Shattered Kingdoms

Pretty sure that change was only introduced as a balancing mechanism for hedgehog and wolverine stance, which would be completely fine if the swashbuckler couldn't be "knocked" out of those stances if they get bashed, tripped, etc. Qulrokil and Gann pretty much nailed the problem. You get punished for standing front row or attempting to play a tank. Prone resets your stance, magic resistant barbarians negate your buffs from the second row, gear has been nerfed so petrify even from recited scrolls can kill you now much less when cast by a 14 art sorcerer, necromancers with a dozen pets, etc.

You're nuts to sit up front, so it's not surprising there are no tanks to do PvE because the rest of the game punishes you for specializing in weapons that require you to be front row. You're better off picking a polearm or a missile weapon. Or waiting until you age and picking up a tanking specialization with your third slot. Or you just play a magic resistant barbarian and not have to worry about gear, consumables, PvE, petrify, etc.

Yep, that's fair. I guess it mostly comes down to D not having much time to code lately. I bet he'll chime in here at some point. We've been spit-balling some pretty straightforward tweaks to the prone/stance issue.

(Edit: In response to Edoras' post.)

With respect to aura of negation: I've held a belief for a long time that the vision of aura negation can be preserved while still making it much less harmful to the game. The vision of aura of negation was to give some avenue for MR barbarians to take against their natural enemy, the buffed up warrior, because MR barbarians will always lose out to a buffed up warrior on account of how strong buffs are. Aside from the fact that I think that's perfectly fine considering that MR barbarians get total spell immunity, here's my fleshed out thoughts from the last thread I created on the issue.

Right now, aura of negation is too strong IMO for two reasons: It has a high chance to dispel with no cap on the amount of spells removed, and it's also able to applied from the second rank via a reaching weapon. That provides for very little to no counterplay aside from just "don't be in the front rank" or "be an MR barb yourself," because being front-rank with no buffs is a death sentence for any class. The vision of AoN was to give barbarians an option against crazy buffed up warriors, but instead it's actually made it so that buffed up warriors have no recourse against being fully dispelled from the second rank even when they're not fighting the MR barb directly.

I think that A) Aura of Negation should be changed to an active skill in combat, usable while prone, that dispels only the people hitting the barbarian with melee attacks, like blitzkrieg and spirit horde do. That ought to be a rather straightforward code change given that blitzkrieg is already a skill in the game that only targets people hitting the skill user with melee attacks. Balance-wise, this will make it so that MR barbarians have to make the hard decision as to whether it's worth standing on the front line in order to dispel their opponents, as opposed to the current obvious best choice of standing in the second rank while wielding a reaching weapon to full dispel for free.

I also think that if AoN is changed to target everyone hitting the MR barb that it should be capped at the number of affects it can dispel on any given target, although that might be more difficult to code. I think that dispelling a maximum of 2-3 spells per activation is a gracious plenty if the skill can be activated with a 2 round lag.

I think that if those changes are implemented, there won't be a need to add a will save to AoN, which wouldn't make a great deal of sense anyway. I also think that it would much more accurately reflect the danger and feel of entering into the barbarian's "null-magic zone."

That still makes aura of negation too powerful. The benefit of being a magic resistant barbarian is that you don't have to worry about finding armor with fortitude/willpower (which is much, much harder now) and you are immune to all spells. I don't know where this concept of a magic resistant barbarian stripping all the buffs off their enemies came into play.

Yeah, they would have to fight characters with buffs without aura of negation - that's the drawback of doing an MR build. Right now there is no drawback. You don't have buffs - neither will your target. But they still have the huge benefit of not needing to worry about resistances, like willpower or fortitude, and being immune to magic.

The current setup is win-win for MR barbarians. All benefits, no drawbacks. They don't even lose out on healing because of mistletoe. The entire setup is ridiculous and poorly conceived.

I don't think it's a win-win. You're not factoring in that being an MR barb does make you magic immune to negative affects, but also makes you immune to positive affects. Forsaking access to fly, refresh, detections, haste, giant strength, sanctuary, armor and protection/spirit aura is a very, very high price to pay for a melee class, lowering both your maximum damage output as well as completely destroying your ability to tank melee damage. While you can argue that the benefits are equal to the drawbacks with just that, the fact is that Dulrik doesn't feel the same way, and he has a point; Without something like aura of negation, MR barbs get completely outclassed by normal warriors.

My problem isn't with the existence of AoN, it's with the implementation. Since it's inception it doesn't just "even" the playing field with buffed up warriors, it completely skews the fight towards the MR barb's side because of how AoN can be used with no defense or recourse at the current time. Putting an MR barb in the second rank in PvP is by -far- the best choice for any sort of PvP that ever happens. Lowering the skill to only hit people attacking the MR barb and lowering the number of max spells removed would fix the broken-ness of the skill while still leaving MR barbs with a recourse against magic-wielding warriors.

Plus, it would be really hilarious to see an MR barb use it against an army of undead.

Well. Nobody's mentioned the insane power of MR barbs to completely ignore magic damage from weapons yet, which is another HUGE perk. Edoras, what's wrong with MR barbs being worse than other warriors in a 1v1 situation? I sort of think they should be considering how great they are against casters. Right now, MR barbs are the counter to both spellcaster enemies and well prepared melee enemies - which is bananas.

I wish the stance thing were getting more attention. It's such a no brainer to reverse this change. If it was really implemented to "balance" swashbucklers, lol.

To be honest, Qulrokil, I can actually understand MR barbarians having an avenue against spelled up melee fighters. At first I wasn't a fan of the idea because, like you, I felt like gaining magic immunity came with the understanding that you would be sacrificing maximized potential. However, a couple of things have changed my mind, and they ultimately stem from the fact that without AoN or something similar, non-MR barbs will almost always outshine MR barbarians and basically make the build path a joke. In fact, I'm pretty sure that AoN and the magic weapon immunity was implemented in response to the fact that the MR barbarian build was almost universally viewed by the player base as a total joke after its implementation.

There's a couple reasons I say that. One is that fury already gives a bonus to fortitude and will, which are the primary saves that people are worried about. Additionally, after AoN was implemented, berserk/fury was changed to give a BONUS to magical protection as opposed to a penalty, which means that damage-based spells against normal barbs is not as useful as it used to be.

If AoN were simply deleted from the game right now and nothing else were changed, MR barbs would lose way more than they gain with respect to going the MR route, and it would go back to being a very poor build path. It would suck terribly in PvE and be at best situationally useful in PvP. It wouldn't just be the 1v1 matchup in favor of non-MR barbs: It would be pretty much all matchups, because MR barbs will be worse tanks on the front line and do less damage from the second row. If AoN is changed to work against only attackers, then that would mean that MR barb would have the option of risking his own life in order to remove buffs from the enemy, which I personally think is a pretty neat interaction.

I do agree that the fact that MR barbs just take half no damage from magical weapons is very dumb and wrong, because it basically punishes people for going out and exploring new areas to get good gear. I never liked that change and I wish it was removed.

How about this. Instead of AoN stripping all buffs, it only strips haste (reason will be clear later there might be another one/few that fits in the category), but the AoN is a buff of itself that when an attack is made against the barb it ignores all buffs the character has (GS and whatnot) and the barb ignores all buffs when making attacks (Stone skin, Protection, Sanc, and whatnot).

While that sounds neat, Galactus, I'm pretty sure that would be an absolute nightmare to code.

Not really.