Is there a good reason why weapon damage doesn’t apply to regular attacks with a knife (pierces)? Shouldn’t knives be treated as weapons for regular melee attacks (pierces)?
All other forms of attack get something from either weapon dam or ham dam, it seems inconsistent. It also means regular attacks from thieves are the weakest in the game.
In my opinion either weapon dam should be applied to “pierces”, or a proportion of the players stab damage. They simply aren’t being treated as equal. Even if this were to change, it wouldn’t make knives better than the weapons players already use, so essentially it would be a slight buff to thieves.
For a comparison, I do 50% less damage wearing my spear of pestilence, than I do winterblade or sphairai (Not even counting the proc damages). All other classes are getting some sort of hand or weapon bonus added to their regular attacks accept thieves it seems. Not a wonder thieves stab and die, they can’t finish anything. Might I add, auto switching weapons after an opener would be a fantastic addition to the game as msdp doesn’t update quick enough to be used to change weapons properly.
Agreed. Thief pierce damage is incredibly low and when it comes to hitting a larger target it goes really slow after the stab.
However, if it was just weapon damage a thief would generally have no weapon damage from gear and probably not anything from runes either. It would be a trade between circle dam and weapon dam on runes, but some combination of gear may net about 2 weapon damage from runes. The rest would have to come from the avatar shop and rebirth, so we’re looking at probably less than 20 total for a maxed out thief.
A portion of stab damage would be more in line with thief gear and natural progression. Maybe 50% of stab damage gets applied to piercing weapons for thieves to bring their attacks more in line with warriors and monks.
So we discussed my post in my xp group tonight.
Bandit’s pierce is currently 38. (Hell low! But he’s 6 levels from 9x40)
My slash is almost 3x as much. (Obviously I’m completely maxxed though, and rebirthed)
In order to do better damage a thief has to switch to a sword… but then they can’t circle - a prime skill… even proc weapons probably do more damage than a pierce and a circle… so the whole thing with piercing damage doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially in the context of the new proc weapons.
I would expect that if I was a thief my pierce should be doing 90-100 damage or at least on a par with monks who are supposedly using non-pointy objects.
As per Bandit’s post, some proportion of stab dam should be applied to their pierces… something that would bring it up into the 90’s when maxxed out I think.
We were talking more about new gear, stats, and general thief things in a group again. Gorka was commenting that monks and warriors really got a nice boost with all the hand damage and weapon damage that is available, but thieves generally fall behind because +dam isn’t as available.
One thing about a thief is we’re not lacking at all in hit roll, and many people have tested and came to the same conclusion that hit roll has a soft cap of around 30 where anything beyond that won’t provide any noticeable benefit. Since thief gear tends to have a heavy amount of hit roll it’s trivial to hit that limit. Perhaps it’s better to convert some of that into dam roll to move thieves into a more prominent role of stabber?
The Serpentine Blades of Silent Death (thief prime): Has +5 hit on it, maybe adjust to +3/+4 and add +1 dam to it, moving it up to +2 dam total. Also +5 stab bonus could be increased to +10, and remain as bonus because hitting stab cap isn’t hard at all. Adding +1 dam and adjusting the hit on the 6x40 dagger would be appropriate too, the upgrade between 3x40 and 6x40 dagger isn’t really an upgrade due to losing damage between the two.
Midnight Armor of Crisscrossed Knives: Could remove the +1 hit and replace with +1 dam, moving it up to +2 dam total plus other stats.
That would at least provide 2 more dam roll, which is about an extra 20-24 damage on each stab it. Right now if you were to put thief later in the class order, like Gorka has at 7th, the only difference between stabs is about 30 damage due to stab damage cap. There does not appear to be any difference between accuracy, or chance of double / triple stab happening between class order, though that was only from limited tracking of Gorka’s stab in a group vs. a lot of data from my own stabbing.
Or perhaps it’s better to think in terms of +stab bonus / + circle bonus for gearing? I say bonus because the caps are easy to reach for these with all of the claps and gems available that either the cap gets raised for thief prime or we have to deal in bonus to avoid the caps.
Driven was also talking about possibly adding a thief type relic in lines with the tank chalice and caster gauntlets. He mentioned leggings, because no legging actually provides a damage boost, but I’d like to suggest the shield slot as more appropriate. Mainly because there are some decent legging selections already that at least help thief with damage reduction and because there aren’t any good shield choices unless you’re a tank, a monk, or a caster. Thief would generally just use the crystal greatshield (-1.2 ac), red shield of valor (-1.0 ac +1 hit), or triangle shield (-1.0 ac -1 spell saves) as best in slot and none of these are anything special.
I was thinking something like a main gauche, parrying dagger, or sword breaker type item. An offhand “weapon” that is really more about utility than actually attacking with it, since I doubt dual wielding would ever become a thing. But, that’s really more in the spirit of naming and it would be classified as a shield.
Nekode (1000dr) / Crystal Sleeves (1000dr) / Even the new boots at 1000+dr currently represent very poor value for drachma, and probably should have been upgraded in the drachma eq changes. I’m not saying the items aren’t good, just poor value for money. Since they are really specifically thief items, they should have been packed out more. Stab dam / Circle Dam / Mv Regen etc
The irony is in this game, anything with +1 damage represents poor value for drachma… but on the other hand there is proc weapons which dish out literally hundreds of damage points per round for “free,” and no one battered an eyelid. Handdam and Weapondam eq pieces are usually about half price Dam pieces. There needs to be more consistency.
I think maxxed monks and warriors operate at around 22 dam + 45 hand dam or weapon dam.
I think maxxed thiefs operate at around 35 dam.
I also believe that a maxxed monk death touching in a major house might also now be doing about as much, or more than, a thieves triple stab when not grouped. (Certainly more than my maxxed triple stab anyway). I always thought that a monks deathtouch was not intended to do more than a thiefs stab. I’m sure I can find that in places on the forum if I looked - as quoted by immortals.
