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Classlead and Movement Changes [BetaTest]
Jeremy Saunders
Administrator Posts: 1,251 admin
I have loaded the following changes to our beta server to test for the remaining of the day and tomorrow before we load them into the game. Some of these items are pretty big, including many of the movement changes. If you would like to help out in the beta testing of these skills, please message me in the game and I can try to let your character onto the server. I can only have 10 max people on a beta machine, so you may not be able to get on when you want to.
I will be working on that server for the next couple of days tweaking everything to get it just right. Particularly the new movement changes. Keep in mind that the list below will probably change before they are loaded live.
Classleads
Artifact - Foreboding Stone: Can only be tuned to one person now. TOUCH STONE <target> and will fade after an hour. TOUCH STONE with no target to turn it off.
I will be working on that server for the next couple of days tweaking everything to get it just right. Particularly the new movement changes. Keep in mind that the list below will probably change before they are loaded live.
Classleads
Artifact - Foreboding Stone: Can only be tuned to one person now. TOUCH STONE <target> and will fade after an hour. TOUCH STONE with no target to turn it off.
Artifact - Wand of Reflections: The wand now has 3 charges and they each use will recharge 60 seconds after being used. In addition, you may only use the wand once per second, including on failed attempts.
Artifacts and Rampage - Backflip: Will no longer work in water rooms even if you have the waterwalking defense.
Brutality - Teeth: Decreased the amount of bleeding.
Clotting (All skillsets): This ability will now strictly take a percent of mana. Previously it took a base amount in addition to a percent.
Curses - Swiftcurse: Flare chance changed to 100% when swiftcursing.
Curses - Swiftcurse: Swiftcurse now has 4 charges, which are used when doing swiftcurse. Charges regenerate at a speed equal to twice the balance used when using the curse. Attacking mobs that are not loyal to players or organizations (guards) will not use charges.
Curses - Swiftcurse: The custom prompt indicator "*c" will display remaining charges.
Enhancements - Cleanse: No longer has a balance cost.
Enhancements: You can now instantly change the enhancements on a weapon with the ENHANCE command. You can put 2 or 3 on a weapon depending on if you have the Effectivity ability or not. In addition, you can string the enhancements together. For example ENHANCE <weapon> WITH TEETH RENDING AGONY.
Chivalry - Purge: The enhancement now causes burning nerves instead of nausea.
Desecration - Germinate: Now has a short equilibrium cost when using the ability.
Devotion - New Ability - Crusade: This attacks works with Weaponmastery attacks and will hit the target with dazzle, peace, or penance.
Devotion - Dazzle: Renamed to Retribution and hit targets with justice instead.
Devotion - New Ability - Atonement: New transcendent insta-kill ability for Templars. PERFORM ATONEMENT <target>
Crystalbinding: Under most circumstances, spinning crystals move to your room automatically as you move now. There is no message associated with this movement.
Curing Messages: The following abilities now have 3rd person messages indicating a cure has happened. Focus Camdus, Heartblood, Kaido Immunity, and Bileshroud.
Maiming - Bloodlet: Now does additional bleeding based on the number of afflictions the target has.
Nightfall - Wraiths: Vigorous and Whispering wraiths now gain charges when you lose health (or mana) and your health (or mana) falls under 75%. Charge can only be gained once every 3 seconds.
Pyroglacia: Removed dizziness from icicles and added recurring freezing instead. It is used with the freezing command.
Pyroglacia and Terratheria: Four new abilities that allow the user to summon elemental minions that assist in bashing in a variety of ways. Check the AB files for FIRE, WATER, EARTH, AIR.
Relic - Aegis: We have reduced the effect of this relic to 15, 25, and 50%.
Sabotage - New Ability - Expunge: Cures a random affliction at a balance and mana cost.
Shamanism - Jinx: Removed from the game.
Shapeshifting - Natureaura: Has been removed as an ability and the speed bonus has been permanently added to anyone in Wyvern form.
Shrines - Perspicacity: You cannot get more than a 1,000,000,000 additional XP from the shrine per game year.
Tarot - Aeon: No longer blocked by speed.
Tarot - Hermit: Now blocked by monolith and similar items if they are in the characters current room.
