General balance situation of Icesus.

[yoz]

Allrite, after thinking about this for a long time i've decided to make a long post about few of the most disturbing/annoying problems with current icesus.

As players grow rapidly in worth, rest of the mud is staying far behind. Eqmonsters are bound to have 99% resists which leads that killing some of the most "challenging" eq mobs becomes an issue with your ass muscles instead of wits/reaction which is how it should be. Most of the high-end eq mobs are plain boring, they always have HUGE resists and its fairly easy to lose interest in making eq.

The issues that causes this are the resists and generally low damage/spratio of casters compared to Melee.

Yes, damage of casters are good in bursts. But in real eq nothing else matters than archers with bodkins and constant damage to the monster. Debuffs and buffs are rather useless unless they interfere with casting or cause loads of stuns. Sadly very rarely any spell/skill interferes enough because most of the monsters damage outputs are from specials and stunning eqmonsters effectively is pretty much impossible.

Here i come with the first suggestion.

Uptune all caster damage heavyhandedly.

This would have no notable downsides but loads of perks. I list few below:

Eqmonster killing would become more interesting if instead of archers casters would be the best damagedealers once again, and archers would just be the secondary damage output of a party. Instead of sitting 9hours killing neralath you could perhaps spend 5 and you could actually do something else that day too.

This would most propably lead to bigger amount of eq-capable players in game too. There could be much more people in eq reincs who could waste few hours of their day to banish the chosen eqmonsters.

This would also lead to some others than the elites of them all being capable of organizing eqtrains. Which is what this mud needs. Badly.

Casters on exping have been WAY below offs for quite a while now. Almost none of the buffs/debuffs they really get are useful on the long run. Offs just idle in frontrow and let the exp flow in with 20k/min without an effort except few special enter syntaxes here and there. Where in casters must struggle with much shorter runs, much less exp than offs and much lesser income in general. Downing offs heavyhandedly could also solve this problem, but it would not make eqmaking any more interesting than it is currently.

Most of the eq monsters just stand there without even being paid any attention for months before anyone even bothers to do anything with them.

Here are few questions to administrators and i am amazed if anyone even cares to answer them:

Would it kill the mud to make eq making bit more pleasant. Of course 1 or 2 monsters could remain as marathon monsters, but halving/taking one third of the required time away would just make it much more fun and wouldn't kill eq trains after 1 month of full dedication to one game when everyone gets frustrated and swears that they will never do eq again. Eq prices are sky high already, we need bit of inflation so that the eq monsters that are made to be meant killed could be like they were planned to be -> Kill -> get eq. Rince and repeat.

----

Nothing can beat melee, with occasional crits/bigger crits when combined off skills/spells. No caster can be compared to this. No matter how many arrow/missile/blights etc they do. Its not even near. Melee has almost endless duration compared to casters. Casters do higher spike damage but in some point they just stop and cant do shit and have to regen. This is when offtanks just continue running around obliterating everything on their weapons path.

Disabling monsters is a way too small part of the game. Rarely any debuffers are needed. None of the exp monsters really kick back. None of them offer any resistance. Even all the lower end eqmonsters like gokuzerz, lich, treant etc can be easily downed with just an offparty.

There aren't that many debuffs that are used even when doing eq.

Who needs any kind of disabling when the exp monsters die in few seconds anyway and when doing eq the debuff effect is just so small that it practically does nothing

Add in a offparty with stunpowders, and healer barely uses any sp at all.

This again leads to another issue. Ifs Monsters would be made trickier, no one would want to play healer with the current variety of spells. A huge issue with the heal0rs.
As we know, the healer situation currently is terrible.
Almost no one wants to play a healer as they are boring as hell.
We'd need a variety of different partyheals/spreadheals to make it bit more interesting again.

Here were my few pointers.

Heres what i'd suggest you to discuss about:

What could be done for healers to make them more interesting? (More damage dealing is not a solution.)

How could casters be brought in par with offies on exp, or with archers on eq. My suggestion is bring up the damage. A lot.

How could exping be made bit more challenging?

Why does every class have to take archery be useful?

Shouldn't every class's own spells make them useful?

What could be done to reduce the time to down an big eqmonster to make it more fun and less time consuming. How could it still remain challenging?

Discuss, flame. Whatever.

[dracu]

What could be done for healers to make them more interesting? (More damage dealing is not a solution.)

