Shattered Kingdoms

Is it totally wrong that I couldn't quite resist posting this? Lol.

Looks like a good patch. Anticipating much feedback on prone.

The magma change is nice, and keeps the spell from being funky.

I'm curious about how much of a difference the prone change will make. I recall a while ago how Dulrik mentioned that the difference between defensive and neutral was being overblown with respect to how much of a difference in tanking it makes, and the playerbase in general disagreed pretty strongly. I wonder how much of the perceived difference between defensive/neutral was in response to the fact that the prone accuracy debuff was tanking people's parry chance.

Unless the accuracy debuff somehow was affecting shield block/dodge, I still find it hard to believe that the prone nerf will make tanking less painful but I am certainly curious.

I have always been curious about the contradictory nature of defensive stance. The help file states that the stance reduces accuracy which would mean that your would have a penalty to parry, but appears to increase various defense bonuses.

This is a good point. Back in the day, the penalty was being made to your "to hit" bonus, which was purely an offensive stat. Then "to hit" and accuracy (which has both offensive and defensive applications) got rolled together into one attribute, but was still being used in most of the same places as a de-buff to offense. I'd have to double check what the code is doing now, but probably could use some additional thought and tweaking.

Are there plans to adjust prone status to not reset stance? The accuracy reduction of prone was never the issue. The issue is that stance is reset to neutral by the prone status, this leads to an onus on being a front row character (tanks/swashbucklers). I strongly recommend keeping the accuracy decrease to prone status and remove stance reset. That way trip and bash are still useful as an accuracy debuff, but are not effective "I win" tactics against front row characters. This would also lead to encouraging front row characters tanking (PvP and PvE).

There are further plans for tanking and proneness, yes. This was merely the first step of an effort to make things more balanced and interesting, and you can expect more changes as Dulrik has the time to implement them. Retaining a higher accuracy as a tank does have some mechanical implications, especially for people who are in the front rank without a shield, so this can be seen as a minor relative buff to all of those types of characters. Even shield users will parry better than before while prone, which means many traditional tank builds will be slightly improved. As an aside, what you may not be aware of is that the accuracy penalty for being prone was out of line with other conditions that penalize accuracy. It is now better balanced with those; it's bad enough being prone without also having your accuracy destroyed.

What determines the 2nd stick of liquid hot magma? Are the chances fairly low?

I presume from the code change that magma now always does full damage on a failed reflex save.

Magma only clings on a failed reflex save, but before this change, it also always did half damage if you were clung, and reflex basically didn't matter after it clung first. It made it so that once you got stuck with magma, you were guaranteed to always take half damage. It was quirky and counter-intuitive.

Now, if you fail a reflex save, you always take full damage whether it was already clung or not. I would presume that it doesn't cling again though. Probably doesn't even reset the cling timer.

Presumably resist elements still mitigates damage, as "prevents magma from clinging" is clearly no longer that valuable?