Removal of greenshard in conjunction with CHAMPION CHALLENGE being a yes/no syntax means that I'm probably at a net loss for engagements/day. Greenshards were nice because it forced champions who often ran to stand and fight me, though even that was at the expense of the bone prize. Now? I have to hunt down a champion, challenge them, and they deny it/run. After three strikes, I get a bone and they get to.. go get champion again and we start this all over?
Some suggested tweaks..
BOTH OF THESE SUGGESTIONS FOLLOW THIS LOGIC - IF THE CHAMPION SYSTEM CONTINUES TO REMAIN ENTIRELY OPT IN, THEN YOU ARE OPTING IN TO THE DANGER OF THESE TWO SYNTAXES AS WELL AS THE CURRENT RISKS -
1. Make CHAMPION CHALLENGE function as old green shard, but only on Champions. This powerful 'holding' tool should be the pay off of tracking down and finding a champion 'in the wild'.
2. Make CHAMPION SEEK DUEL - a global syntax that does some neat powerful lore signal that batsignals to every other champion that another champion wishes to battle. However, the identity of the champion seeking the duel should be completely anonymous. If a second person uses the SEEK DUEL syntax, it queues them in to a greenshard battle as above.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>****, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
A shadowy figure's eyes gleam as you are butchered with a wicked blow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Damage report: raw damage 159 blunt. Attacker: a shadowy figure
Modifier Value Result
Armour Resistance (159 reducible) 24% 120
The Reaper -25% 151
Surcoat 15% 128
Bonedust 10% 115
Plague Staff 5% 109
Bear Bone Image 10% 98
Evasion Skill 17% 81
Total Resistance 49% 81
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Damage Taken: 81 blunt (raw damage: 159)
Recording here for posterity. Reaper plague is +25% damage malus area-wide and can cleave you like some kind of mini-boss.
Now, ignoring all the glaring problems with this system right now (like "why is this 1v1 combat system encouraging a 4 hour slugfest between groups over a bloodthirsty PvE hot potato?" or maybe "what's the lore here and why is Sarrius not a demonic agent in disguise?"), I'd like to bring something else up: transparency. I think I'm growing tired of the mystery game that is 'guess which plague is good'. Just to illustrate why I'm growing weary of this, here's the x easy steps to Champion Plagues for those not in the knowhow:
1. Become the Champion. 2. PK PK PK. Don't forget to get those bones out of bodies! .. oh, wait, you can't, because nobody's a champion! 2b. OK, nevertheless, there's about 70 bones out there right now! That's enough, right? Loot them bones, baby! 3. At 50 bones, pick your time and place to plague. A sensible person would do it when nobody is online (or do it on the edge of primetime so I have less time to respond, :PJSalt:) .. a madman like @Septus will do it in a beloved bashing area during prime time. Bind that sucker in and buckle up for a 4 hour snoozefest or slugfest! When it comes to 'sensible', I say sensible because the Art of War would advise you to strike when you have the best chance of victory.. yanno, when nobody is online. 4. Complete 4 hour PKFest.
It turns out some of them:
sleep to heal (my Nightmare did not, Justus' Reaper did) - This will come in to play below. Suffice to say, Imperian's age is showing - and its size. Plagues have far too much health to support the amount of players in the average team these days if they're going to be crit immune (and they should - I firmly believe they should be crit immune, scepter immune.) We made a significant dent in the Reaper plague and then were forced to engage the enemy team every single time as a full party, which let the Reaper heal back fast.
some of them are crit immune (my Bloodwyrm and Nightmare were not, yet Justus' Reaper was - what gives?)- This meant that last plague I summoned, it melted underneath the attack team before my team got out of the Dis after the first wipe. Combined with the above, the Reaper healed back to full every single time we were re-engaged by the defending team. some of them move more than others - The Blood Wyrm was very wiggly and ran around a lot.. I could have corralled it to the Heartlands myself if Eoghan hadn't put it back where it belonged; the Reaper preferred to join the Kinsarmarian defense team for a camping trip and never left the tent when we tried to move him)
some of them are immune to terrify .. I understand this, but with the aforemention nonsense entrenchment and bad luck on mob movement, we were forced to fight a cleaving boss fight in a one exit room vs. somebody with a raksha band and stonewall figurine, lolololol; #RefundRaksha2018
some of them have way better area maluses- Nightmare's is niche; it makes it impossible to channel instas due to ticking, unavoidable fear.. uncomfirmed if Sukhder Aspect blocks.. no idea what Blood Wyrm's is, aside from being some parasite that likely has to do with how much you're bleeding! Now, in comparison, Reaper is +25% damage taken. WTF? Would be nice to know that when I'm making my decision!
some of them are mini bosses - my Nightmare was not - I was capable of soloing this mob over the course of ~10 - 15m of base shaman bashing.. nor was my Bloodwyrm. In comparison, Justus' Reaper had a neat staredown mechanic that made us sub people out of the room repeatedly lest we eat instant kills; this turned out to make the Reaper the MVP of the night on Magick's side when he cleaved me mid fight.