Thespia: Song messages should use custom harp of harmony messages now.
Thespia: You can no longer sing theraputics, battlemarch, restoration, ward, corescate, empower, requiem, enliven, awakening, or fortify to other players. You now PLAY <song> and anyone you have allied in the room with your, will benefit from that song. You can stop playing a song with the command, STOP PLAYING.
Thespia - Duet: This now lets a character play two songs to the room at the same time. This works with the PLAY <song> change above.
Thespia - Truefeign: Removed truefeign from the actor specializations and added the obfuscation and soulmask defenses instead.
Terratheria: Can now project pyroglacia flood.
Warchants: Warchants now require less mana, the greater your rage. In addition, that displaced mana will be equally drawn from your target. For example, if you shout would normally take 10 mana, but your rage is at 40%, it will only cost 6 mana and drain your target of 4 mana.
Necromancy and Devotion - Piety and Gravehands: These no longer stack. It will only check the one with the greatest chance of holding you.
Necromancy and Devotion - Piety and Gravehands: These no longer stack. It will only check the one with the greatest chance of holding you.
Noctu - Flash: Relapse now gives epilepsy to a target if they do not already have it, and only does damage if the target has epilepsy.
Noctu - WhisperingMadness: The speed defence will now block whispering madness. However, if the target is afflicted with AshCloud, it will bypass the speed defense as well.
Voice - Nuarinyu: Frozen has been removed as a possible affliction.
Wyrmriding: You may now ICEWYRM EMOTE <emote>.
Predator, Assassin, Renegade, and Engineer - New Ability - Disable: When used on a boltthrower the boltthrower will be inoperable for 10 minutes.
MOVEMENT UPDATE
Movement bloat in Imperian in a real thing. Over the course of 15 years, we have added so many skills and artifacts that movement is almost meaningless. Instant movement creates problems. First, the size of the world shrinks down to nothing. Second, characters instantly escape all PvP situations at no risk to themselves. Raiders can jump into a city, cause havok, and zip away at no risk to themselves.
The following changes address some of these problems. This should not be too bothersome for most players who are just playing the game. It will increase your time to get some bashing area to bashing area, but it will make some movement skills and artifacts more valuable. It will make those who jump into PK a bit easier to hold down once they start fighting. One of the big things is reducing the ability to instantly escape PK situations by adding some channels to travel skills.
Here is a full list of movement changes:
MOVES PER SECOND and ENDURANCE
------------------------------
Movement is now directly influenced by your Dexterity and Constitution.
Dexterity determines how many moves you can take per second (Moves Per Second or MPS). Previously this number was out of control. In some cases, 10 or more moves per second. This number, in general, will range from 1 to 5. There is a list below of everything that can change this number.
Constitution now determines how many moves you can take before you need to slow down a little. This number will probably range from 40 to 60 if you have a couple abilities or artifacts. We will call this Endurance (E). This number regenerates by 1 point every second. There is a list below of everything that can change this number.
Example: Imagine your character has a MPS of 3 and an Endurance of 50. You can move 3 rooms per second until you have moved 50 rooms and which point you can only move 1 room per second. (Actually, the number is higher than 50, as you are regaining one endurance point per second while moving).
NOTE: These numbers will be adjusted and effects changed as we test this out in beta.
MPS:
----
Base Rate is determined dexterity. Note that "2" was the previous base rate in the game.
1-9 : 1 MPS
10-11: 2 MPS
12-13: 3 MPS
14-15: 4 MPS
16+ : 5 MPS
Effects that reduce MPS to 1:
Ethereal Chain
Ethereal Shackles
Green Shells
Beast Card
Red Apple
Spatium Flying (If you cannot fly via other means)
Windstorm Rooms
Other Modifications
Crisp Apple: +1 MPS
Rigidity : -2 MPS
Calfshot : -1 MPS per effect level.
Health Modifications
50% Health: 1/2 Total MPS
25% Health: 1 MPS
Endurance:
----------
You can use *E to see your current endurance in your prompt.
Base Rate is determined Constitution.