Monks did particularly well in the past year (I wonder why? :twisted: )… as all the hand dam that got added, also adds to their grip and strike. Belrath for example matches Gorka’s scores in the coliseum now because handdam adds to all his monk skills, well weapon dam only adds to regular warrior attacks. A max monk and a max warrior seem to compare quite evenly. Clearly these were the favourites of the eq changes - mindue they do represent half the mud these days.
Oh, why not, I’ll bite.
Driven’s max damage at 9x40 rebirth will be 62 (combination of hand damage and damage-damage). This is without gods of war, because brothers in valor is an absolute requirement for deathtouch not to miss 25%+. Deaththouch at 62 hand damage will do 1160 damage. Just for the benefit of Belrath, he is the only player in the game that can run 63 hand damage because he can hit 25 strength.
Driven has an eqset where I run +23 damage and +30 stab damage wielding a thunderbolt, which grows to +30 damage with gods of war, and when I remove my thunderbolt, I am at +56 hand damage. In this gearset, my backstab averages 380, and once I remove my bolt, my strike does 300+ damage. Driven is lacking 2 damage from the rebirth shop. I have not bought any of the stab damage from either the avatar shop or the rebirth shop. I addition, the bolt’s average damage (2d5+3 averaged ==> 9) is 3 less than the spear (3d7 averaged ==> 12), so I’m effectively 5 damage short of max. In the end my backstab should peak 500 damage if I pursue that.
The primary advantage of backstab over deathtouch is not in its damage (though by the end of this post, you will see that for thief primes, it is in its damage as well), but in its lag, or lack thereof. Deathtouch automatically incurs a full round lag, so I get no special attacks until after a full round of combat. Strike itself has slightly more than a full round of lag (5 seconds of lag, whereas a round is 4.5 seconds). So, doing the math, if Driven lands a 2x stab, remove weapon, and strike before the first round of battle (which the game allows), my damage will be 1.3k, which is 150 damage higher than deathtouch. Now if I land the trip stab, I will be at 1.8k, which is 650 damage higher than deathtouch.
Without poisons, thief prime should be able to cap 600 damage per stab, and so a 2x stab will be higher damage that deathtouch, not to mention the damage procs I put on their weapons, and the possibility for a 3x stab. With poisons, the damage goes up from there. On large mobs I believe poison adds over 100 damage per stab, based on conversations I have had with Gnu in the past. In the end a 2x stab will do about 1.4k damage and a 3x stab will be 2.1k.
Major house adds a lot of damage to deathtouch, but not enough to close the gap. Last I checked Driven did about 1.5k damage on deathtouch during a major house. Thieves trip stabbing in groups should be doing 2k+ without houses. Do thieves not get damage bonuses on stabs during their major houses?
Some of my own observations:
I completely agree with Gorka that weapon damage should add to regular attacks of stab weapons. Getting a boost of 20 per attack would do more than you think. I’m not instantly opposed to adding a boost from stab damage, but it needs to be carefully considered.
Drachma prices on damage gear is appropriate, in my opinion. Damage has more multipliers than hand damage because of 2x and 3x stabs. Thief primes get 11 or 12 (I’m not sure which) multiplier per damage point, whereas non-primes get 10, so for a 2x stab, a thief prime is getting, on average, 22 to 24 additional damage on a 2x stab, 33 to 36 on a 3x stab, and a non-prime is getting 20 on a 2x stab and 30 on a 3x stab. Hand damage has a multiplier of 10 on deathgrip and strike, and a multiplier of 15 on deathtouch, so each point of hand damage adds +15 damage to deathtouch. Elite hand-damage gear costs between 800 to 850 drachma (shield, scriptures, leg plates), whereas elite damage gear costs 1k damage.
We have yet to see a 9x40 rebirthed thief (go, Bandit, go!) who has been properly geared out and bought all of the appropriate bonuses, so it’s tough to draw too many solid conclusions. It’s hard to compare Gorka/Belrath/Driven to any thief in the game because of this. I know the difference between Driven at 9x40 the first time (without shop bonuses) and 9x40 rebirth now is night and day. That is a combination of gear, stats, and bonuses from shops. Rebirth affords the player enough drachma to get the best elite gear in the game, plus the 2nd 8x40 item, and the bonuses from the shops are sick.
For the love of Sloth, will someone finally actually track the trip stab rates of Gorka versus a thief prime? I really want to know the actual stats.
I will hopefully have some time this summer to put together the thief artifact, which I think thieves will really like. Oh, and last but not last least, let me say this. I am an immort, obviously, but I have absolutely no access to the code. All of the above is simply my observations as a mortal, so there is no immort info here at all.
I tracked my own stab rates:
Triple stab triggers about 25% of the time.
Of those times it actually hits about 20% of the time.
Brothers in Valor seemed to have little to no effect on it, as suggested by Driven to try it.
Maybe Gorka can give us a bit of info on his stab accuracy. I tracked it some in a group with him and it seemed that the trigger rate was about the same, but at that point I wasn’t tracking accuracy. Next time I will.
These stats were gathered from about 1.5 hours of grouping, BiV on the entire time which put me at 37 hit roll. I have 22 dex and 22 str if either of those help. I did do some tracking a while back with 24 dex (5 reaction bonus) and saw no difference, but at the point I wasn’t tracking accuracy on the third stab, was just tracking how often it would trigger.
Maybe it’s more of the perception that this skill triggers so rarely, and when it does it misses so often that makes it feel like it’s lacking as a skill.
Just so we’re clear, “Triple stab triggers about 25% of the time. Of those times it actually hits about 20% of the time”, means the following–
1 out of every 4 mobs, you get a triple stab
Of the times that triple stab fires, 1 out of 5 of those cases actually trigger excruciating blow, meaning that you’re only getting excruciating blow about 1 out of every 20 mobs (1/4 multiplied by 1/5).
Did I read that correctly?
I considered redoing triple stab ages ago but if I redo it then excruciating blow will only go off if all 3 stabs land…
and you met the str hit dam minimums that I come up with.. you can get excr blow with triple whiff.
Decided you probably prefer it as is..
