Shattered Kingdoms

There are some that subscribe to that arena of thinking: Personally, I feel that a change like that will greatly encourage the use of triggering, even though it's illegal. I actually like the fact that, barring a missed bash, it's possible to lock someone down completely without the use of triggers at all. It gives incentive to the person willing to lay down the first bash.

Been there. Done that. With the implementation of prone, bash is highly overpowered. An amateur level skill that locks a victim in combat for three rounds, prevents a myriad of actions, and lowers weapon accuracy. Not only that, but one can spam this skill without lag, even sneaking in a heal,heal pot before the victim regains his footing and being ready for another bash. The prone victim, however, is hit with a massive lag for even attempting to queue commands.

Bash is the most used non-auto skill of any class. OH WAIT, anyone worth half their salt will be using a pet/tribunal NPC/charm/dominate/elemental that will bash automatically. Guarantee going into ANY fight that a bash will be attempted and often times, succeeded.

You do realize that before the implementation of prone, bash made you take 50% more physical damage, you were prevented from taking any actions at all (Your connection was actually lagged), and it was still spammable, right?

Prone actually made spam bash able to be escaped from.

Perhaps what I should have said was "even with the implementation of prone".



O all rescue self is pretty handy, true. But spamming bash is still tried and true.

This part was the part I was focusing on. It doesn't really bother me that people can spam bash agaisnt their prone opponent to try to bash at the earliest opportunity. What I don't like is that when I get knocked onto my rump, I have to wait and time my ability to happen as I stand (Unless somebody uses rescue on me), while my opponent doesn't get punished for not doing the same thing.

I'm certain there's a reason for this feature, and as you all know, I'm not exactly the brightest when it comes to game mechanics. I'd just like to know what the reason is, so that next time I get knocked down, I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I learned something today.


Another thing I fail to consider is the use of triggering. Since I'm not very proficient with my client, I forget about all of the things people can do who are good with theirs. This raises another question: How prevalent is illegal triggering at the moment? What percent of the playerbase do you (any of you) think is using illegal triggers?

A trigger for flee or quaff word that fires when you regain your footing is obsolete against spam bash.

3-8% maybe using illegal triggers. From the pvp logs I've seen, I haven't seen too many coincidentally timed events. Note: Not saying that there could be more, totally anecdotal evidence.

I think that hardly any of the playerbase uses triggers as they are. However, if the only move that is anywhere close to guaranteed for keeping someone disabled and securing kills (bash) were changed so that triggers would give a definitive upper hand, then I think that trigger usage would become more prevalent: And probably only in the PvPs that made a huge impact on the game.

The way things currently are, the person bashing doesn't need a trigger because they keep priority if they are spamming bash. For the same reason, someone who is prone against a bashing PC doesn't benefit from a trigger because even with perfect timing they wouldn't escape before someone spamming bash had a chance to bash them.

However, if things were changed so that the basher was lagged as well, then every single bash would come down to a timing contest: And it usually takes multiple bashes to kill a PC. As a result, both the person bashing -and- the person being bashed would benefit tremendously from using a trigger to bash or escape a bash, and neither person would be able to know for certain whether or not their opponent was using a trigger. It'd be impossible to know whether or not any kill using bash was legitimate or not, and anytime that someone got "lucky" and happened to hit a bash or escape from one with really good timing, people would cry foul.

I've seen this side of things because I've played a lot of casters who had to perform all their bashes through orders: Whenever someone flees from a bash milliseconds after they regain their footing, there's always that nagging thought in the back of your mind thinking "Were they cheating, just that one time?" I'm sure that anyone who's played a sorcerer, necro, warlock, scout or anyone else who orders bashes has had that feeling before.

I know that one argument is "Well, if people trigger bashes, then they'll just get deleted," but it's nigh impossible to prove triggering unless an IMM is actively watching the PK and also logging timestamps: And even then what if someone just got straight up lucky on their timing and then ended up getting wrongly deleted for using a "trigger?" The only real way to catch someone for certain would be for an IMM to activate the trigger themselves by echoing the regain footing message... but if I got an IMM-echo that said "You regain your footing" in the middle of combat I'd probably think it was legitimate and try to quaff recall myself.


To sum up, I oppose bash having lag on part of the basher because it would A) Greatly increase the benefit of using triggers in PvP, B) raise the question in every PvP of "Was my opponent really cheating?", and C) be impossible for the IMMstaff to police effectively, unless they spent their entire time doing so. IMMs have plenty of more important things to do.

The way it is now, bash = win

Imposing bash lag would = trigger battles.

Eliminating prone command lag = spam battles.

Put some form of randomization on the lag for both sides, it will be much easier to catch people with triggers if you don't know the exact lag each time someone is getting up or losing bash lag.