Penalty to sorcerers and subguild elementalists

[ABoredLion]

I know this is an old topic and I'm late to the party, but I did want to offer my opinion on this very belatedly and hopefully hear some discussion, or perhaps staff offering further on their reasoning on this, if it is true and the numbers are as they say. I also want to be clear up front that I will speak from the perspective of a character type that takes risks, is typically out in the open world, and often involved in some kind of potentially dangerous conflict with either the world itself, or other players if necessary.

While I didn't play for the last year or so before Arm shut down, I have quite a bit of experience as combat mundane characters, I played old full-guild mages(though only the lower karma ones), and I played what was arguably among the most devastating and tempestuous of the magicker subguilds alongside characters in environments where combat was a constant risk.

I understand these changes in regards to sorcerers to a degree, as they legitimately could just get to a point where fighting with them was borderline impossible. However, even still, they had to play by hit and run tactics usually and were not able to just front face the threats of the world gathering together. One specific spell that a specific type of sorcerer gets (I don't know which one, but you know it when you hear it) which is apparently not something fire mages get anymore (re: Halaster's post) enables them to do this more consistently and get away with a lot more, but as the society is generally against them and reinforced by staff to be such, we're just talking about evening out playing fields for character sorcs.

Admittedly, the occasional Power Ranger squad pops up and the Plainsman's gathered goons empowered by all 15 elements and their mum's pizza rolls shows up as a united front, but usually that's not something the game is balanced around as it's a rarity. Over many years of play, the amount of Power Ranger teams that have popped up and not been dead in like, a month at most are very, very few.

So what are we really balancing the elementalist subguilds here for?

Most combat is relatively one sided once it's begun, and now that major clan groups are also recruiting elementalists potentially(on top of Templars having always been able to get them), you will see more than ever that the non-gemmed elementalist just gets stomped out. No changes necessary. You could have given nongemmed elementalists a boost, and barring a huge change in the design of the game world and emphasis of staff's chosen roleplay location, the non-gemmed elementalist's abilities are all organized around existing things.

I hate to dash people's mystique, but at the end of the day, a spell that does damage is just like a kick that does damage.

The very best (iconic) spell of spells to reference for damage concerns, is not going to kill anyone faster than your common fighter class who has spent 50 days played in the Byn getting extra extra swole and rough circling it. The difference is the time investment, and in the spell caster's case, historically they're the ones getting nonstop staff attention if they act out of line. Now, admittedly, staff has made quite a few changes to the game as far as combat in the last year, but it was absolutely routine in my experience in a combat clan to see hits to HP that were 30-50% of your HP in a single hit if it hit you in a bad location(I saw the wrist changes, eliminating/lowering some of that slightly), and even with honest to goodness top of the end armor and sparring weapons, you could still do 20% or more of someone's life per combat round on an even decently trained PC one versus one without those special hits, which isn't a very common way to fight in the first place. Combat only ever got 'questionable' when you and the person you were up against were equivalent. Then combat would slow down, and it might be chance, who gets lucky, and you could feel that in the moment. In these moments, a spellcaster's deadliness rises.

Up front, a great deal of magicks essentially just provide you skills you may not have. I can't get specific on this for obvious reasons, but considering there's "Tar of the Council" on Armageddon's Whiran images and you can clearly see that his feet are floating off of the ground on the helpfile, you might assume that he is not concerned with "tripping". In my experience most of magick is in the vein of this, just pretty scripts of effects that are mundane otherwise essentially. It is our roleplaying and the reactions of people around us that make magick actually feel like magick. The story, the setting, and the effect despite having not necessarily earned a skill to do that thing you're doing.

So what does all of this have to do with me saying that dropping those subguild elementalists' skills is a bad idea?

