Elemental Team

[WarBlade]

Oh, I have another suggestion too. Seeing as we are using PvE skills, how about we run through all of the non-Destroyer missions first? That will give us a chance to pick up some title ranks along the way, open up time for people to acquire more skills and maybe get a few Zaishen Mission quests in as well.

It won't have a huge impact, but at this point we could use anything we can get.

[FoxBat]

GOLEM is probably going to be the hardest or 2nd hardest mission for this group, since it's the only destroyer mission with a time constraint. So I'm good for saving that till later. A possible path for us could go

Blood Washes Blood -> Charr Missions -> Gate Too Far -> GOLEM -> Destruct Depths -> Time for Heroes

This way we can tune ourselves for fighting charr for a while, transitioning into increasingly tougher destroyer missions later.


Before obsessing too much over GOLEM strategy, let's try and get the rules sorted out.

The primary purpose of the variant as I see it is to emphasize elemental/nuking approaches and solutions to the missions. There were several good choices for doing this, but these are the reasons I picked the current rules:

- Instead of specifying "fire magic" in the skills, we could've gone with "fire damage" about as easily. The main reason I didn't was to put an emphasis on elementalist defenses, including things that don't damage like blurred vision, blinding flash, icy shackles, earth wards, and so on. A secondary reason was to bring the healer roles into a unified system that was still somehow "elemental", and prevent the use of too many spirits/prots that would negate the need for elemental defenses. A third reason was to allow oddball damage types in the elements, like the cold skills in air magic, and armor-ignoring in earth.

One negative to this approach is that I'm seeing people very reluctant to bring the ebon wards and ressurection signets, because they have so few slots to even fit their energy management. They're also very unlikely to bring extra damage skills in those slots like the asura summons. I think it's worth tweaking this a little.

Old rule: must have 5 skills in the attribute
New rule A: must have at least 4 skills in the attribute
New rule B: must have at least 5 skills that are either in the attribute or reference the right element. (So, summon ice imp, snowstorm, chilling winds, or even winter could help fill the water quota.)

- The additional "damage type" restriction was to make sure the elemental damage wasn't overshadowed by a few key insane skills like splinter weapon, discord spam, and minion or spirit walls. Skills like snowstorm and asura summons seemed perfectly within flavor damage-wise. Honestly I didn't even think about stout-hearted in this context, it just so happened to fall under the razor of this KISS-oriented rule. The only issue I have with stout-hearted is if we find it more effective to flare-spam than DoT purely because of the title bonuses, and it's certainly looking that way for the fire mage at least.

The flavor justification is very far-fetched and specious for the record, and I'm trying to avoid the laundry list of exceptions that develop when you make your variant truly flavor-based and therefore subjective, but in this instance the rules can be fixed fairly easily and intuitively.

Current rule: can't deal non-elemental damage
New rule: can't equip non-elemental damage skills, must use weapon of matching element. (By inference, titles are unrestricted.)

- The damage type was checked BEFORE conversion to prevent shenanigans, like a "fire mage" summoning minions under a conflagrate. First most of these setups are conditional and won't always apply like the conflagrate example, but more importantly the caster in question isn't using firey skills. I was very much thinking about winter in this context, as a time-honored tradition for smashing titans in hell's precipice. The fire mage might be dealing cold damage, but he still has to use fire skills to do that, and it emphasizes him running a bunch of great fire DoTs. (And yes, similarly the fire mage still needs fire skills with stout-hearted, so it's not that bad on those grounds either.) Additionally the spirit spammers in DD will use winter "against" us, and if we can wait out/endure the effects of QZ, we could end up abusing it anyway. I don't think we want to tack on crazy rules like "you can't cast under enemy winter" or "we should hunt down winter immediately".

Without winter the DoT-based approach is useless against destroyers, since the best DoTs are in fire. Beyond the occasional meteor/meteor shower the attribute is useless aside from maybe triggering stout hearted with flare spam, but wanding with conjure+flurry is probably just as effective. The strongest use would probably be to stick him on an axe with flurry and conjure, smiter maintaining strength and honor on him, and equipping 5 nearly useless fire skills while swinging away for ~50 armor-ignoring DPS. Melee is a loophole I purposely left open so if someone's favorite character was a warrior or assassin, they could make an oddball build with conjure, PBAoEs, and something like warrior's endurance, but everyone seems to want to play casters anyway.

Personally I would hate the fire ele reduced to something like that and want them to do what they do best, blowing stuff up, and destroyers will be at least a third of our enemies and certainly the toughest of them. I wouldn't mind if damage conversions were character limited, E.G. it would be most flavorful if the water mage brought winter, but I did not make that rule because it would be an issue if someone wanted to use a non-elementalist primary for the water role. Whether fixed to a particular character or not I'd rather see winter included. I also don't mind plugging the melee loophole considering everyone does want to use an ele.


Summary of possible rule changes:
- 4 skills of the attribute, or 5 skills either in attribute or referencing the element
- must use wand or staff of appropriate attribute
- cannot equip non-attribute skills that (before conversion) deal damage outside your element
- damage conversion skills only useable by the appropriate character? (e.g. winter only for water, judges only for smiter, conflag for fire, etc.)

