Shattered Kingdoms

Sounds like Ardith is scared of IG because his enemies learned to use it. Now he's pissed off about it and QQing that it needs to be changed.. suddenly.. after a decade.

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

I doubt it's that simple of a synopsis. As Syn pointed out, he can just go to diamond which will more than make up for the IG, and I'm pretty sure he knew that.

There's an incomparable amount of BS spewed in this thread, and all of it is Ardith trying to get ironguard nerfed so that he can annihilate iron-weak clothies with his crossbow specced merc.

The spell is called IRON. GUARD. It does one thing. It GUARDS against IRON. Yeah, it does a good job of that. It sure had better otherwise it'd be a stupid waste of a spell. It's already received a nerf from its original incarnation, in that it used to give 100% protection regardless of level. Now, it's level based and you have to gather, brew, and burn a high-level vial in order for it to mitigate a noticeable amount of damage.

Sure, guards in most cities use iron-based weaponry, which means they aren't very effective by themselves against someone with ironguard. This seems like a good idea to me, in that it encourages actual prep before trying to rambo into a city. Even then, who the heck has ever actually gotten ganked by solo gate guards anyway? This is a pointless argument.

Some of you might say "But it's dumb that I can completely mitigate an entire racial weakness," but that's probably because you've never had iron weakness used against you in PK before. It sucks hardcore. Anyone who's ever played a iron-weak cloth class against just one person who uses iron bolts or iron daggers for circle stabbing will tell you that if it wasn't for ironguard, their character would be absolutely useless. Ironguard doesn't protect you any more at all against non-iron based weaponry, which means that all it prevents is you getting 1-shotted with iron circle stabs or 2-3 rounded with iron crossbow bolts; Instead you get 2-shotted with circle stab or killed in 4-5 rounds with crossbow bolts just like every other clothie. Every iron-weak race besides half-elf anyway has other inherent weaknesses with no spell to mitigate them, so it isn't as if ironguard removes all penalties from playing as an iron-weak race. It just makes them actually useful.

In addition, anyone who's ever played a melee character with iron-weakness knows how much it sucks to lose a fight because your opponent simply did 50% more damage than you. Half-elves, sprites, even elves and deep-elves have a hard enough time just being on even footing with humans already, they don't need any less incentives to be played as melee classes.

So no, Peso is not right in this thread. Nerfing ironguard more will just mean that cloth-based iron-weak PCs will be absolutely murdered by ranged combat with absolutely nothing they can do about it. As it stands they already have to quaff high-level IG, and then they're at least closer to even footing with every other cloth-wearing race as far as ranged combat goes.


To counter-point some specific nonsense statements:
No, nerfing ironguard would not weaken your character, not at all. You play an elf merc, which is different from every other merc in that elves A) suck on the front row, and B) can retreat with almost no penalty. Your merc is never on the front row unless you're about to recall or are dying, indicating by the fact that the log snippet you posted in the OP was when you should have recalled, but instead died. On the other hand, your merc is specialized in crossbow and carries around iron bolts all the time, and spends a heck of a lot of time shooting iron-weak races. Funny how you somehow seem to think that nerfing ironguard will totally nerf your character.

No, elf merc is not insanely good. The only thing that an elf merc is better at than a non-elf merc is retreating, and the one thing they're worse at than every other merc race is staying alive. They suck on the front rank, their CON is bad, and their STR is bad, not even taking into account their weaknesses. The only weakness you mentioned here that can be mitigated at all is iron. Brewed ironguard will never mitigate 100% of that damage, although it will mitigate most of it. It's also definitely a weakness if in order to not get screwed over in PvP you have to always quaff a high-level vial that another PC had to brew. One thing you cannot brew against as an elf, however, is negative energy weakness. You might say that FoD is trash but that sounds like a load of crap considering that you posted a log of your elf merc getting brought down from 100% to 22% in one double FoD scroll on two resists. Yeah, really trashy. Negative energy weakness also means that you're straight up screwed by any weapon that has a life drain attack.


tl;dr: If you don't like ironguard, then don't use iron weapons. Nerfing the spell would just completely screw over all iron-weak clothies and absolutely all melee iron-weak races.

I'm just gonna stop you right there. There's lots of ways to add survivability/mitigate iron weakness that don't involve a spell that makes you completely immune to iron damage. There was this front-row, light armor sprite a while ago (not going to mention character name, since evidently that's a faux pas these days) that went toe to toe with a +10 damage, cold iron massive weapon (before the most recent downward tweaks to the weapons) and didn't get faceripped without ironguard.

This is the part where you say "But you had other buffs so that doesn't count!" and then I'm just going to reply with "Uh, yeah, I did, that's kinda the point." There's more than enough DR buffs out there that the existence of a single one that just completely immunizes someone against something they're supposed to be racially weak to is brain damaged.



This quote also makes me laugh. Show me a single cloth class that is meant to be a beast tank against any kind of weapon. Don't want to be squishy? Play something that doesn't wear cloth armor. Oh, but wait, you do play a cloth armor class. That probably accounts for your desire to be wtfinvincible and still have all the utility/NPC zerg that is supposed to be the balance to squishiness.

Are you dense? Are you [REDACTED]?Dear OA: When you only quote the first half of a sentence you look like you aren't even trying.

Also, your sprite had GM-level spirit aura, which by the way, doesn't mitigate circle stab or ranged damage and is only available to shamans. Way to go.

Rofl. My sprite shaman laughed at Tolene's ranged damage, and it was iron based. I think I took a total of about 7-8% over four rounds of direct fire from iron bolts.

EDIT: Also, SA absolutely does affect ranged damage, it just doesn't reflect it back to the shooter.

Shamans also can wear light armor and have access to shield block, which means that if they go defensive with a shield up they're going to just about ignore ranged damage: And your 25 dex size tiny sprite shaman was almost always defensive if I recall. Try doing that as a cloth class without shield block and see how well you do against a frenzied iron-shooting merc.

EDIT: We can agree to disagree on SA affecting ranged damage. I haven't tested it, but there are no messages to indicate that it does so.

The problem here comes when you would think to use iron legitimately against a front-line class of a race that's weak to it, and, already having to deal with heavy armor, sanctuary, protection/spirit aura, etc., you also have to deal with ironguard munching away at most of the damage...

Not that big of a problem, granted, but it is what it is.

Also, last I remember, Youma took way less damage from ranged with spirit aura than without.

If it were to be nerfed, I think it should only negate any extra damage from racial weakness.

Note IF it were to be nerfed.

Sure, but using iron weapons against most heavy-armor classes is a bit of silliness anyway: although Dulrik did change the weapon deterioration code (which I'm very grateful for), an iron weapon is likely to degrade in quality against bounty NPCs before you ever encounter your target.