That’s correct Driven, the values are usually a range. Could be anywhere from 15-25% trigger rate of triple stab over a period of time, usually averages closer to 20%. And the accuracy tends to be anywhere from 20-30%. So, probably does average around 1 in 20 times it’s successful.
As far as I can tell excruciating blow (the armor debuff thing) only gets applied if the third stab lands already, so 1 in 20 or so times.
That said, we still don’t know Gorka’s numbers. Maybe there is some amount of str, hit, dam that I’m lacking that would improve the accuracy of the attack. I’m pretty sure Gorka has the same trigger rate, but the accuracy rate for him seemed to be a lot better. But, I’d rather get some real numbers on that before making that claim.
I’m not really complaining about the skill, just trying to explore what makes it work and if there is a way to improve it over the lifetime of a thief. If it’s something that will be amazing when maxed out, but not so great when being a wimp like me then that’s great and something to look forward to. Overall I play a thief because I really like the class in muds, so I’ll keep exploring thief and trying to calculate what makes them work.
I’ve been away finding a new apartment in the mountains. Laptop charger died, and so did my laptop when the battery ran out… I won’t be back for a few more days. Good to see the conversation carry on without me. I really don’t like being the only one to say things. It feels like most of the time I am talking to myself - and I bet I often am too.
I don’t track my stabs, but I do log my sloth and I could come up with something later. I kind of doubt that stab rates change depending on class order, my instinct tells me it’s just the caps changing… I could be wrong. Teker or Breeze could confirm that by looking at the code fairly easy without us have to find patterns in what are essentially random numbers.
Belraths power and scores in the coliseum have really surprised me… Josiah informed me last year I was at least a trillion xp ahead of other people, and now I suspect even more xp. To have a monk play pure monk style and push my coliseum scores is amazing. I am using second wind and a mixture of stab and blasting to get my scores. Admittedly my 71 was in a minor with lost con, but Belrath’s achievements have really surprised me. What’s more is that Driven is right in saying grip is laggy… and that’s why I don’t pursue that line of attack. I’m pleased monks are up there where I am, I just didn’t expect it so soon and by using such a pure monk style… There was supposed to be a gap between stab and grip and clearly that gap seems to have closed significantly. You can’t add so much handdam to the game, and only a single point of dam to thieves and say that gap hasn’t closed. I can’t improve anymore, so I am doomed to watch all the other players catch me.
Belrath and I had a discussion about Bandit’s progress and we tried to figure out how much dam he was missing compared to us… it was at least 10 points, and we both think perhaps it’s a bit too early to say thieves need a boost in the stab department, but we are totally willing to support that move if it proves to be so… but in regards to their piercing that’s a no brainer to me, perhaps some of there stab dam should be added.
Regarding dam drachma eq, unless your a monk or a thief it’s not multiplying… and I still maintain it’s overpriced - as compared to other items - because IT IS (for us “normies”). I’m looking forward to seeing Bandit at Rebirth 9x40 where we can compare “apples with apples.” My stab is maxed except for 7 stab dam, which I am yet to buy. A triple isn’t going to even come near to Driven’s stab numbers… but like Breeze says… “be careful what you wish for.” It might be best we wait until Bandit makes it. It would seem monk’s are actually poised to be “the class” for the coliseum - at least the 9x40 gauntlet. I didn’t see that coming… but with 10++ handdam (which multiples) added in the space of a year I shouldn’t be so surprised. Belrath is yet to buy damage, and I bet he has mana left before every orb. I have practically everything optimised, and Belrath is literally stepping on my toes with some ease it would seem. I can only guess how much more he might get if I optmised his run, but the truth is his style doesn’t probably need optimising… because he’s probably not using much mana apart from a few refreshes and heals. Monks are the new cocaine it seems. I think the coliseum is a good litmus test for raw burst power. Would be interested to see what a mage can do… they might offer some competition I suspect.
Personally I think artifacts are rocking the game too much. Adding a thief one will probably only add to the rocking of the boat. It’s ok to add improvements and EARNED damages but they need to be more the “Teker” approach… conservative and gradual. Not saying I don’t welcome extra damage, as a player of course I want more, but the fact that monks got the best deal is an objective observation I think… because there damages all multiply. Clearly the nest has been feathered.
The fact remains that I am triple stabbing, get exec blows, and second winding firewinds in houses… and Belrath is on the verge of kicking my ass, typing pull chain, touch, strike. Nothing against Belrath, just pointing out the favoritism the monks got and where that came from. The correct thing to do would be to make sure the other classes are like monk and warrior.
Just to give us an idea of a maxed out thief, I believe the end stats would be this:
-8.8 ac, with iron skin
43 hit, with grace (+3 more with BiV)
35 dam (+7 more with Gods, but I heard it doesn’t actually give as much as it shows up in MSDP?)
70ish stab dam, should be capped. Don’t know the cap as it’s 64 at 8x39 and should go up some.
80ish circle dam, should be capped. Don’t know the cap as it’s 71 at 8x39 and should go up some.
25 damage reduction
Str and Dex would be 25 without potions, and their benefits are added to the above already.
Checked on Swordsmanship, and it does not apply any bonus hit roll to piercing weapons. I was at 8 naked wielding a dagger that gives no hit roll, at 11 wielding a long sword, and at 10 bare handed. 8 was my base from avatar levels and str bonus at 17 str.
Thanks for replying, Gorka. You clearly think things through, and that’s quite welcome. If I think about the game as a whole, I like to think of it in terms of trade-offs, and I believe there are two essential trade-offs when you are playing solo, which I believe apply to all of D&D:
Offense vs. defense
Burst damage vs. sustained damage
By calling them a trade-off, I’m effectively declaring that they should be trade-offs. Game designers can screw these up, as it’s perfectly possible to give high offense and high defense, but the game designer will have screwed up, because they have violated the entire notion of a trade-off.
The more offense you receive, your more your defense should go down. Conversely, the more defense you receive, the more your offense should go down.
The more burst you receive, the less sustained your damage should be. Conversely, the more sustained damage you receive, the more your burst should go down.