As i've been playing Air_priest over the years I'd say scale the masteries a bit, give them other effects in the process, remove the no-good cleansing mastery and replace it with something else, perhaps to affect the who-knows-when-to-come new healing spells, downtune offensive spells (we are healers for a reason), scaling healing spells, there is only 3 good healing spells at the moment, others just lose their meaning in very early stages of the guild, giving access to few new healing spells with different effects, like spread heals, party heals and the Sanctuary spell which was discussed in another thread which would make the room you're standing in a safe room, preventing monsters to enter that room or just making it a safe room, heard it was being planned but i don't know what happened to it, atleast bards was meant to get similar spell/song like that. The teaching of elements sub-guild could use some fancy injections as well, atleast purify soul is a bit useful at the moment which is fine, aspect of elements could give other bonuses/resistances as well, atleast i liked it when the aspect protected you against attacks even if you were in backrow but that caused other...minor abuses iirc. I haven't used the Gift of Elements too much but what i've gathered it increases the healing done to the target which is so far been useful for only wilders, that could be changed aswell.

Those are the things where i'd like to see some changes atleast, but then again as i've played the guild a lot maybe i'm just bored with it nothing else, I'd like to see what other long-time Air_priests thinks about those.

~~~~~~~~~Dracu of the Cigarets

[osma]

How could casters be brought in par with offies on exp, or with archers on eq. My suggestion is bring up the damage. A lot

Attempting to approach this from both sides, two suggestions:
(note had mages in mind when wrote this)
One thing I have noticed from the few parties where mages are around, is that in general, delayed ball/tornado is used up front, and arrow is used during, because dball is so slow that the damage is much less worthwhile while the mobs are attacking. Perhaps one solution is to lower the sp cost and/or raise the speed of ball.

In most games, the damage/cost ratio of lower level spells are not as good as higher, because lower spells are used by newbies. It seems strange that in Icesus, the arrow spell is used regularly throughout much of the game.

Likewise, I have rarely seen people using bolt/missile on a regular basis.

If these spells were made to cast all around the same speed, then mages might cast the best spell available at all times, (which would have the effect of raising damage) and if the cost were reduced, they would be able to continue to cast over a longer period of time, causing less/equal regens (less regens, or same regens but more damage, = higher exp rate).

From the other side, you could lower the cost of arrow to nearly nothing. It is already low cost, however if you were to lower the cost even more, and maybe increase the speed, you would have a mage that could last as long as an offtank, and produce slightly higher damage in the duration (after all, mages are SUPPOSED to produce the majority of the damage, while tanks keep the mobs off.)

Final possibility is a seemingly simple one: let mages aim. To my knowledge (which is limited dealing with casters), spell casters cannot aim at body parts as can archers/throwers/slingers. If a mage could aim at head, then even if their ability to aim sucked (low dex), they would deal a more consistent damage without actually raising damage any.

[yoz]

How could casters be brought in par with offies on exp, or with archers on eq. My suggestion is bring up the damage. A lot

Attempting to approach this from both sides, two suggestions:
(note had mages in mind when wrote this)
One thing I have noticed from the few parties where mages are around, is that in general, delayed ball/tornado is used up front, and arrow is used during, because dball is so slow that the damage is much less worthwhile while the mobs are attacking. Perhaps one solution is to lower the sp cost and/or raise the speed of ball.

Using slow spell to begin is a newbie plasebo tactic that does nothing. arrows all the way.

In most games, the damage/cost ratio of lower level spells are not as good as higher, because lower spells are used by newbies. It seems strange that in Icesus, the arrow spell is used regularly throughout much of the game.

It is supposed to be the exp spell. That makes constant small damage instead of huge spikes. Imho that is how it should be. Highbies still do higher damages than newbies with the same spell.

Likewise, I have rarely seen people using bolt/missile on a regular basis.

I agree with this. The golden middle way in this situation fails in its target.

If these spells were made to cast all around the same speed, then mages might cast the best spell available at all times, (which would have the effect of raising damage) and if the cost were reduced, they would be able to continue to cast over a longer period of time, causing less/equal regens (less regens, or same regens but more damage, = higher exp rate).

From the other side, you could lower the cost of arrow to nearly nothing. It is already low cost, however if you were to lower the cost even more, and maybe increase the speed, you would have a mage that could last as long as an offtank, and produce slightly higher damage in the duration (after all, mages are SUPPOSED to produce the majority of the damage, while tanks keep the mobs off.)