Mundane guilds are very, very strong in their current form for violence, especially if you pick one of the heavy combat ones and they also grow very, very fast. I've seen and experienced well trained mundane main/subguilds hunting magickers before, and once their skills get to a certain point, they aren't worried. It has been my experience that the only time the fear really comes into combat mundanes is when a sorcerer comes out, or they're up against an equally trained mundane skilled class with the right mix of magicks.

Even the idea that roleplay should enforce fear of magickers fails more now, because it's hardwired into the documents even further that commoners went to butchering magickers during the Magefall thing, and now their clans can also have them, enabling them to have IC reason to understand and react to spells, and generalize what mages might do in different scenarios. So now any non-gemmed antagonists are supposed to potentially confront those groups, when those groups can gain access to effective abilities similarly, while the non-gemmed are also being mundanely weaker, despite having every aspect of society against them already.

Further, it's another of these steps which are backwards from the spirit of roleplay and collaborative storytelling. I've always found it bewildering to create arbitrary caps on different skills rather than letting players' experiences and time spent bring them to a place that they're at, but I understand the underlying spirit of there being some amount of balance. This is just another step further from that with more arbitrary limitation.

Just putting up the raw numbers, two 100 days played characters with similar combat experiences, the same main guild, and a magick subguild on the other one, yes, the mage probably kills the other if two people post up and stare at each other and just start slapping sticks. That's not how the game world works though. What happens typically for nonfatal, surprise murder encounters is that a mundane somewhere will snitch their hearts out, and the whole world starts hunting and whispering and slinging stuff at the non-gemmed. Even scary magick armor and 'mon un SuperKickbutnotreallyKick,becausethisismagick' won't stop you from getting killed by the Byn unit that spots you after. You get lucky enough not to get rolled, you get combat locked by casting a spell, and now you sit here until you're dead. Almost all of magick is pretty much, 'once you're seen, you're screwed' even if you weren't setting out to be a Big Bad somewhere.

As far as the dangers, you can cast fairly quick, but there's time between effects and reactions people can have to them, and combat goes very, very fast.

If staff were determined to lower skills, the only pertinent skills that should have been lowered were offense. Not defensive, not utility. Life is already going to be hard enough for any non-gemmed. From experience, it is a slog to walk that line. The reason that sorcerers can handle this change a lot better than elementalists is that there's overlap between different spells that aren't offered by the same schools historically that work to cover these bases and enable the defensive nature necessary to survive any antagonism from an aggressor. Their mixed toolkit of magick types seems to give them a little of this and that (aside from that one lucky one) that covers these bases and the other skills just make those aspects even more insurmountable.

To genuinely compare a subguild elementalist to a sorcerer for necessary balancing is ridiculous. With the split up of their aspects of magick, most elementalists have very exploitable weak points and the ones which really don't seem to, actually have the most obvious of weak points ever in that if they go outside once they're "out" and are outright dead or forever facing random attempts on their life going forward. Many different weak points had different interactions from other abilities which historically gave elementalists some coverage for varied events but they're often lopsided now or are missing entirely, and that thing which invalidated needing that particular skill potentially (see our guy Tar of the Council) may not even be in your particular selection so you're losing things there too.

Now, full disclosure and respect to current staff and changes made since I was really being choked by Armageddon's lure, there were some spell effects and even new spells added by staff. So some of these apparent weak points could have been reworked within spells or effects changed; I experienced some changes while playing one of my characters, so I know they were reworking some things, but my point still stands. It does seem like a gross step over the line to compare even the most devastating of mages for skills which can actually negatively impact Arm's culture in any way to sorcerers for their power. It wasn't ever even close and non-gemmed mages are even worse off now, because the system's against them, their defensive skills, stealth, and manipulation skills are going to be bad for the environment they're dealing with.

Further, these are all locked behind special applications, which means you're not getting to do them often even if they were potentially, at the very highest end, anywhere near a sorcerer. Which they weren't.

This change is a bad decision. An unnecessary one.