I'd like the rest of the system to be more transparent; especially plagues and their effects. Transparency makes this system easier to test and iterate on. You're essentially asking me to put a lot of time and effort in to protecting my boneyard so I can... run in to more bugs and massive inconsistencies like above. Soon, we'll be out of bones anyways and this will be a moot point; with only a handful of Champions and most holding veils, good escape skills/broken escape artifacts, etc, hunting them has become a truly onerous task. Gathering bones is a pain in my **** that I'm only suffering because I cannot personally stand not knowing what each plague does. I'm already salty I have to summon Blood Wyrm a second time to test that.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>****, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Okay so all of this is coming from someone who doesn't PK and doesn't like to PK and knows basically nothing about the Champion system, but... Killing that Reaper plague is possibly the most frustrating and boring thing I have done in Imperian in like... as long as I can remember.
My gripes:
That BS cleave is way too random. Sometimes it was jumping targets in the space of a single attack, sometimes it was sitting on people for what seemed like a good minute or two. At one point it didn't target cleave on someone for about 3 minutes. I think if that awful mechanic is going to stay, it needs to have a set timer and very clear messages when focus drops from you as well.
It took like... 30mins or 40mins or whatever (I didn't time it) and awarded nothing at all except much less experience than Behlonoch, who takes about 10 minutes to kill. It was also extremely frustrating because of the constant need to leave and re-enter, and to fend off the defender also. This makes it extremely unrewarding and I think next time I won't bother trying to kill the plague and I will just gag out the war-call spam it gives off.
I feel like the reaper needs to cancel out walls, because with its cleave mechanic it's a massive **** for anyone who doesn't have wings/can escape if defenders decide to plonk those down. Combined with swim rooms, this is super annoying. It annoyed me anyway.
It appears to me that there is no real way to kill this particular plague if there is any sort of meaningful resistance. When we managed to kill it, it was just Twistus (Ilu Justus I promise) defending and even that made it an absolute **** to defend. I can see it being nigh impossible if there was an actual defending party. I can't speak for the other plagues, however Sarrius' one dropped in about... 3 minutes last time which seems really unfair but what would I know.
It seems that it would be satisfying for the summoner to have a mighty plague, but this experience was extremely not fun for those of us trying to kill it. I imagine it wasn't too fun for Justus either, given it was he vs the world.
In summary: Killing the plague was hard, boring, pointless, and unrewarding. Please fix the Reaper mechanics and give me something for killing it.
The reward for killing the plague is not letting them claim the area.
I suspect that once the area is claimed, the plague becomes much tougher to kill, or perhaps the reaper gains a buff when it kills people. When magick stopped the bloodwyrm, we had a lot more artifact clout, and it still took us long enough to kill it that multiple people came back from Dis and attacked us again. They just did so one by one, instead of grouping up, resulting in more easy kills for us.
I doubt that the reaper was really super tough and the other plagues super weak, because that would seem utterly random and weird. What's more likely is that there's some mechanic we've yet to figure out that makes a plague far tankier, for example, if you don't have ANY champions hitting it, or after the 4 hours is up and the area claimed. Rather than assume "omg reaper broken", try to figure out what was different and why this one plague might have been significantly tougher due to the circumstances.
The instakill thing is kinda funny, though. If the walls were in the way, destroying those isn't exactly hard, as most classes have a way to either quickly destroy or bypass walls, and then everyone should have a shard skill to do so, too.
I certainly remember that the Bloodwyrm was pretty unfun to kill. Health would drop in minuscule amounts - we just had the good fortune of not being interrupted once we wiped the defenders out. As I said to you in game, I genuinely don't remember it being hit with a critical, because I remember wondering if it would ever end.
The Reaper wasn't ever left to just suck it up, as we kept coming back. That being said, I don't think a little more transparency about what you're going to get is a terrible thing. Even I feel slightly sorry for Mike in that he's had to go through the pain of it twice to no avail.