1-10: 15
11 : 19
12 : 23
13 : 27
14 : 31
16 : 35
17 : 39
18 : 43
Abilities that modify endurance:
Mounted: +10
Fitness Celerity: +5
Armband of Celerity: +5
Devotion Celerity: +5
Shadowbinding Fleetness: +5
Enslavery Nin'kharsag: +5
Beans: +5 per level
Other cases:
Pathfinding Compass: +10 while using pathfinding
Landstriding: Negates all endurance costs your affinity environment.
Roads and path environments half endurance costs
TELEPORTATION SKILLS
--------------------
In addition, all major teleportation skills now have a short channel on them. This channel time increases substantially in most cases if you have taken some type of PvP action (not PVE).
- Movement: The following skills now have a 1-second channel.
- Wayfaring Relic
- Sect Pillar
- Shard Mark
- Bonecasting Raven
- Runelore Raido
- Shapeshifting Track
- Wyrmriding Track
- Tarot Hermit
- Terratheria Windtrack
- Movement: The following skills have a 5 seconds channel if you have been PvP aggressive in the last 60 seconds.
- Wayfaring Relic
- Sect Pillar
- Shard Mark
- Bonecasting Raven
- Runelore Raido
- Terratheria Windtrack
No changes were made to these instant abilities. This is because they are random, require set up, or a very situational.
- Sect Removal
- Nightfall Shadowtwist
- Rampage Mirage
- Spatium Warp
- Spatium Vortex
- Tattoos Brazier
- Tarot Empress
- Telepathy Travel
- Telepathy Wrench
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Comments
Otherwise, re the piety/gh stack: were others left out eg blackvines, the noctu one, blizzard? And can germinate be combod or is it standalone now?
Germinate works as before, it just has a 1 second eq time after being used.
Outside of that I like the changes though, looks cool.
* If someone wants to test it, the combo that should give haemophilia with no prep is combo slash shred (slash first) with a teeth enhancement and a non-artefact longsword.
Can it be used off balance like other Desecration stuff?
1. Do Predators get Expunge in addition to Shrugging, or does it replace it?
2. Does the Enhance swap in Weaponmastery replace the ability to fight with two swords?
3. How does DEVOTION - CRUSADE work? I don't see a classlead for it.
4. Is there a counter to Sabotage - Disable? For example, will Engineering - Repair make it operable again?
Like a daydream.. or a fever
2. I don't think it "replaces" it, but I am not sure I understand the question completely.
3. Classlead 535 for the most part. But I may tweak it slightly tomorrow.
4. No, but that is a good idea. Will play with that as well.
I wanted to release this tomorrow, but we may wait another day for these little changes and a couple more.
On second combo, teeth proc, but that seems easily defeatable by clotting to full between combos.
However, after getting my strength up to 14 (base athletic) and whetstoning my sword, I still can't get the combo to fire. Armor doesn't matter for bleeding at all, I get the same bleeding whether I'm wearing fullplate or nothing at all. However, the longsword I've been testing with is serrated light, which is probably the source of the problem, as 25% is a significant chunk of damage. Sadly I can't find a serrated sword that isn't also light in any shop
I know about lich, that's how I've been able to match my strength to what baseline Athletic strength would be.
This is an aside, but out of curiosity, what's the point of double wielding longswords? Enhancement cooldowns are per person, not per weapon. When I was playing DK two years ago, I had 2 swords, a light/serrated one with teeth/agony to build a bleed stack and heavy/infused one with soulquench/fleshburn/negate to burn down. That was also the reason to play clever DK because soulquench/soulstorm damage was controlled by your intellect. Don't know if that's still the case.
Anyway, the real point though, is that I don't understand the philosophy of having the bleed requirement on teeth where it is, or why have it at all for that matter. It seems unduly punishing to less than optimal statpacks and weapon setups. Trigger requirements on other enhancements make sense to me, the general philosophy behind them is that if you are able to get a strategy rolling, they will then, ahem, enhance your strategy.
The problem with teeth is that unless you are able to trigger it on your first swing, there really isn't anything you can do to step into it. So you have a very binary situation where you either have the statpack/gear combination to start a bleed strategy rolling or you don't. If you are not playing the right combination, your bleed ramp up isn't slower, it just doesn't happen.
