Main Guild Discussion

[evilcabbage]

do you really want to see sixteen different people conked out in the middle of the street, completely naked because pickpockets have master sap now?

i do not.

[wizturbo]

I think all this debate on this thread is useful for staff to see just how much controversy there is going to be during these guild changes.

[evilcabbage]

agreed.

it is not going to be possible to please everyone.

[RogueGunslinger]

do you really want to see sixteen different people conked out in the middle of the street, completely naked because pickpockets have master sap now?

i do not.

Hah. Suggesting people make pickpockets. I wouldn't be surprised if they were more rare than anything 6+ karma

[Dar]

Having some experience with long lived assassins and long lived pickpockets, I am of opinion that pick pockets are already very powerful combat wise for what they're supposed to be. Sap is also a good 2x more powerful then backstab. If I was special apping a concept and I had to ditch either backstab, or sab, I'd ditch backstab.

[Majikal]

There's a pretty big difference between a branched assassin with raised skills and sap and a branched pp with raised skills and equivalent sap. Ditto with ranger + sap.
Assassin will always be more terrifying with it.

[Tannhäuser]

do you really want to see sixteen different people conked out in the middle of the street, completely naked because pickpockets have master sap now?

i do not.

This argument is illogical.  Master sap already exists in the game, and this has not been the usual consequence.

[Dresan]

And yet, I'm still more terrified of that bash from a skilled warrior with advanced weapons. Archery from a ranger with poisoned arrows. And master back-stab with the right poisons from an assassin.

This is not to say that sap is not effective or scary but since people can currently play assassin/bounty hunter, or any number of other sub-guilds to get to master sap quickly, I still don't think giving it to a new merging of burglar+pickpocket guild to eventually branch is a bad idea. There is no reason they shouldn't have their own special tool to make them scary. It doesn't change the fact that you will still want the newly buffed assassin with better combat abilities to take out beefier targets.

I will agree though that burglar+pickpocket should probably not branch parry, but these modest fighters should still be master of the sap.

[WarriorPoet]

Change is bad. I fear it and do not approve.

[Dresan]

At the very least, let it not be said this community is not full of great tippers

[IAmJacksOpinion]

I honestly don't think Rangers, Warriors, and Assassins need much re-working at all, with the new sub-guild changes. I mean, if you go back 2-3 years, before extended sub-guilds, your main guild was your only real guild, and because of their almost uselessly low caps on skills, sub guilds were really only good to get your cross-environment sneak, quicker branching, or one-off popular skills like desert-nav, food forage, and climb.

Now, with the 2/16 change (may it live on in infamy), anyone with 2 or more karma (which is probably most of us) never has to play a standard subguild ever again.  You want a warrior who sneaks and backstabs? You got it, no spec-app necessary. You want a ranger with parry from day 0, hour 0? Here you go? You want a character who can sneak, hide, peek, steal, pick, poison, backstab, scan, etc? (The classic D&D Rogue.) Also easily doable...  

Even without main guild reworkings, the average PC going forward has the potential to be so versatile it's scary... Take a minute to think about that.

At that rate, I don't see a lot of point in arguing Warrior vs Ranger vs Assassin in terms of what skills they get - they're all pretty solid already. But let me tell you about pickpockets....

Well, actually I'm going to step back and weigh in on this D&D Rogue situation. D&D and a MUD are extremely different. In D&D you play an epic level adventurer who occasionally does day-to-day things (usually between sessions, via a phone call to your DM). In a MUD, you play a day-to-day person who occasionally goes on epic adventures in which you stand around and try not to spam the screen while the templar you're escorting does epic things. Or you sit on a bar and talk to people all day. So in D&D, rogue is a fun and necessary class to most groups because the party needs someone to shadow the suspicious guy, or steal the guards keys, or open the locked treasure chest. And since D&D is combat heavy, they also have this sneak attack gimmick to make them not entirely useless. It works for D&D because its players versus the environment. In Armageddon, it's mostly PvP in the capacity that the meeting you're listening in on could foil IRL weeks or months worth of planning. The items you're stealing are things that could be sorely missed, or of immense personal value. And the guy you're backstabbing for the majority of his health has days and days invested in that character. It's too much power to cram in one class. (Even though you can, with the right Guild/Ext. Subguild now. And it's awesome.)