There is a third aspect that comes into play, but it is not a trade-off, per-se, because you can’t have both ends of the spectrum at the same time, and that’s reliability of damage, or risk. In other words, you can’t have both high risk and low risk at the same time… it’s a logical contradiction. In that way, game designers can’t really screw risk up in the same way that they can screw up the trade off of offense vs. defense. It would be irresponsible, though, to create a class that has 100% burst, 100% offense, and 0% risk. Game designers also have the additional responsibility to make sure classes don’t fall into the weird corners of this matrix. For example, having bursty, low offense would be useless.
From the perspective of “how true D&D should be” (i.e., not what Sloth actually is), I would place the classes into the following place within the matrix:
Warriors are 100% defense, 50% offense, 0% burst, 100% sustained, 0% risk.
Monks are 50% defense, 75% offense, 75% burst, 75% sustained, 50% risk.
Thieves are 25% defense, 100% offense, 100% burst, 25% sustained, 75% risk.
Mage are 50% defense, 100% offense, 0% burst, 100% sustained, 25% risk.
Feel free to quibble with the precise values of those numbers, but I believe this to be the general theory behind these classes. The general portrait I have painted is more important than the individual brush strokes. I have left out the other 4 classes because they borrow so heavily from these 4 in solo that the lines become almost indistinguishable. One of the difficulties of Sloth is that the story as I have described it is not as simple as this. Subclasses, while cool, amazing, and quite necessary, throw a wrench into it. Subclasses alleviate weaknesses of the prime class. For example, thief primes often choose mage as a secondary class because the player wants to move the 25% sustained damage closer to something like 75%. Conversely, thief primes sometimes choose warrior as a secondary class because the player wants to move the 25% defense closer to something like 75%. The entire point of doing this is to mitigate the risk value of the thief, and it works. Subclasses are, in fact, are a good thing. It’s what makes thief and warrior playable, for example. Warriors need to mitigate their 0% burst, so they take on thief or monk styles to get their burst up. Unfortunately, mages pay a fairly hefty price for their 100% offense and 100% sustained damage in that the game prevents them from mitigating their 0% burst by preventing mirrors from being cast after a grip or stab. I still feel rather strongly that they need some form of burst. Again, the exact numbers are not the point, but I’m using them merely to paint the picture.
Now consider risk in the context of the arena. Thieves, for example, have such high risk, that bad luck can ruin an arena run real quick. Monks run into this in spades with wraithtouch and to a lesser extent with deathgrip. Deathtouch doesn’t have this problem nearly as much, which is one of the reasons why monks are rising in the ranks. The length of an arena run forces risk to be a significant factor. The more a prime class assumes the risk of a subclass, the more exposed that player is to risk. For example, Gorka is more exposed to risk in the arena than Driven is, because Gorka relies on backstab, and deathtouch has much lower risk than backstab. This is why people get upset so much when warriors appear to land stabs at such high rates, because it appears that somehow a warrior has received the benefit of the thief’s burst while somehow, mysteriously, they didn’t assume the risk that should have come with it. All of this translates directly to the arena.
The arena is such an odd beast. At the lower ranks, sustained damage is rewarded, because a thief or monk’s damage output from backstab/grip at those levels don’t put a big enough dent in the mobs to matter as much as spellsaves and spelldamage. At the upper ranks, the burst damage matters a lot more, because they make a much bigger dent in the mob. This is less a function of the scalability of the classes themselves, but rather the hitpoints of the mobs at the upper levels. It would be incorrect to draw the conclusion that mages, for example, need to be beefed up simply because they can’t do the burst damage that a monk or thief can. The mage was never intended to be bursty and so if you are measuring the ability to burst, then yea, the mage isn’t going to win. You don’t change the pitch of your floor just because your level is broken. Mage’s strengths are in their high damage output that is sustained, not their burst damage. The problem with the higher levels of arena is that they are far too skewed to rewarding burst damage, and by doing so, people suddenly start drawing incorrect conclusions about the actual value of burst damage.
I used to watch Surfnazi solo 30mil mobs in the desert with relative ease, using mirrors and massive amounts of damage, and he wasn’t even a rebirth. Driven had very little hope of doing that until 9x40 rebirth where my overall power curve exceeded Surfnazi’s. I simply can’t do as much damage as a mage over the same period of time, and that’s ok. I simply can’t stand toe-to-toe with 50M mobs like Gorka can, and that’s ok. Can a monk burst more reliably that a warrior? Yes, and that’s ok. Does this mean that monks are the new cocaine? It depends entirely on what kind of mobs you want to kill. If you filled the arena with 50 mil mobs such that warriors were the only ones who could survive the fight to begin with, would warriors and druids become the new cocaine? No, the arena would be broken, because it would be too skewed towards rewarding the strength of those classes over the other classes. To make the arena properly balanced, you need the proper mix of mobs that play to the strengths of each class. Monks are rising to the top because the mobs die after a deathtouch and 1 round of fighting and their reliability is higher. If you increase the hitpoints on most of the mobs to extend beyond the burst, particularly the ether mobs, I think we’ll see a very different mix in the leaderboards, like we do at the lower levels.
Driven wrote:
Warriors are 100% defense, 50% offense, 0% burst, 100% sustained, 0% risk.
Monks are 50% defense, 75% offense, 75% burst, 75% sustained, 50% risk.
Thieves are 25% defense, 100% offense, 100% burst, 25% sustained, 75% risk.
Mage are 50% defense, 100% offense, 0% burst, 100% sustained, 25% risk.
