A few questions for Kyronix on this Shadow event

KroDuK

Grimbeard said:

Lord_Nythrax said:

Lord_Nythrax said:

The next event phase actually sounds fun, what's the punchline? I'm gonna get there and find out everything has negative life leech, right?

Just got back from TC and yup, called it. What a crock of shit.

You guys have allowed a particular melee template to become dominant, and rather than ever actually do anything meaningful about it in terms of overall game balance, you just decide to randomly punish people for playing it about 50% of the time. It's an embarrassing inept cargo cult imitation of game balance.

Seriously, imagine a real game threw a line into their patch notes like:

"Death Knights will have half their abilities disabled during the next event, because we think they're OP and have to be put in their place, but the team no longer has the skill or ambition to actually balance anything."

And you know what's especially galling? You'll throw this little detail in here to jerk sampires around, like you're big boy developers making the game more fair or something, but we all know the event is going to end up dominated by the usual scripted multi-box thrower death squads anyway.

Like good job guys, when everyone is struggling to get a hit in edgewise between three dozen synchronized auto-healing gargoyles with alphabetized names, I'm sure they'll notice how my samp can't leech any life back and really appreciate playing such a fair and balanced game.

@ Kyronix if I promise to buy five accounts and run them all by script, can I be allowed to play my sampire? Is that what it takes? Please let me know.

You're right the proper way to nerf the abomination known as sampire is to make necro leeches scale off spirt speak also negative and positive karma spell should damage the opposite about a dog archer nerf should fix it 

Curse Weapon was a perfect balance.. u need to actually cast the spell (fizzle) without SS the lenght is just ridiculous.. casting tons of curse weapon lower the karma just enough to make the pally healing and cure worthless.. and for mana leech u need wraith form (on foot) + SS.

But since SA.. it all changed even worse with all those Best In Slot OP items mainstream shard bound under BS mismanagement.. at this point the sampire or sappire ain't the problem (or the tamer with their OP pet will become the new problem if they nerf the sampire).. it's the bad itemization with no real overall limit other than this "designer" imagination and his love for those theme park generic template.

@Lord_Nythrax the duo 2 dexer/archer cross bandies.. usually high octane fun stuff.. but yeah in 2024 with BS management.. your gonna have 10 totally legit non botting players stack on top of each other grinding 24/7.. the duo hard grinder stuff gonna lose all it's beauty.
In those circumstances, I get it why u'd want to be able to turn your brain off and pound on the sampire.

Cookie

Grimbeard said:

Lord_Nythrax said:

Cookie said:

hurf durf arf barf

Look, you don't have anything interesting to say and to be honest I don't really bother telling you apart from a couple of the other local chuckleheads with bad typing who love taking an L, but at the same time I wouldn't mind having you help keep this thread bumped. Could you maybe remind me what your schtick is, so I can antagonize you to just the right level required to keep the thread rolling without the mods getting overly concerned?

Cookie wants everything in fel and better love for gargoyles 

And Sampires deleted.

KroDuK

If EA ever look into BS to clean house and start banning bots users.. i'ma be the first one to tap dance on your grave son.

Here watch what these beast dev was doing on UO (the best was Raph Koster imo)..I even time stamp it:  (9min03sec, something off with the forum timestamp)

Lord_Nythrax

KroDuK said:

Curse Weapon was a perfect balance.. u need to actually cast the spell (fizzle) without SS the lenght is just ridiculous.. casting tons of curse weapon lower the karma just enough to make the pally healing and cure worthless.. and for mana leech u need wraith form (on foot) + SS.

Here's the template I play. No particular meta reason, I just happen to like it.

Swords, Tactics, Necromancy, Spirit Speak, Bushido, Parrying, Resisting Spells.

It works pretty well in most situations you'd expect it to. The greater life leech from Curse Weapon more than makes up for the relative lack of damage without Chivalry or Anatomy in terms of being able to survive, while the ability to actually use Necromancy adds some fun options. I can turn into a wraith and run around spamming Wither, I can cast Animate Dead and throw some minions around, whatever.

The thing is, it also comes with some drawbacks. Things with long unbreakable paralyzes give it problems, and the means of dealing with max-level poison is to... just be poisoned and leech through it. Maybe I could cram Healing and Anatomy in somewhere, but doing so would require serious sacrifices.

