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Observations and a suggestion now that I'm playing again
Iriaen
Member Posts: 114 ✭✭
Now that I've been playing again for awhile, I want to congratulate Garryn and Jeremy on how the game seems to have come a long way since I quit playing. I think that just about everything has tangibly improved and I really appreciate the hard work that has clearly gone into all this.
With that said, I wouldn't be me if I didn't start suggesting complete overhauls, so here are two based upon my observations.
My first idea is this: create an affliction called fodder. This affliction has only one effect: it pushes back your target's cure balance without actually requiring that a cure be used. Spamming fodder enough will also consume tree, focus and purge. The upside to this fodder affliction is that combat continues to exist as it does currently, only with much less spam and it's much easier from a system standpoint to begin working towards sticking the afflictions you actually want to give. Game is the same, only with fodder, the real afflictions actually start to seem significant again and the amount of spam in the game is massively reduced.
Hopefully you realize that my first suggestion here is tongue in cheek, I am trying to prove a point. It appears to me that we are looking at the twilight of the affliction-spam game type. Even mages are basically about spamming funky magick-dsl as fast as they can (though the new crystal mechanic is cool, no doubt). I think I remember Garryn floating the idea somewhere about giving everyone the ability to see specifically which afflictions are cured so that affliction tracking can be taken up a notch. While this is certainly a plausible idea and shows that Garryn and friends are continuing to think things through, I want to say that I am against this for the simple reason that if this is done, combat again becomes about making a better system than the next guy. New additions to the combat system would take this into account and we will eventually come full circle back to someone needing a system for effective PvP again, the only change being that now we have huge amounts of spam going on as compared to how the game was in its antiquity, when you originally didn't need a system to PvP but there was also much less spam.
With the above in mind, I'm going to make my second and more serious suggestion. With the right changes, I think that afflictions and healing skills could easily be rebalanced so that afflictions work fundamentally differently. The way to do this would be to overhaul general healing skills (tree, focus and purge) and then significantly increase cure balance timers, as follows:
Tree tattoo, focus and purge would no longer heal single afflictions but instead they would reduce someone to only 2 salve, smoke and herb afflictions respectively upon use. The minimum number of afflictions would depend upon skill level, so a low-might person might be reduced to a minimum of 4 afflictions of each cure type and so-on. From there, consumable healing balances get slowed down significantly. The really immediately crippling afflictions like slow balance, shriveled limbs or cure locks get removed or reworked. Combat would then be like this, when you are fighting 1v1, you always have at least one affliction of each cure type on you and you have to modify your tactics based upon which affliction you've decided to let your opponent stick.
So for example, you let your opponent stick sun allergy (you move indoors), or sensitivity (you use reserves), fire (you try to move to water), etc. I think that ideally, each affliction should require a different player decision instead of just being a fodder-like mechanic for working towards a simple tactical goal, which is generally what they are right now. This system would work fine in team combat since the tree, focus and purge skills remove excess afflictions instead of just one affliction, so a person would still get afflictions piling up, but the slower cure balances wouldn't result in immediate affliction overload against a team because excess afflictions would be shed in a burst-like fashion, though the pressure of the team would force those extra afflictions onto you temporarily until your next general healing skill cooldown.
Some of the more advanced afflictions would come into play in different ways, for example, all of the "bad" afflictions could be funneled into a single cure type and afflictions like hellsight would only give you those "bad" afflictions. If you then choose to let your opponent stick hellsight onto you, you can avoid getting something more dangerous stuck onto you (like sensitivity), but now you have to contend strategically with a spam of random garbage afflictions like vertigo when your affliction-capping skill is on cooldown. For example, if the garbage afflictions were put onto herbs then hellsight would spam you with the bad afflictions in-between purge blood cooldowns.