I was also thinking about the costs, and for example covens do large amounts of damage but their spcosts are insanely high. Mages in this department are kind of the same. Just that their general damage is bit lower and their spcost in average is lower from the smallest spells and higher from the highest spells. However, reducing the spcost being one of the possible solutions does not make eqmaking any less stressing. Its a good idea but im trying to think about the big picture.

I do not want casters to be duracel bunnies like offies. I just want them being able to stand in line with faster runs with more damage dealt than offparties. If you want to make long runs with constant flow of exp offs are good for that. But if you want to do caster exp it should be of equal level. And only thing that would separate these two ways of exping would be the durations of the runs.

Here is an example of my exping how it goes:

An ideal Offparty does 70k-90k/min with 4-5 members and each gains aprox of 15-25k/min exprate depending on the shares. They keep on going for one hour in row and then they have a short regen. Its fun and its beneficial.

Casterparty with a def and 2 blasters kills 2-3 monsters much slower than good offparty and regens after that. Leaving the exprate somewhere near 30k-40k/min. Giving each member roughly 10-15k exp/min. Its fun, its relaxing. But the benefit from it is petty.

Casterparty with a caster and a healer.

They do short runs also. Usually at the end of run healer is ~60-70% sp and the blaster is dried out. roughly 40k/min giving 10-15k/member.

There are many other variations too, but these are the ones i've been exping with mostly lately.


Its perfectly ok that casters do shorter runs and regen more. After all their sp is everything they depend on where offs can even keep on exping if their ep is totally out. Just heal it with dreams/embraces and continue trashing.

The damage that casters deal is just not high enough. They should make the monsters spasm and trashe all the time in order to compete.

Final possibility is a seemingly simple one: let mages aim. To my knowledge (which is limited dealing with casters), spell casters cannot aim at body parts as can archers/throwers/slingers. If a mage could aim at head, then even if their ability to aim sucked (low dex), they would deal a more consistent damage without actually raising damage any.

A nice idea from you, i never thought i'd say this.

However, leave dex out of it and let it be adjusted with the skill called target focusing or whatever the mage skill is called. This is one way to boost it maybe a little. Still not sufficient enough, but a fine idea.


Thanks, keep on posting!

[solar]

The problem itself is simple, but the solutions get tricky.

My opinions are mostly based on mages, though.

"Just get rid of imposed arrowchaining and make the more massive spells more appealing."

A decent mage can cause a normal mob to 'scream' with his fancy-prancy arrow of DOOM, but hey, off does the same amount of damage with a decent dice luck in one round - and arrows do not fire each round, plus they cost more in sp than one round costs in ep for an offtank.

The main problem with mages is not necessarily the sp/dam ratio of spells, but their insanely long regen times due to their spr vs spmax. When making exp, at least. For a mage to be playable - to get parties and be of use in them -, he'd need spr/regenbooster partymembers: fire/water templars, water_priests etc.

As for eqmaking: Give mages access to asphyx damtype and perhaps magic and physical. Should help with normally resistant eqmobs as well.

And add features to and/or improve their masteries. A lot.
Secrets of XXX could use a few extra specials. Like when the mastery is X, Y or Z, it adds to the amount of swarm projectiles in a swarm that uses the according damagetype. Make some amount of blasted damage pierce the mob's resistance to a degree, &c.

But then again, I don't really have that much experience in playing blasters, because they are not interesting/useful/soloable/xyz.

[lipides]

There is already a slight asphyxation damage with mages coming from first fire element.

Well then to my point for healers. I'd like to see few spells recoded completely, for example Bless which is totally random and its usage is close to none. So maybe turning Bless into something close to other rpg spell like increasing stats a bit or something. OR make it element based, since we are sooner or later getting firepriests you could have a certain stat buff coming from your own element,air for wisdom,earth for str and con etc. Even thou there are other buffs for that but some constant increase (only a slight one will do some difference).
And like yoz said,healers arent supposed to be huge damage makers..which atm fails since they do higher damage than mages at low/midgame levels.
Even thou many wont like it, maybe DOWNtune healer offspells or up mage spells considerably.

About areaheals, I'd like to see more party-only healing, I'm taking this idea directly from ragnarok online which priest have this Sanctruare spell which gives constant small heal zaps and does minor damage to undeads. I know this sounds overpowered but if healer off spells will be downed, why not? priests are supposed to be anti-undead anyway. or am i wrong?

[cezar]

DISCLAIMER - I've never done any serious eq in Icesus, so I'm mostly going by Yoz'es description of it.