Mages trying to kill you should always be scary, at least a little bit, no matter your days played. I get that on staff side, when you can just create a mage NPC and take it into combat with another NPC you probably load up nearby to test how quick one can potentially kill the other or whatever, that the numbers might seem skewed (I'm sure you guys have some way to test this kind of thing) but that's not indicative of actual roleplay experiences. If you're not attached to characters at all or playing roles, then you can throw danger around willy-nilly and it doesn't matter beyond the moment of combat, but that's just not reflective of long term experience in the game world. It's also not particularly reflective of the newly fleshed out stance on PKs, which will drive people to not kill(something I agree with) but will also result in inevitable killing or enslavement(essentially killing if you don't care for that playstyle) for anyone who doesn't care to play gemmed.

Defensive changes are massive in Armageddon despite what I believe to be relatively low point values. The difference between advanced and journeyman parry is huge in experience. The difference between master and advanced, also. The same goes for shield use. Most stealth skills are borderline useless even at 75% of potential max in my experience, and something like climb (barring notable exceptions) dropping even that amount massively escalates danger in most of the places where such a thing is impactful. In Armageddon's environments that I felt like you actually, truly needed climb skill, it's always been that you just kind of do it or die environments/moments. Binary on the ups, and any slight failures on the steps down = death. That's terrible news for 90% of these elementalist subguilds, especially if they're doing their thing.

Now, admittedly this all could be a move toward making less magick in the game and pushing people away from playing magickers, but I'm hoping that's just not the desire. The special applications probably already did that, and I'd assume that staff are happy to let people play what they want to play and just want to enjoy the game world that they put their time in too generally. That's why I'm going on the assumption this is a balancing concern mostly.

[Kavrick]

To begin with, I'm going to be frank and say that I skimmed through this because it's 8am and that is an absolute mountain of text. That aside, despite the fact I cannot talk for staff and assume their intent, their changes fix a handful of rather important problems with elementalist subguilds.

1. Subguild elementalists had an entire main guild which they could use to hide the fact they are Gicks. The fact that the percentage of gicks in the game was so high, yet it was rare that one was ever discovered proved this.
2. Taking a combat main guild would make you incredibly hard to kill, removing any real weakness that a mage might have.
3. Taking something like an enhancement rukkian or several other subguild options would simply enhance your mundane skills by a significant amount. This means that subguild elementalists were often just straight up better than a true mundane with any other mundane subguild option. A fighter, no matter the subguild will never beat a fighter with access to magic. This meant that mundane characters were basically redundant as long as you had access to magick subguilds, and without them requiring a special application, you could just roll a subguild mage into a subguild mage into a subguild mage with no penalty.

Making full-mages the default means that you can play a magick-user if you wish, and they have their strengths and weaknesses. Subguild mages are still an option and incredibly potent, but are limited by special applications.

[Lotion]

The gick nerfs did not go far enough. Ever magick user's bash skill should be hardcapped at jman.

[dumbstruck]

I don't think that people will play subguild mages after the changes.

I don't think subguild mages were actually good for the game.

So I don't feel like it's a loss.

It was far too easy for mages to never be known as such to anyone they didn't want to know it. I also have beef with the fact that the way that it was set up empowered the hell out of a small margin of players to minmax and grief beyond reason.

It was problematic for me, because it split the thread rather than threading the needle. Which it still does now, just in different ways. By all reason and rights, mages /should/ be able to be as good as a mundane at mundane things. However, in practice, that turned into a handful of people using that reasonable position to exploit pvp. If people were simply exploiting pve things, I don't think anyone would have had a problem with it. But not only did it make mages as good at mundane things as mundanes, it also neutered the hell out of magick, magick users, and so forth. Why? Because the way the guilds were split were terrible. Just straight up. Imagine a wind witch that can neither fly nor become invisible? A water witch who could not heal people. A fire witch - no, their stuff was already geared heavily toward 1 play style and it really just exacerbated that.

