Shattered Kingdoms

Taunt needs a 3rd victory option which does not include the combat lock to increase its success rate. Similar to disarm where you fail disarmed, disarm and send flying. Only Fail taunt, taunt to attack you, taunt and lock in place. Keep in mind a swashbucklers place is next to another class they are not 1v1 fighters. Rogue,swashbuckler combo is high damage. Swashbuckler caster can be just as deadly if they have low to mid saves. Swashbuckler archer is another combo that make for a pain in the backside.

I believe Dulrik has made it pretty clear before that swashbucklers are supposed to be a warrior class, in line with merc/barb. They are not an adventuring class. They should be able to stand toe-to-toe with mercs/barbs.

As it stands, a swashbuckler in top tier, armor protection enchanted things, doesn't tank PvE half as well as a merc in crappy tanso, and is lucky to live 3 rounds in PvP.

Another problem with heckle as a band-aid, it does not help with multiple opponents. A swashie would be dead before he could even try to heckle two characters, whereas it's not difficult to imagine a merc/barb living through the duration of a bash while attacked by two opponents.

There have been some perfectly succesfull swashbucklers. I think these improvements are good to bring them up to being truly on the level, but I also think the bad rap they get is somehwat due to poor play.

Would you agree, though, if they were able to stand toe-to-toe, the no-flee power of taunt must drop?


I have a suspicion you play swashbucklers often and a lot.


Also, Dulrik:

Now that they got a buff, can we make cha affect taunt more heavily to mirror the 'charm person' spell?


Both in terms of effectiveness to land and also the duration by which you remain taunted?

I'd like to see swashbucklers having to rely on high cha rather than high str, if you get my drift. Such as having the difference between the success of a 15 cha and a 24 cha taunt be massive (way more of a valley than it is now).

You know that triggers is overkill for this, right? Is there a client that exists which does not let you redefine the actual color represented by $1 to whatever you want? Even base telnet will do it for you on most platforms.

You don't like Dark Blue on Black? Use the color slider in your client settings panel to make it lighter or change it to Ultramarine or whatever else. Ultimately all I've forced on you is 1 of the 16 color settings. Each of those settings can be whatever you want.

Heckle relies heavily on charisma.

While I won't say everyone is wrong, I do see everyone jumping to conclusions (as usual) after having less than 12 hours to try out a new feature. Unfortunately, these conclusions set the conventional wisdom, which is then self-fulfilling.

Heckle is both fast to use and potentially powerful. I think it's more than a band-aid. But unlike the days of the past, swashbuckler is no longer parry/riposte with no useful active skills. You will actually have to follow the pace of combat and use your active skills in order to be successful.

As always, I reserve the right to change anything after a few months of play. After all, this swash update is a calm and measured response to the swash update seven months ago.

I actually use $1 for a few rare events. However, I don't want to see it every time I trip, rally or taunt.

That actually sounds like a great move to an 'active tank' set up.


I'm also glad we're making them more cha reliant and less str reliant, as that would get us into barb/mercenary clones.


Neat. Is there anyway that players could be part of the "beta testing" process on this? Some of the stuff that changes we can't tell at all because we don't know what we should be looking for and also the actual values are obscured from us (by design, I'm sure).


If possible (because hey let's just ask more stuff from you, haha) could we also get more detailed patch notes? Akin to how they do on modern games?

Heckle is a pretty nice skill, with the right amount charisma it makes a good difference and in honesty, it makes bringing a swashbuckler along for adventures a bit more viable because they can help the tank essentially tank better because heckle doesn't force the target to focus the swashbuckler. So with this, it makes it harder for your tank to be hit and increases everyones accuracy against the target since it has a lower dodge chance...

I'm in favor of adding a downloadable code snippet that gives 256 colors in mxp mode. Not sure what would best fit with the codebase, though, but there are several pre written snippets for it floating around.