Shattered Kingdoms

This is an interesting change. Definitely look forward how this will change things.

Nice changes. Trip now has an effectiveness to bash it self other than flying or mounted

I know that a lot of people have always asked for the "lag on bashing/tripping a prone person" for a while, but I feel like now all PvP will leave people wondering whether or not the other guy triggered, because there's no way to definitively prove it one way or another if the person triggering is any good at it.

Effectively, reflexes just became a much bigger deal, and by the same virtue triggers just became infinitely more powerful. Illegal or not, this mini-update basically encouraged everyone and their mother to start using triggers.


Dulrik, would you be willing to let the pbase know the general direction that the tweaks to bash/trip/gore accuracy went? Did they become more or less reliable from the person bashing/tripping/goring?

Adding lag to flee and reducing the effectiveness of aggressive stance may not be ideal, but all in all these changes seem better suited to balancing melee in an appropriate way. I've always been one to prefer a buff to balance rather than a nerf, but these are a good tweak to the existing system to incorporate the new stance code. I'm curious to see what bash accuracy looks like now, I'll have to mess around with it a bit.

Completely removing the spam bash playstyle is probably the best of these changes. Buffing the hell out of trip (it almost appears preferable to bash now) was appropriate due to the already-extant limitations on the skill's use.

Fixing the angry spam is a great fix, btw. Definitely one of the more annoying aspects of PvE, glad to see it gone.

Returning to lag on flee command... I'm not sure the game should give preference to quaff word over flee. If anything, there should be incentive to flee instead of quaffing word to escape. Adding lag goes contrary to that idea, and will make people rely on the more potent quaff word escape hatch.

Other than that, good changes. Glad you listened to the pbase about what your last set of changes did to balance in pvp.

This idea is just as bad as recall costing EXP. Now everyone will be stocking up on word of recall since flee has just become effectively useless in most situations as there's very little NPCs that don't give chase. In PvP it may be acceptable allowing other players time to react to a fleeing target, but in PvE.... ruins the option completely.

With trip, it's hard to tell, since having it start using weapon accuracy allows for a lot of variability and makes it a bit of a new ballgame. Bash/gore are a bit less accurate now. All in all, I tried to avoid making big changes to any one thing, in favor of small tweaks in several places. I went a little easier on trip in these changes, because of the additional restrictions on it's use, but I would not necessarily say that it's better than bash now.

Please experience the changes and let me know with more detail where things may need more tweaks.

I agree with this sentence. Even with flee, I managed to get killed in PVE, mainly because I was playing a game of Russian roulette with the three man form in bakemono... two of them bash and one is a barb. I managed to go from the locked down all the way to the cave entrance while dirt blinded and they still managed to catch up and kill me. Oh, they disarmed me as well, that's why I was really screwed! :p

Anyway, story aside, there are some very aggressive NPCs out there that will tear you to pieces if you can't get away fast enough. I think this should be rethought a bit. Perhaps there is some way to put a delay on all npc's after flee/retreat has been used? Long enough to mesh with the flee lag in an attempt to recreate the same time table before the lag change, that way the lag change still has the added affect in pvp.

D, I will echo Edoras on the bash change. I like the idea but as was proven on a certain not to be mentioned site, a simple alias can be setup to bypass the need to be careful with bash. I love it but those without the access to *mud/mushclient/... won't be able to compete due to spam bash/trip can still be used.

Playing a rogue right now I expect this to impact my playstyle, since I use flee (no xp cost for rogues) very liberally to regroup and come back at enemies mid-combat. I'll have to experiment a bit to really say how dramatic the impact is though.

All I ask is that people spend several days of actually playing with the changes before coming here with more change requests. I am not interested in what you expect to happen. Only what you have verified through multiple personal experiences.