You probably knew you were making a mistake putting values to the attributes… and rightly so… because it’s exposed your thinking… That goes right to the heart of the issue for me… it shows that in your mind not all classes are equal as the values you’ve assigned clearly favor the monk class of which you came back to play. The thoughts about the other classes seem to be only “after thoughts.” This is just one example, but a good observation of the eq changes since EU and since your return clearly show favoritism, and there is no doubt you’ve made an effort with the other classes as well, and as a warrior I don’t have much to complain about… but clearly all the eq changes came about because you wanted a raging monk. You designed everything you needed to get it, that’s why your called “Driven” and then you set about doing it. You made a very half-hearted attempt with most of the other classes… warriors you obviously thought about a lot more, and you consulted with me and I thank you for that, and with others… but lets face it this is partially why Ezekiel got so upset, and sphairai and gauntlets were made as “after thoughts” out of that situation. Thieves literally got +1 damage, and a proc weapon which all the other classes already had. Now everyone is biased, no one is perfect, but the best thing you could do, is acknowledge that you need to spend a bit more time in thought regarding the other classes and bringing them up to a similar standard.
Monks are now the same as warriors or even more powerful… as warriors have to use there other classes, triple stabbing, and maxed firewinds to even compete with a monk just using prime skills. You got what you wanted, now spare a thought for the thieves, necros, bards, clerics and druids. Put monks and warriors to one side for a sec as they are somewhat balanced, certainly not even, but not as much as the other classes, lets raise the other classes to the same standard. Why can’t mages and warriors burst, don’t warriors have a skill called berserk… does that not sound like some form of bursting… the fact mage spells do more damage (apart from openers) than anything in the game, does that not sound like bursting?
I follow your thoughts about D&D and how things need to trade off, but clearly when you add up your thoughts the monk class is always rated higher in your mind, and you don’t seem to understand how plain it is for others to see that. In my mind all those attributes should be different for each class, but add up to the same value. It’s called balance.
Is it not possible to make 9x40 rebirth test chars and equip them to the max in class gear and run some tests. I’d help you with that, we would need to try a few things like, stab mobs, chop mobs, small mobs, big mobs, xp per hour, coliseum etc, and then properly adjust eq or game attributes to restore more balance to classes. You’ve definitely made an effort with monk and warrior, monk was probably a bit overdone because of the modifiers… we should do the same with the other classes.
I have added +4 hand dam to the game. Legs, held low, head, and body. I have added 2 damage for thieves, 1 in dagger, 1 in belt. 2:1 ratio between hand dam and dam is well established ratio well before I ever came along. I had very little if nothing to do with the EU changes or the rebirth shop. What is this nonsense you have cooked up in your mind about me?
Oh, and for the record, I do not think the classes are properly balanced. I just don’t think the arena, as it stands today, is the proper ruler to measure that by. My bigger problem is that I don’t really know how to balance all of the classes with just eq. How do you make a cleric prime as powerful as a thief, monk, or mage? I struggle with that, because the class itself is built around healing, not offense. You will never make a cleric a better backstabber, gripper, or blaster than a thief, monk, or mage, which are the raw materials to battle. Because the game allows for retreating/fleeing out of battle, healing can quickly be relegated to that thing you do when you aren’t in battle, if you so choose to do.
Thieves may need a bump, I have already stated that, so we’ll have to wait and see when we get a fair comparison. I also have my eye on mages, to see how a 9x40 rebirth does. Bards and necros are insanely powerful in ways that the arena cannot display, and druids are bonkers powerful. Really in my mind the targets are thief, cleric, and mage, and I’m open to suggestions.
Seems at least 16 has been added, since EU went in, of which your 4 went in after you had the knowledge that at least 6 had already been recently added. Thieves got 2? by that time? Where is this well established 2:1 ratio? How do you explain the death proc gaunts that had to do 5,000+ damage and a weapon that removed a drachma shield from the mages, to bring them up to a mark that monks and warriors operate at, that procs 300+ free damage after a player drama which partially stated the same point that I am continuing to make. Or the fact your areas like sub palace has a mob that gives probably the most coins in the game, or necrop at least double the xp of 95% of areas in the entire game. Where is the consistency? Where is the balance? How did you forge the new damage boots you added, before me, when the forge was broken when I tried? So many questions… I don’t think I am full of nonsense at all… certainly short some proper answers though.
Some thoughts I’ve had on the thief class that may increase their power, of course these require code changes instead of just creating gear with more stats.
Dual wield: Offhand must be a piercing weapon. Works with second, third, avatar attack, and haste to get additional attacks with the offhand weapon just like the main hand. This could help provide more hit/dam stats for the offhand/shield slot for a thief and eliminates the need for weapon damage or stab damage to be applied to a pierce. It would basically boost their sustained damage in a way more relevant to the class while still having the “risk” of not landing.
Reduce the number of no-stab enemies? There are certainly areas that are nice exp and can be gripped, but can not be stabbed. It would seem that if it can be gripped that it could be stabbed? Also the nogrip things can be striked, but the no-stab things can’t be circled. Not sure all the reasoning behind all of this, but areas like Shadow Keep where half the skeletons are stabbable and the other half are not is more annoying than useful.
Enhanced tumbling defense (avatar thief prime): Tumble more, reduced move cost. Right now 40 moves is a good chunk to eat up for a skill that offers a little protection, I’ve heard Sochi say it amounted to about 1 damage reduction overall? The skill is usable by everyone right now, but most classes don’t have to deal with moves being their main resource to deal damage. Compared to Monk’s counter attack. 0 move cost, completely stops an attack, deals damage back.
Assassinate (avatar thief prime): Currently everything around stab seems to be available to all classes. Monks have deathtouch which separates their grip from non monk primes. Maybe something that enhances a thief’s stab in some way that other classes can’t do would give them more of an edge on stabbing.
Just trying to think of things that a thief could get in avatar levels that separates them. We do get sleight of hand, but that just decreases lag from apply poison. At least, that’s all it seems to do even though the help file seems to say it does so many amazing things for a thief, but unless we get some specifics on the code I don’t think we’d ever really know what it does. Even crippling strike seemed to do nothing? Maybe it does, but the perception I had it when I first got it was “what’s this even do?”, I didn’t see an increase to my damage and haven’t seen an increase after gaining 20 avatar levels with the same gear.
Your order of events are wrong. By the time I updated the 3x40 gear (where I added 2 damage points for thief primes and 2 hand damage for monk primes), no EU gear existed yet that added to the elite endgame. The monk prime shoulder guards were redundant with the drachma guards, so that added no additional hand damage to the game. So after I added the 3x40 gear, thieves were given comparatively more damage than monks (1:1 ratio instead of 2:1). When I added the drachma gear, I then added +2 more hand damage for monks, but you forget what I also added.
