characters were like ten to one (around 70-10) over Ragers - and they weren't a cabal enemy in one instance. I just don't think Ragers are the unkillable force everyone else seems to (malakhi had 290ish wins but I died 90ish times to get there).


Anyway, this morning I thought of an unoriginal way to balance ABS mages with known sleeks - limit the number of sleeks you can have from your location to one or two at a time.

Limit it to 2 of each sleek at any given time, regardless of the charge count in it. That way, mages can get their ABS, but can't carry enough to have it up all the time if there constant fighting.

Obvious problems I see are the collecting issues. Do I just drop the rods I have somewhere or just pass them off to a buddy before going and collecting more? I could see people doing that. You could need to hard code it somehow so you couldn't even CARRY more than 2 of each type in your inventory. That would stop mages from getting a kill, dropping all their sleeks, looting the victims sleeks and getting theirs again. It would also insure most times the wands they were carrying around lacked a charge or two in them.

Really good idea. I can see it being a happy medium.

The whole idea of limiting access just doesn't really work out because along the same lines of giving them as class spells with timers the people will just be in avoid mode until they have it again.

They will also start complaining that its not fair to have 4 barrier, 5 aura, and 90 shield wands at all time.

They will also still complain about finding their wands.

What might be interesting is if there was some way to break at least barrier (thereby enhancing the value of sanctuary relatively). Perhaps it can only absorb so much damage or blows of unusual force have a chance to shatter it. Having your barrier fall mid round could be somewhat interesting in fights.

Sanctuary is already way better than barrier due to not reducing healing.

Personally as a mage I find myself fighting people who are not villagers more often then people who are villagers (due to ratio of non village to village chars out there).

Think of it this way, you make a method to remove barrier and it becomes that much easier to take down power house scions as a member of fort.

To cry this much about deathblow.

Man, you just sound like a complete noob with your constant deathblow bitching and your 0 ragers under your belt.

WAAA WAAA WHY YOU FORUM STALK ME!? /buttfrustrated

Deathblow was the most obvious response to "big hits destroys barrier" other than something like nova.

I generally try to put myself in the other guy's shoes before posting, and I've done that thus far with you, good sir.

But I gotta say you DO put forth an inordinate amount of complaint about ragers in general (deathblow, parity, etc.) for someone who has never played one.

Just so we're clear, my last rager was Balthudar, which was over a year ago I'm pretty sure (ran around getting raped by Tiria, if you remember her). So I don't really have a dog in this fight (Mike Vick) other than the overall Game Balance topic.

But the amount of input you have on ragers and OP'ness is a bit like if Morin (as an example) were to constantly, for years on end, non-stop, complain about evil conjurers and how OP they are. Purely because evil conjurers (I use them as an example because their servitors can sometimes do deathblow-esque damage really suddenly) have killed them using "no skill", just conjured up a demon and c mag Morin. Not because he'd ever actually PLAYED an evil conjie. He just...knew they were OP.

You see how silly that would sound?

And I get it. You can't stomach playing a RBW. That's fine. Nobody's forcing you to. But I have to tell you the same thing I tell people who think evil is too OP but have only played Fort - you can't really complain about something being OP until you've played it. And not just a passing glance 40 hour char. I mean really *played* it.

You say it way nicer than I can and sum it up way better.

Thanks Twist for saying what I was trying to but way more professionally.

Granted, it won't be a pincersvirf or other standard build, and I've never played a warrior before, but we'll see how it goes.

heh

.

nt

Morin would never play an evil conjie because:

1) Well i just suck at Evils, see my recent mino failure. *
2) Evil conjies scare the crap out of me trying to manage all the stuff they have to and still be successful.

Just wanted to Clarify.

++++EDITED TO ADD++++

* this does not in any way pre-suppose I'm good at playing neutrals or goodies either.

...you also are unlikely to bitch about how OP conjurers are for any great length of time. Because you clearly recognize the drawbacks.

Once the have their wands there can be no question.

Tac on Scion powers and you are nearly as easy to play as a shifter. Who cares of you eat mobdeaths at hero?

Just saying Sir.

Somehow it seems ironic that wands were brought up for one of the few characters that legitimately can have aura, barrier, and shield up without any wands/talismans/scrolls being involved.

To be even fairer, there have been a lot less 100+ kill evil conjurers than there have been bash-spamming newb RBW's with 100+ kills.

I get that wasn't the analogy you were making but we should face the facts:

CF damage redux is hard to balance because:
1) Deathblow
2) There's a large amount of stackable damage reduction in the game.

If you fix some of those things, you could just balance the mage classes to not require wands instead of jumping through all these hoops to let elites curb stomp groups.

Honestly, the wand system is one of the most awful things about CF, I have no idea how people go on and on defending it like it is a good thing.

thats why we defend it.

..I think it should be part and parcel of any consistent complainer to have to ultimately take advantage of what they consider "unfair" and show the unenlightened why their thought process was ultimately correct.

It would be like me complaining about anything non-rager =)

-thinnie

I swear with my last mage, if I had three sleeks of a specific type, my sleek location just wouldn't "pop". I don't know if it was possible to cheat that by leaving a stash of wands somewhere, but given I could collect my wands with roughly zero risk, I never bothered to try to get around it.

To be honest, it sounds like you have less issues with ABS for mages and more issues with ABS + stoneskin + voker shields + protection + etc.

I'll be the first to agree there is way too many types of stackable dam redux in the game and personally I'd just make some/all of them go away.

Less hands in the cookie jar = easier to balance.

There seem to be two general camps out there on this issue.

