Shattered Kingdoms

I dunno man, anyone remember sleep + maledictions?

Not to mention charm person spam pre-nerf.

One of the unfortunate realities of the game is how real-life schedules impact availability for code changes to be implemented. Since the code changes to swashbucklers were implemented, there just hasn't been opportunity for much new code to go in. That just means by necessity that sometimes some changes go in more quickly than others, and sometimes "fixes" go in more quickly than others, and sometimes we're stuck with frustrating things longer than we'd like.

It's also much easier to identify problems than to identify truly effective fixes. Because no aspect of the game exists within a vacuum, every time you make one change, it has a ripple effect across the game, directly and in comparative relation. Any change to the barbarian class as a whole, for instance, affects all PC barbarians, plus all classes with access to barbarian type NPCs (ie- tribunals with leadership, scouts with tame, sorcs with charm, necros with control, etc), it affects the variable difficulty levels of all NPC travel/levelling zones, *AND* it affects mercs, swashbucklers, rogues, hellions, etc from a comparative balance perspective. All of these issues need to be considered whenever implementing any new changes, and usually we can foresee what most of those secondary and tertiary ripple effects will be, but it's impossible to predict all of them all the time. There's also always methods for twinkery and exploitation of such changes that can also often be foreseen, but sometimes may not fully come to light for a month, 6 months, a year, or significantly longer.

Data is most necessary for building a compelling argument for change. I understand and sympathize with the difficulty of that, but the staff is in a position of constantly having to weed through lots of suggestions/ complaints/ etc, and it's astounding how much of that comes directly from rumor, from emotional exaggeration, from extrapolation from a single event, or directly from the butts of one player or another who are flat-out lying through their teeth about a certain ocurrence. Tied up in this is having to discern between the playstyles of the players involved, the nature of the event they're drawing conclusions from, their opponents, the race/ class/ religion/ cabal mix involved, etc. Sometimes you've got a situation that seems completely balanced for years, and then a skilled player like finney gets ahold of it with the perfect blend of accompanying factors, and suddenly it blows up.

For these reasons and others, in addition to all the data and all the feedback from the most skillful players in the game and countless logs and debates and discussions, on some level you just have to make an educated guess, implement the most reasonable-sounding idea, and see what comes of it. Sometimes it's a tremendous success, sometimes it's an utter failure, and most often it falls somewhere in the middle and requires extensive play-testing and massaging to make it right.

If I remember right, the stance-changes were part of implementing the swash stance changes while trying to keep them from being overpowered, and also hopefully trying to help wimp the barbarian/merc aggressive/defensive stanced character-- but honestly my recollection of that is hazy now, so don't hold me to it. I have come to share in your disdain for those changes, and myself see them as an unsuccessful decision that was made. Perhaps they should work in regard to the advanced swash stances, but I think I would not be upset to see the typical defensive/neutral/aggressive stance in regard to prone be put back to how it used to be.




I wasn't a big fan of this suggestion when it was going in, and fought against the original idea. This was part of the final compromise we came to, and I still think it was a good idea. Prior to this change, most spellcasters and the power of spells had become completely ineffectual due to the universally high number of saves that all players, particularly warriors, held on their gear. I think this change was a boost for spell-casters, and I still stand by it.

The biggest issue I had with this change was how it nerfed skins, which is still the only real problem I have with that change. I never saw the thread but somebody somewhere made mention of an idea they had for making skins carry over some innate enchants from their host creature. I actually *really* like that idea a lot, and would be interested in fleshing out specifics for how it could work, and to encourage Dulrik to address it in the near future, when time allows.




Ugh. Don't even get me started on that one. I *HATED* the idea and implementation of aura of negation, and to this day I think I even hate it more than I did back then. IMO, AoN was a horribly conceived and implemented idea, and belongs in the garbage can. But I don't foresee that happening anytime soon, so I just have to eat those sour grapes for now.

I personally advise all players to just not PvP against MR barbs, unless they have their own MR barbs to throw away.

MR barbs put in maybe 10% of the prep time of a normal character and have a completely foolproof way to negate all of the other person's prep.

I still say Mr trains should cap at 50%, requiring Mr barbs to you know, get suitable armor like everybody else.

It's really mind boggling that AoN isn't like, at least a willpower save or something.

Smh.

Caster4lyfe.

I'm reasonably certain of my recollection that the change of "%PLAYER% starts to concentrate." to "%PLAYER% starts to pray." and the like happened within two weeks of someone posting the idea on the forum within the last year. Change can happen quickly.

The problem we face mechanically is that we need data. If the mechanics were documented, we wouldn't need to collect data. We could simulate it, or better yet, just perform the appropriate mathematics on the mechanics themselves. If information (rather than data) were more readily available, potential fixes could be simulated and tested as well.

