Shattered Kingdoms

Good! Perhaps you will start thinking more like a barbarian. But once again, you keep using the word dispel and resistance interchangeably, which they are not.


False. A barbarian cannot activate an aura while prone. If they had already activated their aura and it has not yet been triggered, it can be triggered while prone. As for your example, obviously anything can happen when random chance is involved. The other way of looking at it is that he failed to dispel almost half the buffs.


If the aura triggers at the beginning of the fight (ideal), then the healing often amounts to nothing, since the barbarian hasn't been hurt yet. If the aura didn't work until later in the fight, then the opponent has had multiple rounds of beating on the MR Barb while fully buffed, so the barb is definitely going to need that healing to gain parity. Nobody is forcing you to use buffs that may cause fatigue -- that's always been the drawback of using those spells. Now you will have to think harder before deciding if it's safe to use them.


I have the benefit of future sight. In the past, people also said that you were stupid to make an MR barb. That may not be quite as true now.

Were the opposing sides of this game more evenly balanced class-wise, I'd still say it's stupid. Any warrior class should drop an MR barb like a bad habit, and any team that has a non-MR warrior on their side should just be aware of where to target their melee damage.

That's kind of my point, and you're the one who seems to think otherwise. Removing something on someone -else- is not resistance. It's dispelling. This:

Is not resistance. It's dispelling. On top of that, it's the most powerful dispel in the game, and it's given to the "least magical" class in the game.

I didn't realize that aura of negation couldn't be activated while prone: I was misled to thinking that from seeing bashed people utilize it multiple times while bashed due to it firing more than once. It's still stupid.

The last part is certainly true, but why did you have to do it with such a nonsense skill that has absolutely no precedence in the game and favors throwaway character playstyle?

My gripe here is not as much that MR barbs were brought into "balance" with these changes, but the way they were done so seems to come from a background of someone who doesn't engage in PvP much. For example, if someone else had proposed this idea in Gameplay before the update, the vast majority of the mud would have said "wow, that's stupid."

Obviously, as you seem to be making mention of in that last quote this is your MUD and you can do whatever you want with it, but would it kill you to get a little feedback from the playerbase before implementing new skills, whether publicly in gameplay or maybe getting some ideas from a few prominent players just to see the kind of impact it would have on the game? It would inspire me to vote and play more if I knew that the upcoming features were at least things that the over half the playerbase wouldn't think were dumb or of negative impact to game balance. As another example, losing lighten load from trib members is another thing that this update put in that screwed over a lot of character builds that players had spent hundreds of hours playing: I mean, I'm glad that you mentioned after the fact in the Q&A thread that you're intending to remove held spells as a whole, but it would have been at least nice to get a heads up of that stuff a little more in advance so we didn't log in one day and then suddenly have to drop a hundred pounds of EQ to make our characters viable again.

To get more to the heart of the issue, here's a pattern that I see arising, which seems inherently problematic and generally leaves everyone at least a little unhappy: I'll use MR barbs as an example.

A) People complain about something or suggest something (For example, people complained that while the help files say that barbarians typically don't like magic, there's no benefit to avoiding magic. Or something, I have no idea what started MR barbs in the first place.)
B) You, Dulrik, notice these ideas/complaints and decide to do something about it. (For example, deciding to implement MR trains)
C) You, Dulrik, implement these changes, only that in your head they worked out a lot better than they ended up in practice. (For example, everyone realized that rolling an MR barb was a one-way ticket to screwed-ville).

Lather, rinse, repeat. The same thing happened in this update, when you decided to just wildly buff MR barbs and on top of that even give them the ability to dispel other people. The same thing happened with CRS: It isn't as if the original problems weren't real, or the solutions weren't "intended" to fix them, it's just that the implementation of the new features had problems of their own, sometimes with a cost greater than the perceived initial problem, and the cycle continued.

