it's pretty much impossible nowadays for a newbie to free to play their way to tri- trans.
Lesson packs help alleviate this problem quite a bit. Alynea is dual trans, with lessons in various other things (boar in tattoos, insomnia in survival, mounts in taming etc) and I've only bought lesson packs for her. I probably could've trans'd another skill (possibly almost 2) if I didn't trade my credits to people for Achaea credits. (Gotten about 300-350 so far from bashing, with another 43 sitting on me right now)
This is (technically) my first character in Imperian, as well. Had another Aspect almost two years ago, but haven't touched her in about a year.
The lesson packs are hugely helpful. To be fair though, you're a power basher. Newbies/non-scripting smart people bash manually (like me!), unless they happen to be professional coders though. They don't have things like bashing scripts for their main client - much less for their phones so they can bash while at work (I just recently learned phone bashing is a thing in IRE). On the one hand, more power to you, but a lot of people are going to compare themselves to you and not understand why it's so "easy" for you (and hard for them).
Hell, it's not even particularly easy as a power basher. When I'm employed again, it's very unlikely that I'll be able to bash anywhere near as much as I do. The average I've been able to bash(since I'm without artifacts that would accelerate it) is around 3 credits an hour. That's not a lot since 3 credits translates to about $1. >_>
I think there's room for some kind of mechanic to earn lessons past aspect in exchange for maybe the gold that you'd be earning? Some way for us to turn our time into lessons that doesn't simultaneously involve bringing so much gold into the world.
-Transmute credits purchased from credit market into lessons
-Use lessons for whatever (Item you wanted)
This system is taking your time and turning it into lessons, which is what you want. You're just not a fan of the efficiency. If you want to look elsewhere you can use iron elite (Khizan's argument of a dr. pepper a day, etc) and after that cheap lesson packages (2 dr. peppers a day and maybe a swing by the blood bank) and presto.
I'm obviously not in this boat, but just eyeballing it, getting to some sort of minimum level of being able to function as a "free" player seems pretty daunting, and those players are worth having around (and hopefully will become paying players at some point too). Then again, some people do have an amazingly stubborn attitude that they don't ever want to spend any money on the game (even if they could), which is weird, but happens more than I would have expected.
I think the issue is that the amount of gold required to buy credits off the market is still too high for new players to really make use of the ability to purchase off that market. @Baasche says he can make 3 credits per hour, but he's bashing places like demon's pass, which are not really places that your average new player can handle. At current market prices, 1 credit, which equals a measly 6 lessons, costs 17,000 gold -- think about how much time it takes for a level 50 player to accumulate that gold? (It is some non-trivial amount of time).
At bottom, it is a balance between two resources: time vs. money. If you have more time on your hands, you can bash for gold/credits; conversely if you don't want to bash for gold/credits, you can spend RL money and sell credits or do direct credit-to-lesson conversions. The problem is, what happens when you have new players who do not have the resources to do either? How do you capitalize on their interest in the game to at least keep them coming back? Because I think we all agree that attracting and retaining new players is an overall good thing for the health of this game.
Imperian is a business. The idea is to get them involved up to a point where they start making an investment in the character. The first step is you get enough lessons and credits to get the necessaries and a trans skill (likely your bashing skill). This is pretty much the way you get people addicted. Here's a taste man. If you want some more...let me show you these two SUPER cheap lesson backages. It's just enough to make you buy your first set to top off. The system here is awesome.
The system you are having problem with is that the game economy is ****. It's terrible. It's always been terrible. The players make terrible arguments for the economy (legacy gold doesn't matter) (it does) and the administration don't really understand economics or player behavior (Miss you, auctions). They cling to things like "The aspect system is a gold sink." No it isn't. I bash up the gold for that specific reason. Net gold removed from the system is 0. The BETTER argument here, and the one we should focus on, is why is our game economy so frakking terrible?
I'm clueless how to cure against hunters, apart from the obvious (turn off tree vs instability) there's another aspect that I don't know how to get around.
Starts with this:
Baasche lashes out with his wicked talons, drawing slices across your body.