For example, let's say a proposed fix to NPC exploits would be to develop a suite of scaling mechanics to create advantageous NPCs of various types: different beast races for scouts, different undead for necromancer animates, and a collection of base npc classes and racial templates for charm person. The system could be made very easily to spawn newly-evaluated NPCs that can perform to consistent standards independent of the source material supplied by a builder, bypassing where most of SK's scope creep comes from, whenever they are required. We could easily have the game roll out balanced, systemic approaches to some of the most exploitable materials. However, without even the most basic knowledge such as the true formula for calculating hitpoints, we're left scraping around with bad data and poorly-substantiated information. It becomes more of a rhetoric-based discussion than is suitable.

The only way for anyone other than Dulrik to have any reasonable mechanical SK discussion is to attempt to reverse engineer the process or to make use of staff-based knowledge. Even things like running tests to detect significant deviations from the original ROM hitpoint values risk making a lot of unforeseen errors, such as falsely attributing non-uniform distributions to a modification of the 90% max hit dice mechanic ROM performs before rolling dice.

MR barbarians are fine. People have conflated being annoying to fight against with being overpowered. Log after log after log shows them getting destroyed on the other site, which is the price they pay for requiring less preparation than other builds. Melee in general is fine, too. The real issue is stances resetting when knocked prone, accuracy stacking from multiple sources and haste stacking with speed enchants.

1. Only allow the largest accuracy buff to affect to-hit chance (but continue to allow them all to affect parry, etc.)
2. Remove haste and speed stacking
3. Prone no longer resets stance

You're welcome.

That's because the suggestion just happened to come at a time when the head coder had lots of free time that he was putting into the game.

I think you were trying to refute my information, but you actually just reiterated my point. The implementation of code changes (and countless other things in the activity of players and immstaff alike) are subject to real-life schedule limitations.

Sometimes we have more time to invest in the game and there may be a flurry of intense activity.
Other times we do not, and long periods of time may pass with relatively little change implemented.

Have to strongly disagree with this point as it'd be an inadvertent buff to MR barbs.

That's because the current crop of MR barbarians drag their knuckles on the ground. A single MR barb on one side of the other will destroy a group in group PvP. An opportunist can also play quite effectively solo when finding victims fighting say the guardians in the Chancel, or in a cabal raid. On the PvE side they also make areas like the temple of nightmares a complete joke.

Anyway, as per stances, any buff to bash and trip don't have my support. They're already shown in about 99% of pdeaths in PvP.

A few balance notes:

1) Art should probably be reduced across the board, and the highest casters should only get a bonus of +10. I'm only encouraging a small nerf here. Spellcasters should be more reliant on their spells in the first place. I don't really read logs of spellcasters being successful in PK through magic. I see them locking in a kill with o all bash and letting their npcs do the work for them.

2) Enchant weapon used to only add to-hit, and damage. To-hit was never as potent as an accuracy buff. Also speed was added. I'm not saying that the spell needs to change, but mercenaries and barbarians bread and butter skills need re-evaluated. Berserk in particular gives a perverse amount of buffs. I'm still of the opinion that the accuracy buff to specialize should be removed. This will nerf mercenaries in the melee and ranged game. It'll also make scouts more competitive in the ranged field, which is okay. They don't have anything going for them to begin with. Barbarians could afford to lose both the speed and accuracy from berserk. But that's okay, that's what enchant weapon is there for.

3) Prone should no longer change stance. I'm sure people are going to say I'm being overly dramatic, but this change was on par with recall hosing xps. It's game breaking.

4) There are too many buffs that stack for accuracy. I'm surprised that people even miss these days.

5) Aura of negation needs properly balanced.

Art could be used to shape likelihood of success rather than to directly modify likelihood of success. We could use art as factor in calculating the degrees of freedom in a chi-square function whose cumulative distribution represents the probability of succeeding a saving throw depending on a value representing the defender's relative advantage. You wind up with something like this:



As for accuracy, the solution is extremely simple. When stacking multiple sources, use a transformation to implement decaying returns on multiple sources. All you need to do is go into where the bonuses are summed and add the appropriate transformation into the math. Easy. So easy, in fact, that I'll even give you the formula right here:



First, this expresses each linear bonus as a series of points. +1 = 2 points. +2 = 4 points. +3 = 8 points. etc.
Second, each source's point values are then summed up.
Finally, then we take the results and convert them from points back into a bonus.

In conclusion, this way you get rewarded for everything you can add to the equation, but you get decaying returns for it.

For two sources each varying from 1-5, it looks something like this:


The easiest way to retrofit SK's code would be to change each modification of accuracy to add the point-value of the intended bonus, then slap a layer on top where that sum total point value gets turned into a derived bonus in a new variable or class function not unlike how stat attributes have a class function to report their bonuses. Using this method, penalties could also be scaled into the mix as raw point deductions capable of using all the mathematics already built into SK.

I can say that with my shaman, going from defensive to neutral is absolutely deadly. I go from taking 0 damage from NPCs to far too much.

This change essentially ruined tanking because bash and trip are far too successful! Do not get me wrong, being a shaman I can also utilize this change to my advantage, but I believe it was a bad change in the long run. Tanking is not near what it used to be.

Hell, gear only matters so much when you cannot keep defensive...