Official: Light Armor Mastery and several rogue changes

[Methais]

They don't have to do poisons that are strictly damage based. Poisons could impact other aspects of creatures - cause blindness (maybe cuts perception by half), lowers DS, drops EBP, slows, paralyzes/stuns, causes confusion (prevents creature from attacking) and so on.

I didn't mention anything about strictly damage though.

[nocturnix]

Much needed buffs to the rogue class. Makes me want to play my rogue more or my baby monk. I feel alt-itis coming g on...

[Alashir]

Much needed buffs to the rogue class. Makes me want to play my rogue more or my baby monk. I feel alt-itis coming g on...

Srsly. Such a great change. And it comes on the heels of all sorts of fun TWC releases at duskruin

[m444w]

I appreciate the improvements, the Light Armor Mastery is the big win here, the other stuff is playing checkers when everyone else is playing chess.

Smastery already costs a hell of a lot of cman points and now it requires even more to make it what it should've been in the first place, passive.

Silent strike got some buffs, but it still costs somewhere like 1/6th of your resource pool at cap to use for a ginormous aiming penalty that invokes hard RT? It's supposed to be the sort of stealth keystone trump card ability, and it needs a bigger overhaul than this to actually be useful, but I guess rogues don't really have anything else worth spending stamina on.

Compare the silent strike buff to the buff fire 520 for extra flares, which wizards are lulzing at because it's not as good as EDPing or whatever from earth 520....

It's like if you were a boxer in a fight with both hands tied behind your back and then someone unties one and tells you it's progress.

[Methais]

I appreciate the improvements, the Light Armor Mastery is the big win here, the other stuff is playing checkers when everyone else is playing chess.

Smastery already costs a hell of a lot of cman points and now it requires even more to make it what it should've been in the first place, passive.

Silent strike got some buffs, but it still costs somewhere like 1/6th of your resource pool at cap to use for a ginormous aiming penalty that invokes hard RT? It's supposed to be the sort of stealth keystone trump card ability, and it needs a bigger overhaul than this to actually be useful, but I guess rogues don't really have anything else worth spending stamina on.

Compare the silent strike buff to the buff fire 520 for extra flares, which wizards are lulzing at because it's not as good as EDPing or whatever from earth 520....

It's like if you were a boxer in a fight with both hands tied behind your back and then someone unties one and tells you it's progress.

I don't know much about how this new stuff affects rogues, but for what it's worth, those flares are the same strength as regular flares, which are typically weak as fuck and aren't going to make any noticeable difference in 99% of a wizard's encounters. And they always flare fire, regardless of what spell you're casting, which is extra dumb and makes it useless in a lot of situations.

That, and the base 5% chance to proc with some stupid seed requirement that's not worth picking up fire lore for to increase the chance.

The whole idea is to make fire lore worth training in again, at least past the 20 ranks needed to unlock Steam because that's all it's currently good for, but they keep failing at it really hard and then getting butthurt when wizards aren't creaming their pants over underwhelming low hanging fruit dev that nobody asked for in the first place, because Estild is scared that if he implements anything with some actual power behind it, it might cut into his P2W profits while the things wizards have been asking for for years and years, like fixing our useless trash spells (914, 915, 514, 525, etc.) continue to be ignored. The only non-P2W dev Estild is interested in is shit that takes like 10 minutes to code, because he'd much rather spend all of his time working on P2W items.

Estild has been trolling wizards for like 5 years now, ignoring everything that's needed and instead trickling in weak bullshit that nobody asked for just to pad some annual list of meaningless dev accomplishments, which that list now includes bug and typo fixes...as dev.

I'll put it this way...even Krakii thinks the flares need to hit harder if they're expecting people to pick up fire lore for it. And Krakii is one of the biggest advocates in the game for overall mediocrity and tedium and nerfing everything under the sun and making shit boring and useless.

If those flares could be trained up to hit like sonic flares with 150+ fire lore ranks or something like that, that would make it worth training heavy fire lore for. Having drake falchion quality flares attached to it, no so much. An extra 5-25 damage or whatever that apparently never crit kills (I haven't even seen one of these flares crit kill a vaespilon, which are super squishy and even 901 can crit kill those) isn't going to make any kind of difference, and certainly isn't worth giving up the crit padding you get from 520 earth, which in almost any situation is the only 520 effect that's worth using.

If they want us to give up a huge defensive bonus, then the offensive bonus we're giving it up for needs to be strong enough to be worth the defensive loss.

It's like if you were a boxer in a fight with both hands tied behind your back and then someone unties one and tells you it's progress.

This is pretty much the case with wizards too if you're comparing pre-ELR to post-ELR, which also just happens to be around the time when P2W became Simu's top priority.

Why give professions cool and powerful abilities when you can put it in an item to flip for cash instead? That's basically Estild's outlook these days, and is exactly why P2W dev GMs need to be completely separated from non-P2W dev. It's a massive conflict of interest and is complete shit for the game as a whole, for all professions.