+10 stab damage on the titanium lock pick
+8 stab damage on the midnight armor of crisscrossed knives
+10 stab damage on 2x interwoven rings of shadow and pain
+5 bonus stab damage on the 8x40 dagger
That’s +33 stab damage, which is equivalent to 3 damage points on a stab. If a thief really can’t take advantage of the +28 stab damage (the part that is non-bonus) because of caps, then we need to look at converting some of that stab damage to bonus stab damage, because providing EQ that in all practicality can’t be used is meaningless. Either that or just raise the caps on stab bonus. For those of us who have chosen thief deep within the classorder, I have little pity on our low caps and our inherent inability to take advantage of these bonuses. Having spent some time thinking further about this, I think that stab damage should receive the reverse multiplier when being applied to regular attacks on stabbers (divided by 10), so a stab bonus of 135 will add +13 damage per attack.
Drachma eq updates were added in January of 2019, and the EU expansion went in February of 2019. It’s hard to believe that was less than a year ago.
+2 (total) from trapped souls
+2 from seal of asmodeus
Shoulder guards in EU were redundant with drachma eq. Seal needs to be fixed so that only one can be worn. I can probably do that with MUDL if Teker doesn’t have time to fix it. Driven is only using one despite the fact that I know I can wear two, because I know Neptune’s intent was to only have one worn. So by the time it was all said and done, before the rebirth shop went in, monks got 8 hand damage and thieves got 2 hand damage and 33 stab damage, which is roughly 5 damage for a stab, but, as we’re pointing out, is only 2 damage on actual attacks, whereas monks got 8 damage on regular attacks. I do think this is the crux of the matter.
The rest of the damage came from the rebirth shop. Monks got +9 damage (3 regular, 6 hand), whereas thieves got +3 damage and +60 bonus stab damage. This means that thieves got 93-to-96 damage adder per stab, which comes out to 186-192 on 2x stab. Monks got 9*15 (135 damage) on deathtouch. Monks got 9 damage added per attack, whereas thieves only got 3 damage added per attack. Again, I think this is the crux of the matter.
As for the rest of your message, I will say this. Sling enough crap and people might start mistaking you for an orangutan. But to settle your mind, since you can’t seem to let things rest…
Necrop was made in Sloth 2, not sloth 3. In terms of mob make-up, it’s no different than CK. Pretty much every mob was a clone of other mobs in the game, with a few updates to make them unique and different. The primary difference from necropolis and the rest of the mud, though, is that I actually went through the effort to make unique mob names and descriptions, which took me forever. You won’t find a single mob duplicated in the entire area. What this means is that you will never experience kill history there within a given run, and so your xp will be a lot higher. You’re welcome. I think the fault is not mine, but the builders who do not spend the time to make their area truly unique–I greatly applaud Idjit for his Raku area, as it’s one of the most unique areas in the entire mud.
The sub palace mob, Azzenon, which you are so fond of referencing, was never intended to be solo’ed, and afaik this stayed true for all of Sloth 2 when the area was built. Flight and Annie managed to 2-man him, but that was it, and I was pretty irritated with them at the time. I have since learned that people will find ways of soloing mobs if it suits them, and there’s very little way to prevent it. I am perfectly content to lower his coins if it bothers you this much.
The balance issues with proc weapons is something that took time to learn, obviously, and you were tremendously helpful in ironing those out. You act like I went into it intending to create this absurd disbalance, though. Rather, it was simple ignorance of the issues at play. Ignorance strikes us all at times. I think that the Sphairai has in fact made life for mages tremendously better in groups, especially 20 minutes into a run and they no longer have any mana. They no longer feel like newbs tagging along for the ride, but productive members of the offense in which their gear actually matters. This was an important step forward in a mage’s life which you have never acknowledged. As I said, ignorance strikes us all at times.
I realize you still question the mage artifact, but I think you have missed the point of the item altogether. The item is constructed such that it has very little impact on solo of xp mobs under 10mil xp. In other words, in terms of changing the amount of xp someone solos per hour, it fails to move the needle outside of the item’s actual stats. The item shines in groups and on epics, in particular, as that is how I designed it. Again, the entire point here is to give mages something that really helps them feel awesome in groups, as sitting back and watching monks, warriors, and thieves pump out damage from melee attacks 20 minutes into a 60-minute run is beyond lame. You like to take the 5k damage # and divide it by the casts it took to get there, and then adding that damage to the average damage per cast to highlight the disbalance. That comparison only makes sense if the disbalance translates to solo xp, which it does not. You’ve missed the point entirely.
KVP procs for forges are easy to typo as you’re copying and pasting hundreds and hundreds of lines of code to the mud. All it takes is failing to highlight a single character in your item #, or accidentally hitting backspace when you don’t realize it. This happens when your client only allows the pasting of a certain amount of text, and so you have to stitch in multiple pastes to get all of the KVP proc in there. When I originally set up Tylvaen, I had her forge correct, and so I made the boots within the first week. As I made updates to other items, her forge for the boots got horked up one way or another and I had to fix it when you went in to forge.
Happy mudding, I have work to do.
Through accident or through conspiracy… or from whomever is to blame, the monk class has done extraordinarily well since your return and influence, or since EU was introduced…
Midnight Kasaya of the Enlightened + 3 HD
Midnight greaves of black ice + 1 HD
Shifting Cowl of the Darkest Night + 1 HD
A mass of quivering tentacles + 1 HD
Scriptures of Disciplined Wrath + 2 HD
a trapped soul + 1 HD
a trapped soul + 1 HD
the seal of asmodeus + 2 HD
Rebirth Shop + 6 HD
Rebirth Shop + 3 DAM
Ability for 25 MAX_STR +1 DAM (?)
