Shattered Kingdoms

For the record I have both played an MR barbarian and been on the receiving end of one.
I agree that prone should not reset stance and should be addressed.

While AoN is powerful, I don't feel as though it is breaking. AoN neither one-shots an enemy nor binds them to the room like plenty of other powerful abilities. In an ever declining game where time invested into a character's tools (potions/scrolls/etc) is rewarded exponentially I find the MR barbarian incredibly refreshing. It is an excellent go to for people who can't spend those immense amounts of time on potions and gear, and it gives them a fighting chance against those who do. And it does these things at great cost to the MR barbarian. The MR build became more desirable as an after the fact. When lots of excellent save gear started getting nerfed/removed, achieving the baseline willpower/fortitude saves necessary to save one's [REDACTED] became more challenging. The MR barbarian then extended its once slapped away hand.

I for one find such claims as AoN being overpowered amusing considering I've yet to see any substantial amount of logs supporting this(I am of course open to seeing these). Know what I see? People (MR barbs included) getting destroyed by sorcerers. If they aren't MR they die to petrification, if they are it is sheer DPS through sorcerer's Charm + Tribunal guard who are both giant strength and hasted. Yet sorcs are fine, right?

I like AoN, when I've had to go against someone with it, it forces me to rethink my strategy and how I combat the enemy. When I played one I knew I could compete because of it. Not to mention the immense mana drain the skill of AoN taken into account when trying to strip buffs. I've seen barbarians superbed at the skill (which isn't easy) spamming their aura against enemies (PC and NPC) and it failing again and again to absorb the magic.

Lest we forget, AoN removes most debuffs from the enemy it hits, not just buffs. AoN also inadvertently reduces potential(what is considered by Dulrik) cheating. The method where one does 7 or so MR trains, has a bard sing songs of magic to reduce the MR, and proceeds to have a sorcerer/priest place buffs on them with a greater chance of success (both through increased caster level and reduced MR). AoN proceeds to purge all magic from the barbarian as well as those he or she is fighting. I like this because if a barbarian wants to use one of their more powerful abilities, they must give up the potential to abuse what is considered a cheat. (I personally think the method is a clever use of mechanics but Dulrik doesn't feel that way.)

The only part about MR barbarians I find OP is the immunity to weapons with magical attacks. This is of course variable to the weapon's level and strength. In much the same way that a fire elemental can be damaged by a fireball higher level than it, so it is for the barbarian. This always confused me because SK is all-or-nothing when it comes to magical attack types. It is either physical damage or magical, which IMO is dumb. I'm used to the elemental damage concept being addressed as additional damage not substitution damage.
For example, instead a lightning sword doing pure lightning damage, why doesn't it do half physical and half lightning? Instead of 2d6 lightning dmg against the target, why not 1d6 physical and 1d6 lightning respectively. This would reduce the anathema to wielding a weapon with a magical attack type and keep MR barbarians from being completely immune to certain weapon attacks (only some of the weapon attack).

TL:DR - AoN is acceptable. Prone resetting stance isn't.

Aura of negation was supposed to level the playing field, but that doesn't jive with the new loot system that got forced on us. It might have been tolerable when the amount of effort required to get a good set of gear was walking to Everclear or Garazul, but now things are skewed drastically in favor of the guy that doesn't have to worry about buffs, consumables (except for mistletoe), one-shot spells like sleep and petrify or doing any of the harder PvE to get geared up.

Either aura of negation needs to go or the imms need to rethink the new PvE progression system, which MR barbarians can skip entirely.

Why do you think it wouldn't? You would have to code the following:
An MR barb's damage rolls get a roll to bypass the damage reduction of sanc and protection (I would presume that damage reduction currently gets handled after the damage is calculated, not before, and not including factors of the attacker)
An MR barb's to-hit roll has a chance to ignore the armor portion of AC granted by the armor spell (I presume right now that AC does not currently take the attacker into account)
Every attack roll made against an MR barb has to make a roll to see if the MR barb gets to ignore the benefit provided from bless/other accuracy spells.
Every damage roll made against an MR barb has to test whether any offensive spells are affecting the attacker, then determine whether those spells get ignored by MR, then determine how much damage to remove from the damage roll as a result.

That doesn't seem like a lot of work and bug-testing to you?

Just because it's easy to describe doesn't mean that it's easy to code.