When I just started playing Icesus, I really liked the idea of the mage guild - WOW! They actually had spell components, and you got to cuztomize your own spells, that's something I've never seen before. The novelty quickly wore off, as I realized that few of those components are ever used, and mages just chain the same old arrow of whatever 99% of the time. I think the mages could use a fresh look at their spell component system to add extra options for different combat tactics, and also reward the mages that use their brain more then Zmud.

One idea (Yes, I admit, I'm ripping this off from Diablo 2) is to have a piercing component, that reduces the mosters effective resistance to the damage type. Note, I'm not talking about Zombie style abjurer vulnerabilities, but just using reduced resistance for calculating the damage on that spell. (Am I being clear ? I'm writing this in my sleep). This will make mages much more useful against mobs with heavy resists, and gives mages more options for combat tactics. For mobs with low resists, use modifiers that make spells bigger; for high resist mobs use regular size spells that hit where it hurts.

I also agree that debuffs aren't used often enough in Icesus. In fact, in standard exp parties they are not used at all. Too bad, as changing monster behaviour, instead of just beating it senseless, could be one of the most fun things to do. The solution, I think, is to add more options there. Let coven be with their curses, (and whatever other debuffs there are, I'm too noob to know better), but also add quick and dirty options that aren't as powerful. It should still do the base damage of a spell, but with the extra cost added have a modifier component. Instead of always opening the fight with delayed ball, give the option of weakening ball, entangling or stupifying ball.

Ok Yoz, you can flame away now.

[dracu]

Lipides wrote:

And like yoz said,healers arent supposed to be huge damage makers..which atm fails since they do higher damage than mages at low/midgame levels.
Even thou many wont like it, maybe DOWNtune healer offspells or up mage spells considerably.

I have to agree on this, Air_priest can already solo amazingly well, pulling off 20k/min by soloing isn't too hard (Atleast for me and it was ages ago, don't know if it would be the same now) add in a decent tank and you can make +40k/min depending on the Air_priest of course and now with all the secondary guilds around i'm pretty sure it would be even better, who needs a pure blaster with that.

I remember Lipides mentioning to me that mages are going to get an uptune to get rid of the arrow of xyz spamming making the bigger spells more appealing.

Cezar wrote:

One idea (Yes, I admit, I'm ripping this off from Diablo 2) is to have a piercing component, that reduces the mosters effective resistance to the damage type

Actually there is a spell that pierces the resistances of a monster up to certain degree though only Sorcerers/Earth_priests with Unification levels gets the spell and its quite random and it changes constantly so a blaster/archer with elemental tools is going to have a hard time to shoot the correct damage type, as for exping not too many exp monsters have high resists.

[zaltaiz]

Few pointers, too lazy to read the previous discussion:

Balance varies from time to time, as new features are introduced it always effects balance, and sometimes some abilities are better, sometimes worse. As the experience median increases there will be a change in balance in the future, at some point some sort of conversion is bound to happen.

There is already one way to lower monsters resistance, and there will be more in the future, though the amount it can recude may be miniscule. In the past a way to make the monsters more difficult was simply to increase hitpoints and resistances, but nowadays the same effect is gained with more tricky special features.

Future eq-monsters will rely on different tactics and strategies, the current ones are more generic ones. For instance at one point several eqmobs were created so that one could use archers in a party, previously they were completely ignored.

And there won't be many new highend mobs in the near future, but rather lower end ones with equipment that may be stronger if a more newbieish party kills it, to promote eq-making in the low-mid levels too. In ye olden days it wasnt so unbelievable to see a party of 40-50+lvl players doing eq. There are still hordes of monsters such party can kill, inflated eq market just lowers the need to do eq.

And the most important point: even if players think that one feature or way to play is better than others it usually isn't. It's just the current trend. There are several ways to gain same effectiviness.

[yoz]

DISCLAIMER - I've never done any serious eq in Icesus, so I'm mostly going by Yoz'es description of it.

When I just started playing Icesus, I really liked the idea of the mage guild - WOW! They actually had spell components, and you got to cuztomize your own spells, that's something I've never seen before. The novelty quickly wore off, as I realized that few of those components are ever used, and mages just chain the same old arrow of whatever 99% of the time. I think the mages could use a fresh look at their spell component system to add extra options for different combat tactics, and also reward the mages that use their brain more then Zmud.

aye, its pretty close to impossible to make all spells usable, unless some different specials are added.

One idea (Yes, I admit, I'm ripping this off from Diablo 2) is to have a piercing component, that reduces the mosters effective resistance to the damage type. Note, I'm not talking about Zombie style abjurer vulnerabilities, but just using reduced resistance for calculating the damage on that spell. (Am I being clear ? I'm writing this in my sleep). This will make mages much more useful against mobs with heavy resists, and gives mages more options for combat tactics. For mobs with low resists, use modifiers that make spells bigger; for high resist mobs use regular size spells that hit where it hurts.