I think that the thing that needed to happen was for people to get the things that they use in pvp dinged and cut down a bit. Which it did. But it's also affected all of the pve things (namely crafting and crafts, but to a lesser degree, also utility skills). I think it was the right call for pvp skills. I think it was too much on the pve skills. By all means let a subguild drovian with a master sneak guild be sneakier than an elf. It makes sense. But the place where I have an issue with it is in the way it's affected crafting and foraging and so many other things.

That said, I've still considered making a mundane guild/subguild PC in the foreseeable future. So I wouldn't say it's unplayable. And the fact that the cost is so high makes it so less people are going to make subguild mages. But I don't think that that's an issue at all. They were both overpowered and neutered. It's not a good play experience generally. Nothing will be 'optimized' and if you're playing an ungemmed subguild mage, once you've outed yourself, you're out. So most people who play them will be more likely than before to be secretive about it. But again I don't really find that to be a problem.

[ABoredLion]

To begin with, I'm going to be frank and say that I skimmed through this because it's 8am and that is an absolute mountain of text. That aside, despite the fact I cannot talk for staff and assume their intent, their changes fix a handful of rather important problems with elementalist subguilds.

A lot of your reply is a bit off topic and a bit of a counterargument for something I'm not really talking about. This isn't about the re-inclusion of main guild elementalists (and the technical removal of common subguild elementalists) or even the shifting of subguilds to special applications. The thread is about a blanket -% nerf to the maximum skills of subguild elementalists across the board.

I originally wrote up a reply for all of that, but it's a bit of a derail.

More to the point of the thread, lowering the defensive abilities of a villified ENSLAVE or KILL ON SIGHT enemy of the state means an across the board shortened Time-to-Kill. In potential PvP environments, as time to kill is shortened, preemptive aggression and defensive actions increase. This isn't an Armageddon specific environment thing, it's just game design. If the intended goal of staff was to dial back slightly on player kills, increasing Time-to-Kill for everyone across the board would be net wins. All magickal effects require set up and/or maintenance. You don't just get an effect without a spell. This is another disadvantage for magickers NOT seeking violence. Ironically, this pushes them more to be the one aggressing when they're discovered. To run around spelled up and if you saw them, well, now you're a liability.

In Armageddon, typically the people hitting first are the ones hitting last. It's just not a change I like at all. That's ignoring the noncombat stuff this % negative would affect, like climb, sneak, riding, direction sense, who knows what else, which is just huge quality of life across the board or outright necessary in a lot of situations.

[Halaster]

In Armageddon, typically the people hitting first are the ones hitting last. It's just not a change I like at all. That's ignoring the noncombat stuff this % negative would affect, like climb, sneak, riding, direction sense, who knows what else, which is just huge quality of life across the board or outright necessary in a lot of situations.

https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,49825.msg1102426.html#msg1102426

- subguild elementalists now have the same max skill penalty as sorcerers.  Which is a 30% reduction in max combat/weapon skills, and a %15 reduction in max stealth skills.  This does not affect starting skills or gain rates, just max. It affects all skills regardless of whether they're guild, subguild, or racial.  It also affects the 'touched' magickal subguilds.  None of this applies to full guild elems.

the line perhaps causing confusion is "It affects all skills regardless of whether they're guild, subguild, or racial".  That means of the skills it affects (combat, weapon, stealth (not climb)) it doesn't matter how you get them.



https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,49825.msg1102436.html#msg1102436

- based on feedback, removed Touched subguilds from the elementalist subguild changes above, so their skills will not be affected



https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,49825.msg1102785.html#msg1102785

- Carved out exception for climb in the sorc/subguild elem skill nerf (climb isn't nerfed like sneak/hide)



So in summary, all subguild mages (except for touched) have their combat and weapons skills max reduced by 30%, and their stealth skills (except climb) max reduced by 15%.

[ABoredLion]

Gotcha on the combat, weapon skills, and stealth skills thing. Thank you for the clarification.