Summary of implications
- stout-hearted allowed
- melee weapons banned
- winter allowed somewhere
- more room for utility and res skills

[Zed-F]

I like the having 5 skills in a particular element rule. It makes it a real decision whether you go for PvE skills or non-PvE skills. If we're going to relax this at all, make it 5 skills of the attribute or referencing the element.

If we really want to allow damage conversion skills, ok, but I think it should be only usable by the character whose native damage type matches the conversion. So, winter only on the water mage, etc.

Frankly I don't think we are yet at the point where we need to make changes to beat the mission; we haven't come close to exhausting all possibilities we could be trying with a reasonable chance of success. If we want to make changes because people don't find it fun as is, that's another matter.

[FoxBat]

Frankly I don't think we are yet at the point where we need to make changes to beat the mission

Under the rules I posted winter is allowed and stout-hearted is in a grey zone, so those points are necessary clarifications rather than new changes.

we haven't come close to exhausting all possibilities we could be trying with a reasonable chance of success.

In a sense without stout-hearted or winter, we basically have. My own mind starts turning gears towards "abuses" like 3 conjure elementalists under strength an honor and great dwarf, conjure imbagons, and so forth. If the fire ele still can't do that, we're probably still best off with him using his DoTs, it's still more damage than anything else. But using the DoTs effectively at such low damage is going to require solid coordination, like counting down to AoE spike, and a prescribed order of who uses their knockdown when, and possibly two or more people setting up bodyblocks for the targets. And any of these approaches are going to mean gwshacking a team build instead of letting people bring their own thing. That's somewhere I don't think we should go for a one-night a week, quick/fun summer variant, especially seeing as we more or less roll through everything that isn't a destroyer.

[Seijin]

So I wasn't going to post anything until something worth responding to actually showed up because I had a headache and I was pissed off after Tuesday night. So I'm not having fun.

What fox said about using winter was my thoughts exactly. Only i would have said it probably much meaner, thats why I didn't say it. I would say it probably belongs on a water ele's bar only because I figured the water ele would try to change the environment to best suit whats needed for battle. If that means converting his teammates elemental damage to cold, then so be it. The other elementalists aren't the ones purposely doing it. Its a tactic that a team could use. And like I stated in team chat that night, WTF happens if the enemy uses winter..."we can't attack?" Of course everyone ignored the question. They are using their element, its simply being converted to cold after the fact. But using something like greater conflag I can understand would be abusive because it converts physical to fire. If, like fox said, someone was supposed to be fire ele and used melee and greater conflag, that would be against the rules because the fire ele is not initially using fire damage, but physical.

Fox said melee weapons banned. What if it has an elemental mod? Like fire would have to use something fire based. So a ranger could be fire, use a bow with a fire string, and use fire elemental skills or stuff like ignite arrows, etc? I was actually playing around with turning my ele into a sin. XD

I think stout-hearted is like a life steal skill. If WB wants to play at trying to explain that cold absorbs heat, then you can make that argument for every natural element. Water...ok we understand that one. Air...c'mon thats how heat i usually taken away from your heat sink. Earth...think of a camp fire, you can throw earth on it, and earth does absorb heat, touch the area the fire was in if you want. Fire...yes...well it doesn't absorb heat, but a big enough controlled blast can use up the air a fire needs to stay alive. Dark and Light, you guys are on your own. Now honestly, absorbing heat doesn't put out a fire, so it doesn't really damage the fire. In fact if you're absorbing heat, you're usually damaging the current state you're in. Like water evaporates if it absorbs enough heat. Earth can change shape or deform. Air, well I guess its molecules start go more haywire and it becomes lighter. So, you'd actually be damaging yourself if you absorb heat in that manner. So its not really a heat absorption thing, its a life steal thing. So, either everyone uses it, or no one uses it, well except the dark guy who i assume can use life steal.

And no matter what, we aren't going to kill fast enough with the build we had, with or without the wards, against the destroyers. Cracked armor will actually do a lot more than the honor ward will. I've played mirror of ice ele against destroyers and I always made sure my target had cracked armor. It boosted my dmg output by as much as the ward did most of the time.

As for the MS and Meteor. Since everyone is kiting, nothing stays in the MS. They tend to move out of it to chase whoever they're targeting. If we had a tank, then maybe it'd help since the tank can stay put. And Meteor is almost useless against a moving target in HM because they move too fast. I missed several time with meteor because the target moved last second to get in range of whoever it was targeting. And my skills weren't realy recharging all that fast because nothing was going down.

I really don't want to be around to be keeper of the wards. :thumbsdow

[Zed-F]

In a sense without stout-hearted or winter, we basically have.

No, we haven't. We haven't tried any builds that require actual coordination and planning yet. We haven't tried having a dedicated tank. We haven't tried any of the things that we learned while working through nudists, even to the point of having proper target calling and actually following the called target. All we've tried is AoE spam and running around like chickens with our heads cut off, for two nights worth of attempts. That, in my books, does not qualifiy as 'tried everything.'