So, I think the aspects of the D&D Rogue need to be split of for Arm. Whether it's with two classes - Assassin and Burg+Pickpocket (Scoundrel?) - or the three we have now.

But if we keep the three we have now, for the love of all that's grimdark and unholy, revise pickpocket.  Currently Assassins are good at killing, and can even learn to burgle to a passable level. Burglars are great at burgling, good at stealing/peeking, and can throw/poison to make them a bit dangerous to mess with. But pickpockets can basically only pickpocket. They can learn to fight decently well against shitty opponents, and they can kind of sap, but they really don't have a lot to fall back on. To make matters worse, their branching order is all kinds of fucked. Sleight of hand and hide from day 0, hour 0 would make them a hell of a lot more useful / easy to keep alive.

The other major difference between burglars and pickpockets, is that burglary is much more socially acceptable. Player behavior has proven countless times that we're much more open to the idea of shelling out hundreds of coins for "apartment insurance" than we are with having a 60 sid dagger stolen off our belt. Additionally, burglars are far less likely to get caught than pickpockets, because if they open your door and see that you're home, they're going to book before you even get a chance to see what cloak they're wearing. Pickpockets, by nature, have to be point blank with their hand in your cookie jar to even use their flagship skill. If they fail, they could be insta-gibbed by overzealous soldiers. And even if they codedly succeed, there's a good chance they'll still "lose" to shitty RP, or another GDB gripe thread about how they didn't graciously accept their own imminent demise with 5 emotes and 2 forms of identification.  (Pro-tip: You can do "steal (bumping into ~amos as he walks past)" to emote while stealing. You don't need to use an extra emote or hemote that tells the whole room "Hey, I'm about to steal some stuff." Didn't see who swiped your dagger, or how they got close enough to you to do it? Well that's because YOU ACTUALLY DIDN'T FUCKING SEE IT!)  </rant>

[IAmJacksOpinion]

So, I don't find main guild revisions incredibly necessary for most classes, but since it's happening here's my personal guild by guild thoughts:

All Guilds:
I think weapon skills are bad, and they should be revised.


Warrior
- Under my proposed weapon skills system that will probably never happen, they would get all teh weapon skills, and to a cap at least 10% higher than any other guild...
- Under the current system, give them advanced weapon skills at like mid-journeyman. Most warriors can hit that in 5-10 days played, and still have time to raise an advanced weapon skill to a useful level. But if this is done, I think the supposed power of advanced weapons should be lowered some. (If they're really all that good. We've all only ever seen them on scary-maxed warriors, so maybe we think too highly of them.)
- Also, giving them no hands ride and charge would be nice, and would give the C-elves more to cry about.

Ranger
- Good as is, but if it has to lose something I'd say a slight drop in melee prowess (like their weapon and fighting style skill caps drop by about 10%).
- Branch parry at Journeyman dual wield or etwo. Parry is a huge boon to early warriors, and I personally am not sold on giving that up. Though it shouldn't be a pipe dream for rangers either.
- Also, I think it would make sense to start with sneak/hide, then branch scan and listen. Reason being, Sneak/Hide are much more useful early on to help you catch the easier prey when you don't have a mount, and can't safely fight more powerful things.

Assassins
- Branch parry at journeyman dual wield or etwo.
- Get brew from sneak or something other than poison. If you can find tablets, you can grind poison earlier, but if you can't you don't have to die or out yourself trying.

Burglars
- Start with pickmaking (or allow some more common items to be used as shitty picks). Or allow it to be branched off of something other than pick. In trade, they could start with much lower pick so that it's not as immediately useful.


Pickpockets
- Start with hide and sleight of hand. In trade, you could make climb and flee branch from something like sneak or sleight of hand. Don't be sour, this means that PPs might actually try stealing from you BEFORE they've already mastered the skill.
- Throw, FFS. To a high level, because they're deft like that.
- I could get behind disarm, but I'd much rather have....
- Pick and pickmaking, to assassiny levels. Burglars can peek and steal from day one, why can't pickpockets learn to burgle a little, after they've mastered stealing outright?

OR, combine Burglar + Pickpocket (Scoundrel?)
The skills could look something like this:
- weapon & combat skills as burglar has now (including high end throw)
- sneak
- - listen
- hide
- - scan
- peek
- - search
- steal
- - pick
- sleight of hand
- value
- - haggle
And maybe throw in flee, and some low level poisoning or something.
The idea is they start as low level urchins and work up to burglary.