Doesn't change my point on this nor my suggestion about the nature of time to kill and defensiveness being the thing I'm arguing primarily for, but it's great that you caught the climbing thing.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you mean 30% of the max of the given class's skills, not 30% of the max of that skill itself's potential max. 30% loss of shield use and parry is massive. It's beyond the difference between a heavy combat class and one tier lower, I'm fairly sure. Like, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm vaguely thinking it's dropping over two stages down on the class proficiency chart in those areas. Meaning a heavy combatant is now a light combatant IF MAXED OUT, with none of the benefits of a light combatant, and if you happened to pick a light combatant... well good luck honestly. You gave up more than half of the element's potential magick for crafting I hope.

[Roon]

To be perfectly honest, I think the aspect subclasses are so underpowered after this change that there's no real reason to worry about them wreaking havoc in PvP. While I won't miss the gamebreaking stuff they used to be capable of, this overcorrection leaves them vastly inferior to full elementalists with mundane subclasses in any meaningful metric of power. A raider with an aspect subclass will have the combat skill caps of a stalker. A miscreant with an aspect subclass will have the stealth of a rogue-type subclass. An infiltrator will have the combat skills of... a craftsperson? And, what, the stealth skills of a fence? And low advanced backstab?

Pretty sure these characters will be absolute garbage for any form of PvP. You could get an objectively superior character with something like Ruk/swordsman or Krath/thief. On top of that, the aspects require more karma than their parent elementalists and are only available through special application. It's such a severe overcorrection that it's kind of cute. They're basically irrelevant now and I don't expect to meet any.

[Kavrick]

I don't really understand what the big deal is personally. How many players actually reach the cap of their offensive skills? And is having slightly lower parry or shield use really that much worse when you have access to defensive magic? This seems a little overblown.

[ABoredLion]

If your cap is low journeyman, everyone can reach that literally by getting unlucky fighting scrabs. It'll just happen.

I can't explain defensive magick here for obvious reasons. The answer is yes, for the context and conversation as far as RP and fewer escalating interactions, especially where secrets are concerned for non-gemmed. I can't stress this enough, but I would give 50% offensive weapon skills to keep these subguilds defensively where they're at as a default, to put that into perspective.

That would be considerably more healthy for them all.

I would sooner see a no-heavy combat classes on those subguilds rule go into place than any of these options. Just being able to play medium combat (unnerfed) would be an already huge upgrade over this, without getting into issues with like archery often being useless below some agility without near master, hide being nearly worthless short of master for every situation you actually, genuinely need it in. There's just so much to unpack in this.

[Roon]

I don't really understand what the big deal is personally. How many players actually reach the cap of their offensive skills? And is having slightly lower parry or shield use really that much worse when you have access to defensive magic? This seems a little overblown.

It's mostly about the defensive skills and things like two handed, sap/backstab, archery. And it's not "slightly lower," it's an enormous drop. It's the equivalent of two tiers on the class hierarchy. A heavy-combat class with an aspect subclass will pretty much have the combat potential of a miscreant. And that's the best that any aspect character can be. It's even worse if they pick a light-combat class.

[Kavrick]

Isn't 30% of max around high advanced, not low journeyman? Also I am familiar with only a couple of defensive magicks, and I would certainly say that they are worth having advanced parry over master parry. Also if this makes T1 combat classes like T2 combat classes, I don't really see the issue. T2 and even T3 classes can be formidable opponents without magic. I have to say bluntly, this feels like a hyperfixation of powergaming in pvp, which doesn't feel like something that should be a major concern? Like the average player isn't going to be powergaming like this.

[Roon]

A 30% drop generally takes you from the highest possible skill level (i.e. what enforcer/raider/fighter have in their combat skills) to the very bottom of advanced (where miscreant/stalker/laborer are at). Essentially two tiers down in the class hierarchy. Stealth skills lose about one tier, but that's also a huge deal due to the way scan works and the fact that a third of the classes and a bunch of subclasses now have master scan.