Now, that said...

And any of these approaches are going to mean gwshacking a team build instead of letting people bring their own thing. That's somewhere I don't think we should go for a one-night a week, quick/fun summer variant, especially seeing as we more or less roll through everything that isn't a destroyer.

If running around willy-nilly is considered more fun than actually invoking a little discipline, I can't really argue the point. I don't really have a preference which way the team goes; this isn't my variant concept so I'm not about to take a firm stand on it. My personal preference would be for more discipline and less fiddling with the rules every time a small snag comes up, but hey, I'll go with whatever everyone else feels like doing.

So, if we want to stick Winter on WB's bar, fine, let's do that.

[Seijin]

If running around willy-nilly is considered more fun than actually invoking a little discipline, I can't really argue the point. I don't really have a preference which way the team goes; this isn't my variant concept so I'm not about to take a firm stand on it. My personal preference would be for more discipline and less fiddling with the rules every time a small snag comes up, but hey, I'll go with whatever everyone else feels like doing.

So, if we want to stick Winter on WB's bar, fine, let's do that.

I still don't see how winter would be against the rules or how its a rule change. Again, if the water ele is supposed to use powers that are cold and can have the ability to change his teammates damage into cold by way of an environmental effect, then what is the problem? The team is not converted to a water ele team. The skill descriptions do not change to doing cold damage instead of fire, earth, or lightning. I only see winter as a problem if maybe someone other than an water ele takes it.

No, we haven't. We haven't tried any builds that require actual coordination and planning yet. We haven't tried having a dedicated tank. We haven't tried any of the things that we learned while working through nudists, even to the point of having proper target calling and actually following the called target. All we've tried is AoE spam and running around like chickens with our heads cut off, for two nights worth of attempts. That, in my books, does not qualifiy as 'tried everything.'

I'm not in the mood for 2 hours setup and 2 hours play (yes, I know, I'm exaggerating...a little...but you catch my drift).

[Courin]

Whew....that was a LOT of reading. But here's my two cents....

Ebon Wards - Seijin, I apologize that I didn't respond, the reason being I don't have those skills yet on my ele, so I just kept my mouth shut since I didn't think "I'd take them but I don't have them" would be very helpful. I will try to get them on my ele this week (in fact, I'll try to get ALL the EOTN skills I can...) Also, the lack of a mic (spelt that way JUST for you Wyrm!!!) didn't encourage me to communicate more than the bare minimums....

Winter - I totally disagree with the idea that using Winter is against the spirit of the variant. Fox's post on July 6th suggests using it, and then all of a sudden it's out, with no discussion or reasoning given in the forums? WB said "The argument against the use of Winter is that it turns ~4 Elemental damagers into ~4 Water damagers". However.... each of us is using skills that are based on our particular element. The SOURCE is rooted in our element. Winter is a skill that changes the nature (Hello, NATURE RITUAL) of the damage, NOT the source. If you are outdoors in the winter (and trust us Canadians to know about this!!), you can fall into water and then get frostbite because it's WINTER and it's cold. Is that damage to you significantly different than the damage caused by the wind blowing (Air) and you getting cold, or laying on the frozen ground (Earth) and getting cold? One is sourced in water, one in air, and one in earth but the end result is the same (frostbite). Admittedly WINTER is a season, and so is more in tune with "nature" than an element, but we allow "light" and "dark" which are also not true "elements". I would argue that the Air ele could take Winter as easily as the Water ele, since a large part of winter is that the air is colder. The "dark" person could take Winter (absence of light....) and so on...

To try and classify something as profound as a 'season' to one element is not realistic to me. All the seasons are a combination of the 6 'elements' we are using in the game by either their absence or their presence. It's like a 3 dimensional cross, with Water and Fire on the x-axis, Earth and Air on the y-axis, and Light and Dark on the z-axis. All of nature fits into that grid somewhere depeding upon the presence or absence of each 'element'. I would say the only characters who SHOULDN'T be able to equip Winter would be a Fire Ele and the Light Ele (since Winter is really dependent upon the absence or the presence only in small quantities of these elements....

Titles - Along the same idea as the Winter debate, providing that the SOURCE of the damage is coming from our Element I think this would be fine. Yes, it's a life steal which would normally belong just to the 'dark' element, but again, it's the SOURCE of the damage that matters, not the result. So I agree with Seijin, if we allow Titles we must also allow conversion skills like Winter. I don't buy WB's explanation that it's ok for him to steal life because ice absorbs the heat of fire and puts it out but it's not ok for air, earth, light or dark damage to be turned to cold damage. Seijin also makes a good point in saying that water does absorb heat....but then it TURNS into air (evaporation). That's a natural conversion right there. So if feel that it's GOTTA be one or the other. And my vote is for allowing CONVERSION damage. It seems to fit with the idea of working within a given environment.


Having said that, I like the idea of going through the missions in some semblance of the order we encounter them in the story line....it justs "fits" so much better that way.

[WarBlade]

blagh
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[Courin]

blagh
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You're entitled to your opinion, I'm entitled to mine.