The problem with rogues is they've been completely ignored for so long that it's gonna take a bunch of updates for them to catch up. Just be glad you have someone like Spiffy working on rogues and not a self-serving tard like Estild who's obsessed with P2W dev over everything else.

TLDR: The fire flares being weak garbage that doesn't even come close to offsetting the loss from not using 520 earth is why wizards don't give a fuck about this 520 fire update.

[khorpulent]

Another nice thing about this is that it makes races other than halfling sort of viable as monks.

[Methais]

WyromToday at 1:53 PM
Best strat is amass +50 stamina recovery. Be a rogue. Use CMAN VANISH every time. You don't even need armor.
WyromToday at 1:53 PM
I hunt with a scimitar and a main gauche.
Haven't died since 2009

I'm guessing he's hunted like twice since 2009, but is stamina the current bottleneck for rogues?

[audioserf]

I don't know about rogues, but amassing +50 stamina recovery is a great strategy for any character that uses anything involving stamina

[m444w]

I don't know much about how this new stuff affects rogues, but for what it's worth, those flares are the same strength as regular flares, which are typically weak as fuck and aren't going to make any noticeable difference in 99% of a wizard's encounters. And they always flare fire, regardless of what spell you're casting, which is extra dumb and makes it useless in a lot of situations.

That, and the base 5% chance to proc with some stupid seed requirement that's not worth picking up fire lore for to increase the chance.

Oh, I'm not saying the 520 fire stuff made sense relative to the other wizard options, but it is at least a persistent boon that increases damage, versus costing a wizard 80 mana or whatever everytime they decide to use it. Also even if they added a 200% bonus to hiding or whatever it still wouldn't matter for the Rift since half of the rooms cannot be hidden in and the environ changes randomly.

TLDR: The fire flares being weak garbage that doesn't even come close to offsetting the loss from not using 520 earth is why wizards don't give a fuck about this 520 fire update.

Basically the TL;DR for rogues is that at cap it's better to have defensive manuevers like subdual strike or gkick, so that you have a lot stronger defenses against bandits versus trying to run around spending a large subset of cman points on silent strike. I am extremely glad to see Spiffy working on this stuff, but the costs for cmans, both CMAN point wise and stamina wise relative to the effect is so far outsized for most of them, they are basically worthless.

If they had changed silent strike to do this and be soft RT, so you could immediately re-attempt to hide when you fumble, then I would think it might be worth it. Compare the effect on if a wizard spends 1/6th of their 400 mana at cap, so let's say 950 versus silent strike for relative resource expenditure... I know which one I'd use in SoS.

My case is that squares with the exception of berserk, relative resource (stamina) expenditure compared to pure resource (mana) expenditure is absolutely not even on the same planet, let alone in the same zip code. The entire conversation is framed like it's still happening in the 1990's.

Also, I absolute agree with your points on there needing to be a separation of P2W dev and actual game dev, why would they improve combat systems at all when they can just sell $500 bandaids and get a cut of the profits (like the P2W gms do for every upgrade sold)? Like we saw with the arrow autobundle quivers and such.

[Donquix]

Oh, I'm not saying the 520 fire stuff made sense relative to the other wizard options, but it is at least a persistent boon that increases damage, versus costing a wizard 80 mana or whatever everytime they decide to use it. Also even if they added a 200% bonus to hiding or whatever it still wouldn't matter for the Rift since half of the rooms cannot be hidden in and the environ changes randomly.




Basically the TL;DR for rogues is that at cap it's better to have defensive manuevers like subdual strike or gkick, so that you have a lot stronger defenses against bandits versus trying to run around spending a large subset of cman points on silent strike. I am extremely glad to see Spiffy working on this stuff, but the costs for cmans, both CMAN point wise and stamina wise relative to the effect is so far outsized for most of them, they are basically worthless.

If they had changed silent strike to do this and be soft RT, so you could immediately re-attempt to hide when you fumble, then I would think it might be worth it. Compare the effect on if a wizard spends 1/6th of their 400 mana at cap, so let's say 950 versus silent strike for relative resource expenditure... I know which one I'd use in SoS.

My case is that squares with the exception of berserk, relative resource (stamina) expenditure compared to pure resource (mana) expenditure is absolutely not even on the same planet, let alone in the same zip code. The entire conversation is framed like it's still happening in the 1990's.

Also, I absolute agree with your points on there needing to be a separation of P2W dev and actual game dev, why would they improve combat systems at all when they can just sell $500 bandaids and get a cut of the profits (like the P2W gms do for every upgrade sold)? Like we saw with the arrow autobundle quivers and such.

FWIW that's been brought up (re: you use a cman like once and you're out of resource). I hope it's something they'll look at. Mixing things beyond attack/ambush is fun, using abilities is fun. using an abilty and losing half your stamina and standing there like an idiot is not fun.