I propose that there be another little part in between step B and C, where you, Dulrik, at least spitball some ideas for future changes with a few players or through a thread in gameplay, so that A) we can maybe iron out some of the chances for brokenness/abuse ahead of time, and also so that B) We can actually get excited about/not be totally surprised by the new changes. Otherwise it's very possible that you can end up investing your time doing something that isn't going to be well received, or in general could have been done a much better way. I think that would make everyone happier: The players would be more encouraged to take part in the forums, and would also be more inspired to play and vote, and you wouldn't be so frustrated because when you put out a large changelog and someone makes a thread whining one feature, you can at least say "Hey, you had your chance to speak your mind before" and you'll be completely right.

I actually like the concept of the MR barb and aura of negation. I am just against the 100% effectiveness of MR and the ease of dispelling Aura of Negation has even with no MR equipment. I think both need moderation. An MR barbarian should not be 100% immune to magic, and aura of negation should only be super effective if a barbarian has all the MR trains he can get and is completely decked out in MR garb.

My point is that it is using the resistance mechanic, which is completely different from the dispel mechanic. You are putting your resistance into direct contact (or weapon to weapon contact) with the opponent in order to intersect your zone of null magic into contact with the enemy. This is the same targeting mechanism that been used on such other not-so-lauded abilities such as blitzkrieg and spirit horde. The targeting of the individual is different, the spells that are effected are different, the odds are different -- it's not the same as dispel.


It sounds like someone got a critical success on their aura and it lasted through more than one triggering event. Luck is involved.


It doesn't and I've answered why, but you are in rage mode and clearly won't acknowledge it.


Or at least you would have said so. You've been using the word stupid a lot, but it's certainly not being backed by everyone. At this point, other players are backing away from your rage mode persona. You really should play a barb.


Actually, the reminder was that I had told people about it before the fact, giving exactly the warning that you claim you didn't get.

This is the kind of reasoned response that is much more productive. I have never stated that I would not moderate the ability as we see how things pan out. I can cautiously get behind dialing down a bit the 100% effectiveness of MR, but Edoras has not been making the case here that it simply needs some balancing. I'd like more time to see additional accumulation of experience and logs.

For the record, aura of negation went through several iterations before going live, based on play-testing and feedback from multiple sources, some of whom are regularly involved in PK.

I don't have anything to gain from MR being on barbarians. I play an elf mercenary that relies on buffs like giant strength, and haste and sanctuary and such.

Sure some of my allies got buffed from it, but my enemies can do the same thing by having MR barbs. I think that aura of negation is really too new to the mix to make a judgment call on it either way.

I can, however, guarantee that nobody would see a problem with aura of negation if my mercenary were getting her [REDACTED] kicked by this ability every day.

I can also think of several ways to nullify this ability so that the barbarian gets their chance to dispel spells taken away, so I don't see a problem with it really.

That wouldn't happen since it requires you engaging in melee combat with someone who can beat you in a fight.

Ardith has plenty to gain from MR being on barbarians because he sticks Qahz in front of him in every PvP he's involved in unless Qahz is offline. He also doesn't have to fight griffons because he's an elf.

I'd like to hear the feedback from the other players/IMMs who tested this change. I would have thought that maybe somewhere along the line the thought of negating another person's spells without any chance of them resisting would have seemed overpowered. It's already been mentioned that players have gotten fully dispelled on the first try by griffons, which is the one race you've mentioned shouldn't excel at using aura of negation. It seems to work pretty dang good to me.

I don't personally have the time to put towards play-testing aura of negation by leveling up a crappy character on top of the one I'm already playing just to test out a mechanic that should obviously be changed already. I'm just curious if anyone else thinks that aura of negation is as dumb as I do, if they gave it some actual thought. I guess it's about 50/50 judging by the votes.


Ultimately, while I still think the concept is way dumb and is a change directed towards only one aspect of a specific class that still is overall just frustrating to play, (Unless you're a griffon) it should be nerfed. Give the person resisting the aura a chance to save based on prep, limit the number of spells that can be "absorbed," or have it actually, I don't know, have a drawback on the barbarian using it instead of just allowing them to set the thing up anytime they want, even multiple times in a fight if they wish to. Personally, I'd like to find and internet-face-punch all the people who play-tested this and thought "Yeah, SK totally needs more kamikaze griffon-MR barbs, let's make life a whole lot easier for them."