Armageddon MUD General Discussion Board

I disagree. Certain subguild + guild combinations are more powerful than most of the old main guild elementalists.

The big exception to this is the Whirans and the sorcs, because of two (maybe three) spells in particular. Those spells should have been severely nerfed a long time ago.

You're not listening. This isn't about power, we all know that certain minmaxed combinations can become extremely powerful if they spend enough time hunting or sparring. But it's no longer possible to ONLY pursue magic. You need to develop your mundane skillset or else you're severely gimped. This isn't optional. It's not a choice. The mundane skillset is now forced down a mage's throat.

When I was playing a merchant / Whiran, it felt like I was playing a mundane merchant with all the disadvantages of the gem. Next time I'll just pick a 100% mundane role, it's almost the same thing with less disadvantages and far more social and RPT options.

And before anyone goes 'why would you play a merchant magicker and not a warrior / ranger / assassin' - because I roleplay instead of minmaxing? Because I had hope that there would be options not open to mundane merchants as compensation, such as magickal mastercrafts? Nope, not really. Also, I don't like Armageddon MUD's combat system and would prefer never having to deal with it ever outside of sparring in the Byn, which is kinda fun sometimes.

But now if I wanted to be a powerful mage I'd have to deal with the mundane combat system... 

Noticed my dad's breathing picked up while I was telling him about it so I think he's worried and I don't want him to worry since he already stresses constantly.

I was all excited about my long weekend but last night temps dropped in the negative and apparently my body doesn't know what to make of that and now my nose won't stop running and I feel like garbage.  Grrr.  I really wanted to do 5 days at the gym this week instead of 4.  We'll see but I feel awful.

I think one part of the problem is the fact that killing someone the "normal" way can be nearly impossible. If you're not a mul/giant or someone with unbelievably high strength and a Club of Lucky Headshots +5, killing with conventional combat is barely an option unless there's a locked door involved. Walking up to someone in the open and typing 'kill man' will result in death 0% of the time.

Namino touched upon the combat delays some pages back. I think it's something that deserves to be revised. It's a part of the game that has probably been untouched since the days when it wasn't even an RPI. Why does attacking somebody leave you unable to act again for like ten seconds? If you initiate combat, they can flee at minimal risk and difficulty, and run halfway across Allanak or the Red Desert before you can begin to give chase.

This leads players to seek out other ways to kill, and these ways tend to be a lot less palatable. The one-shot backstab, the heramide arrow, the apartment tango, the hopeless execution in a jail cell. People know that this is how you actually land a kill, so they plan with that in mind and even make race, class and role choices that accomodate it. A disproportinate number of murders are carried out in one of these few repetitive ways.

It would be a lot more interesting to lose a character in a hard-fought battle to the death where you actually have time to emote, and perhaps to understand the reason, than just getting the old "someone stabs you, your vision goes black. Mantishead." It's a souring experience and something that gets overused, because if you're making a character that you think might have reasons to PK, you're compelled to make it a character that can do something like that. And then once you've finally got that character with master backstab or whatever, it's tempting to look for ways to use it, sometimes a little too frivolously.

Various other MUDs have had no such instakill trump cards, instead it took time to flee. I've had a lot of great fights in games running the RPI Codebase where there's no such thing as backstab or poisons or nonsensical stun damage with clubs. There were plenty of deaths but they usually involved an actual fight, and I think it made for a better and more dynamic PvP environment. It creates a less all-or-nothing scale of character deadliness. On Armageddon, it's too often a binary question of "have you got heramide/backstab/god-strength or are you not dangerous?"

There are certainly times when a quick and dirty kill has its place and I'm not advocating for the removal of those abilities, but I think it's unhealthy when it becomes the go-to method. The fight to the death is underused on Armageddon because it isn't very viable, and I think it could be made viable with a revision of combat delays and the instant nature of flee. Fleeing is just too easy.

Quote from: Nao on January 18, 2019, 01:38:42 PM

The part about magickers getting “like four spells” is just factually wrong. Branch!

I was trying to avoid being too precise because that gets a post edited, so I didn't mean literally four. However, it's not so much more than four.

Maybe this is a spoiler, but the subguilds end up with more than four spells. Significantly much, much more.