What dracu said, but, how many sorcerers have you seen in real eqparties?

As for eqmaking: Give mages access to asphyx damtype and perhaps magic and physical. Should help with normally resistant eqmobs as well.

Mages are fine with the damagetypes they have.

And add features to and/or improve their masteries. A lot.
Secrets of XXX could use a few extra specials. Like when the mastery is X, Y or Z, it adds to the amount of swarm projectiles in a swarm that uses the according damagetype. Make some amount of blasted damage pierce the mob's resistance to a degree, &c.

A nice idea.

And the most important point: even if players think that one feature or way to play is better than others it usually isn't. It's just the current trend. There are several ways to gain same effectiviness.

I disagree with this. YOu can not at the moment attain the same efficiency with casterparties without using offs. The classic def combo does way worse than any off party with skilled leader out there.

There is a clear problem that casters run out of reserves too quickly. They deal less damage than a good off in longer period of time. Unless you got like 12k spmax you could not do the same. Even then you'd need atleast +200spr more to ticks.

Currently the main ingredients are:
2-3 good offs
one healer
Rest of the party can be filled with anything, whatever. But these mentioned above are the ones that are the backbone and most worthy in the party setup.

You can try to get an ideal caster party with watertemplarpreceptorwaterpriestwhatevers and they do pretty well. But still, a frontrow full of hitters just wroom past them and get all the ladies.

Because the monsters just do not give them any troubles at all. No hindering needed/def abilities. Just kill and move to next monster.

Wilder 3man/90k rate is a fine example of this.

NOTE: this only goes for exping.


Another kinda harsh suggestion to change things would just give all monsters default physress of 30+ and actually make hinders/etc much more effective and actually make monster melee much more surprising.

More risks of dying, more big crits from monsters. Maybe chances of REAL turbos like other muds.

Ever heard of legendary batmud 900k expworth butterflies ?

This would give the weapons with damagetypes much more value and could help with casters too.

Then again, this would just be a huge downtune, but maybe it would be needed?

Would be awesome that if covens and other debuffers would be taken to a party just because their debuffs are needed.

This would make psionicists, covens much more desired partymembers and would prolly flood the guild with new members/players.

It would start a new era.

Future eq-monsters will rely on different tactics and strategies, the current ones are more generic ones. For instance at one point several eqmobs were created so that one could use archers in a party, previously they were completely ignored.

And there won't be many new highend mobs in the near future, but rather lower end ones with equipment that may be stronger if a more newbieish party kills it, to promote eq-making in the low-mid levels too. In ye olden days it wasnt so unbelievable to see a party of 40-50+lvl players doing eq. There are still hordes of monsters such party can kill, inflated eq market just lowers the need to do eq.

This is a fine thing to hear.

If the marathon eqmonsters in the game are going to be the last of their kind im fine with it. If wizards/coders have enough imagination to make hard/interesting enough specials then this issue is already solved. Thank you for this answer.

[zaltaiz]

new guild options mix the pack quite nicely, for instance I could see party of three: def/healer, caster/healer, caster/psi etc do just as nicely as any off party

[yoz]

new guild options mix the pack quite nicely, for instance I could see party of three: def/healer, caster/healer, caster/psi etc do just as nicely as any off party

No matter how topend caster you are.

You can not compete with topend offs.

Offs improve loads due to the abilities, new weapons and stuff.

Casters gain damage?

No. They do not. They are stuck with much slower progress than offs. Somehow they seem to hit the wall in some point and stop the progress completely. Where offs just get more and more by getting better weapons and so.

4int in a wooden stick does not do shit compared to some new superb quality adamantium executioner sword with huge amounts of +damage/damagetypes and whatever in them.

[dracu]

Yoz wrote:

What dracu said, but, how many sorcerers have you seen in real eqparties?

Only one but what i meant was the same kind of thingy could and (According to Zaltaiz's post) will be used in the future to help out Eq-parties going out there which sounds great to me.

[rha]

How about adding more caster-oriented eq that directly boosts the caster's damage instead of the traditional +stats? This would help balance out benefits from weapons to melee characters.

[lipides]

How about adding more caster-oriented eq that directly boosts the caster's damage instead of the traditional +stats? This would help balance out benefits from weapons to melee characters.

There already are the "serpent scale" itehms which are supposed to boost mage damage. I had few of those items and frankly noticed no effect in the damage compared to my int items.