Shattered Kingdoms

I understand why you can't use "order all" to order tribunal guards around. However, this feature means that when you are dirt kicked/blinded, you can't order guards the same way you can order pets. Is there an IC reason this is the case? It's hard to imagine that the slug you bought for a platinum is smarter than the elite champion sworn to obey your orders. From a realism standpoint, it makes no sense to me that you can't order guards just because you can't see them.

That being said, obviously any change would affect game balance and considerations to game balance should be given priority. If there were a change so you could order guards even when you were blind, that would be an obvious buff to tribunals. I don't think it would be overpowering and imo cabals have the upper hand on tribunals anyways. I'm not suggesting letting "order all" work for guards, though. I don't think that would be a good change.

What do people think?

Either letting you order a target guard like you could a consumable or having "order all" work for whatever guard you have in your group would be nice.

I can see targeting guards through orders even if you're blind, similar to how you can quaff and eat pills. That would be pretty nice.

Order all working for guards most certainly shouldn't work, of course.

Also although it's off-topic I wouldn't necessarily agree that cabals have the upper hand on tribunals. Ever since you could carry guards into enemy territory and spam funnel guards into attackers of your trib, tribunals are extremely good for utility and also giving you a large upper hand in city warfare, especially offensively. Not to mention that cabals have relics which can be ganked by lamers, whereas tribunals have no counterpoint to that at all.

I would like to see order by position work on guards with the same success rate as deafness provides. Your blindness might make you shout your orders in the wrong direction.

I think the current set-up is fine. Blinding your tribunal enemy is a good tactic to make sure that they cannot order a guard.

I think it is fine as is. I would do anything to discourage NPC wars.

It's effective, I agree, but it doesn't make any sense from a realism standpoint, and it's inconsistent with the way ordering works for all other kinds of NPCs.


@Edoras
Tribunals have more convenience than cabals because of the accessibility of buffs and NPCs that can gate and such, and tribunals can engage in city defense without getting attacked by the people they're defending, but cabal abilities are so jacked that at the end of the day, I'd definitely say that cabals have the edge. Especially when you consider how extremely easily tribunal guards are neutralized (draw them from range or just flee from battle and they will leave their group, and of course they're easily petrified or otherwise dealt with via spells). The skillsets available to cabals put characters on a whole other level of efficacy that tribunal characters do not approach, imo.

This change would make it so that there is one fewer way to neutralize tribunal guards, and while it would certainly buff tribunals, I don't think it would make them more powerful than cabals.

As far as the NPC wars complaint goes, tribunals don't get awesome powers. Instead they get tribunal guards to keep them competetive with cabals. I think taking away one of the many nonsensical ways of neutralizing guards would only do more for letting tribunals hold their own against cabals.

On a side note, it's also [REDACTED] that the peacekeeper marshal has such little discipline that if you throw a stone at him and run away, he'll completely abandon his superior officer in enemy territory. Obviously, Lazeran, Tylinda, and every other tribunal guard can only be understood as having uncontrollable rage issues. I know changing this would introduce more balancing issues, but the complete lack of realism in this aspect of the game is laughable. The whole leaving the group to report crimes when you are trying to re-engage the enemy is pretty annoying, too. I'd rather have my NPCs be lower level, but actually behave in some way that can be explained ICly.