There's no real way to heal around it and nothing you can do about it because the triggers can go on afflictions that you cannot just decide to not cure.
This is totally balanced because reasons.
"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."
Imperian is a business. The idea is to get them involved up to a point where they start making an investment in the character. The first step is you get enough lessons and credits to get the necessaries and a trans skill (likely your bashing skill). This is pretty much the way you get people addicted. Here's a taste man. If you want some more...let me show you these two SUPER cheap lesson backages. It's just enough to make you buy your first set to top off. The system here is awesome.
The system you are having problem with is that the game economy is ****. It's terrible. It's always been terrible. The players make terrible arguments for the economy (legacy gold doesn't matter) (it does) and the administration don't really understand economics or player behavior (Miss you, auctions). They cling to things like "The aspect system is a gold sink." No it isn't. I bash up the gold for that specific reason. Net gold removed from the system is 0. The BETTER argument here, and the one we should focus on, is why is our game economy so frakking terrible?
I think everyone heartily agrees together that the economy sucks. Not only do we all sit on millions upon millions of gold, we have nothing to spend gold on. Hell, we're running out of things we want to spend credits on.
There's so much gold stockpile that ANY gold sink released will instantly become null and void, simply because people don't even have to bash in order to get the money for it. Suddenly, they have the thing they want, and they just keep playing as they've always done. It doesn't increase demand for gold.
In order for a healthy economy to persist in a place where money can be printed, you have to have more demand for gold than supply. Imperian never really had that to begin with, and it just gets worse and worse as more bashing is introduced.
Don't ignore triggered afflictions. You can't just set GBot to stop curing them, because if you could, I would be stuck with a class doing 1 toxin and 1 mental at a subpar dsl speed. Unlike Templar, Sab/Renegade, Diab, Deathknight, Priest, etc, Hunter has no passives. My only useful cure block is instability(apart from very specific setups that COULD make use of insanity, but that sort of setup plays like bard tracking afflicitions that you aren't told what are), and I have no hypnosis building up to lather on affs if the fight lasts long enough. I have very limited holding(block and snare, snare being a 2.8s or so comboable eq(meaning no basilisk aff if I set up snare repeatedly)) and basically no way to stop someone from flying. My shield break is slower than clawing so if hammer is EQ-based, I can't make any progress at all if I try to hammer. Unlike classes that can double-physical aff, I'm limited to strictly 1 toxin+1 mental. Meaning I'm fighting against both focus and purge any time I don't have the appropriate cure blocks in place. Hunter also consumes obscene amounts of mana. Trigger is about 5% of my mana, your passive mana drain is hitting me for 13% of my mana each tick. Sap does huge amounts of mana damage to me.
What I would suggest you do is hit snare early so you have an escape route, be ready to turtle when appropriate, focus on mana instead of damage, keep up those 1.5s stuns every few seconds. Also, keep in mind there is literally nothing that I can do in the air that is useful besides clawing. As far as curing, don't try to ignore Asthma so much, that WILL get you locked. Instead, eat a few triggers and shield or fly when the number of mentals gets too high (generally requires 6+sensitivity or 7-8 without to melt) and only ignore asthma to cure impatience if you have purge ready(or really close to ready) or if you're turtling. You cure affs faster than I cure lost mana, so if you play a longer game instead of hoping to beat me down while ignoring what I'm doing, you'll have a much better chance.
Edit: For more advice, go ask Mathiaus? He handles it better than most.
I'm clueless how to cure against hunters, apart from the obvious (turn off tree vs instability) there's another aspect that I don't know how to get around.
Starts with this:
Baasche lashes out with his wicked talons, drawing slices across your body.
A strange smelling substance begins to leak from your pores.
You are afflicted with slickness.
Baasche gives a stern order to a jagged white-scaled basilisk and it casts a hard stare at you.
The idea of eating or drinking is repulsive to you.
You are afflicted with anorexia.
Huh, maybe I should cure it after all, that kind of sucks without fitness and especially against the affliction load I'm getting.
You quickly eat a piece of kelp.
You have cured asthma.
An odd sensation fills your mind momentarily as a concealed mental trigger activates.
