Shattered Kingdoms

disguise. polymorph.

Problem resurfaces.

Also, not everyone has unique adjectives, nor can you always greet your enemies. Furthermore, warriors tend to forget names easilly so...

Don't get me wrong, I understand where this can be a problem, but there are quite a few other things to consider.

For one, this will make prepared groups be even stronger vs surprised, flat-footed opponent, as they know who to target while those who were not anticipating an attack are at a loss, and die like flies.

For another suggestion, maybe there could be a limit on how many people from 1 group can attack one character (ie: 2 with short reach weapons, and another 2 with reach weapons. That should limit damage significantly, while at the same time, making healing more appealing in PK (instead of brandishing a staff of damage, or reciting a scroll of petrification as a priest)

Are you even reading my posts? Why would you need to greet your enemies?

If you don't have an enemy greeted, you attack them by using their adjective as a keyword. If you have someone greeted, you'd no longer be able to target them by adjective.

If you happen to have an enemy greeted - fantastic. Just target them by their name. Yes, polymorph and disguise could be problematic, so if you're going to do group pkill, you might not want to use those abilities and save them instead for solo hunting.

That's a legitimate case where I could see friendly fire being realistic. What is not realistic is accidentally attacking your halfling buddy, Frank, that has the adjective gangly, while you intended to attack that gangly giant in the enemy group.

However, polymorph and disguise are at the discretion of the character using them. If you're in a group, you might think twice about disguising yourself in such a way that your own party doesn't recognize you. If you want to be 100% safe, don't disguise or polymorph. Then the rest of your party will see you by your greeted name and won't attack you by mistake.

I will stress that while I think this would be a nice change, auto assist should absolutely remain on pets, and charmed NPCs.

I'm wondering, would it be difficult to code that you can't attack people in your own group? If that was possible, the code would somehow have to bypass the necromancers healing their own pets with normally aggressive spells.

Also... if auto assist only wouldn't work on charmed NPCs and PCs, would that mean that it would work on law NPCs? If that was the case, then maybe having tribunals NPCs in your group wouldn't be such a great idea.

If this was implemented, using a stave to start combat would totally be devastating to your own group as all the melee classes would target the same character and no one in your group would assist.

This change could introduce a whole plethora of problems and if you really want to consider implementing it, there would need to be a whole lot of testing done and tweaking out all possible issues that could arise, because you would in a way be completely changing the way combat works in pvp.

As far as targeting is concerned, disguise would definitely need to be tweaked so that players have a set number of carefully picked adjectives they can choose to disguise themselves as and any pet, tribunal NPC, etc that is in the game should -not- have any of those adjectives as key words. As targeting your foe becomes one of the critical issues in combat you'd need to make sure no one can twink out their adjective and avoid being hit.

I'll refrain from voting now because we're only offering our views on the matter, dishing out ideas and maybe discussing possible problems that could arise. I would be in favor of this idea if certain things were tweaked and it was strenuously tested so that the system could not be abused.

I just hope it won't invite a new era of trigger fighting.

I could go either way on this issue. Order all works fine to make them engage. Most casters will be positioned behind their pets, so if they get attacked, their pets would engage regardless since attacking the second or third rank should make the front rank engage.

That's not really auto assist. That's auto defense.

I see your point now, fin.

Still, I find that no auto-assist on PC's will make surprise ganks more effective than they already are, which is a concept I don't much enjoy.

I like this idea, sort of like how, even if you're front row in your group, if someone is fighting a different group you can't bash/trip them.(I'm not 100% sure how this works, only had it happen a few times, you get the like "Someone is in the way" message)

I'm not sure I follow. It'd require the entire gank group to actively and manually attack the target, instead of just one person attacking and the rest of the group auto assisting.

That'd require more coordination, not less. Unless you're talking about a different situtation/scenario.

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