Compare that to:

AoN is changed to an active skill that, on-cast, targets attacking enemies (same targeting code as blitzkrieg atm)
I do think that it might be more difficult to code AoN only dispelling 2-3 spells at max.

I understand your point of view, Baranov, but what you just described is that the MR barbarian is a good choice for people who want a fighting chance against players who have abundantly more time to play the game than you do. I agree, it's nice to have an avenue that makes you feel like even if you can't play a lot that you can still contribute.

Bear with me for a second, though. There's two benefits that MR barbs get. The first benefit is full immunity to all spells, which is useful against spellcasters and allows you to PvP without instantly losing to I-win spells like petrification, sleep, fear, etc. and be useful in PvE without having to spend a lot of time gathering gear first. I'm fine with that. The second benefit is the ability to dispel opponents, which is useful against non-MR warriors, allowing MR barbs to have something to do which prevents a fully spelled up melee warrior from eating them for lunch due to the disparity in aggressive/defensive buffs. I'm fine with that too.

The problem, however, isn't that MR barbs are competitive. It's the fact that MR barbs are the -absolute best- choice to have against fully buffed up melee warriors. In the current implementation of AoN, an MR barb can stand in the second row with a reaching weapon and spam AoN constantly in order to strip spells from their target in addition to any melee damage they deal with their attacks. There's virtually no recourse to this besides just not fighting against the MR barb. That's the real problem with the current implementation. I like the idea of people that can't dedicate a lot of time being able to still compete, but what's really happened is that the shoe is just on the other foot now: A non-MR warrior now -has- to spend dozens of hours gathering gear so that he can have saves that prevent him from being one-shotted and gather consumables to keep him alive on the front rank, yet he's going to lose all of that work if he gets into a fight with an MR barb in the second rank, all because of a single safe-to-use no-save skill. That's hurtful to the game, not helpful. I can't stress enough how debilitating it is to a front-liner to lose all of their defensive buffs, even moreso when you consider how losing haste/GS actually lowers your strength and dex respectively.

One of your other complaints is that MR barbs still can lose fights against sorcerers because a sorc can just throw a GS/hasted charm with a good weapon against him until he gets lucky. In other words, AoN currently still isn't reliable enough against the guy beating your head in, it's actually MORE useful when you're safely poking a guy with a stick from the second row. My suggestion (Having AoN usable while prone and dispel 2-3 buffs off of your attackers instead of your target) makes it so that AoN actually serves its purpose of leveling the playing field without inadvertently screwing over all non-MR frontliners.

TL;DR: Second-rank AoN actively discourages and hurts the players who spend the most time playing the game. My suggestion allows AoN to even the playing field without creating an overpowered way of dispelling targets from the second rank.

After re-reading a bit, I'd see a change like the on Edoras proposed (the super important parts being ACTIVE skill rather than firing on melee hits and only stripping one or a few affects) as a solid change and a step in the right direction.

Stance not getting reset on prone is critical. Everybody agrees.

Edoras, when calculating tohit/damage, the code already has to process it. Add in a flag for AoN, and bam, it doesn't add it. Or, could be just as easy to to reverse the process. (less lag to stop the code from happening then reverse it, but there might be limitations that would force the latter)

I would be amendable to AoN being a single-target active skill, but I would still want it to purge ALL magic. I mean that's what anti-magic is. You don't walk into an anti-magic room and only lose some of your buffs, you lose everything.
I'm not 100% sure how the decision is made code-wise on what is and is not purged from the target of AoN. As I mentioned I've seen MR barbs struggling to suck up all of a target's magic. It seems dependent on the skill itself.

QFT

I suppose, but I still feel like this might be an oversimplification that would inevitably result in random things not being noticed. Ignoring GS for to-hit/damage against MR-only targets, for example, isn't just a simple calculation: If done accurately, the code would have to subtract the amount of strength that the GS spell is currently providing before factoring in the strength of the person in their own to-hit roll. Granted, I don't know what the code looks like, but as a developer myself, I understand that not everything is as simple to implement as it might seem. I would imagine that to-hit rolls and AC calculations are separate calculations, one from the attacker and one from the defender, and it might be incorrect to assume that everything can be easily gleaned about the attacker and defender in both circumstances.

More uber-mobs with scripts to hunt barbs. Noted, thanks.