Shattered Kingdoms

I guess me and the majority of the other players commenting on this topic (read: quite a large chunk of the current player base) just aren't elite or knowledgeable enough. I suppose we ought to just git gud dark souls style and tpk groups in unrecoverable locations until we happen to guess right about these secret tactics.

I can confirm these NPCs having ridiculous saves. I remember spam casting curse on the dracolich and not one took the entire fight. Impairment doesn't actually seem to be working, at least not effectively. Replacing a potential melee group slot with a malediction class just isn't worth it. Even if a curse spell landed midway through the entire fight, the debuff to AC would be negligible when you compare that to the lost melee damage.

Quick reply: It sounds like this was misinterpreted, but Thuban was saying it is virtually impossible that the Dracolich made its save 30 times in a row.

I will try doing some tests tonight specifically using your actual characters. Please send my any matchups you want me to try. For example: Karsh using BoG vs Dracolich.

Thanks to OA for translating.

How about you just assist the one shots to be difficult. Quote frankly I think 75 to 85 percent success rate for mastered spells isn't too much to ask considering what we need to do.


Oh, charm sucks, there seems to be a very small range of people that can be charmed, you lose your charm to no magic, and over air, it's kind of only useful as a meat shield or some extra damage, or my favorite coin gathering.

I think general concensus is we think there is something wrong with the game.

I don't think it's /that/ bad.

However everyone is raising some very valid points about the classes. And this has been discussed over and over recently.

Yes, sure, a Shaman /can/ do other things besides maledictions in end-game PvE. They can cast heal. But at that point, why not just have a Priest instead of a shaman?

Sorcs are "useful" but actually contribute very little any more. All our old tricks to smuggle charms past anti-magic rooms (which are an absurdly popular 'challenge' added all over the place in newer high end areas) which used to be a functional band-aid to make up for the lack of melee PCs not always being around have been messed with, and yet Thuban keeps saying "oh but you can still do it!" okay..if we can still do it, why did you feel compelled to change the /old ways/ people had of doing it and changing it to some new trick that nobody has apparently been able to figure out?

Honestly, one of the most annoying things to me lately is the new "transport" items. Things that move one person to areas one person can't traverse, things that only work in specific (rare) types of map rooms that don't exist in a lot of areas, things that only specific races/classes can use.

None of these are actually "useful" they're just "neat baubles to make the person with them feel cool".

Just because you don't know something doesn't mean the only person who does is the builder. Some methods of getting charms past no-magic don't even involve any special items and have been viable for years. Some involve old items. Some involve new items. There are multiple ways to get charms into endgame zones and use them effectively there. What you are doing here is stating completely counterfactual statements and making conjectures based on lack of information. That is not particularly helpful as criticism of game design, and when untrue statements are the basis for a complaint, I can't really consider it a valid complaint. If you figure out the methods (or think up new ones) and still don't like them, that's an entirely different story.

Calling it "perks for knowing a few OOC things" is basically just calling it experience. Generally speaking, people get better at things as they get more experienced.

I get it that, given your present character, you have no real reason to put any effort into figuring out ways to move charms around and get them into endgame zones. That's fine, and with there only being so many hours in the day, I don't expect you to go around looking for that. I'm just saying people who have played sorcerers have figured them out and brought Lathron or Bill along deep into the Outer Planes and endgame zones.



We disagree the sorcerer is extraneous. Like I said, I've seen sorcerers accomplish great things in PvE, and I'm not talking about sorcerers in any one specific cabal, either. There are myriad PvE uses of polymorph and etherealform, and they have spells that do damage, as well as access to wands and staves that can be very useful in PvE. It's just not as straightforward to use one effectively as it is something like a barbarian or warlock, which can often just button-mash through endgame material.


This is another series of false statements. Ask the player of any well-kitted sprite how often they're getting done in by fort-based glow spells these days. My guess is almost never. Griffons can also get good enough saves to do well against those. It's just patently untrue that a griffon or sprite cannot adequately protect themselves against PvE spells, and glow spells in particular. Ultimately, did you prevail or did the glow spells send you packing? I have a feeling it was the former.

I should note that ratcheting down over-the-top glow spells was one of the first things I did as the Outer Planes KD. It used to be that Ephialtis and a few others had absurd glow spells. Now they're more balanced. It's possible you're basing your conclusions at least partly on old data. I'm telling you that if any player puts in the effort to get a good kit (not even close to the best possible kit, merely a good kit), glow spells are not going to be a major headache for them.

I will grant you that casual players will have trouble in the hardest zones. Casual players probably understand this and can build characters accordingly. A casual player playing a griffon MR barbarian will have an easier time than a casual player playing a griffon scout, for instance. I don't think it would serve the game for me to design or retool endgame content based on the capabilities or level of interest of casual players. Again, that's just going to result in zones that bore veterans to death. I hope that the players who have been active in PvE lately get a little rush of adrenaline or sense of accomplishment when they step up to the endgame bosses, put it all on the line, and win. That is the player experience I am shooting for as the Outer Planes KD.



But there are so many different specific party compositions based on specific non-class/race abilities and how they intermix with the class/race abilities, that it is a moot point. Yes, that precise blend of cabal, race, and class abilities was unique and worked well in that situation. But so would dozens of other specific cabal, race, and class combinations. My point was just that what are considered truisms on SK about party composition and PvE are more about what is tried-and-true rather than what is possible. I'm still waiting to see the first necromancer/bard PvE domination team.



A "single engagement with the dracolich" generally involves more than just the dracolich. Previously you said 30 BoGs hit the dracolich? That is what seems highly improbable to me. The main reason I think this is that I always see it take way fewer before it goes down. It is a boss with a lot of HP, but not THAT many HP.



if you've experienced something in game, it means there's the potential you have a log of it. If you think your spears are too ineffective, it is based on this experience. A log of this directs us to your precise complaint against the precise monster in question. Every monster is different and every PC is different. I'm not asking for you to go out and fight hundreds of monsters, but to send in logs of what you have already done so they can be properly evaluated.