Overall this template feels pretty balanced to play. It's very good at standing in the pocket and surviving tons of incoming damage, but it can't do everything and you need to pay close attention to your gear in order to maximize your own damage. If you split Necromancy off from Chivalry you could have Sampires and Paladins as two separate melee templates that each approach the situation in different ways.

Instead they just let everyone stack everything on one template for twenty years, and then hamfistedly bar it from the occasional event like that counts as balancing the game.

Lord_Nythrax

Seriously, I'm salty as hell over this and I don't mind saying it.

They take what otherwise seems like a decent event and squeeze out a dump on it like oh no, we can't let sampires leech life, that would be overpowered. Meanwhile everyone KNOWS the event is just going to be the usual giant crowd of bot throwers and reapers anyway.

I know you read this crap @Kyronix so why don't you defend it out loud? Tell me exactly what negative consequences would happen to the game if you didn't functionally ban sampires from half of all events. Did you look at the proportion of reapers and garg bots and decide it wasn't high enough yet?

Grimbeard

Lord_Nythrax said:

KroDuK said:

Curse Weapon was a perfect balance.. u need to actually cast the spell (fizzle) without SS the lenght is just ridiculous.. casting tons of curse weapon lower the karma just enough to make the pally healing and cure worthless.. and for mana leech u need wraith form (on foot) + SS.

Here's the template I play. No particular meta reason, I just happen to like it.

Swords, Tactics, Necromancy, Spirit Speak, Bushido, Parrying, Resisting Spells.

It works pretty well in most situations you'd expect it to. The greater life leech from Curse Weapon more than makes up for the relative lack of damage without Chivalry or Anatomy in terms of being able to survive, while the ability to actually use Necromancy adds some fun options. I can turn into a wraith and run around spamming Wither, I can cast Animate Dead and throw some minions around, whatever.

The thing is, it also comes with some drawbacks. Things with long unbreakable paralyzes give it problems, and the means of dealing with max-level poison is to... just be poisoned and leech through it. Maybe I could cram Healing and Anatomy in somewhere, but doing so would require serious sacrifices.

Overall this template feels pretty balanced to play. It's very good at standing in the pocket and surviving tons of incoming damage, but it can't do everything and you need to pay close attention to your gear in order to maximize your own damage. If you split Necromancy off from Chivalry you could have Sampires and Paladins as two separate melee templates that each approach the situation in different ways.

Instead they just let everyone stack everything on one template for twenty years, and then hamfistedly bar it from the occasional event like that counts as balancing the game.

This is an abomination 

Kyronix

Lord_Nythrax said:

Seriously, I'm salty as hell over this and I don't mind saying it.

They take what otherwise seems like a decent event and squeeze out a dump on it like oh no, we can't let sampires leech life, that would be overpowered. Meanwhile everyone KNOWS the event is just going to be the usual giant crowd of bot throwers and reapers anyway.

I know you read this crap @ Kyronix so why don't you defend it out loud? Tell me exactly what negative consequences would happen to the game if you didn't functionally ban sampires from half of all events.

Sampires can leech all leechable ToT creatures except paragons, which has always been the case...this has been true for all of the modern Treasures events, so I'm uncertain what your issue is.

If you'd like to provide specific actionable feedback we can take it into consideration and make changes.  There's not a lot we can do with generalized editorials.

Lord_Nythrax

Kyronix said:

Sampires can leech all leechable ToT creatures except paragons, which has always been the case...this has been true for all of the modern Treasures events, so I'm uncertain what your issue is.

If you'd like to provide specific actionable feedback we can take it into consideration and make changes.  There's not a lot we can do with generalized editorials.

My specific actionable feedback is to remove the restriction on life leeching from ToT paragons. Having a brutal nerf like this directed at one specific template as a matter of policy in all ToT events was a terrible idea from the start. It's like having all ToT paragons suck in and auto-target archers, or disregard pets in order to attack the tamers. As a gimmick on particular mobs these kind of gotcha mechanics might occasionally be okay, but making one a permanent feature is ridiculous.

Like deadass I want to know why anyone thought this was a good idea in the first place. You decided that ToT events were going to be the centerpiece of almost all content going forward, and that sampires would be crippled at all of them forever, because... why exactly? Because you think they're OP? Because screw 'em? What?

Lord_Nythrax

Grimbeard said:

This is an abomination 

LMAO, it's fun!

