Shattered Kingdoms

Okay so this'll be denounced as whining, but whatever. I'll try anyways.

I've been thinking that by themselves these two systems aren't all that damaging. However when they're paired with the new enchant system, the two in tandem is pretty devastating.

Typically a person needs both willpower and fortitude for most of the iwin spells such as petrification etc. With the new enchant system, only innate enchants stack while new endowments only go up to the most one can enchant of one. So a character has 6 slots for saves, 7 if you count the body. Lets do a bit of math.

Lets say you find every conceivable greater mod out there and it has 5, I guess some can have that much if not more. I don't know.. 3 greater fort mods with 5 and 3 greater mods for willpower. That alone is 15 willpower and fortitude and the body slot for 5 reflex for crazy warlocks. Now lets say you manage to enchant one of each of those for willpower and fort, lets say 5 endowments each. That effectively gives you 20 willpower and 20 fortitude. The minimum most people would say you need. 3 greater mods x 5 each innate for 15 + 5 more on one of the items for 20 and then whatever your base con / wisdom factors in.

This is all fine and dandy except finding greater mods. The average player is going to have mods with maybe 2 or 3 enchants. So lets say 3 x 3 mods + 5 = 9+5 or 14 willpower / fort.

That's still quite a bit, but hers the thing. When you take a sorc or something that has high art caps, they're pitting potentially a ton of art vs a little of saves. When you add impairment, things get even worse as you're almost guaranteed to land any impairment spell on the 2nd or even 3rd try now. This is especially devastating when compared with spells like petrification or iwin spells.

Here's the thing. Impairment or art should be toned down. Somehow. The two in tandem tend to be a bit too strong together when you can effectively lower someone's saves while having increased chance of delivering it. It makes enchanting a lot less powerful and creates a scenario of where a person can say..Spam sleep on you and then cast charm. With the lowered willpower it's almost guaranteed to land. Or spam curse or blindness or some other fort saving spell then go for a petrification. The same thing applies. High art + diminished saves = iwin spells get a boost.

One of the two needs to be changed. Art needs to be made less effective or impairment needs to be changed. Perhaps make it affect magical protection so damage spells do something, I'm not entirely sure. The two together however are pretty strong in their synergy.

The bonus to fortitude and willpower from bless is pretty significant now. It is possible to get back to pre-update resistances for your character, as long as you use armor with innate fortitude and willpower enchants AND you take advantage of bless.

With that in mind, I don't think any changes are necessary yet. There is not nearly enough data or samples to make anything but a knee-jerk conclusion at this point.

It's like clockwork with you. Get ganked annnnnd theres a thread. I almost expected a voodoo snipe to be included somewhere in here.

In all seriousness though I do agree that the combination of the two are ridiculous for people that don't have enough knowledge of the game on where to find gear with +saves.

No point posting about voodoo. It's been beaten to death. And me being ganked has nothing to do with this thread at all. I wasn't expecting to be attacked and had my blindness potions up. [shrug] It's whatever. I don't really care anyways. Not like I had anything valuable.

Also it's like clockwork with you too. I post a thread, you call me a whiner.

It's almost like your psychic or something.

The reason that your posts always come off as whining is because of the fact that it comes off as a knee jerk reaction to what happened probably an hour before your original post. Also because you didn't bother to make this thread yesterday, or the day before that, or even the day before that... You made the post the day that you got caught with your pants down and paid for it.

Should impairment debuffs be applied to the casting of petrification, charm, sleep, color spray, FoD, etc? I'm leaning towards no, maybe color spray but that spell is so powerful. I loved it with my sorcs. I think impairment should help damaging spells not 'iwin' spells as the 14 art cap should take care of that already.

If this is deemed a problem (and I'm not saying it is), then there is an easy solution. Art could be made to only decrease saves to zero, but not penalize them further. For instance, if someone had an art of 14 and his victim had a relevant save of 30, the modified save would be 16. If, however, the victim had a relevant save of 10, the modified save would be 0, not -4. In other words, for a caster with a 14 art, his spells would affect anyone with equal probability whether the victim had a save of 0 or 14. Anything more and the victim would start saving with greater frequency. Furthermore, impairment could also not drop the save below zero. The only things that could give people penalties to save below 0 would be racial weaknesses, certain spells like curse, equipment that decreases saves, and low attributes.

It is my understanding that the original intent behind art was as a means for casters to counter the very high saves that people could get. If this change were made then art would still serve that purpose, and would still be very useful against tough opponents with high saves. It would not, however, serve as a means to overwhelm newbies who can't figure out how to get something beyond unenchanted equipment from a store. Veterans would still have plenty to gain by getting high saves, but newbies would not get punished for their incompetence quite as hard. It would deemphasize spending long hours enchanting and make PvP a little less preparation-oriented; the most prepared would still have a significant edge, but the ill-prepared would at least have a chance to contribute or defend themselves. I wouldn't have a problem with that. This would also have implications for PvE. Casters would no longer be able to run over tough yet unequipped NPCs (fytrysks, for instance) with petrification, sleep, finger of death, and so on quite as easily. Those NPCs would pose a greater threat to casters and their groupmates than they do now.

I don't think this would represent a huge nerf to casters. In some ways, they would actually gain from it. Necromancer controls and animates wouldn't go down as fast because they can't save against anything, elementals and charms wouldn't be as easy to dispel, and so on. Casters in tribunals could count on their meat shields not to always get instantly petrified. And, even without the almost guaranteed success that very high art against a very low save gives now, casters would still be effective if their opponents were about 50/50 to be affected by any given spell, which I believe would be in the neighborhood for a zero save adjustment in the case of most spells. Again, remember that the idea behind art and impairment is to offset saves that would make it otherwise impossible to affect someone, not to make casters' spells impossible for newbies to save against.

As a bonus, scouts would get a boost because their tamed pets wouldn't be so easily dispatched by spell casters.

Anyway, that's all if people even think it's necessary to make a change. I think this would be an overall positive change, but I also don't know if it's really worth worrying about right now.

That's already exactly how art works. Also, having a save of zero against something means that you are going to fail against it pretty much every time. Go ahead and see how often a 0 art sorc beats your save if you have average wisdom and no willpower enchants.


As for this OP, D already said that he lessened impairment when the new enchant system went in. If this is related to how you got ganked, your character failed every save except for 1 or 2, meaning that impairment didn't play that large of a role in his death.

This actually has nothing to do with how my character died died. Go read the log if you're interested in that. It's just some random testing I've been doing for a while is all.

Now now, ladies. Save our quarrels for the battlefield ICly...

You have plenty time to maim each other~♫

But reading this, it seems there has to be a balance in Innate and Given Enchants with armor. PK seems to have gotten much more complicated now. Kinda of wondering if its really worth it...