Perm Counterattack Clasp
Midnight Kasaya of the Enlightened + 2 Reduce Dam
Midnight greaves of black ice + 1 Reduce Dam
Shifting Cowl of the Darkest Night + 2 Reduce Dam
Scriptures of Disciplined Wrath + 1 Reduce Dam
Redsteel Legplates of Hades + 2 Reduce Dam
a crystal goblet of fiery nightmares + 2 Reduce Dam (Plus ability for 40k hp Chop mob followers)
Diamond Ring of the Master Bard + 1 Reduce Dam
Diamond Ring of the Master Bard + 1 Reduce Dam
the gem of souls + 1 Reduce Dam
Your attempt to justify the small amounts of dam that was added to thieves, is only insulting. If the other classes want to post what they have gotten since EU went in (and your changes), I have little doubt the list would be also nice but considerably shorter.
Stab dam is one of the worst forms of damage in the game that only applies to the opening move on specific mobs. To pretend that all the new stab dam is actually +3 DAM is intellectually dishonest.
Hand Dam to a bare handed monk is no different to dam… and it acts as a multiplier to there grip/touch, wraithtouch, strike… and all of these attacks are very powerful with the multiplier and are among the cheapest damage forms in the game. Regular attacks and the flurry is also increased, and the effect of the warrior class to monk will also increase there crit hits as a result, further multiplying damage.
Hand Dam, is the second most valuable damage type in the game! No other dam such as weapon dam, circle dam, flail dam, circle dam, spell dam can match it.
It’s all gotten a bit out of control, this and proc weapons, and although us players greedily take all we can get, I lament the lack of oversight for the sake of the game… because what happens is unbalances and upset players… and now we’ve seen both. If a player playing a pure monk style can do the same as a warrior using triple stab, exec blows, maxed firewinds, proc weapons and second wind just by touching and striking with his bare hands - and no question is to be raised about the absurdity of that fact, clearly I am playing the wrong game. I’m done with this thread as well.
Hello!
Since ppl seem to talk about me and my coli score I felt like puttin my 2 cents in, even I dont like to write on forums, since my english sucks and I get misunderstood etc blaablaa, but lets see…
Indeed I am one of the strongest monks out there and I do things differently than any other monk. Only deathtouch/grip + strike. I dont blast, ever. That said when I mached Gorka in coli scores I used prediction, flurry, haste,gods etc… but trying to do the max score I also died several times. How many times have you in coli, Gorka?
That supports the high risk-dam thing Driven posted earlier. Oh, and also when I do coli, I do it with major house, witch gives (according to Josiah) +10 dam.
Not quite sure what I’m trying to say here. Perhaps that I dont feel like power can be measured from coli perspective only, witch gorka seems to got upset. And why would not a superior-monk be stronger in coli than warrior. Perhaps I’m stupid but you all know that.
I’m just trying to have fun in the game and help ppl to have fun. Real life is so stupidly painful atleast for me. Love you all. Lets have more fun.
-Belrath-
I’ve been tracking stab rates for a while now and they always seem to be about the same, or within some range. I wanted to see if being 9x40 made a difference, which it didn’t, and then I wanted to see if having 25 str and 25 dex would make a difference. Sadly, it made no difference.
I quaffed a few potions to get max stats, had 37 or so hit roll, 26 dam roll and lead a group around for an hour while stabbing. At the end of the hour my stab accuracy for the third stab remained at 20%. This is the same as when I solo with lower stats.
When I watch Gorka stab he tends to have 90%+ accuracy on the third stab and I’ve been trying to figure out what would be so different about him that I don’t have. I know he has sneak or stealth, maybe both, in the shop so that’s one thing I don’t have, however I use both skills and keep them up. He is reborn, which I am not, so it’s unknown if that may be the secret to some hidden stat that helps out a lot? We don’t have any reborn thieves yet, but maybe in a few months I’ll rebirth.
I kept Brothers in Valor up the entire time too. It was suggested that restiveness or frenzy may help, but I asked Gorka and he said he didn’t use them. I didn’t either in any of these tests.
Skill wise a thief has 90% backstab while Gorka has a cap of 85%. I believe double stab and excruciating blow are both the same cap. The other difference is that I am a thief prime, while Gorka has thief as his 7th class.
Is there anything else that I may be missing that Gorka may have that is causing such a statistical difference between the accuracy of our third stab?
Is there anything else that I may be missing…
The Spear of Pestilence. It apparently doesn’t have any procs, but maybe the +5 hit adds something.
I have a maxed warcry with 40,000+ kills.
Warrior THACO.
A reborn bonus.
A hairy mole and sexy avatar.
104 years, 15 months, and 5 days of experience. :lol:
8x40 thief dagger also has +5 hit, and the same base damage as the spear. Overall the dagger is a better weapon based on everything we can see.
Even under the influence of someone’s Warcry it doesn’t change anything for me.
I don’t have warrior THACO and I’m not reborn.
Age is 50, not that it should matter, and for the most part a thief would want to keep it around 35 so we’re not losing move regen.
I have seen the same high trip stab rate with both Sam and Taron, so it would appear to be a warrior thing. It needs to be root caused and the disparity needs to be fixed. I think all of us agree that thief primes should be better stabbers than all other classes, yet that does not appear to be the case.
I purchased circle damage in the avatar shop and it is NOT bonus circle damage. There’s lots of circle damage on gear and for the most part I’ve been at or near cap for most of my leveling. It would seem that converting the avatar shop to bonus circle damage would be useful as stab damage in the shop is bonus.
From Gorka’s post about the rebirth shop it had everything listed as bonus. If for some reason the circle damage there wasn’t bonus it would also be wasted to have 30 more available that is limited by the cap.
Bandit, It’s my opinion that the changes that need to happen to thieves really needs to primarily happen at the coding level, not primarily the eq level or shop level. I completely understand why Maniac took more of an eq approach in his overhaul of the eq systems recently… (as it was the one thing within his power to change) I suspect though that this has only created more sync issues between the code, eq and shops. The only reason I say this, is because if you were looking for respite for thieves from the avatar shop… it was always going to end this way.
