mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Oct 30, 2022 4:00:56 GMT -5
Oh, look, another rushed idea to make the game seem less stagnant at a glance! Except this is going to be one of the most favoritism-laden plans enacted by staff in recent memory. The staff sponsorship requirement basically means that you're locked out of the role if you wouldn't be chosen for a typical sponsored role with some power behind it - except since the player initiates the application, any admin can volunteer to take the player on. So what will happen is: admin signals to friend that a sorcerer slot is open, friend applies for sorcerer slot, admin conveniently steps up to be a sponsor.
Also, since every sorcerer PC comes with an NPC teacher, that's actually two sorcerers in the game, and one of them has the omniscience of staff. Or maybe it will be just one NPC for all PC sorcerers. Some kind of Man from the Plains, perhaps.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Oct 30, 2022 17:47:16 GMT -5
Why the fuck would I app in someone who doesn't know sorcery just to learn it in character? Do these 'blank slate' sorcerers get uber magic compared to regular sorcerers? If so, isn't that just bringing back fullguilds? Why would staff REDUCE their mundane abilities if the intention is to have them be less random-pkers? Sorcerers aren't Pking with their ride and sap abilities they are pking with their elementals and 4 armor spells.
Shouldn't a roleplay heavy game support a random character, who isn't apping in, learning sorcery themselves?
Why would a defiler spend time with a teacher outside of the time it takes to learn how to defile and how long it takes them to kill their master?
Why would a defiler not act as a raider?
Why would staff think at a time where players are talking about how little freedom they have to do things staff introduces the most baby-sitting-esque high karma-spec app required position we've ever seen to date? What says staff support and trust more than -throws dart at board- frequent requests being put in and -throws another dart- being unable to do anything unless your staff pc god lets you.
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Post by lechuck on Oct 31, 2022 0:43:21 GMT -5
Actually, reducing sorcerers' mundane skills is the only sensible part of that announcement. Before this, sorcs were way overpowered. Even with their limited spell selection, combining these with master skills was absolutely gamebreaking. A sorc with invis + fly + master hide literally cannot be found, caught or targeted by anyone, period. It was actually impossible to do anything to such a character. A sorc with master combat skills and a full lineup of buffs was unbeatable in combat. I watched one effortlessly defeat the entire northern military without taking a point of damage, and without actually casting a spell during the fight. He just stood there facetanking the entire Legion, dealing horrendous wounds with every attack, and nobody landed a hit on him.
While the original sorcerers were powerful, there were counters to them. They were 100% reliant on their spells, so if you could find a way to overcome that, they had nothing else. Since changing sorcs to subclasses, overcoming their spells (even if they have fewer than originally) meant you were still dealing with a full-fledged mundane character, one who'd had the means to go anywhere in the world and skill up against the most effective grinding targets on obscure mountaintops and whatnot. I'm not aware of any established sorc being defeated since they changed it to a subclass that could be paired with a mundane main class. I wouldn't be surprised if it simply hasn't happened, excepting ones who died before they could branch and skill up.
When I played in the Legion, the clan practically crumbled because anytime we left the city, we were attacked by this one sorc and we just couldn't do anything about it. There was basically no way of fighting back. I don't particularly blame him for what he was doing, because it was probably the basis of the character concept, and he did go out of his way not to actually kill us; but we simply had no options against him, and we literally had to stop going outside because he was essentially bullying the entire city of Tuluk. In the end, staff had to tell him to stop so that the north could actually be playable, and I believe he got fed up and quit as a result. Tuluki templars have all these special abilities to counter mages, but those were designed back when mages were fucked if you could overcome their magic. When that was no longer the case, sorcs became more or less unopposable. Nerfing their mundane skills is necessary if staff wants sorcs to have some measure of freedom to do what they want.