So I'm not really calling OP, @Galt - just the inconsistency. Here's the inconsistencies again so you know what I'm talking about:
1. I know for a fact I crit my Nightmare plague when I mopped it up. I am almost 100% you guys crit my Bloodwyrn when I summoned that one. I suspect @Jeremy Saunders asked @Dec why plagues aren't crit immune, under duress of my own whining in fact, and it backfired on me in the form of an undocumented change.
2. Every plague has generally the same amount of health - I measure this based on how much my non-crit attacks did to my Nightmare and the Reaper. The Reaper just died slower because he was crit immune and the Bloodwyrm was not. It does not change my feedback that the amount of health necessary to go through is too high. Imperian doesn't have enough players to deal the proper amount of damage to a plague before it heals back up between team fights. At the team size we had (4v4 or 5v5), we were not making a suitable enough dent. We would have had to sacrifice a single player who could keep the plague awake.
3. The types of area malus are wildly inconsistent. Area-wide tick based fear vs. 'your DPS classes do 25% extra damage' is a pretty laughable comparison. While you're acknowledging that it is a double edged sword, so to speak, why would I ever pick Nightmare? There's no end result that's different between picking Nightmare and picking Reaper - Reaper is just a better plague objectively. It has a better defense mechanism, a better malus, it's actually crit immune, its kills get credited to you..
4. They do not take extra damage from champions. I did the same amount of damage to one as a non-champion as I did as a champion. They also do not take less damage post area-claim. I have tested both of these factors.
5. Your 'doubt' that the Reaper was super tough is questionable. A mob that chooses to cleave people with a suspicious amount of discrimination, in a room full of targets duking it out, is far better than one that actually doesn't do anything special. This is another glaring inconsistency.. some of them are actual encounters, some of them are bland test dummies with huge health pools.
Please assess the situation and look at the detail in my responses and feedback before you assume that people are here to complain for complaining's sake. This is a system with not enough testing. @Zerin put 45m and several deaths in to fighting a buggy boss fight while a Raksha Band owner continued to harass her. She basically did it for science, at my behest. Her feedback as a PvE-oriented player is shockingly important in this PvP system.. because for some unknown reason, our definition of a great PvP system is a 4 hour campfest on a living NPC objective. That's a PvE encounter if I ever heard of one. The reward isn't worth bashing the plague because there is no reward. The 'reward' is only a reward to people like me, who take umbrage with others winning without contest.
@Jeremy Saunders, @Dec - please reduce the number of bones necessary for a plague or something until we can work the kinks out on this system. The 50 bones cost is making it increasingly difficult to test this system for you, and it sorely needs a lot of that. I suspect it isn't really reluctance, you've got Engineer things to do, but we're pretty much in beta for that now.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>****, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Overly esoteric mechanics just punish the exploratory users and make balancing harder. The plague list should at least say things like what their debuff does and their special attack/lack thereof/whatever other bonus.
Sarrius didn't like me putting it so heavy to sects since he isn't in one for whatever reason, I still say that they should be Sect "Rift Heralds" that modifies shrine fights somehow, lasting while it's alive and for 1 rl day per hour it lives. Those are group things already, it'd make it feel like it had a point, shrines need a way to hit them, and champions are already linked to sects when you remember that the 'real' method involves laying on the altar and someone else sacrificing you.
In general I'm not a huge fan of tying one conflict system to another unrelated one, and I'm also not a fan of making membership in any sort of org mandatory (although the ship seems to have sailed on that between highfavours from sects and shard skills being city tied). Beyond all of that Champion is as it stands an entirely individual accomplishment up until the plague summon (which does raise the question, why make an individual accomplishment that requires a team to see through, either go completely one way or completely the other imo). In general if you're going to tie Champion to something it should probably be city or circle (sorry rogues, although again that ship has sailed). I'd also like to see plague binding be worth more than bragging rights, because the massive effort involved deserves more than just 'yeah this one dude in your circle is good at pking I swears it'.
