Holy gick. Four gick guilds = subguilds, 3 gick guilds gone

Drovian removal will have big ripples seems to me.

There are going to be so many merchant/magick subguild combos. So many.

More stuff to further make 0-karma characters bad...

What they're doing is making it more and more important to obsess about karma and staff favor. This used to be a game where you could be amongst the best even with 0 karma, and thus didn't have to censor yourself and walk on eggshells to develop good standing and maximize karma gains. Magicker characters were a separate world and one that you largely didn't have to worry about, because the elementalist guilds were pure mages and thus didn't interfere with most mundane activities (lightshow RPTs aside). Same thing for advanced races, they were a different game mode and karma represented the difficulty of portraying them. It seems karma is now just a representation of "we like you a lot so you get +5 power to your characters."

Now, first with the extended mundane subguilds and then these new elementalist subguilds, a 0-karma character is shit. There's gonna be so many players "competing" with you (either actively in PvP or indirectly in a professional sense) who are vastly more powerful, ruining what was once a very important metagame balance. There are no longer any serious drawbacks to playing a magicker. You don't have to give up the ability to fight or stealth or whatever. Sure, you might not be as strong at magick, but that's a different discussion. The fact is that karma is becoming more and more a thing that you must care about and strive to obtain, which is the opposite of what they've always tried to teach players. It seems really unhealthy for the game.

It's getting to the point where anyone who doesn't have access to this stuff is a DISTINCTLY second-rate player in every way. In the past, lacking access to half-giant and elementalist options meant rather little as these were very unique playstyles with considerable restrictions and limitations, existing in kind of a realm of its own without directly interfering with most mundane players. I don't WANT to think that they're consciously making these decisions in order to get players to fellate staff even harder, but... y'know.

Besides, this seems insanely powerful. An assassin with Krathi buffs, a warrior with Rukkian protection, etc. -- and they can be in any clan, do anything, be just as skilled as anybody else, giving up nothing other than whatever they'd have gained from a mundane subguild. While we haven't seen the spell lists, this LOOKS really perilous.

They should have just removed the whole class system, gone with a skill-picking model like the RPI Engine uses, and then have karma be for races and special roles. Not this shit where karma is just a path to a stronger character with no real disadvantages.

I have no qualms with them fucking with magick. I don't care about magick. I care about what used to be a factor of underrated importance that made Armageddon an appealing game to new players, and an easy game to return to for departed veterans: 0-karma characters were ultimately the most playable, and had the most roleplaying potential. That's gone now. Your 0-karma character is no longer able to become truly great, the power creep has done away with that. That's really sad.

Mundanes are now going to all be objectively worse than any given magicker of the same class. It used to be that you could just be a human warrior and you had the same potential as every other human warrior ever created, and that was so important and healthy for the game. Both for attracting/retaining new players, and for making sure people didn't have to obsess about karma and be so careful with their characters that they were afraid to fucking do anything. The basic options having as much potential as anyone, as the mundane guilds really did prior to extended and magick subguilds, was instrumental in making sure people could relax and focus on roleplay instead of obsessing about currying favor with staff, and being so afraid of doing anything interesting for fear of losing their spec-apped warrior/demigod because they can't stand the thought of having to go back to playing a warrior/hunter or whatever.

I honestly don't understand why they couldn't introduce those subguilds while maintaining the elementalist guilds. elementalists were a big draw to the game for me -- in particular Nilazi, who battle with having incredible abilities while being outcasts. it was an interesting dichotomy overall.

it's kind of hard to see any reason to take anything besides a non-elementalist subguild if you have the karma. if you want to be an elementalist down the line or benefit from it, you can utilize it at any point and have an 'awakening'. otherwise enjoy the game as a mundane.

also don't see the point in removing elkran/drovians/nilazi. drovians and nilazi were probably the only unique aspect of the Arm magick system. every other mage guild was just spells ripped straight from D&D: fly, teleport, fireball, armor buff, strength buff, heal, etc.

whatever remaining interest I had in ever playing the game has pretty much flown out the door tbh.

You think with the subdued gick roles now, do you think they will introduce in the reaches already implemented, make an actual Defiler subguild with Nilazi spells, or do you think they are going to butcher the existing guilds into portions of what they currently are?

No reaches. They just aren't balanced, it's a huge clusterfuck. The reaches made it so that anyone who didn't have them was just massively inferior, and turned everything into an OOC quest to obtain them. People just swapped them back and forth with their OOC friends and shit. It was a total mess and I hope they're never introduced again. A lot of spells become wildly gamebreaking when turned into AoE effects and whatever other shit could be done. Like completely bonkers.

The removed elements are probably just gone. Outside of a few gimmicks that really pushed the limits of acceptability, Drovians were pretty much just walking spycams. Elkrosians were powerful but also didn't feel like they had much real substance as "energy elementalists." They're nothing that the four core elements don't represent already. Nilaz was the only one that feels like a real loss, and that should really have remained as is. It had a place in the game and was an incredible class for generating roleplay. That's a serious loss for the game, unlike Drovians and Elkrosians.

Hands of Wind.

drovians had an excellent niche and major drawbacks. send shadow had some major drawbacks -- in particular taking constant damage in daylight, echoing to a room when you died, and leaving you vulnerable as well as being able to be tied to the drovian. eth was risky as well, as it was somewhat unpredictable about when you'd fall out of it.

i thought elkrosians were a decent class as well. i agree the flavor as 'energy elementalist' could have been improved, but they also had a unique playstyle.

but like I said, i'm puzzled as to why main mage guilds needed to be removed entirely from the game. from the staff post:



sooooo why couldn't this be rectified with the new extended subguild system? if people want to have characters that spend their lives as mages, then they have the option to do it and can supplement themselves with an alternative subguild. if they want to be mundanes that dabble slightly in magick, they can pick a karma subguild and have it on top of their mundane role. I don't understand why having these options is a negative thing or why 20+ years of a guild-based system that worked fine needs to be eradicated but that's Arm for you.