Merchants
I actually kind of want to see merchant split into two guilds; one for silkies, and one for weapons and armors. Uh, Artisan and Warforger? Idk.
I die a little bit inside every time I have to buy a weapon from "the <beverage>-skinned, <color I don't know>-tressed fme", and they're like "here u go i made this myself. its good i know cuz im a master weaponsmith. but i don't use them myself. evr."

The silky branch could get all the listen, scan, and whatever other skills would compliment someone catering to society's elite. Meanwhile, the weapon branch could get some low level weapon skills, so you get the impression that they have the faintest clue what the fuck they're talking about.

But this is a minor urge. Anyone else?

Various Wigglers
Just, no to giving them "thematic" skills. If your drovian isn't killing people because he doesn't have backstab, you're doing it wrong and backstab won't solve that for you. Put in a special app if it makes you feel better. With the expanded subguilds, and the possibility of extended sub guilds via spec app, if your mage needs to get some more mundane skills, they readily can.

The other thing I would like to see changed, more than anything else, is a way to fix the grind. Right now mages can just sit in their temples for ~5 days and grind in absolute safety, than step out and be scary.  On one hand, it's understandable because they have almost no survival skills until they've branched them. I'd love to say "no Nil - go out and do something!" but honestly, in practice this would either mean that you need to run up to a scrab unarmed and try to fireball it before it kills you - LITERALLY DOZENS OF TIMES, or you need to spend even more time than you are now sitting in your temple waiting for a spell effect to wear off so that you can go out an RP...

[Warsong]

But if we keep the three we have now, for the love of all that's grimdark and unholy, revise pickpocket.  Currently Assassins are good at killing, and can even learn to burgle to a passable level. Burglars are great at burgling, good at stealing/peeking, and can throw/poison to make them a bit dangerous to mess with. But pickpockets can basically only pickpocket. They can learn to fight decently well against shitty opponents, and they can kind of sap, but they really don't have a lot to fall back on. To make matters worse, their branching order is all kinds of fucked. Sleight of hand and hide from day 0, hour 0 would make them a hell of a lot more useful / easy to keep alive.

While this is true, such a change would make it so that pickpockets branch practically nothing. They'd start with all of their relevant skills. Burglars already pretty much do that, and these two classes largely suffer from a lack of... well, evolving. Maybe that can just be a fact of life for the two thieving classes, but it does feel a little boring. I like the feeling of having a kind of development curve for characters, and pickpockets and burglars already feel like they lack this. There's nothing to look forward to. It's as if things like latch/unlatch should have been its own skill that branches from steal. Add some kind of disguise skill to branch from hide, merge the two guilds, and then I think we're looking at something that stacks up to the other mundanes.

[fourTwenty]

.

Merchants
I actually kind of want to see merchant split into two guilds; one for silkies, and one for weapons and armors. Uh, Artisan and Warforger? Idk.
I die a little bit inside every time I have to buy a weapon from "the <beverage>-skinned, <color I don't know>-tressed fme", and they're like "here u go i made this myself. its good i know cuz im a master weaponsmith. but i don't use them myself. evr."

The silky branch could get all the listen, scan, and whatever other skills would compliment someone catering to society's elite. Meanwhile, the weapon branch could get some low level weapon skills, so you get the impression that they have the faintest clue what the fuck they're talking about.

But this is a minor urge. Anyone else?

I never knew how badly I wanted this until just now.

[IAmJacksOpinion]

But if we keep the three we have now, for the love of all that's grimdark and unholy, revise pickpocket.  Currently Assassins are good at killing, and can even learn to burgle to a passable level. Burglars are great at burgling, good at stealing/peeking, and can throw/poison to make them a bit dangerous to mess with. But pickpockets can basically only pickpocket. They can learn to fight decently well against shitty opponents, and they can kind of sap, but they really don't have a lot to fall back on. To make matters worse, their branching order is all kinds of fucked. Sleight of hand and hide from day 0, hour 0 would make them a hell of a lot more useful / easy to keep alive.

While this is true, such a change would make it so that pickpockets branch practically nothing. They'd start with all of their relevant skills. Burglars already pretty much do that, and these two classes largely suffer from a lack of... well, evolving.