It's not unrelated lore-wise. I wouldn't mind just removing plagues off of champions entirely and make it something sects charge through essence gained by defiling while replacing boneyards with a COME FITE ME arena of some kind, but champions are linked to plagues more tightly than sects are, so I can see the admin opinion being that they stay there. I also don't see a way to keep the Plagues as the doomtrains they are and make it a 1v1. Hence trying to salvage the weird group fight by pushing it towards a group combat system.
just spitballing a way to make it 1v1 would be something like once they summon and bind, they go to an area much like the former greenshard, and for X amount of time they have to 1v1 anyone who challenges via some form of Syntax, if at the end of their time, they are still standing the binding is complete, the area spawns the mini-versions of the plagues and the boss version, anyone who attacks them then give the champion pk reason, and the area effectively becomes their private preserve with a miniboss. At that point I think there has to be a way to remove claimed areas (perhaps another champion trying to bind to that area), and the powerbashers get some new high level mobs/zones and another miniboss to bash. (Yes I recognize that there are massive problems with that as written, but it's an interesting start imo) otherwise just tie it to city or circle and work around it as a team objective, and instead of being Septus has 3 areas claimed it's AM has 3 areas claimed. (as a sidenote the 1v1 version presents the nice possibility of creating a questline for killing the existing plague miniboss).
P.S. I think the failure chance for plague summoning should be removed. There have been so few plagues since the system was implemented that it doesn't seem necessary to have this as a mechanic. I mean, the idea is to incite PK, so it would make sense to let the plague bind each time. It still takes a considerable amount of effort to gather enough bones too, so when all that effort is wasted in 5 minutes, I feel like it might turn people off the system.
This rather behemoth of a man is made of straw and sticks, each piece crafted in a bulky fashion.
His arms are as thick as a tree-trunk, while his torso looks as though it could cast a shadow over
mountains. Hollow eyes peer out from his twisted features, as an eerie green glow spills from his
maw, illuminating the sharpened teeth that line his jaw. Instead of hands, this great creature has
pitchforks, allowing him to claw his enemies with their serrated tips.
The Wickerman almost glows with nearly god-like power.
It weighs about 375 pounds.
It is loyal to Sarrius.
You see nothing in it.
<div>H:339 M:507 R:0 B:9 <eb db> </div><div>The Wickerman takes hold of you and shoves you into his fiery trap, which sears your flesh as the</div><div>flames dance across your body.</div><div>H:339 M:507 R:0 B:3 <eb db> </div>
I'll leave it to you folk to figure this one out.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>****, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Comments
Removal of greenshard in conjunction with CHAMPION CHALLENGE being a yes/no syntax means that I'm probably at a net loss for engagements/day. Greenshards were nice because it forced champions who often ran to stand and fight me, though even that was at the expense of the bone prize. Now? I have to hunt down a champion, challenge them, and they deny it/run. After three strikes, I get a bone and they get to.. go get champion again and we start this all over?
Some suggested tweaks..
BOTH OF THESE SUGGESTIONS FOLLOW THIS LOGIC - IF THE CHAMPION SYSTEM CONTINUES TO REMAIN ENTIRELY OPT IN, THEN YOU ARE OPTING IN TO THE DANGER OF THESE TWO SYNTAXES AS WELL AS THE CURRENT RISKS -
1. Make CHAMPION CHALLENGE function as old green shard, but only on Champions. This powerful 'holding' tool should be the pay off of tracking down and finding a champion 'in the wild'.
2. Make CHAMPION SEEK DUEL - a global syntax that does some neat powerful lore signal that batsignals to every other champion that another champion wishes to battle. However, the identity of the champion seeking the duel should be completely anonymous. If a second person uses the SEEK DUEL syntax, it queues them in to a greenshard battle as above.
Now, ignoring all the glaring problems with this system right now (like "why is this 1v1 combat system encouraging a 4 hour slugfest between groups over a bloodthirsty PvE hot potato?" or maybe "what's the lore here and why is Sarrius not a demonic agent in disguise?"), I'd like to bring something else up: transparency. I think I'm growing tired of the mystery game that is 'guess which plague is good'. Just to illustrate why I'm growing weary of this, here's the x easy steps to Champion Plagues for those not in the knowhow:
1. Become the Champion.
2. PK PK PK. Don't forget to get those bones out of bodies! .. oh, wait, you can't, because nobody's a champion!
2b. OK, nevertheless, there's about 70 bones out there right now! That's enough, right? Loot them bones, baby!
3. At 50 bones, pick your time and place to plague. A sensible person would do it when nobody is online (or do it on the edge of primetime so I have less time to respond, :PJSalt:) .. a madman like @Septus will do it in a beloved bashing area during prime time. Bind that sucker in and buckle up for a 4 hour snoozefest or slugfest! When it comes to 'sensible', I say sensible because the Art of War would advise you to strike when you have the best chance of victory.. yanno, when nobody is online.
