How do you feel about the upcoming class changes.

Those aren't details.


They really should just go with the system used in the open source RPI codebase:

- You can pick x amount of skills to start with
- You can learn new skills through use/teaching
- Individual skills are capped by relevant stats, like [sneak = 5x agi], [subdue = 3x str + 2x agi]
- Total amount of possible skill points is determined by wisdom
- Characters of a given race get the same general amount of total stat points
- Stats are rolled with minor variance and are heavily customizable, just not completely deterministic

It's just better in every way. Who the hell thinks a rigidly class-based system is most realistic or balanced in this day and age? It brings a slew of problems and no real benefits. It belongs in hack'n'slash games and the 90s roleplaying scene where people didn't know better.

On SoI/Atonement/Parallel, the skill system was frankly perfect. You could design your skillset to exactly suit your character, and the limitation on total skill points meant you couldn't just become a god at everything. If you wanted to be the most muscular dude in town, you didn't get to have the same finesse with a sword as the most nimble dude in town. If you wanted to be the nimblest dude in town, you didn't then have some chance based on pure luck to also be the strongest, toughest and wisest dude in town. If you wanted to be good at a wide range of things, you couldn't make wisdom your dump stat. It was a thing of beauty.

i peeked at the gdb recently. nessalin seems fairly active coding so I honestlyu wouldnt be surprised if this is him wanting some sort of 'coding' thing to do for the game. programmers tend to be a lot like this, I mean he's been the main programmer for decades now so almost every 'code' change you see he will have his hands in it.

I doubt the players wil have much say in it though.

This chart is literally the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen, related to Armageddon's staff plaintive attempts at world building or class design.

this looks like something someone would make who had no idea how to design a game system, or even an RP atmosphere.

They have basically looked at the current state of Armageddon guilds and decided that the solution to their problem would be to make a whole bunch more guilds that are even shittier than Pickpockets.

It also makes it harder for a player to grow over the course of their character.

How fucked in the ear do you need to be, or have any experience whatsoever with the game, to think that adding classes like 'Miscreant, Laborer, Craftperson, Artisan, or Fence' is going to excite anyone. Those all sounds like 'a Merchant or Pickpocket, but way worse'. 'Adventurer' and 'Pilferer' sound like shittier Burglars.

They've got 18 proposed guilds up there, and about six of them might actually be doable, which is surprise surprise, roughly equal to the number of mundane guilds currently allowed.

Also, 'Craftsperson'. Whoever came up with that has been fucked in the ass at some point in their life, I would wager money on it.

Here's how someone with any sense would have divided the guilds:

Take Merchant, and build it into the new Dune Trader and Artisan guilds. Dune Traders get a bit less crafting skills, but more survival and a tiny bit of combat. Artisans might get...well. Who knows. They pretty much just exist for tinysex anyways. So maybe backstab. I kid.

There's a vague argument to be made, that Assassin, Warrior, Burglar, and Pickpocket, might be able to be re-configured into three guilds that are a bit less stupid. Perhaps something like Assassin, Thief (a slightly less combaty Assassin, but with burglar skills) and something like an Enforcer, which would be sort've close to an urban warrior. 

Then you can probably take the other half of Warrior, and make a more wildernessy/archery/ridey Raider, but without all of the extra skills that Rangers get.

In this new version of the mundane classes, Rangers and Assassins are largely left alone, and the other classes raised to their level.

The chart doesn't even make sense given the current list of skills.

Soldier is a light combat class? Is there a role in the game that relies any less on non-combat skills than a soldier? What else do they get to compensate for being 'light combat'? Knowing the staff's traditional disconnect from real gameplay, it's probably shit like the laughably useless search skill or armor repair or something.

What's a miscreant class supposed to be? Few of the criminal classes have names that match the way anyone actually plays the game, save that we can probably surmise that enforcer is some kind of warrior with sap. Infiltrator sounds vaguely like burglar, and pilferer is the only one that sounds like it has good steal, but the names are so vague that you can't be sure. Nothing looks like the backstab+poison class.

Fence? What can a fence class possibly have besides hide, sneak, value and haggle? Why devote an entire fucking class to the practice of selling stolen goods? Has anybody in the history of Armageddon ever had the job of a fence and wished for a class devoted to it? It's a role that has literally no skill requirments. It's like having a 'cook' class. Or, if fence is actually the high-steal class, it's like having a wildly misnamed cook class which is in fact the best animal hunter.