I know this would be a radical change, hard to wrap one's mind around and probably people won't be interested in it, I just wanted to throw something out there at this point because I don't think a slow return to system-necessity is a good idea for the game. While Garrynbot has been an overall good thing for the game it has also turned most afflictions into just fodder and spam against most players at this stage and I don't like that. A fodder affliction would actually be a reasonable addition at this point and that's not a good thing. I don't want to see us return to a heavily system-dependent form of gameplay either. I don't really want to fodder through someone's curing balance because it's spammy and makes afflictions feel dumb. Now that we have reached this Garrynbot point, I think we have a template here to make something more strategic in the future provided that the players are up for the challenge.
With that said, I wouldn't be me if I didn't start suggesting complete overhauls, so here are two based upon my observations.
My first idea is this: create an affliction called fodder. This affliction has only one effect: it pushes back your target's cure balance without actually requiring that a cure be used. Spamming fodder enough will also consume tree, focus and purge. The upside to this fodder affliction is that combat continues to exist as it does currently, only with much less spam and it's much easier from a system standpoint to begin working towards sticking the afflictions you actually want to give. Game is the same, only with fodder, the real afflictions actually start to seem significant again and the amount of spam in the game is massively reduced.
Hopefully you realize that my first suggestion here is tongue in cheek, I am trying to prove a point. It appears to me that we are looking at the twilight of the affliction-spam game type. Even mages are basically about spamming funky magick-dsl as fast as they can (though the new crystal mechanic is cool, no doubt). I think I remember Garryn floating the idea somewhere about giving everyone the ability to see specifically which afflictions are cured so that affliction tracking can be taken up a notch. While this is certainly a plausible idea and shows that Garryn and friends are continuing to think things through, I want to say that I am against this for the simple reason that if this is done, combat again becomes about making a better system than the next guy. New additions to the combat system would take this into account and we will eventually come full circle back to someone needing a system for effective PvP again, the only change being that now we have huge amounts of spam going on as compared to how the game was in its antiquity, when you originally didn't need a system to PvP but there was also much less spam.
With the above in mind, I'm going to make my second and more serious suggestion. With the right changes, I think that afflictions and healing skills could easily be rebalanced so that afflictions work fundamentally differently. The way to do this would be to overhaul general healing skills (tree, focus and purge) and then significantly increase cure balance timers, as follows:
Tree tattoo, focus and purge would no longer heal single afflictions but instead they would reduce someone to only 2 salve, smoke and herb afflictions respectively upon use. The minimum number of afflictions would depend upon skill level, so a low-might person might be reduced to a minimum of 4 afflictions of each cure type and so-on. From there, consumable healing balances get slowed down significantly. The really immediately crippling afflictions like slow balance, shriveled limbs or cure locks get removed or reworked. Combat would then be like this, when you are fighting 1v1, you always have at least one affliction of each cure type on you and you have to modify your tactics based upon which affliction you've decided to let your opponent stick.
So for example, you let your opponent stick sun allergy (you move indoors), or sensitivity (you use reserves), fire (you try to move to water), etc. I think that ideally, each affliction should require a different player decision instead of just being a fodder-like mechanic for working towards a simple tactical goal, which is generally what they are right now. This system would work fine in team combat since the tree, focus and purge skills remove excess afflictions instead of just one affliction, so a person would still get afflictions piling up, but the slower cure balances wouldn't result in immediate affliction overload against a team because excess afflictions would be shed in a burst-like fashion, though the pressure of the team would force those extra afflictions onto you temporarily until your next general healing skill cooldown.
Some of the more advanced afflictions would come into play in different ways, for example, all of the "bad" afflictions could be funneled into a single cure type and afflictions like hellsight would only give you those "bad" afflictions. If you then choose to let your opponent stick hellsight onto you, you can avoid getting something more dangerous stuck onto you (like sensitivity), but now you have to contend strategically with a spam of random garbage afflictions like vertigo when your affliction-capping skill is on cooldown. For example, if the garbage afflictions were put onto herbs then hellsight would spam you with the bad afflictions in-between purge blood cooldowns.