4. Complete 4 hour PKFest.
It turns out some of them:
sleep to heal (my Nightmare did not, Justus' Reaper did) - This will come in to play below. Suffice to say, Imperian's age is showing - and its size. Plagues have far too much health to support the amount of players in the average team these days if they're going to be crit immune (and they should - I firmly believe they should be crit immune, scepter immune.) We made a significant dent in the Reaper plague and then were forced to engage the enemy team every single time as a full party, which let the Reaper heal back fast.
some of them are crit immune (my Bloodwyrm and Nightmare were not, yet Justus' Reaper was - what gives?) - This meant that last plague I summoned, it melted underneath the attack team before my team got out of the Dis after the first wipe. Combined with the above, the Reaper healed back to full every single time we were re-engaged by the defending team.
some of them move more than others - The Blood Wyrm was very wiggly and ran around a lot.. I could have corralled it to the Heartlands myself if Eoghan hadn't put it back where it belonged; the Reaper preferred to join the Kinsarmarian defense team for a camping trip and never left the tent when we tried to move him)
some of them are immune to terrify .. I understand this, but with the aforemention nonsense entrenchment and bad luck on mob movement, we were forced to fight a cleaving boss fight in a one exit room vs. somebody with a raksha band and stonewall figurine, lolololol; #RefundRaksha2018
some of them have way better area maluses - Nightmare's is niche; it makes it impossible to channel instas due to ticking, unavoidable fear.. uncomfirmed if Sukhder Aspect blocks.. no idea what Blood Wyrm's is, aside from being some parasite that likely has to do with how much you're bleeding! Now, in comparison, Reaper is +25% damage taken. WTF? Would be nice to know that when I'm making my decision!
some of them are mini bosses - my Nightmare was not - I was capable of soloing this mob over the course of ~10 - 15m of base shaman bashing.. nor was my Bloodwyrm. In comparison, Justus' Reaper had a neat staredown mechanic that made us sub people out of the room repeatedly lest we eat instant kills; this turned out to make the Reaper the MVP of the night on Magick's side when he cleaved me mid fight.
I'd like the rest of the system to be more transparent; especially plagues and their effects. Transparency makes this system easier to test and iterate on. You're essentially asking me to put a lot of time and effort in to protecting my boneyard so I can... run in to more bugs and massive inconsistencies like above. Soon, we'll be out of bones anyways and this will be a moot point; with only a handful of Champions and most holding veils, good escape skills/broken escape artifacts, etc, hunting them has become a truly onerous task. Gathering bones is a pain in my **** that I'm only suffering because I cannot personally stand not knowing what each plague does. I'm already salty I have to summon Blood Wyrm a second time to test that.
My gripes:
- That BS cleave is way too random. Sometimes it was jumping targets in the space of a single attack, sometimes it was sitting on people for what seemed like a good minute or two. At one point it didn't target cleave on someone for about 3 minutes. I think if that awful mechanic is going to stay, it needs to have a set timer and very clear messages when focus drops from you as well.
- It took like... 30mins or 40mins or whatever (I didn't time it) and awarded nothing at all except much less experience than Behlonoch, who takes about 10 minutes to kill. It was also extremely frustrating because of the constant need to leave and re-enter, and to fend off the defender also. This makes it extremely unrewarding and I think next time I won't bother trying to kill the plague and I will just gag out the war-call spam it gives off.
- I feel like the reaper needs to cancel out walls, because with its cleave mechanic it's a massive **** for anyone who doesn't have wings/can escape if defenders decide to plonk those down. Combined with swim rooms, this is super annoying. It annoyed me anyway.
- It appears to me that there is no real way to kill this particular plague if there is any sort of meaningful resistance. When we managed to kill it, it was just Twistus (Ilu Justus I promise) defending and even that made it an absolute **** to defend. I can see it being nigh impossible if there was an actual defending party. I can't speak for the other plagues, however Sarrius' one dropped in about... 3 minutes last time which seems really unfair but what would I know.
- It seems that it would be satisfying for the summoner to have a mighty plague, but this experience was extremely not fun for those of us trying to kill it. I imagine it wasn't too fun for Justus either, given it was he vs the world.
In summary: Killing the plague was hard, boring, pointless, and unrewarding. Please fix the Reaper mechanics and give me something for killing it.I suspect that once the area is claimed, the plague becomes much tougher to kill, or perhaps the reaper gains a buff when it kills people. When magick stopped the bloodwyrm, we had a lot more artifact clout, and it still took us long enough to kill it that multiple people came back from Dis and attacked us again. They just did so one by one, instead of grouping up, resulting in more easy kills for us.