What the fuck is a stalker? What would they have that a scout doesn't? Is there any value whatsoever to a wilderness stealth class whose place in the combat spectrum is below 'light combat'? Is this just a pure stealth and perception class or something? A Zalanthan Steve Irwin? Surely it can't be the designated hunter class, being so low on the combat rankings.

Laborer. Ah yes, the role that nobody has ever played. What is this, a class with apprentice bludgeoning plus stoneworking and forage? People will line right up to play that, I have no doubt. Maybe this is the class for players who want to quit the game but also wish to leave behind an NPC on Miner's Road for people to remember them by.

Was the merchant guild so overpowered that it needed to be split up into three classes? Do craftsperson and artisan not get ride or what?

Adventurer? Surely that one was just rammed in there to make the grid line up right. A non-combat wilderness class that isn't really a crafter? What do they get, ride and climb? What sort of adventuring can possibly be done without combat skills? 

Most of these classes sound like subguilds, and shitty subguilds at that. Diluting the already pathetic criminal guilds into even more classes makes you wonder if Armageddon's traditionally barren criminal scene is something that staff endorses. Is warrior so versatile that it makes sense to split it up into four classes that all fit under the same umbrella? Is there really room for five wilderness classes when we previously had one and a half?

And what the fuck did they do to assassin? I can't imagine it's stalker, the wilderness merchant-combat mix class. Surely it's not enforcer, the criminal heavy combat class. Can't possibly be miscreant, pilferer or fence. Infiltrator? What does infiltration have to do with the assassin skillset? Judging by the chart, it almost has to be infiltrator; but if they made infiltrator the new assassin and pilferer the new pickpocket+burglar, the names don't match their skillsets in the slightest. Either the skillsets make no sense at all or the class names are terrible.

This is the list of traditional mundane roles on Armageddon, not counting aides and whores and stuff like that where class is entirely irrelevant. 95% of characters fit into one of these:
Soldier/mercenary/guard
Ranger/hunter
Crafter
Merchant
Thief
Murderer

As Sirra points out, two thirds of the new classes don't look like they fit in anywhere. There are two core criminal skills in the game: steal and pick. There are two criminal guilds that specialize in them: pickpocket and burglar. Just about everyone says they ought to be merged into one as neither is worthwhile on its own. Instead we're getting four criminal classes (plus enforcer which is probably just a rinth warrior type)? Even if we assume that one of these four is the new assassin, what do you do with three classes to cover two jobs that are so underwhelming that general consensus is that they should have been merged into one? It's essentially guaranteed that at least one of miscreant, pilferer, infiltrator and fence is going to be completely pointless--whichever one doesn't get the highest steal, pick or backstab. The skills to support a criminal crafter/merchant role don't exist.

That is why some of the people who are testing these guilds don't think they're going to work as staff intend. You need the heavy combat characters to be good at heavy combat in order to do anything combat related, other than surprise PVP. You need the rogues to be, to a standard above everyone else, superb and solo-efficient before they're able to cope with the games on/off stealth mechanics.

These new guilds are starting a bit higher than the original guilds, but cap out lower and have much less versatility. My first and lasting impression is that they're doing this to get away from combinations like warrior/outdoorsman, assassin/outdoorsman and ranger/rogue, where a dollop of karma lets you break the game across your knee in ways the game isn't designed to compensate for.

It sounds like a universal neutering to player characters, for the purposes of making the game artificially difficult and forcing players to be dependent on each other for the majority of the things people can pick up and run with on their own right now. From one cut/paste from one of the light combat guilds, I'd call it half a ranger where none of the skills have any synergy and the combat skills of a pickpocket.

When I looked at it, I couldn't really figure out what it was intended to do in the game, except be different and die a lot easier than an old guild would. It could be paired with a complimentary subguild to make it a low cap ranger, or a low cap assassin, but either way, it looked like hot trash.

If they're so desperate for new players, why not just add... you know... roleplay tools? Let people create their own clans without retarded requirements or staff turning into the eye of fucking Sauron to make sure they aren't encroaching on staffalt I'm-a-Viv-but-also-a-preserver-in-the-Mantis-Valley bullshit. Loosen up master-crafting so players can custom create their own objects. Make it so that crafting or even money actually has a purpose in the game.

I always question what staff actually does. I see them posting messages for role-calls and such, but when it takes your clan storyteller a week to answer your report and there's only two people in your clan, I start to wonder how they're spending their time. I didn't see any animations or plots of quests over the past week. You busy RL?

Maybe it takes a whole lot behind the scenes to keep the game running. Like a gortok won't load unless someone is pulling the levers.