It's also thematically very appropriate for a necromancer/vampiric style of warrior, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses. He can't rez you, he can't heal you, he can't generate life at all, only steal it from other things, either via inflicting damage or spirit speaking corpses. And yet played properly, it's pretty strong.

Also it's what you get when you take Chiv out of the Necro equation, so if I hadn't thought of it first, your idea about separating the two would create it anyway. lol

Kyronix

Lord_Nythrax said:

My specific actionable feedback is to remove the restriction on life leeching from ToT paragons.

We will discuss it and see about making any changes.  Thanks for your feedback!

Grimbeard

Kyronix said:

Lord_Nythrax said:

My specific actionable feedback is to remove the restriction on life leeching from ToT paragons.

We will discuss it and see about making any changes.  Thanks for your feedback!

Remove the anti life leech then bring vampiric embrace into line with all other necro forms and not allow mounting a ride..

Lord_Nythrax

Grimbeard said:

Remove the anti life leech then bring vampiric embrace into line with all other necro forms and not allow mounting a ride..

That's ridiculous.

Grimbeard

Lord_Nythrax said:

Grimbeard said:

Remove the anti life leech then bring vampiric embrace into line with all other necro forms and not allow mounting a ride..

That's ridiculous.

Why ? You make untrue statements like paragons don't attack archer or tamer you simply want to maintain the ridiculous superiority of your gimp temple 

Lord_Nythrax

Grimbeard said:

Why ? You make untrue statements like paragons don't attack archer or tamer you simply want to maintain the ridiculous superiority of your gimp temple 

Except that literally isn't what I said, so maybe learn to at least read English at a gradeschool level before trying to cop an attitude. How utterly embarrassing for you.

Grimbeard

Lord_Nythrax said:

Grimbeard said:

Why ? You make untrue statements like paragons don't attack archer or tamer you simply want to maintain the ridiculous superiority of your gimp temple 

Except that literally isn't what I said, so maybe learn to at least read English at a gradeschool level before trying to cop an attitude. How utterly embarrassing for you.

Now you are going the Pawain route and using personal attacks just admit you like be top of the food chain 

Lord_Nythrax

Grimbeard said:

Now you are going the Pawain route and using personal attacks just admit you like be top of the food chain 

So let me get this straight:

I post to Kyronix that having mobs be immune to life leech would be like giving them other unusual mechanics, like having them suck in archers, or ignore pets in order to target tamers. This is what's called a hypothetical.

You come in and read this, and somehow in your little brain, what you think I said was that mobs don't target archers or tamers. Which not only isn't what I said, but isn't even part of the hypothetical I was describing.

Seriously? This is what you're trying to double down on?

Not only that, but the first sampire nerf you put forth? Making Chivalry and Necromancy spells damage opposite-aligned characters? Did you notice how I not only supported that, but am already running a template that doesn't include Chivalry in the first place? How do you square that with "wanting to be on top" or whatever?

Just get out of here dude, you're coming off as illiterate and making a fool of yourself.

Grimbeard

But that is exactly what happens 

KroDuK

Lord_Nythrax said:

KroDuK said:

Curse Weapon was a perfect balance.. u need to actually cast the spell (fizzle) without SS the lenght is just ridiculous.. casting tons of curse weapon lower the karma just enough to make the pally healing and cure worthless.. and for mana leech u need wraith form (on foot) + SS.

Here's the template I play. No particular meta reason, I just happen to like it.

Swords, Tactics, Necromancy, Spirit Speak, Bushido, Parrying, Resisting Spells.

It works pretty well in most situations you'd expect it to. The greater life leech from Curse Weapon

Dumb question why are u not using protection spell: "Characters under the Protection spell effect can no longer have their spells "disrupted" when hit."

I was using a cristalline ring (when u die u lose protection and wraith form) to cast protection, to remove it.. The spell stay active even if u have 0 magery.. the counter part is Resist Spell ain't possible with protection.. wich ain't a big loss for a PvE leech template that can use remove curse.

Agreed for necro.. i had only 45 necro tho.. I could use corpse skin in the room #2 in the gauntlet and wither with jewerly to reveal the room #4.

The leech and poison stuff.. was why I hated vampire so much (plus back then we didn't had enough skill point to make it a viable solution).. u've killed the Dark Father.. u cleaning trash mobs.. u got a rotting corpse poison.. no more mobs to leech on.. I could use cure potion with wraith form.. since my paladin cure was not an option with my low, curse weapon, karma.