Your ability to use tattoos appears to be reduced.
Strange, everything doesn't quite seem so simple anymore.
You are afflicted with stupidity.
This would be fine, except it repeats next round, and the next, until I'm overwhelmed with the extra affs.
I can't just not cure asthma O.o Thoughts?
Dynamic priority settings will get you far with fighting against Hunters. You can't rely on a static set. Watch for when triggers are applied as well as when triggers go off. You're going to want to track how many you've got on you. If two have gone off, play a delaying tactic, because it'll lose all the momentum a Hunter has.
Funnily enough, the FIRST thing you should do when the first trigger is set is cure the first triggered affliction. That allows you to keep yourself from getting stacked too high with triggers.
Killing the basilisk every so often doesn't hurt either, if you've got a high crit rate. Though, I'm not entirely sure if they've increased the basilisk health or made crits not work or whatever while I've been gone.
All of the advice against hunters thus far has been terrible and doesn't actually solve the problem. They're called 'delaying' tactics which only buys you time before you cure yourself to death. I've attached a gif that sums up trigger.
Not curing only sticks that aff. Bad option.
Killing the basilisk only gets the basilisk re-summoned.
Curing the affs to avoid more triggers which sets off the trigger that gives me more affs right before I get another aff and another trigger in hopes of avoiding more triggers makes as much sense as brushing my teeth with acid. It works, sure, but so does not using acid.
Tl/DR: trigger is a bad design that doesn't belong in this game.
Gold sinks don't actually work because they force you to bash up the gold. The best gold sink in the game was auctions, but we got rid of those because the myth is they don't generate profits. Imperian hasn't really mastered the art of draining gold from the economy (by any means) or curtailing the hilarious amount of gold this game generations. Then they went and built a shrine system that is 98% spam bashing the entire game 20 hours a day. Womp Womp.
@Icarius Ahkan is bad at fighting Hunter. His advice is bad and he doesn't know what he's talking about. Again, if you want to know how to live a while in a fight against a Hunter, ask someone that doesn't just flail about, get themselves locked immediately, then cry OP in every medium he can for hours. Mathiaus lasts considerably longer against Hunter than most people, and that's not entirely because of his class. He actually adjusts his curing and that makes things on the Hunter's side considerably more difficult. Cure the trigger when you're not buried in mentals. If you are getting close to getting melted, take steps to hinder or turtle. I promise it's more doable than he says, and seeing as I'm the Hunter here and he isn't, my advice is more likely to be accurate.
If a basilisk has been trained in stamina, you're not likely to kill it since it'll have A LOT of health and I'm pretty sure they can't be crit'ed.
If you want something quick and dirty that would likely make a difference. Adjust the priority of impatience based on if you have mentals and if you have focus balance. Beyond that, track your own mentals and decide early where to turtle. Maybe 4+ mentals you start hindering or step out of the room for long enough to cure impatience and a mental or two. Hunter's don't maintain momentum through turtling all that well. If you cure all your cure blocks, you're going to clear your physical and mental list fairly quickly and I'll be starting from scratch after just a few moments of curing.
Tbh, Dicene is being disingenuous about the situation. I'll explain.
If you start 'not curing' the triggered afflcition you're going to open yourself up to have the locking afflictions 'stuck'. Have fun rolling around with anorexia and asthma. We know how that ends once you can't eat any herbs.Following that, if you've fought Baaaaaaasche, you'll notice that he's a huge fan of rolling impatience/peace and spamming entangles because combat is fun. For him, it might be. For anyone who actually likes fast paced combat, the inability to actually attack because of your opponents offense is sort of a bummer (See class leads 2010-2015).
One of the most telling sentences in Dicene's anecdotal straw man is "Mathiaus lasts considerably longer against Hunter than most people." Notice how the wording is not Mathiaus beats me or Mathiaus wins. It is "Mathiaus lasts considerably longer against Hunter than most people." The ultimate problem here is that regardless of whether you cure or not to cure, you end up screwing yourself because both options are bad. "I either don't cure this cure inhibiting affliction or I eat 2 afflictions...ad nauseum." Mathiaus 'may' switch his cures up, but most of Mathiaus' durability stems from the fact that Mathiaus and Dicene are playing a race of who can hinder the other faster and Mathiaus loses...because of trigger.