I doubt that the reaper was really super tough and the other plagues super weak, because that would seem utterly random and weird. What's more likely is that there's some mechanic we've yet to figure out that makes a plague far tankier, for example, if you don't have ANY champions hitting it, or after the 4 hours is up and the area claimed. Rather than assume "omg reaper broken", try to figure out what was different and why this one plague might have been significantly tougher due to the circumstances.
The instakill thing is kinda funny, though. If the walls were in the way, destroying those isn't exactly hard, as most classes have a way to either quickly destroy or bypass walls, and then everyone should have a shard skill to do so, too.
The Reaper wasn't ever left to just suck it up, as we kept coming back. That being said, I don't think a little more transparency about what you're going to get is a terrible thing. Even I feel slightly sorry for Mike in that he's had to go through the pain of it twice to no avail.
1. I know for a fact I crit my Nightmare plague when I mopped it up. I am almost 100% you guys crit my Bloodwyrn when I summoned that one. I suspect @Jeremy Saunders asked @Dec why plagues aren't crit immune, under duress of my own whining in fact, and it backfired on me in the form of an undocumented change.
2. Every plague has generally the same amount of health - I measure this based on how much my non-crit attacks did to my Nightmare and the Reaper. The Reaper just died slower because he was crit immune and the Bloodwyrm was not. It does not change my feedback that the amount of health necessary to go through is too high. Imperian doesn't have enough players to deal the proper amount of damage to a plague before it heals back up between team fights. At the team size we had (4v4 or 5v5), we were not making a suitable enough dent. We would have had to sacrifice a single player who could keep the plague awake.
3. The types of area malus are wildly inconsistent. Area-wide tick based fear vs. 'your DPS classes do 25% extra damage' is a pretty laughable comparison. While you're acknowledging that it is a double edged sword, so to speak, why would I ever pick Nightmare? There's no end result that's different between picking Nightmare and picking Reaper - Reaper is just a better plague objectively. It has a better defense mechanism, a better malus, it's actually crit immune, its kills get credited to you..
4. They do not take extra damage from champions. I did the same amount of damage to one as a non-champion as I did as a champion. They also do not take less damage post area-claim. I have tested both of these factors.
5. Your 'doubt' that the Reaper was super tough is questionable. A mob that chooses to cleave people with a suspicious amount of discrimination, in a room full of targets duking it out, is far better than one that actually doesn't do anything special. This is another glaring inconsistency.. some of them are actual encounters, some of them are bland test dummies with huge health pools.
Please assess the situation and look at the detail in my responses and feedback before you assume that people are here to complain for complaining's sake. This is a system with not enough testing. @Zerin put 45m and several deaths in to fighting a buggy boss fight while a Raksha Band owner continued to harass her. She basically did it for science, at my behest. Her feedback as a PvE-oriented player is shockingly important in this PvP system.. because for some unknown reason, our definition of a great PvP system is a 4 hour campfest on a living NPC objective. That's a PvE encounter if I ever heard of one. The reward isn't worth bashing the plague because there is no reward. The 'reward' is only a reward to people like me, who take umbrage with others winning without contest.
@Jeremy Saunders, @Dec - please reduce the number of bones necessary for a plague or something until we can work the kinks out on this system. The 50 bones cost is making it increasingly difficult to test this system for you, and it sorely needs a lot of that. I suspect it isn't really reluctance, you've got Engineer things to do, but we're pretty much in beta for that now.
Sarrius didn't like me putting it so heavy to sects since he isn't in one for whatever reason, I still say that they should be Sect "Rift Heralds" that modifies shrine fights somehow, lasting while it's alive and for 1 rl day per hour it lives. Those are group things already, it'd make it feel like it had a point, shrines need a way to hit them, and champions are already linked to sects when you remember that the 'real' method involves laying on the altar and someone else sacrificing you.
This rather behemoth of a man is made of straw and sticks, each piece crafted in a bulky fashion. His arms are as thick as a tree-trunk, while his torso looks as though it could cast a shadow over mountains. Hollow eyes peer out from his twisted features, as an eerie green glow spills from his maw, illuminating the sharpened teeth that line his jaw. Instead of hands, this great creature has pitchforks, allowing him to claw his enemies with their serrated tips. The Wickerman almost glows with nearly god-like power. It weighs about 375 pounds. It is loyal to Sarrius. You see nothing in it.I'll leave it to you folk to figure this one out.