Edit: personally the down side of this build was the lack of stam regen without good items (u could use divinum furis tho) or when the Dark Father would cast a double oath (I had always a remove curse precasted to counter his oath spell) sometimes he would pop a second one instant earlier in the combat (with his mana pool full).. it would kill me everytime.. was happening once every ~4 DF

Iniquity

My feedback is to not change it sampires can do enough.

Lord_Nythrax

Grimbeard said:

But that is exactly what happens 

I've been on TC1 and they most definitely don't suck archers in, so what exactly are you talking about? I don't get it, are you mad that things sometimes target your tamer?

You do understand that bog-standard paragons can target-swap on character movement, right? And that all mobs can target-swap when they deal any sort of area damage? That's just standard mob behavior for 20+ years, not any kind of special event mechanic meant to jerk around tamers.

God what a pointless tangent.

KroDuK

Kyronix said:

Lord_Nythrax said:

My specific actionable feedback is to remove the restriction on life leeching from ToT paragons.

We will discuss it and see about making any changes.  Thanks for your feedback!

I got a better one for you.. if u do this type of limitation for leeching life.. do it on stuff like undead. Seems pretty forward to me and logical.. like when u cannot suck mana from a mobs cuz he's out of mana.. maybe they could sap the undead stamina AT BEST.

Off the bat; sampires and sappire would know if it's undead.. u want a paladin.

Lord_Nythrax

KroDuK said:

Dumb question why are u not using protection spell: "Characters under the Protection spell effect can no longer have their spells "disrupted" when hit."

I've considered it, I've just never found it to be worth it. It's not that hard to keep CW up unless you're really surrounded, and when you are surrounded, whirlwind with a slayer weapon plus the default vampiric leech is a full heal unto itself.

My usual Dark Father strategy is just to roll in with a demon slayer tali equipped, set to swap between a demon slayer bladed staff and an undead slayer double axe. Spam armor ignores on the boss whenever the trash isn't too thick, whirlwind whenever it is. Keep an eye on my timer and start looking to reapply CW early. If it blood oaths me, just switch to whirlwinds and ride it out, no big deal.

KroDuK

I see.. make sense.. now u must be WAY MORE powerfull than I used to be.. like WAY MORE.. I was like 170 stam hitting for ~80-120 on a DF.

Personally I was trapping myself in the corridor of the second room, you have a pedestral.. only the DF would melee you.. U just needed to kill the LL.. with protection activated no need to time stuff and u could even keep shade alive (low lvl magic trash mob)

Just Curse Weapon and Wraith form.. 0 leech on weapon.. would do the job(like 50% life and 24% mana total).. Most of the time i could use non slayer weapon, in solo u could honor + ennemy of one + your 100% PvP dmg on items.. u'd be cap at 300% (and later using a conjurer trinket would help even more for DF's, to clear the LichLords)

Using stuff like that (this one was the solo WW)
 
the extra FC would also compensate for protection spell.

Edit: for the DF.. try using concussion blow.. was way better than AI

Lord_Nythrax

Iniquity said:

My feedback is to not change it sampires can do enough.

You know what? That's fine. But if sampires are going to be soft-banned from every ToT event for eternity, I think at least one other template should suffer the same fate. So yeah, keep the paragons immune to life leech, but make it so... I dunno... whenever a tamer pet hits them, they teleport on top of the tamer and attack them directly. After all, that template can already do lots of things, so they can just go do something else, right?

Lord_Nythrax

KroDuK said:

Personally I was trapping myself in the corridor of the second room, you have a pedestral.. only the DF would melee you.. U just needed to kill the LL.. with protection activated no need to time stuff and u could even keep shade alive (low lvl magic trash mob)

Just Curse Weapon and Wraith form.. 0 leech on weapon.. would do the job(like 50% life and 24% mana total).. Most of the time i could use non slayer weapon, in solo u could honor + ennemy of one + your 100% PvP dmg on items.. u'd be cap at 300% (and later using a conjurer trinket would help even more for DF's, to clear the LichLords)

Not bad, that's pretty impressive. Must have taken a hell of long time without slayers. They make the DF rubberband back to the spawn point if you lure him anywhere now, so you need to be able to just stand in the open and whirlwind all the trash. The main thing is to have hit fire area on your whirlwind weapon so it all dies fast.

