Shattered Kingdoms

Should lose the accuracy bonuses. Specialize should retain the speed bonus, and berserk the damage bonus. It is way too easy to stack accuracy bonuses these days, to absurd levels, I might add.

Phoenix Heart should probably lose the accuracy bonus as well, while we're at it. Fury also needs to lose the speed bonus, or speed enchants need to stop working in conjunction with fury so that it's no longer possible to get 5 attacks with massive weapons or 6 attacks with weapons like pikes on a barbarian.

I'm going to have to disagree.

Because I'm in 'Mercua.

You could also accomplish this by making haste not stack with speed enchants. The numbers you describe above require the barbarian to have haste - I can't get beyond 5 attacks with even the fastest weapon enchanted for speed on my barbarian. My testing suggests that while the "weapon speed bonus" from haste in your affects list disappears when wearing a weapon with at least +6 to speed, the haste is still having an effect. That is, it still gets you another extra attack.

Also, if you're going to nerf #attacks on barbarians, you'd need to do it on mercenaries too. Which would mean dropping the speed bonus from specialize I guess or having specialize not stack with speed enchants. I think the easiest way to reduce attacks across the board would be through the haste thing, though (if you believe # attacks in general need to go down).

This already happened with mercenaries. Barbarians are currently the only class able to get to 6 attacks with a pike or 5 with a massive weapon through speed enchants + haste/fury.

Also, the only reason that you're not able to get beyond 5 attacks with your barbarian is because you trained 9 MR which means you don't get the benefit of having haste unless you spend the time having a guard spam haste on you until it finally goes through.

Yerryn, for instance, can get a ridiculous amount of damage output with his weapons because of the fact he gets the bonus of having the speed enchants on top of the haste spell giving him another attack. This isn't because he has +15 damage, +15 accuracy and +15 speed on his weapons like Peso would probably want most people to believe, either.

Interesting - I didn't know this happened with mercenaries. Is that because speed enchants don't stack with specialize now? That is, if you take a merc specialized in pike, enchant that pike 5 times, and then cast GM haste on them, they don't get 6 attacks? Ardith should know relative to his bill spec. Do you get 5 attacks with haste on your bill now Ardith?

In terms of my 9 MR enchants, I was taking that out of the equation. I did my tests with and without GM haste (just takes a while to get a successful cast through). And I stand by my statement that even when haste seems no longer to be affecting weapon speed (it disappears off the affects list), it does seem to be increasing # of attacks.

Halberd spec'd merc, 7 speed on the halberd, and GM haste, and I was only getting 3/4 attacks per round (second row, aggressive).

So, that seems to be in a pretty reasonable place.

What do you get without haste? What if you dont enchant the halberd? Trying to figure out what it is that's not stacking on mercs. I guess it must be specialize that's not stacking with either speed enchants or haste.

I haven't done any testing since I noted that it wasn't any possible to get 6 attacks with my rapier spec with haste even without speed enchants. It seems like that is no longer the case though.

Specialize should just give a speed bonus, and berserk just a damage bonus considering the wide range of weapons that the barbarian gets at their disposal. That way you use weapons as a melee class, but the way you use them differs depending on class. That, and mercenary and barbarian are way too good, and deserve to be wimped.

Turns out this is not accurate. I just did some testing with a mercenary. You can still get to five attacks with a hasted, specialized merc on a massive weapon with speed enchants. So I assume you can get to 6 on a pike or something. Would be easy for Ardith to verify on a rapier.

So I return to my previous position that if we're going to nerf #attacks, the easiest way would be to make it so that haste does not stack with weapon speed enhancements. In fact it already seems like Dulrik was trying to do this with the way the affects list no longer shows the haste weapon speed effect after 6 enchants. But for whatever reason haste still adds an attack even when it doesn't look like it should be doing anything.