That's fair, but the issue is more that pickpockets are missing two skills that could be considered essential. I guess sleight of hand isn't THAT essential, but thematically it's weird that I can steal a longsword in broad daylight with ease, but I can't cheat at cards. I think it would be better if latch/unlatch were on a different skill than sleight of hand. Also, in my 2nd monolithic post I also advocated giving pickpockets more skills, which could all be branched since they're less essential.

[hyzhenhok]

Well, actually I'm going to step back and weigh in on this D&D Rogue situation. D&D and a MUD are extremely different. In D&D you play an epic level adventurer who occasionally does day-to-day things (usually between sessions, via a phone call to your DM). In a MUD, you play a day-to-day person who occasionally goes on epic adventures in which you stand around and try not to spam the screen while the templar you're escorting does epic things. Or you sit on a bar and talk to people all day. So in D&D, rogue is a fun and necessary class to most groups because the party needs someone to shadow the suspicious guy, or steal the guards keys, or open the locked treasure chest. And since D&D is combat heavy, they also have this sneak attack gimmick to make them not entirely useless. It works for D&D because its players versus the environment. In Armageddon, it's mostly PvP in the capacity that the meeting you're listening in on could foil IRL weeks or months worth of planning. The items you're stealing are things that could be sorely missed, or of immense personal value. And the guy you're backstabbing for the majority of his health has days and days invested in that character. It's too much power to cram in one class. (Even though you can, with the right Guild/Ext. Subguild now. And it's awesome.)

I don't see how the game explodes if you give assassins Steal, which is basically all the merger idea is. Master pickpockets are rare enough we're really talking about merging burglar and assassin, whose skills overlap so much it's hard to convince me that merging them will change anything at all. The parade of horribles I'm seeing here are things that already can and do happen.

Mundane characters do epic stuff all the time. If we look at the maximum potential of the ranger and warrior vs. what this hypothetical merged rogue would have, I'm not seeing a big difference.

[Harmless]

Burglars
- Start with pickmaking (or allow some more common items to be used as shitty picks). Or allow it to be branched off of something other than pick. In trade, they could start with much lower pick so that it's not as immediately useful.

No, this would be bad because of the way training pick works (needing a lock of the right skill level to be able to try). They definitely need to start where they do to allow for enough flexibility to learn it at all.

[IAmJacksOpinion]

Then how do assassins, whose pick starts quite a bit lower than burglars, train it? I'm merely offering trade offs for giving easier access to picks. Not that a few points in pick will slow down progression much at that point.

I don't see how the game explodes if you give assassins Steal, which is basically all the merger idea is. Master pickpockets are rare enough we're really talking about merging burglar and assassin, whose skills overlap so much it's hard to convince me that merging them will change anything at all. The parade of horribles I'm seeing here are things that already can and do happen.

True, I played an assassin/cutpurse once who had all the skills, and could do them all well - but he wasn't a master of everything, which is more what I'm arguing against. I like the idea of there being a sneaky class focused on killing, and a sneaky class that is not. Currently there are two sneaky classes that are not so much, but one of them is basically an exercise in willful masochism because it has no secondary aspect to it.

[RogueGunslinger]

Assassins should have maxed throw.

[Inks]

They get master. It's fine.

[RogueGunslinger]

Why have I always thought it was journeyman and never trained it?

[Molten Heart]

Then how do assassins, whose pick starts quite a bit lower than burglars, train it? I'm merely offering trade offs for giving easier access to picks. Not that a few points in pick will slow down progression much at that point.

They find the wimpiest locks in the game to start with, and they are few.

[CodeMaster]

Strongly disagree with the ideas of merging any classes.  I can see your guys' arguments, but I'd rather we had a bigger pie to cut from than to make everyone share their slice.  If that makes sense.

[Delirium]

Merge pickpocket and burglar into rogue, maybe adjust starting levels for assassin skills, give merchants brew from floristry & start all initial craft skills at journeyman, give warriors advanced/master riding & mid-level perception skills, leave rangers alone.

Scatter a few journeyman crafting skills among all guilds that correlate to their primary profession.

Give everyone mid-level climb, give forage food to select subguilds or have it branch from basic forage, and open wilderness quit to anyone with a tent.

Subguilds can cover the rest.

Done.

[Jihelu]

If they remove nil just have it so you don't have to choose a target or can choose "wall" or "floor" as a target.
Otherwise leveling fireball will take years.
And it will be more funny if you just chuck a ball of flame towards the wall every now and then till people in the temple get fucking pissed at you.