I know this would be a radical change, hard to wrap one's mind around and probably people won't be interested in it, I just wanted to throw something out there at this point because I don't think a slow return to system-necessity is a good idea for the game. While Garrynbot has been an overall good thing for the game it has also turned most afflictions into just fodder and spam against most players at this stage and I don't like that. A fodder affliction would actually be a reasonable addition at this point and that's not a good thing. I don't want to see us return to a heavily system-dependent form of gameplay either. I don't really want to fodder through someone's curing balance because it's spammy and makes afflictions feel dumb. Now that we have reached this Garrynbot point, I think we have a template here to make something more strategic in the future provided that the players are up for the challenge.
Drill baby drill because luck is a skill.
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Comments
The only thing about Defiler that really seemed to change how you play the game was hound torment, you get to track easily to your allies, and gutwyrm is a good teaming skill. Otherwise, you're just a straight damage guy or a webbing guy.
I'm adding this in cause this is a good example of the point I want to make, the game is in what decisions we make and afflictions should ideally require us to make decisions. A skill like torment hound that lets me ride on it and teleport to my allies changes how I play, choosing between several seeds that all do damage doesn't change how I play.
This post surprised me at first until I remembered that this is the guy who thought old-school Malignists needed a 100+ damage daegger jab.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Ahkan said: I was thinking about if I should keep playing Diabolist or go Summoner and it came back to this thing you posted and evileye infirmities.
Infirmities are one of those mechanics that sounds great on paper but in practice, not so much. In a team fight you could kill someone in another way with a bunch of other people helping you long before you got 2-3 infirmities in and then catharsis'd them. In 1v1, 90% of people will have no qualms about running away once you have 1-2 infirmities stacked onto them, so you won't get too many kills that way either. Sure, some guys are hard enough to say "Oh, if I get to under 80% mana I'm going to die... guess I'll stand here and let him kill me since he made that good affliction tracking system" but those guys are in the minority.
So what happened here is that bad afflictions were basically turned into a form of damage. I can push them onto someone in a 1v1 fight if my affliction tracking is good enough, but then I could also just put taint aura onto someone for much, much less effort and have far more utility skills to draw upon at the same time, and not be required to spend 20% essence to become a wight or lich for each fight, or juggle my wielded items as the daegger goes in and out of my hands, I could go on but I don't think it should be necessary, Summoner is just a fundamentally better class right now.
It's a trade off. It's how it should be. It's just a play style you don't like.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Templar has a lot of things that just need opportunity costs.
That said, I thought about my latest idea a bit more today and think that I have improved upon it significantly. One effect per affliction is too much, but I've noticed that classes and skills that give one affliction at a time tend to be stronger already, whereas many of the dual-affliction classes seem to be either suffering or are too strong in the current environment.
So as a variation on my most recent idea, what if afflictions gave an immediate effect presuming that you give two of them at a time, and the immediate effect is based upon which two you gave. This would provide a foundation that could help to balance dual affliction classes. Here's some examples which I think would be important in order to put this idea into perspective:
Oxalis + sun allergy = temporary blindness as your eyes adjust to the light, so you can't attack for 1/2 of a second.
Clumsiness + vomiting = coughing, which could strip the fitness defense. No more blowing part of your cycle to strip fitness!
Agoraphobia + claustrophobia = being afraid of indoors and outdoors must be nauseating, this could strip constitution (similar to and likely preceding the above).
Agoraphobia + vertigo = makes the target kneel when outdoors.
You get the idea. This could be particularly useful in buffing some of our less dramatic and/or useful afflictions, but wouldn't improve stronger classes that give fewer afflictions at a time.
Also, I apologize to any Lusternians for likely mauling this history -- I read the first dozen or so pages of the forum proposal when it was released, but most of the rest I've received secondhand from people who play that game.