The disingenuous argumentsfrom ye ol' Dicene doesn't stop there. I changed my priority healing, sacrificed damage to pick up extra healing and bursted him down with cds, reusing dameron for golgotha, etc. You know what happened? He died like a wet napkin. Too bad he was building for starburst 1 (and likely 2) because despite the fact he said "I'll be starting from scratch after just a few moments of curing" that's not the case when his entire offense persists after his death and subsequent rebirth. Hunters are 'rolling' the Trez but with faster-than-vivisect set up. They won't lose any momentum through the first kill.
For the coup de grace for disingenuous mumbo jumbo he offered the advice "leave the room." Let me direct you to our friend AB HALLUCINOGEN. @Dicene (a hunter) is telling you that the best way to avoid dying a hunter is to leave the room and instantly give yourself hallucinations, impatience, and dementia. He will follow this up with a post that says "You could spam shield" which of course would work, but it would not bolster your offense. The best case scenario is you both restart at square one where you be forced to choose asthma and anorexia or impatience/peace/heroism/recklessness.
With a closing remark to seal the deal here, one of the highlights of this is to ask the question, "Has Baasche come near beating me as anything but hunter?" If you're like me, that answer resounds with no. The choice of 'get locked' or 'get overwhelmed with mental affs' is a bad one. Heal the triggered affliction or not, all roads end at affliction overwhelm courtesty of autocuring.
@Ahkan How long has it been since I've fought you 1v1? I can kill you in Renegade. I can kill you in Hunter. I can probably kill you in Runeguard, as lackluster as it is if you're not rolling 24/7 transfix. I could probably beat you in Druid, as much as I've avoided the class for a few months now. The only time you've fought me even remotely close to 1v1 has been when this incident when I hit starburst(because you totally don't have access to it too, right?). And that was me vs you and Wysrias. I had you locked before I even died and that's because your reaction to Hunter isn't to try and figure out how to best defend against it, it's to QQ, get yourself locked immediately, then cry about how OP it is.
If you're not willing to use shield and other tools appropriately try and keep yourself from dying in combat, all you're asking for is for two people to just hit each other repeatedly as hard as they can until one dies. That's not how combat works, and people that try that make bad combatants.
"I can probably kill you in Runeguard, as lackluster as it is if you're not rolling 24/7 transfix."
That's not even the scary part of runeguard. I see now why we're in the clueless thread.
"all you're asking for is for two people to just hit each other repeatedly as hard as they can until one dies"
I've never said this. If you were actually citing evidence instead of emotionally typing out words you'd realize this. I'm honestly a fan of whatever gets the job done at the time. If it's me and 3 people who don't track afflictions, well, I'm just going to have to hit you with a hammer until you stop moving. To be fair, the hammer works -really- well on people in the fast stat pack, like you! If I've got 2-3 people who announce their afflictions, I'm going to support them and maybe throw in an enlighten. It really depends on my class (which is pretty much dependent on how ADD I'm feeling) but I keep my options open as to how I want to kill people.
You also forgot Cassius was there You shouldn't diss your boy like that. Leaving him to die is one thing but pretending like he wasn't there. Dude, that's cold.
Flare nairat/loshre are pretty beastly for wytchen and they're not rolling with dsl (aka: No direct access to hemotoxin). The things you can set up with it are pretty obscene. Then once they're pretty much locked you can transition into sowulu and pithakhan and widdle them away or push them to disembowel. On top of that it's just tanky as crap. After that ansuz/totems, engage/laguz, there's a lot of preparation you can drop on someone who's not expecting it. Spam transfix is always an option, but that's like kindergarten.
When flared on a tablet, the rune will cause the next attempt to use a specified method to cure a physical affliction to fail. This effect has a 2-second delay, and will fade after 10 seconds if not triggered.When flared, this rune shares the cooldown with Loshre. These methods can be picked: plant, salve, pipe, purge, focus, tree, active, passive.