KroDuK

Lord_Nythrax said:

at least one other template should suffer the same fate. whenever a tamer..

Just add random Skeletal dragon.. paragon are sampire trojan.. do the same with tamer..

Does bounded pet still turn wild when u attack a skeletal dragon? 


Jokeaside both these template make most PvE resident sleeper in 2024.. trained pet and all those heretic items.. 

Lord_Nythrax said:

Must have taken a hell of long time without slayers. They make the DF rubberband back to the spawn point if you lure him anywhere now, so you need to be able to just stand in the open and whirlwind all the trash. The main thing is to have hit fire area on your whirlwind weapon so it all dies fast.

I was 300% dmg (cap) without any slayer with honor (100%) ennemy of one (100%) and 100% for PvP on items. I would use a similar non slayer weapon gnarled staff for concussion blow vs DF's when i was solo (with honor).. when they added conjurer trinket.. I could kill faster the LL that would spawn from bones.. at certain point the bones would stop popping mobs.. there was too many trash mobs around the DF (all melee that wouldn't dmg you.. with a couple shades)

The big problem was early on.. when the DF mana pool would be full cuz of those oath.. like u remove curse (hit for 120 u almost one shot urself).. he pop a second oath.. u disarm urself.. one way out through a DFs and a tons of minions like rotting and mummy.. those dbl oath, it was a dead sentence.

When they change the loot distribution for a point system.. in solo it was one artifact every 4 hours. (2 run)

PS: I hear ya for the new meta, will keep that in mind.

Cookie

So for the record, at champ spawns, and these events, it takes 3 throwers to have the same impact as 1 Sampire.
We all know this, this maybe why you see so many throwers.
Maybe if you buffed thrower output x 3, you would see less throwers.
But anyway, I think the Sampire debuff on paragons is fair, you can still life leech off the smaller mobs while fighting it.
Otherwise, Sampires just mow everything down.

We see just as many Sampire bots as thrower bots, and for the record, my throwers are not botted. In fact I don’t see so many thrower bots as they do not have the survivability you can’t go away and leave them for hours like I see with Sampires, because they die very quickly unattended.

KroDuK

Cookie said:

Otherwise, Sampires just mow everything down.

You mean like tamers does?but the sampire/sappire are front line; putting their balls on the line not their pet to retreat at any moment!

I still believe the undead event/ solution for anti leech type of stuff would be great.. the trojan horse solution on every event is meh in my opinion (it encourage script pocket healer like u admitted doing on one of my first post about PvP). It would be like the skeletal dragon stuff for tamers.. trojan stuff.. it ain't fun walking with rocks in your shoes.

Some event they could do undead.. Sampies shall not pass!! Bring your paladin.. plus it make no sense leeching life from a pill of bones.

Iniquity

Lord_Nythrax said:

Iniquity said:

My feedback is to not change it sampires can do enough.

You know what? That's fine. But if sampires are going to be soft-banned from every ToT event for eternity, I think at least one other template should suffer the same fate. So yeah, keep the paragons immune to life leech, but make it so... I dunno... whenever a tamer pet hits them, they teleport on top of the tamer and attack them directly. After all, that template can already do lots of things, so they can just go do something else, right?

That's fine by me I play a macer tamer no problem if it targets me.

Cookie

KroDuK said:

Cookie said:

Otherwise, Sampires just mow everything down.

You mean like tamers does?but the sampire/sappire are front line; putting their balls on the line not their pet to retreat at any moment!

I still believe the undead event/ solution for anti leech type of stuff would be great.. the trojan horse solution on every event is meh in my opinion (it encourage script pocket healer like u admitted doing on one of my first post about PvP). It would be like the skeletal dragon stuff for tamers.. trojan stuff.. it ain't fun walking with rocks in your shoes.

Some event they could do undead.. Sampies shall not pass!! Bring your paladin.. plus it make no sense leeching life from a pill of bones.

I really don’t think tamers do mow anything down, they are nowhere near the level of what Sampires can do.
Tamers have a great tank pet, but the playstyle is very slow, being on foot etc. I cannot even do it because I fall asleep with the slowness. But I understand tamers are a different breed, they love their pets, and they are ok with a slower pace of game.

I’m sort of ok with your undead concept, it would have to be tested for balance, as only 1 out of 6 slayer types are undead.