Shattered Kingdoms

Is Dulrik not a pro player?

ardith, too. I mean, I think you guys have some solid points, but so does Styles. (who might be a veteran player for all we know!) That's all I'm saying. Let's look at things from everyone's points of view. I don't think he's ignorant.

You don't need to play a class to know that something is broken and overpowered.

Nightwing, you're an idiot. This supposed "preparation" you're talking about doesn't exist. It takes about 10 minutes of preparation time to raise an entire army of animated dead. After that you can skip down to the <adhesive medical strip> in <adhesive medical strip> to buy a wand of etherealform if you weren't lucky enough to get one of the favored ones that float around these days. And hell, if you're just straight up lazy you don't even have to arm your wraiths with weapons, they do just fine with wild fighting. Once they hit berserk wild fighting does great damage.

The players of necromancers tend to be able to get hoards of loot back quickly after they die because it is just very easy for them to mow over other players with even minimal preparation.

Also, whatever, Surrit would have steamrolled Alaric. I don't know why any of you are kidding yourselves. My character would be steamrolled by Surrit if I had to sit and fight in the same room without other PCs to back me up. I don't even question this fact.

I think Finney recently made a point against the arms race mentality of boosting one class to bring it up to the level of other classes. That has consequences. It is true that you can balance classes by making them all overpowered, but then PvE gets wrecked in the process, and builders have to put in a ton of work to get the entire MUD up to speed to deal with a bunch of superman characters running roughshod over every area and every NPC in the game. Needless to say, I don't think continuing to improve classes to bring them in line with necromancers is the right method. I think that bringing necromancers down to the level of other classes is the right idea. The whole point of my aside about griffons being allowed to get 50 attacks/round is to show the foolhardiness of this method. While it's true that finally a PC (besides a necromancer) would be able to take down Dianambis solo if griffons could get 50 attacks, thereby balancing out the ability of a necromancer to solo two cabal guardians in under a minute, the point is that none of that should be possible for any one class. Do you think Finney was ignorant when he made that statement about putting a stop to buffing as a means of compensation against imbalance? I don't. He strikes me as a fairly knowledgeable player.

Your contention that these ideas arise from a position of ignorance is immaterial to the discussion. If they were borne of such ignorance, they would be easily discredited, their obvious weaknesses exposed. So far nobody has been able to do that. Is Tragonis ignorant when he claims, and I am paraphrasing here, that playing a necromancer is essentially playing SK on easymode? It is an undeniable truth that necromancers are out of balance with other classes both in PvP and PvE. As I said before, even the tough players agree that necromancers would not be made an inferior class if animate dead were given some sensible adjustments. Necromancers would still be very playable and very deadly in PK. So why not make the adjustment?

I think there is a subtle aspect of this that people are missing. It is true that a prepared, veteran player should have an edge over a newbie in a one on one situation. Generally speaking, they do. Necromancers especially, as they are able to 2-round a newbie into the dirt. I believe they would retain this ability even if their animates were toned down. Let's be honest: a necromancer with one shadowy wight and nothing else is going to own a newbie. The difference is that by toning down the animates, necromancers lose some of their tremendous edge against other veterans. Prepared veterans will be able to better hold up to and destroy an undead army, forcing the necromancer to use some tactics besides "order all bash" and "zap self" if they want to win. There are so many tactics necromancers could use that they don't, simply because they don't need to. Very little creativity is needed to get kills and avoid dying. They actually get applauded for casting a spell in PK because it seems so novel compared to just letting their inordinate melee output take care of itself. This change would alter that, to where the necromancer's opponents aren't the only ones who have to be creative to get the win.

If you go through the logs, you will see necromancers using the same tactics over and over. They try to overwhelm their enemy with melee damage. The only time you see necromancers lose is when they make some glaring mistakes or when their enemies make a creative move to beat them. The necromancers win just by sheer button mashing, and can generally escape when they get outplayed by a prepared enemy (almost always an enemy group, at that).

If he's a veteran player with an opinion worth considering then he shouldn't feel the need to roll a sockpuppet account just to post about how necros should be nerfed again.

Although to Ardith's last statement, I never felt the need to run and hide from necros on my last peacekeeper character. In fact, I actually PKed the only active one into deletion without help from any other PCs.

I also find it absurd to think that a class which can easily die in the span of two order lags can win fights by button mashing.

Why is this brag worthy?

I find it so disgusting.

I wasn't bragging, but merely illustrating that she got trounced so badly that she didn't even want to play the character anymore. I wasn't trying to PK her into deletion. She just kept attacking Exile with hoards of undead, so when I put her in jail she deleted.

My point is that most people just delete their necro once they realize how easy they can be dismantled. People build necros up in their heads so much, and then when they play one, it's awesome: Until someone who knows how to beat them comes along and then they're all of a sudden placed right back down with everyone else, so they delete.

This was a skilled player you were up against, yes? Not some newbie, right?


Just answer this one question. If animate dead were ratcheted down as per one of the ideas in this thread, would that make necromancers underpowered and inferior to all other classes? If the answer is "yes" (lol), please explain why. Everything else is ancillary to this one simple question.

I wish you guys would stop trying to win this argument with "oh, man, I steamrolled this noob" anecdotes.

I've yet to see ONE of you who oppose any changes defend the idea that a necromancer will effortlessly anhillate a player of equal skill of ANY other class 99.9% of the time.

Really?

I'm pretty sure it's been refuted repeatedly.

Rogues, scouts, warlocks, paladins, sorcerors can all pretty easily take on a necro. So can the melee classes in the hands of someone "of equal skill".

I mean, you are ignoring the countless posts by the actual PvPers where they are like "yeah, I tanked that necro played by Tragonis or Peso".

I'd really like for someone to point out all these necromancers who are doing these amazing feats. And then look at that player's history of characters. Edoras played a /gnome/ merc who was probably one of the better melee characters in recent memory. A gnome.