(Just so you can ab, nairat, loshre, inguz, sowulu, pithakhan, wunjo)
Gold sinks don't actually work because they force you to bash up the gold. The best gold sink in the game was auctions, but we got rid of those because the myth is they don't generate profits. Imperian hasn't really mastered the art of draining gold from the economy (by any means) or curtailing the hilarious amount of gold this game generations. Then they went and built a shrine system that is 98% spam bashing the entire game 20 hours a day. Womp Womp.
A) Personally, I was really sad Hunter got changed so much and Outrider got all the cool entourage and axe throwing and spear stuff. Boo. I'd totally be willing to trade.
While initially an interesting idea, Hunter's entire mechanic is flawed in both the user's hands and the opponent's face. It used to be pretty friendly to anyone who wanted to try fighting, as you could just reflex/gorilla maul and kinda feel good about yourself, but now it's pretty useless to anyone who doesn't want to build a whole affliction tracker. Is it really any wonder how few Hunter combatants there are? I still haven't coded my system because it just takes so damn long.
Also, not fun to fight against, so whenever you get into a fight people just decide to cheese. Also not fun for the player.
If Hunter were to be redesigned, can we get more focus on the Wyvern being awesome and not the basilisk doing whatever weird psychic basilisk stuff that doesn't really fit into any theme anywhere? I mean, basilisk mind melting as a nature thing...? What?
The shrine system, I think, is destabilizing the economy even more. Just like how there was a massive influx of gold when cults and sects first came out because everyone was bashing to get their belief up, it's happening again. While the idea was to do something more with sects and cults, I think that there was little consideration as to what other effects this would cause.
IMO, the biggest fix we need right now isn't more conflict or balance or PvP or whatever, it's the economy. If the economy can be fixed, then people will want to start playing again. If gold is in demand again, it means people have a reason to go out and get that gold, which is activity in the game. More demand for gold means lower credit prices, so people can buy credits off the market again. More people buying credits off market means more people willing to sell, because once again, gold is in demand. Suddenly, profit for the IRE business!
"I can probably kill you in Runeguard, as lackluster as it is if you're not rolling 24/7 transfix."
That's not even the scary part of runeguard. I see now why we're in the clueless thread.
"all you're asking for is for two people to just hit each other repeatedly as hard as they can until one dies"
I've never said this. If you were actually citing evidence instead of emotionally typing out words you'd realize this. I'm honestly a fan of whatever gets the job done at the time. If it's me and 3 people who don't track afflictions, well, I'm just going to have to hit you with a hammer until you stop moving. To be fair, the hammer works -really- well on people in the fast stat pack, like you! If I've got 2-3 people who announce their afflictions, I'm going to support them and maybe throw in an enlighten. It really depends on my class (which is pretty much dependent on how ADD I'm feeling) but I keep my options open as to how I want to kill people.
You also forgot Cassius was there You shouldn't diss your boy like that. Leaving him to die is one thing but pretending like he wasn't there. Dude, that's cold.
I think the issue is that the amount of gold required to buy credits off the market is still too high for new players to really make use of the ability to purchase off that market. @Baasche says he can make 3 credits per hour, but he's bashing places like demon's pass, which are not really places that your average new player can handle. At current market prices, 1 credit, which equals a measly 6 lessons, costs 17,000 gold -- think about how much time it takes for a level 50 player to accumulate that gold? (It is some non-trivial amount of time).
At bottom, it is a balance between two resources: time vs. money. If you have more time on your hands, you can bash for gold/credits; conversely if you don't want to bash for gold/credits, you can spend RL money and sell credits or do direct credit-to-lesson conversions. The problem is, what happens when you have new players who do not have the resources to do either? How do you capitalize on their interest in the game to at least keep them coming back? Because I think we all agree that attracting and retaining new players is an overall good thing for the health of this game.
The only people who can realistically solve this problem is Jeremy & co. because they have access to the retention data. If they haven't decided to reduce the costs of transing yet, there must be good reasons or they continue to deliberate these things. Besides, even PhDs can't fix an economy.