Regarding shops. Ahhh gosh… there are all sorts of little issues, and your issue regarding stab and circle dam also goes for other stats in other classes. Cyprimus for instance has mentioned this several times - in some cases we are forced to purchase bonus stats in rebirth shop when we can’t cap regular stats, or perhaps the stuff we buy in avatar shop is essentially no use. (Bandit’s point)
The avatar shop is old, and things have changed, and the avatar shop hasn’t changed much from s3.
There are 3 ways to play with player power…
Code changes
Eq changes
Stat shop changes
They should all work together. However these days they appear to be all out of sync. Eq has increased massively, but the shop never kept up with that… and in some places the code hasn’t kept up. The bonus stat issue has only made the problem more difficult to fix and then you have different caps for different classes. It’s a tangled ball of string.
Personally I think the bonus stat system was a mistake… instead they should have just lifted the caps and just had normal stats. It would be simpler to maintain balances if this were the case. I fear the horse has bolted now and it would be (possible but) a nightmare to re-balance things.
Personally I think and react like you Bandit in these situations when I see problems. Despite ever fiber in my body wanting to point out the mistake, or perhaps a better way, with sloth I’ve had to learn to wait and enjoy the game for other reasons, than for the reason of progression or making sense. I fight it every day, but it’s something you have to live with and continue fighting for, or just quit which is not a solution either. Things do change here, although very slowly. I don’t think there is a player or an immortal who doesn’t agree thieves need a positive re-evaluation. The rebirth shop will be better for you.
The rebirth shop I believe is robust and solid (the future), however it’s kind of built on top of the avatar shop which is a crumbling old entity. Maniac’s eq changes have been an attempt to rectify game issues… that really should have been addressed in code. For example, giving mages the sphairai… would have been better handled by a code change where the base damage of spells was lowered, but the effect of saves and spell damage was increased. Now the sphairai is in play… it’s more difficult to make a code change without mages ending up like monks at the moment. What I am trying to caution you against is pushing for quick fixes to shops and eq… the proper fix for thieves is code changes in my opinion. To fix thieves through eq and shops will only exacerbate the current balance issues.
Right, no doubt there are things that require code changes. Just trying to point out some issues, that have probably already been pointed out in the past already. Maybe we can get the attention of the people in charge of the code for some of this, I know we have a couple builders looking at it. Neptune mentioned he was looking at the building docs and there was no mention of bonus circle damage even being a thing for gear, and he was going to look further to find out if it was something new added for the rebirth shop.
As of the last reboot Circle damage in the avatar shop is now Bonus circle damage, thanks Neptune and Teker! The stat is also available for new gear and so on.
Bandit wrote: As of the last reboot Circle damage in the avatar shop is now Bonus circle damage
This may revert - I was making changes hastily and the intent was to put that in the rebirth shop (where all the other bonus xxx stats are).
Breeze mentioned something today about adjusting triple stab. Something like making it so the accuracy on the third stab was better, but that the proc for a mob taking extra damage for a couple of rounds would only trigger if all three stabs land.
Right now triple stab has about a 20-25% rate of going off, and for a thief prime (using this because that’s what I am) the accuracy of the stab is about 20%. Yes, that’s an 80% whiff rate on top of it only having a chance to land 20-25% of all backstab attempts.
If accuracy for the third stab was raised to be more in line with regular backstabs, or scaled up in a way that it’s more accurate as your str/dex/hit raise I think it would be a better overall skill. Being able to see something improve over time as you can get higher max stats and eventually rebirth and buy the max stats for even further improvements would be a good change as far as I’m concerned. It would also address some of the “risk” of a thief, because right now with it being massively inaccurate it only provides failure instead of risk.
For what it’s worth 1st and 2nd stab accuracy combined is usually around 85%.
And on the point of hitroll helping land stabs, right now we’re estimating some sort of soft cap around 25 hitroll. As I’ve leveled up after rebirth I generally found that to be true. Before I was at 25 hit my accuracy was lower, but when I started getting 25+ it seemed to normalize with the status I would see when I was 9x40 with 36 hitroll. For what it’s worth thief gear is overflowing with hitroll and with max gear and shop purchases my hitroll would be in the low 40s, which could also mean 15+ hitroll that is wasted.
Also Bandit… (This is real by the way…)
Bandit places The Serpentine Blades of Silent Death in the back of Aeolus, Lord of the Winds, resulting
in some strange noises, a lot of blood, and a corpse.
Aeolus, Lord of the Winds has been banished to the astral plane!
You receive 28666862 experience points as your share.
You gain 1451261 bonus experience!
You are buffeted by waves of remorse! … it passes.
Total exp for kill is 476346357.
:lol:
Back at ya G,
Sphairai OP.
Alias utters the words, ’eawiahuai'
Baraneth, the avatar dragoness growls at Alias and attacks!
Baraneth, the avatar dragoness brutally massacres Alias with her claw.
Baraneth, the avatar dragoness screams in agony as red tendrils of mist infuse
her body.
HP: 1128/1128 MA: 815/981 MV: 362 [+10] [AC:-7.8] [The Thordfalan
Volcano]
[E:41,555,269,034] [G:707,880] [indoors] [+24 | +13]
[TARGET: -%]
71
Alias reports 1323/1394 hp. Change: -66. Need: 71. Spells: glowing, greater fluidity.
HP: 1128/1128 MA: 815/981 MV: 362 [+10] [AC:-7.8] [The Thordfalan
Volcano]
[E:41,555,269,034] [G:707,880] [indoors] [+24 | +13]
[TARGET: -%]
#Ok. $fight is now set to {0}.
You turn your attacks toward Baraneth, the avatar dragoness.
Baraneth, the avatar dragoness is dead! R.I.P.
You receive 202,906,032 experience points as your share.
You gain 71,693,472 bonus experience!
You gain 202,906,032 extra bonus experience!
You have gained an ungodly amount of honor.
You have gained an ungodly amount of bonus honor.
Total exp for kill is 972,563,088.
Your blood freezes as you hear Baraneth, the avatar dragoness’s death cry.
:lol: :lol: