Dulrik wrote:
Yes, it's certainly a feature, even though Edoras is only talking about the potential disadvantage of making play mistakes. It gives everyone - you, your allies and your enemies - the ability to target your undead individually. Obviously this can be a strength or a weakness depending on how people use it. Features that allow variance give more room for tactical play to evolve.
Then I'll remind you, as I did before when I asked for targeting animates by keywords to be removed, that the situation of people needing to target your undead individually and having this help is nonexistent, so while this feature is cool RP wise, it only made the necro class even more annoying to play. In fact, if anything, this feature just makes targeting specific animates even more annoying than it used to be.
The only time that anyone would ever need to target your animates specifically as opposed to hitting a specific type is if they're behind you or in front of you or someone else in your group.
The only people who need to worry about undead being behind you are rogues, and they already have a "A 2.barghest is standing behind your victim, blocking your attack" message. In fact, this is probably WORSE for them, because now you can have 3 zombies all with similar keywords standing behind the necro, but the circle message won't tell you what number zombie they are specifically because they aren't exactly the same. For example, I can have a pale skinned priest zombie, an intimidating priest, and a pale-skinned green siren as zombies, and if I put the pale skinned priest behind me a rogue is just as likely to hit the intimidating priest or the pale skinned siren zombie as he is to hit the one behind me.
As for the animates standing in front of you, unless you have zombies standing in front of you now then you're an utter idiot and are going to die anyway as your undead are going to get 1 or 2 rounded by melee damage or insta-destroyed by holy word, so anyone who wants to target the undead in front of you can just stack an "info" followed by a "c dispel zombie," "c bolt zombie" or "dirt kick necro" afterwards just for good measure.
However, let's assume even the most extreme scenario, where someone decides to use the info command to find out what undead are in front of you/behind you in your group so that they can take see what your group will look like for the first 2 rounds of combat before someone drops a HW bomb. All they will see is a bunch of this.
Code:
[a wraith of a p][a wraith of a p][a wraith of a p]
[a wraith of a h][a wraith of an ][a wraith of a p]
[a wraith of an ][a wraith of a d][a wraith of a h]
Yeah, real helpful there. Even by your own volition, this change still doesn't prevent people from just animating corpses with the same keywords, which is honestly a really good idea for necros nowadays because having to deal with an extra 20 adjectives that you or any of your allies might accidentally hit is going to make PvE an exercise in frustration. However, there's only a handful of areas that actually contain more than 2 GM or near GM NPCs with the same adjectives, and one of them is filled with a bunch of NPCs with the keyword "guard," which is about as likely to get you into trouble as OA is likely to toot his own horn. Can't say I'm surprised that OA jumped on the bandwagon though, since he clearly rolled Utirna just because he couldn't put Surrit in jail on Tari, given that it's a common practice of his to petrify people, then depet/charm/strip them to be taken to Exile's jail. I'm sure that he's glad I can no longer as effectively punish him for using the elite "recite petrification/flee" tactics that got him killed before the change.
I'm not sore because you nerfed my class. I'm sore because you took what was a very neat thematic class that was already very underplayed and drove it into the ground on the advice of someone who had no clue what they were talking about, and you still refuse to acknowledge that I actually -do- know what I'm talking about.