The only onus I place on the players is to give us an idea of what their expectations are, because we are not mind readers and cannot do much to make meaningful improvements based on qualitative statements and subjective terminology.



That is a meaningful datapoint we can work with. Are you assuming max art casters here or baseline casters? It's also worth mentioning again how impairment works with this. If the initial success rate is 50%, the success rate on the next casting is going to be higher, etc. A 40% success rate with no impairment means the expected number of attempts for the first success to happen will be 2.5; with impairment, that will drop.




I believe in the philosophy that you design to the extremes, not the average or lowest common denominator. SK on a holistic level works well when it has things that entertain newbies and things that entertain veterans, not merely things that entertain the average player. On the PvE side of things, these don't have to be the exact same things. Given that everyone was a newbie at some point and everyone can become a veteran, it makes no sense to call this elitism. The idea is to appeal to every player, which is the very opposite of elitism.

What you say, that it's possible to make something challenging across the board without making it impossible or boring for either end of the spectrum may be true in theory but, in practice, in the context of SK, I don't know what that magic bullet is. And it may not exist in the PvE realm.



What I mean is things like the dragon quest loot store. It used to have a suit of marginal armor that was kind of useless, but now it has a suit of useable armor and some other useful loot. So you put in the time once to earn access to it, and it is there for you for the rest of that character's life. That's just one example; tribunal outfit is another. There are other things besides these, and there are more things on the way. I think the dragon quest loot store is both a good and quick option. Instead of restarting at 0, you're restarting with something.



You can talk to Dulrik about that. I'm just a builder. I cannot open up the infinite loot and respawn point nozzle. Besides, I will take SK and 3 days instead of 3 weeks to reequip over any of the infinite loot respawn games anyway. That's why I'm here and not there. By the way, who says it requires priests or sorcerers to enchant? That's not true. There are lots of ways around that.



I don't need you to understand my mentality. It is what it is. We're all individual people here.

When I say no characters have found the stuff, I mean no characters have found the stuff. Yeah, OK, maybe Thuban knows IC, but I don't think what Thuban knows IC is very meaningful in the context of this discussion. Everything I build is out there for the players to find. Maybe they'll find it. Maybe not. And maybe if they do find it they'll have fun doing so. Exploring and finding it may not be your cup of tea, but I think I have succeeded in building some stuff you do like. That's about the best I can do: a little something for everybody. That is what I shoot for instead of everyone liking everything 100%. That seems impossible to me.

You could just read the help files. Like the one for shocking grasp. Have you ever wondered if it's easier to knock something (or someone) prone after it gets hit with shocking grasp and, if so, how much easier? I personally think those are interesting questions. There are a lot of nuggets like that to consider in the help files. You can read them and test them with an ally with no fear of a TPK in an unrecoverable location. There are ways to debuff or effectively debuff enemies besides just impairment from saved-against castings.

On this we can agree.



Because shamans can do things like tank and beat stuff up with spirit horde? They can do a few things priests can't do.



The lamp is the only thing that's gone, and that was explained in the punishments thread where its removal was announced. The rest of the stuff is just a matter of game balance and sprucing up the place a bit. I think a sorc was the first person to "fully explore" the newer high-end zone in question (though it hasn't been "beaten" yet). That guy didn't let the anti-magic rooms get him down. He bossed up and figured out as much of the zone as anyone else did before or after him with comical tactics that somehow worked.



What's wrong with making people feel cool? If I can achieve that as a builder on an online fantasy RPG, then I feel like I'm doing my job.

Whether something is useful is subjective. A lot of them have multiple functions and can be combo'd with other items, too. You just have to think it through. You may not be aware of all the items yet or how they can be used synergistically, but I know you are aware of some of them. If you want more useful items, by whatever your definition of useful is, you can post about which items you actually do like in the items you like thread and we can make more stuff along those lines or that supplements them nicely. Which items, both new and old, do you actually use the most? Which do you see other people use that you think are useful? Which do you just like the most for whatever idiosyncratic reason? Go post in that thread and I, for one, will certainly take your feedback into account when designing new items. Otherwise, it's just me building random loot all over the place that I'm inspired to build or that I think fills an appropriate niche, and you guys either like it or you don't. Saying you don't like something is less useful, because plenty of other people may have different preferences for what they want from the game and like stuff that you don't like.

Honestly, nothing at all wrong with it, and you've done fairly good at it, tbh. I'm probably still a bit jaded about the old portal rings and brass hoop and gate-eggs. Sigh. Loved those things.

I can, admittedly, think of some very convoluted ways to combine some of these things. But getting all the items together to /do it/ is a whole different story.

Like sure, maybe the 'transport 1 person' items can be used in conjunction with a certain set of disappearing containers, to move a bunch of people. Even then though, some of the items just....aren't usable by everyone, one of the notable transport items has some pretty strict 'stat requirements'.

And that'd, minimum, require 3 different highly unique and sought after items.

Anyways, I'll keep the rest in mind, thanks.

P.S. I've never been a fan of shamans tanking stuff. But, they can theoretically do it, yes. The problem with it for high end PvE, is they can't rescue, and it's basically required. Maybe work-aroundable with a bard behind them, ofc.

I'm guessing this was before the recent tweak on 12/31. Impairment definitely works, and it's unlikely to take many tries to land a curse on the dracolich, unless you steamrolled the thing really fast before the spell took, or you didn't train any art. Before the change, yes, it would have taken significantly longer to successfully land a curse.