I actually sort of do understand why it was designed that way initially, because without some limiting boundary on teeth, you could step into a self-ramping bleed cycle from the first swing, but that was addressed with the change to teeth in this classlead. And the developers clearly don't think that a teeth/shred on the first swing is bad, because with the right stat and gear you can trigger it no problem. The only reasonable rationale might be if the developers think that an on-demand activated shred with the speed of light is unbalanced, but even that's dubious, first of all, because light combo is a whopping 0.09 seconds faster at a cost of significant bleed loss (so your bleed build up would be slower, especially now, with a tapered teeth - that's your trade off), and secondly, you actually can probably stack enough strength to trigger teeth even with light longsword and you can certainly do it with an artifact one.
Anyway, classlead just went live so it's too late for all that, but just something to think about.
Aegis.
While I definitely think 50% is too strong for L3 still, it doesn't solve the core issue of disparate effect of sanc/defiles that skew it more heavily to the defender than just "I get to fight in this position I probably fortified with helpful relics nearby for at least twice as many fights." It should reduce sanc amounts by the same level, at least.
Currently Germinate can't be used off balance. Is this working as intended or should I bug it?
The endurance changes while good also have some drawbacks especially aimed towards the higher geared players.
In my samples I ran today...I did my normal Necropolis runs and each time I was constantly having to sit to regain my endurance back. I don't care about having to stop and catch my breath/and I understand the need for some form of monitor on movement speeds. Though given the low tier health pools mobs have and the speed at which a person of Tyden's artifact/stats/etc bashes at I find the process of having to constantly sit/stand or just constantly catch my breath to be a bit on the overkill side of things.
To be absolutely clear: I do not mind resting/sitting, in fact I welcome the change to endurance. However, it feels that my high end character is suffering extremely hard due to how effortlessly it is to kill mobs. Take what you will from this post, but figured I'd chime in some.
I am going to wait to suggest possible tweaks, mainly just wanted to state my experience.
Edit: I have 111 endurance mounted
So basically, its the light longswords that are problematic
This means you can be wielding longsword #1 with enhancements A and B at the same time as longsword #2 with enhancements C and D and get all four enhancements proccing against the enemy.
Germinate is using 1.2 second of eq per seed.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/4QtyqAzA
Doesn't let you "hotswap" enhancements by having ENHANCE [weapon] WITH ENHANCE1 ENHANCE2 replace previous enhancements - you still need to cleanse before hand (but maybe that was the intention?)
My suggestions were just going to be looking at some environ changes in hunting areas (Making the middle line of Necro path would do a lot, for example) and making the E gain from bash exp to not punish grouping. Then this weirdness with extra commands that people are going to be confused about and not really stopping me from making it to basically anywhere within my E bar? Bleh
tl;dr this version of the movement changes could have been implemented by "Make everyone move at 3 MPS." I dun like it.
The last version of endurance was fine. You wouldn't run out unless you did something like try to speedwalk across most of the continent, and even then, it wouldn't slow you down much. Once endurance on kill was added when bashing, that meant you'd hardly feel it bashing, unless you had a very iffy system and ended up speedwalking around an area with next to no mobs. Then you might actually run out of endurance.
The last version did what the changes were meant to do: Cut down the top end of speed without making movement too painful. Yes, if you were used to fully arti'd up moves per second speedwalking, you'd probably feel a noticeable slowdown, but not by much. The one exception to this was speedwalking with a pathfinder compass, which unless I'm mistaken, could hit 9 rooms per second. That was ridiculous and needed to change.
I get that for some people 'QoL' and convenience are everything, but sometimes you have to accept that a change that inconveniences you is still good for the game overall. If you can't do that, you're going to have problems playing any multiplayer game.
I was one of those fast-moving people. I took full advantage of that. It was kind of fun bashing, and gemhunting, and just getting around - But I recognised that it made the world feel too small, that it made travel skills and artifacts less valuable and it also meant people just couldn't keep up with people who had both the move speed artifacts/skills and good scripts. I don't feel the current iteration of endurance goes quite far enough in terms of slowing people down and I'd personally like to see it go back to what it was before, with the following tweak:
- Base move speed of 2 average rooms/second when low on endurance.
Those that abhorred the endurance update didn't even give it time to settle in before kicking up a loud fuss, it feels like.