It's a little wonky mathematically because the master level is "smaller" than the previous levels, but the last points are also more impactful due to the way stuff's calculated. Suffice to say that nobody is scared of a miscreant's fighting prowess, and that's about as good as any character with an elemental aspect can ever become. And their stealth will be limited to that of, say, the thief/rogue-type subclasses at best.

I have to say bluntly, this feels like a hyperfixation of powergaming in pvp, which doesn't feel like something that should be a major concern?

It's not a "hyperfixation." It's discussing a topic that naturally pertains to PvP because that's what this change is relevant to. Would you walk into a discussion about backstab or poisons and scold people for caring too much about PvP? Nobody has much reason to care about whether or not poisons are balanced for use against NPCs because that's unimportant. Same goes for magick and, to some extent, combat skills altogether.

Talking about things that pertain to PvP does not automatically equate to "hyperfixation on powergaming." That's kind of a strange perspective, and one that doesn't do anyone any good.

[ABoredLion]

It's not about powergaming for PvP, it's about the fact that PvP exists, and that roleplay exists, and in this world, the roleplay toward any non-gemmed mage is in its inherent nature negative and oppressive, and exceedingly dangerous. Defensive capabilities being measured only on the grounds of "I walk around looking like a damn Super Saiyan!" removes a massive part of the whole idea of being a character, which is that all magickers shouldn't be just their magick and literally nothing else codedly. There should be options that aren't that, and still capable.

It's 30%, it's around 1/3rd, because that's math, and there are typically points 'into' mastery for skills. If we imagine 90 as a maximum skill, losing 27 points is a very big deal. So no, it's not a tiny change. It's a huge one. It will affect your quality of life playing that character, massively given we're talking specifically about combatants.

To me this is about survivability, and not needing to resort to Super Saiyan status to walk outside the gates if you're in general danger potentially, or to exist as a character without seeming odd or out of place in the environments I would generally play these kinds of roles in. Especially for what these subguilds give up in the process. The idea that mages are not just mages even codedly is important to me at least. The reality is that due to how Arm's wildlife, general NPC enemies, and player classes are balanced (at least before this shutdown) these changes would make anything short of nuclear not just a risk, but an extreme one.

I am for mages blending in. I know you're against it and see it as an issue they remedied; your post made that clear. I prefer at least some mages within a specific niche having that option while maintaining upward competency in combat. I like the full mages coming back. I wanted it very, very badly, but I think the niche of subguilds that can just be anyone is important too. I also don't want that niche to be nonexistent because fear of some powergaming unkillable machine which doesn't really exist in Armageddon. Sorcerers with the best coded powergamey advantages get killed despite those advantages. Everyone always says they're unkillable, and then one day they get ran over by 53 inixes or something and that's that.

It will affect you fighting humanoids which are not players. It will affect you fighting raptors which may be players. It will affect you risking going out to find a drink and that surprise tarantula pops up. It will affect much more, and for the group that has the MOST to lose with just a few words or one secret that can potentially turn the world against them, and put them in a position of facing (potentially) constant attack for being a magicker, these skills are important.

[Halaster]

There were a few reasons why we did this:

1.  We (staff) believed, based on observations over the past few years, that subguild mages when paired with heavy combat, which was what we saw most of the time, was simply OP.  It's true you didn't get all the spells, but you got ones that were good enough to be just as effective.  And you took away any weakness that mages had to offset that.  I've heard it described as mundane++.  Or that there's no reason not to take one because of how much stronger and effective the characters were.

2.  As a result of the above, mages became far more common that we were comfortable with.  Sure, there were recurring threads by some folks about how the game has too much magick, and others agreeing.  But the silent majority showed otherwise and kept playing them, and there were just "too many" mages in the game.

3.  We tested it with sorcerers and got feedback from a few of them:  the changes were definitely noticeable, but it didn't gimp the character, or make them unplayable, or even wimpy. Having a high journeyman kick vs a master kick didn't make them useless.  It just made it a bit more difficult, and made them need their magick to make up for it.  The feedback was mostly positive as I recall.



