Shattered Kingdoms

I was wondering if this was already the case, since most of my experience with trip is Lathron, who seems rather disasterous at it. I'd still expext Lathron to land more prones than he does, but less than a PC and more than a pet seems reasonable.

From messing around, my impression is that it takes a lot less reflex to avoid getting proned than fort to avoid petrification and willpower to avoid charm. Am I missing something?

I agree with this, and my suspicion as to why, is pretty simple...

Mercenaries/Barbarians don't have art.

I think another issue is that a missed bash is nearly a death sentence.
A good place to start would be to greatly lower the chance becoming prone after a failed bash.

In regards to buffing bash, idk how numbers are working behind the scenes right now. But we could probably get away with tweaking it to make it slightly more successful. Think of a player with fully greater gear (a good mix of will fort and reflex) and treat bash as if they had four fewer runes on it.
So let’s say, for example, they have 20 reflex? Buff bash so that, while they have 20 reflex after the buff, it feels the way it did when they had 16 or 17 reflex, before the buff.
Does that make sense?

Yeah, failed bashes being so horrible is the other issue.

I'd like to see failed bashes perhaps recover more quickly and greater reflex required to save against bash/trip.

Looking at the code, there is the possibility that I was too aggressive with a miss being interpreted the same as a critical failure. I am willing to look into revising a normal miss to be less catastrophic. Such as: you would still suffer command lag but not actually be knocked prone yourself. Would that help satisfy people?

Irregardless of that, I am still interested in feedback about ways to make PK more exciting and particularly my idea about changing recall potions.

This is a major factor in balancing bash, trip, etc. Making them more reliable doesn't actually help mercenaries as much as it does necromancers, warlocks, and other classes that can bring several bashers to bear. Unless, as you say, there is some way to differentiate between the two situations. There are a few ways this could be done. NPCs could just be worse at bashing than PCs. But, now here is where I'm biased as a builder who makes endgame content that is meant to be challenging: I don't want all the bosses to get steamrolled because they are terrible at bashing. I realize that's a bit of an exaggeration, but every nerf to the bad guys runs the risk of making PvE a snoozefest where there's no real challenge and you don't even have to pay attention.

There are other ways to do what you're suggesting. Presently, charming or controlling something has an effect on its stats, such as making it hard for charmed casters to be effective casters. This could also apply to all non-passive skills, making them less reliable when used via the order command (perhaps with the exception of rescue, since it would be very annoying in PvE if your elemental or charm failed rescue even more than it does now). Tribunal NPCs would not suffer from that, since they are not under affects like charm, but at least they are relatively limited and require leadership to use.

Make int affect bash. A smart take down should he more effective than a brute smash. That way charmed things will be worse at it because of the int debuff or charm.

Do not make int affect bash. Giant's, who get bash Innately, have the lowest Int. Wouldn't make sense at all.

Agreed. And giants already have enough problems in the willpower and equipment departments (see: starting giants with 25 STR being unable to wield weapons).

Furthermore, INT affecting bash does not change the two principle complaints players have voiced about bash/trip: 1) proning someone else is very unlikely and 2) proning yourself is very likely (there's the stance reset thing, too, but someone else can argue for/against) that.

I think what Dulrik has proposed to make a missed bash be less catastrophic is a good start but I am unsure it will be enough without fixing the probability to save against it.

ETA:



I have a lot of feelz about endgame PvE that I should save for a different post, but I do think endgame PvE will remain sufficiently challenging even if you can bash all the baddies. Most of the really nasty things still cast their spells when proned anyway, don't they?

But playing a sorc, I gotta say, endgame PvE is mostly already a snoozefest because of null-magic and open air rooms that negate my charms and the preponderance of NPCs immune to petrification and/or magic all together. Dispel is super handy some times, but for the most part, there's not a lot to do in comparison with other classes.

I just want to see more differences in warrior builds. Adding int would boost the none common warrior races and make builds a little different then just hp.