The way Armageddon's combat system works, someone who's near the top of the combat skill curve can beat an entire unit of characters who are at the typical plateau for clanned people. After they nerfed all the traditional twinking tricks, you can only get to the level of "fairly good but not all that" by conventional means. Becoming a genuine badass requires the means to grind skills against things that mundanes can't realistically fight, or even get access to. Regular elementalists also struggle to surpass the plateau because they generally lack either the tools to reach those areas or the tools that make it safe to grind there. As such, a sorc can reach such a vast advantage in combat skills that the only way to hurt them is via the gotcha mechanics (sap, subdue, poisoned arrows, half-giant club to the head), and at least one of the sorc branches has spells that make you impervious to all of these tricks. It was idiotic, and easily predicted when they introduced the new class system.
Paradoxically, in their bid to make mages more interesting, staff made them far less interesting when they changed the class system. Mages went from spooky, mysterious outsiders to people who were just deadlier in combat because they could buff themselves or blind you or whatever. It went from something resembling traditional D&D wizards to something more like Pathfinder where you dabble in a couple of level of some arcane class in order to capitalize on an overpowered synergy with your otherwise generic warrior character. It's so lame, and magic has been a blemish on the game ever since. It just isn't cool and interesting anymore. It has became nothing more than an exercise in picking the subclass that has the spells that best complement your mundane skills. It isn't any more special than HG strength or access to peraine arrows, and that fact is reflected in the way people play mages nowadays: same as any other person except you can buff your stats or whatever.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Oct 31, 2022 2:31:35 GMT -5
This is a personal opinion but I'd much rather have Dick-Ass the Inix riding scout + Fire mage then them returning to some weird not-full sorcerer but presumably full sorcerer. If they didn't add those and were just doing slight nerfs to their max? Yeah sure whatever the guy still has 4 different elemental ways to teleport me into the sun.
But it seems to me they are making sorcerers like psions in that they had a dog shit 'class' that had reduced maximums but were still full psions
Anyway this does remind me of: The game straight up still wants us to believe people 'learn sorcery to augment their mundane abilities' as the actual lore explanation for the sub-guild sorcerers and that is the biggest slap in the cock ever.
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mehtastic
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Posts: 1,335
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Post by mehtastic on Oct 31, 2022 5:41:30 GMT -5
To be honest I don't have a strong opinion either way on where sorcerers' mundane skills should be at. It seems like there are advantages and disadvantages to both setups, though I lean slightly towards sorcerers having worse mundane skills. Call it a result of them focusing so much on their magick that they neglect their other skills or whatever. It's generally important for Armageddon's game balance that one character can't do everything.
The main reason why I find this change funny is that it's a response to game stagnation... and it effectively makes a single staff member prioritize animating a teacher NPC that exactly one player will meet. It turns the whole "staff work on stuff that multiple players will see and have fun with" excuse for why staff do nothing on its head. They're diving headfirst into favoritism and the playerbase hasn't even begun to see the implications yet.
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Post by lechuck on Oct 31, 2022 17:21:16 GMT -5
I predict that it'll quickly turn into a case of "where the fuck is my NPC mentor? I've been twiddling my thumbs for over a week." Consider how often clan staff go AWOL, or how it routinely takes at least a handful of days and sometimes upwards of two weeks to get a response on any sort of correspondence. Now imagine that your role's progress hinges entirely on that. And not just any role but one that depends on that progress for survival because your character is universally kill-on-sight. There will probably be sorcerers who die because they didn't get a response soon enough on their request to learn some crucial spell.
And then there's the whole can of worms concerning the fact that pretty much all veteran players (certainly all who can be classified as 'movers and shakers') normally skill up much faster than what staff would like to see. You're not supposed to max out mundane skills inside three days of playtime or sit in a cave and spam-cast until you've branched your most important spells, but we all know that this is how you self-medicate your way around the game's ancient progression systems and the fact that it's just boring to play in today's stagnant roleplaying environment until your character has some coded oomph behind it and begins to have some agency.
What happens if you get assigned a sorcerer liaison imm who subscribes to the daft notion that it should take RL months to develop a codedly useful character? You know, the ones who think it's okay to gain one or two skill points per 24 hours played because what you're really supposed to spend your time on is developing relationships with other characters, which they somehow think is mutually exclusive with coded progress. Imagine getting Lizzie as your designated staff overseer.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Oct 31, 2022 22:51:15 GMT -5
I usually hate RP exp and literally Arm is one of the few games that disgustingly needs it.
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