So we took a two-prong approach to changing them (nerfing them as some folks say).  We made them special app only to cut down their numbers.  And we gave them the combat/weapon/stealth penalties to cut down their over-powered nature a bit.  Obviously as you can see from the wildly varying opinions in this thread, it's a heavily disputed topic, and I get that.  This is the direction we've chosen for Season One.  We're always open to improving and changing things if something doesn't work out.  Though it's no secret, we're sometimes slow to make big changes like that.  We want to "let things play out" for a while.

The concept of subguild mages is fun, though, which is why we left Touched alone.

[Lizzie]

So as I'm understanding it:

A sub-krathi who has a mundane combat main class -

Normally the mundane combat main class's piercing skill maxes out at 100. But playing a sub-krathi, it will max out at 70.
HOWEVER - the sub-krathi gets Melt-Face, which mundane characters don't get at all. I'd say that balances out just fine.

[Roon]

So as I'm understanding it:

A sub-krathi who has a mundane combat main class -

Normally the mundane combat main class's piercing skill maxes out at 100. But playing a sub-krathi, it will max out at 70.
HOWEVER - the sub-krathi gets Melt-Face, which mundane characters don't get at all. I'd say that balances out just fine.

It's not as simple as that. It's much more nuanced than "piercing skill still good? then everything's fine!"

But to stick with a similarly simple analogy, it's more like: you could also have picked Krathi/Swordsman and got roughly the same combat skills as Raider/Sub-Krathi, but then in addition to Melt-Face, you also get Cook-Perfect-Steak, Detect-Betrayal, Make-the-Sun-Spin and Conjure-Wyvern which the aspect subclass won't have. And the superior option requires less karma.

Ultimately, it's good that we won't have obscenely powerful hybrid characters running around wielding the best of both worlds. However, it isn't actually balanced. It's decidedly unbalanced. It's not necessarily a problem that it's unbalanced, but it definitely is unbalanced. And for all the same reasons that there were too many subclass mages before, I think there will now be few or none. I don't personally mind that, but I definitely think it's an overcorrection that moves the needle just as far in the opposite direction as it was before--just with a less pernicious consequence, since the only ones who suffer from this are the ones who are disappointed in their own characters' weakness, as opposed to the ones who previously had to deal with other players' overpowered sub-mages.

Halaster points out that the problem was really with the heavy-combat classes paired with aspects. As @ABoredLion suggested, it would probably have been enough to nerf that particular combination instead of everything. If we get right down to it, the real issue was combining mastery in skills like parry and shield use with certain spells that make you incredibly hard to kill on their own and virtually immortal when layered on top of master defenses. This change was a rather heavy-handed way to handle that. It caught everything else in the crossfire.

If this had happened before full elementalists returned, and before mundane subclasses were made much better, it would have made somewhat more sense. Since that's now a thing, though, I think it would have been more reasonable to go with something like: aspect subclasses limit your combat skills to 70 (to stick with your example). That takes care of the problem of mundane++ combat characters without hitting the classes below the heavy-combat tier so hard. The way it is now, if a mage-sub brings a raider from 100 to 70 handwavy combat power numbers, it brings a stalker to like 35. That's basically the same as not having combat skills at all. And then you also drop down to advanced stealth? Sheesh.

[zealus]

Implying that subguilds get simular skills to main guilds is just untrue.

Apart from that:
When was the last time you maxed out offense and defense? I personally never even came an inkling of close.

[Patuk]

The people who insist that it's about the roleplay, that the coded skills aren't the point, that magick is interesting, are going to be entirely unaffected. They are free and un-nerfed in playing artisan or adventurer mages without even a shred of a nerf to what they are good at.

Go! Show us your karma's worth! Make those mercantile mage subclass PCs and dazzle us all!