Shattered Kingdoms

Eh, with stacking enchants, everybody who put about 30 minutes into it could have 21 fort/will just through enhancements. 10 more minutes to get gear with just moderate innates (which is so plentiful it's painful) and we're talking 40ish. That's probably absurd.

Yeah, in retrospect, the main reason that people feel like they need to have max enchants to be even viable in PvP is as a result of how oppressive the I-win spells of petrification, sleep and dispel are. If those spells are brought down a notch, then a lot of the current mechanisms of the game are more balanced.

I guess I just don't see how you've decided it's those three spells that are the worst when charm, weaken and voodoo not to mention a certain cabal's spell are essentially just as deadly. Dispel especially is very easy to resist.

It's hard to voodoo kill a target if they're a magically resistant race or without a doll. It's also not guaranteed that you can secure the gear after the kill, and you open yourself up to the vulnerability of being gated to even if it succeeds. Obviously, no one ever voodoos unless there isn't anyone online that could kill them afterwards, which is another point, but though I don't like the spell, it has its limits in my eyes.
Weaken is murderous, but cmon, you aren't going to sit there and say that weaken is as deadly as petrification. If you fail a petrification save, you are dead. Weaken doesn't do that. At least if you have giant strength up in a fight you have to lose that before you get hit with weaken. You also can't double scribe weaken.
Charm has already been nerfed a lot: It has just as long a casting time as petrification, requires concentration to hold it, doesn't impair (right?), a few races are resistant to it, and you can't scribe it onto scrolls. It's a lot lower on the totem pole than petrification.

I don't think dispel is easy to resist: I think that it's just as easy/difficult to resist as all other will saves, and I think that it's way too powerful in its current form because once you do fail it's save once from a GM cast, you're almost guaranteed to lose all of your buffs and are effectively a dead man walking.

In my view, the utility of the class also factors into how strong I think their spells should be. I don't think that anyone would argue that sorcerers and priests provide the most utility in SK hands down, and while shamans do provide some utility of their own, I don't personally think that voodoo/weaken are as much of a balance issue than petrification, sleep and dispel are.

I see people get dispelled a ton by holy word. If you play a priest it's probably one of the best opening actions in a group battle, provided you're battling the opposite aura. Sadly, I see this play made more by lighties than darkies.

I think if you use the adjective "murderous" to describe something that you then shouldn't go on to say that it simply can't be compared to something else.

This is exactly what has been the problem with spells in SK and why people stacked absolute mountains of fortitude and willpower. The penalties for failing a save are far too steep in some instances. People don't stack reflex for the very reason that reflex based spells don't really pack that much punch. However, you stack that against weaken, or petrification and the argument changes pretty quick. While I won't argue against petrification being a legitimate challenge, the reflex based damage spells should be the bread and butter of the way that caster classes land kills. I can't say that's ever really been the case though. At least since the change to how much damage that spells do. There are no more one shot kills from magma spray.

I think that's okay, though. If PK is over too quick then it's boring. And that's where SK is back at now. Warriors can wield weapons that in many cases do way too much damage, sorcerers are destroying characters with petrification and charm person.

Weaken is murderous, but not as murderous as petrification. There's other options to protect against weaken, like having giant strength on you when the battle starts, wearing extra STR mods (does weaken lower peak STR as well as current STR or did only taunt get changed that way?), or just having someone else or yourself casting cancellation/giant strength on you after you get weakened. Also, weaken is not a spell that is possessed by the class with the most utility in the game, but rather is possessed by shaman, hellions and necros, and I don't think that anyone is peeing their pants over a shaman or hellion in the room with them. Let's just leave necros out of it for now, if you roll a necro that spends his time casting maledictions you should have rolled a shaman.

Aside from one specific cabal spell, there's no counterplay for petrification besides the standard "Get fort on your gear." Getting petrified means that you die, and it's very likely that you're going to get full-looted very soon afterwards. Even in the absolute perfect scenario where you get depetrified yet have a friendly ally standing by at the ready with a depetrification scroll, you'd still lose all your buffs, lose your formation, and lose any other charms/controls that you had before you got depetrified. Yes, it is the highest-level spell that sorcerers get, but I think that it could stand to be taken down a notch, specifically against PCs.

Charm person is just as deadly as petrification when it lands on account of how the caster just has to quaff a recall and then have you strip at the stones, but it is much less applicable. Some races have innate bonuses against charm, and charm cannot be scribed and requires the concentration of the caster to be maintained. At least if someone in a group fight charms you and recalls, they've taken themselves out of the fight as well, whereas with petrification a sorcerer can petrify multiple targets in a single fight.

Anyway, that's my two cents. The enchant changes are overall good, but the problem is that petrification, dispel and sleep are just way too deadly to have land on you in PvP, so anyone who isn't lucky enough to be on the side with all the save gear is going to get absolutely wrecked by all the max art sorcerers on the other side.

I don't know about you, bro, but shaman has some mad versatility.

Hellion is fun too.

Only on necromancer did I feel bored. Speaking of which, necromancer has one of the other instant kill spells. While it's not as powerful as petrification (magic resistant races can never die to the spell, unless they're elves; something that should probably be fixed), it's got some one-shot applications.

Oh, shamans are versatile in combat, and hellions are fun, but the point is that neither of them possess the raw utility that a sorc does with enchanting, identify, locate, gate and charm all in one, and on top of that sorcerer is also the top dog in PvP at the moment on account of petrification.

Finger of Death is alright, but is also definitely nowhere near the strength of petrification on account of spell damage mitigation. In fact I'm pretty sure that just the sanctuary spell is enough to save a naked elf from a GM cast FoD, let alone AP enchants, shield and protection.