1) The first camp feels they need to use ABS a lot and want easier access to getting it.

2) The second camp thinks ABS use is too prevelent and want to see some restrictions on how often it can be used.


Now while I personally tend to fall in the second camp both sides have strong arguments. There are certainly situations which absolutly neccesitate additional DR to be succesful. There are also people who are ultra conservative and won't fight without full ABS even when they already hold significant advantages without it.


My suggestion is to appease both camps with the following changes.

1) Every mage now starts off with 2 sleek black spots instead of one (essentially give all mages barrier attunement from the get go).

2) Drop the standard dam redux of barrier. My suggestion would be to 30% across the board.

3) When fighting multiple people (that is the number of people targetting you directly with melee goes up) you get bonus dam redux. I would set it such that if you fight 3 PC's you get the same dam redux as sanc. And I would cap the dam redux at 50%. NPC's fighting you could each count as a portion of a PC (2 NPC's to 1 PC seems fair)

4) The dam redux rates affect on healing stays at the same level as barriers base damage regardless of number of people currently fighting you.

So how will these changes appease each of the camps?

For the first camp they now have doubled their chance of finding their sleek black and also if one happens to be particularily challenging for them they have a second spot that might not be. You also now can leverage enhanced healing when fighting multiple people to your advantage and in general get more bang for your heal heal buck at healers.

For the second camp you have made barrier not as useful when ganking someone or in one on one fights and there is actually an incentive to use barrier for larger encounters instead of for everything under the sun. You have also increased the value in group on group fights of splitting who you target with melee from who you target with skills.

Also when you start getting into situations where say you have 3 mages fighting all with barrier the one guy is going to get a bit more mileage then the 2 against him which seems good to me.

I figure we already have some of the infrastructure to accomplish this built into the anti-gank code and barrier attunement edge so the changes seem manageable.

Which applies no restrictions but gives you an incentive to use it only when you think you need it (as opposed to all the time, just to be safe).

Give "barrier use" as a spell, start it at 100%, and give it a possibility of decreasing each time the spell is used (i.e. opposite to how a skill would normally improve).

To stop longer lived characters being at a disadvantage, give some % back when someone reaches an older age bracket.

nt

Bravo good sir. Bravo.

I think it would become obvious pretty quickly why having a degrading DR spell is retarded when you make them think about something other than barrier. Show up, hit the outer or something, they use the spell, walk away. Do it again 5 minutes later.

Jesus your bitching is so one dimensional.

nt

You'll see a rager is the weakest cabal in the game imo

nt

I think the tradeoff for their easily abused weaknesses are their ease of time sink.

Villagers are the EASIEST to screw over. having played both sides many times it is clear that it is hard to play a villager and unless you know what your doing it can be the weakest cabal in game. Preps/flight/return potions are amazingly useful. People dont realize how good they are until OMGZ they dont has them and you get roflstomped by an invoker/shapeshifter/conjie/transmuter/necro/AP. My facorite is the being wanted and getting summoned into the warehouse in Galadon by a Magistrate. A semi smart/prepped mage can destroy a villager if they plan it out well enough. I admit i cannot kill villagers with invokers...that is because i fail with them not because they are very strong.

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

I think the best solutions is to just reduce the amount of damage reduction preps including ABS and the effectiveness of DB.

I think the best solution is one that requires less prepping. Similar to what was done with haste preps a couple years ago.

I've seen people using really incompetent tactics do decently because of abs. On occasion, I'm that person.

I've survived fights and won because of protections. I had one recently against an unknown where I used aura and shield. I won the fight where one more hit would have killed me. He turned out to be a berserker with the head.

The main thing though, is, I think what Tonghi said. I didn't read his post closely but I think it seemed to be saying that the crux of the matter was whether it's worth risking attacking. It's massively advantageous to be getting the jump on someone. Without abs, if you try to jump a berserker as an ap (say), you can be dead before you unlag from whatever command you opened with. Therefore you avoid these people. Therefore you are less deadly.

Your theory is wrong - I think the metric you made up to analyze the value of redux shows where your thinking is going astray.

Imagine a fight vs a thirsting rager. Let's say he does 0-800 damage per round, so you attempt to flee when your hp is below 800 so as to reduce the chance that he has a big round and kills you. He doesn't flee ever. Now, many of the fights that you win will be ones where you are above 800 hit points - does that necessarily mean there isn't a need for dam redux? No - in fact, dam redux makes the game better, because the hp totals become lower (because the amount of combat that can take place before a nonzero chance of death kicks in is longer) giving the illusion of closer and more thrilling fights, and with longer combat comes more tactical options.

Ever get one rounded by a villager, and think "man, this is so dumb. they are so overpowered!"? The villager knows that it's an incredible fluke of luck to hit 3 DB's in the same combat round. Now, imagine that everyone had 50% dam redux - that opening salvo would only take you to 50%. The effect of luck on the game is reduced. Imagine a game where everyone has 400 hp - there would be quite a bit less stragety, people would be afraid to fight because every encounter is potentially death - surprise opening attacks become incredibly powerful, and the entire combat changes. It would be thief standing in one room spamming backstab, afraid to leave the room knowing that other player is spamming bash in the other room, and knowing that whoever gets the first hit wins.

That seems like a lot of work and fuss when there are things like snoop and a log board. A reasonable sample of logs (or literally years of watching fights of every kind and match-up live) should give the Immortals who make these calls a good enough handle on things to make informed design decisions.

That's on top of whatever fancy analysis may (or may not) have been done over the years when this stuff was designed, revisited, etc.