I've gotten lucky and killed Baasche a couple times, especially if I use bloodworms against fitness. Mostly it was about setting up against peace and stupidity which he loves to load onto the queue. My biggest problem in most fights is outpacing fitness, which is why I tend to use longer balance afflictions. Also helps if you're offense can slow them down (longer balance, clumsiness, stupidity, peace, et cetera) and force shielding if you can.
That all being said, I hate triggers and hope they die a fiery death.
Why does Selthis make this statement about Phylacteries? Like. Are they good now? How were they changed?
There is for sure a point where if you don't have alts the value of it all becomes crap. <----- Talking about Iron Elite.
Especially with new phylacteries.
I think Selthis' statement was the opposite. New phylacteries seem to spit out random useless commodities, assembly pieces, and maybe a couple of credits.
It's a bit of a comedown from my first IE phylactery, which had a 300cr artifact.
Comments
This is (technically) my first character in Imperian, as well. Had another Aspect almost two years ago, but haven't touched her in about a year.
The system you are having problem with is that the game economy is ****. It's terrible. It's always been terrible. The players make terrible arguments for the economy (legacy gold doesn't matter) (it does) and the administration don't really understand economics or player behavior (Miss you, auctions). They cling to things like "The aspect system is a gold sink." No it isn't. I bash up the gold for that specific reason. Net gold removed from the system is 0. The BETTER argument here, and the one we should focus on, is why is our game economy so frakking terrible?
There's no real way to heal around it and nothing you can do about it because the triggers can go on afflictions that you cannot just decide to not cure.
This is totally balanced because reasons.
"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."
What I would suggest you do is hit snare early so you have an escape route, be ready to turtle when appropriate, focus on mana instead of damage, keep up those 1.5s stuns every few seconds. Also, keep in mind there is literally nothing that I can do in the air that is useful besides clawing. As far as curing, don't try to ignore Asthma so much, that WILL get you locked. Instead, eat a few triggers and shield or fly when the number of mentals gets too high (generally requires 6+sensitivity or 7-8 without to melt) and only ignore asthma to cure impatience if you have purge ready(or really close to ready) or if you're turtling. You cure affs faster than I cure lost mana, so if you play a longer game instead of hoping to beat me down while ignoring what I'm doing, you'll have a much better chance.
If you want something quick and dirty that would likely make a difference. Adjust the priority of impatience based on if you have mentals and if you have focus balance. Beyond that, track your own mentals and decide early where to turtle. Maybe 4+ mentals you start hindering or step out of the room for long enough to cure impatience and a mental or two. Hunter's don't maintain momentum through turtling all that well. If you cure all your cure blocks, you're going to clear your physical and mental list fairly quickly and I'll be starting from scratch after just a few moments of curing.
For the coup de grace for disingenuous mumbo jumbo he offered the advice "leave the room." Let me direct you to our friend AB HALLUCINOGEN. @Dicene (a hunter) is telling you that the best way to avoid dying a hunter is to leave the room and instantly give yourself hallucinations, impatience, and dementia. He will follow this up with a post that says "You could spam shield" which of course would work, but it would not bolster your offense. The best case scenario is you both restart at square one where you be forced to choose asthma and anorexia or impatience/peace/heroism/recklessness.
If you're not willing to use shield and other tools appropriately try and keep yourself from dying in combat, all you're asking for is for two people to just hit each other repeatedly as hard as they can until one dies. That's not how combat works, and people that try that make bad combatants.
E: Then check that against anyone else semi competent with assassin. Or check to see why mirage sucks, whatever.
You also forgot Cassius was there
What is the scary thing about Runeguard @Ahkan?
Serious question. I'd like to know.
There is for sure a point where if you don't have alts the value of it all becomes crap. <----- Talking about Iron Elite.
Especially with new phylacteries.
to load onto the queue. My biggest problem in most fights is outpacing fitness, which is why I tend to use longer balance afflictions. Also helps if you're offense can slow them down (longer balance, clumsiness, stupidity, peace, et cetera) and force shielding if you can.
That all being said, I hate triggers and hope they die a fiery death.
It's a bit of a comedown from my first IE phylactery, which had a 300cr artifact.