Seven Samurai Progress

[WarBlade]

somewhere. I'm just asking why can we use sigs, but not spells? The rationale was that the samurai had no spells so we can't use them. I'm rationalizing they didn't have sigs either, so we shouldn't use them. :neenernee

I'm rationalising that issue this way:

Signets, supposedly being some kind of item, take the place of poultices and field dressings etc. In other words I'm treating them as first aid kits rather than the small, possibly mystical items that Guild Wars might otherwise present them as.

[Zed-F]

So what are we suggesting now, something like this?

1) At most 7 Samurai characters, anyone else must be a peasant
2a) Samurai must have 10+ base swordsmanship, other weapons optional
2b) Peasants may have up to 9 spear mastery, and must use a spear
4) no rituals, pets, elites, PvE skills, or non-assassin spells
5) no shields or offhands
6) (no consumeables or shrine bonii)

Other suggestions:
- Try to have a Katana on hand for your sword
- Try to think of what build(s) you want to run beforehand

While I'm fairly ok thematically with opening up the floor for assassin and paragon skills, I do have a couple questions for the team:
- Are paragon chant webs likely to be too powerful on account of not requiring a minimum spear mastery for peasants or restricting echoes?
- We've really opened the floor for all sorts of assassin skills, is there anything we need to worry about balance-wise with respect to this?

I'm ok going with this and seeing if there are any problems vis-a-vis being too powerful via playtesting, if that's what most would prefer.

[Seijin]

I'm rationalising that issue this way:

Signets, supposedly being some kind of item, take the place of poultices and field dressings etc. In other words I'm treating them as first aid kits rather than the small, possibly mystical items that Guild Wars might otherwise present them as.

Yeah, but that's not what a signet is. A signet is usually some type of symbol on a seal or ring or what not that has no inherent powers or use.

Troll unguent is like a poultice.

Maybe I can rationalize that ritualists represent a type of shintoist monk appealing to the ancestors and gods. They did have shinto monks in those days and buddhist ones too!

I really just wanted some more options for the Assassin primaries. If you want to exclude ele's (because all they do is cast spells) thats fine. Might be interesting using some caster classes without using their spells.

[FoxBat]

- Are paragon chant webs likely to be too powerful on account of not requiring a minimum spear mastery for peasants or restricting echoes?

In terms of "too much protection/defense", no, thanks to limitations on armor stacking, and the lack of elites like Defensive Anthem. In terms of "too much healing".... well, some seemed to be complaining about the lack of that. Either you bring alot of heal chants, everyone else brings some self-defense, or you die. My own agenda admittedly was to push the 2nd, because it's a tack that I've found very entertaining in the soloist expeditions, and is in the spirit of the "seven assassins" variant- you can't just stand there and smack things. We've heard several complaints along those lines so far though - people want to run typical builds without gobs of self-healling and defense, how odd.

In practical terms, we're probably only going to have 2 paragons plus maybe a hero peasant, given our team members. So even if the rules allow, our particular team will have trouble getting too abusive. Chants and heal echos are also a pain to use with melee, because the time spent casting and in aftercast slows you down from running between enemies- particularly it makes chorus of restoration highly ineffective. That time not hitting things in turn makes adrenaline harder to come by, which limits the amount of energy you can put into spamming echoes. My ideal setup would probably be 2 swords with command (2 copies fall back, SYG, and never surrender), and 1 spear/peasent with motivation- team members still ought to bring a self defense skill if not necessarily a heal, just because this is a more efficient offense than 2 full motigons.

I'd generally put 9 spear on any peasant paragon I made anyway, that leaves plenty of room to max motivation, get enough leadership, and the diminishing GFTE returns from command investment aren't really worth the mild spear damage.

Anyway vizunah is an odd case with the double teams. Naphui is one team with no healer NPCs, so that would be the real litmus test.

[Seijin]

If you want to try again with the original rules, then fine I'll try to bring more defense, probably a lot more. I really don't have much fun playing that way though, hence why you'll never see me making a soloist and why my soloist are purely farmers. Too bad I didn't get warrior tomes from the z-chest.

I don't know what skills the peasants have and if you want to make it more difficult, why don't you say no spear attribute, only use CC spears (like cheesy bamboo spears). No attribute can be higher than 9, can have 5 skills and sig of return or res sig. They are peasants after all, so I don't see why they would have as many skills as a samurai.

[Drasca]

So any consensus for tomorrow?

[FoxBat]

Zed's rules look good, like I said let's give chants/echos free reign next time. There's a few points where Togo is going to get ray'd to death which are going to be very hard anyway. I did some playing around without monks and indeed, although you can withstand pressure pretty well, concentrated damage on a single target racks up the DP, and adds up over time. Smart humans can run away and try to shift aggro, but masses of heroes will not unless you're good at flags.

Spawns in the 2nd and 3rd rooms seemed more difficult to manage than the first... e.g. just ignoring one side did not stop additional spawns from coming out. It still seemed helpful to try and camp center together as much as possible, do not get drawn significantly out to the sides chasing down ritualist healers in the corners and the like. When soloing with henchies I had to run back and forth a little to clear out enemies accumlating on one NPC or another, with two teams we might assign one team priority to guard one NPC or the other.

I have a command sword para in local, currently my peasants are two motigons w/chorus and I have a W/P doing tactics armor buff + protector's defense. So keep in mind any shouts/chants you might bring can double as a decent (90ish) self-heal too.

[Seijin]

Okay, so here's my new sin under new rules.

Its not great on damage, but can do well.

Sharpen daggers will add bleeding (14s) for my next 9 attack skills.

Soldier's strike I think is good to get off a bleeding condition right away and since we should have shouts, it can't be blocked. Plus I can just spam it on recharge and with only 6 tactics gives me +22 which is more than what most sword attacks give me at 10 swordmanship.

Gash just gives me +15 dmg and deep wound to bleeding things.

Malicious Strike gives me a nice +27dmg + critical hit against conditioned enemies. Plus I use it to renew critical defenses.

Wild blow is just in case I come across something with an annoying stance and just in case I need to renew critical defenses.

Critical defenses = my defense! and can be renewed by Malicious Strike and Wild Blow as well as crits generated by Way of the Master

Way of the Master is to help keep critical defenses up and give me extra dmg from crits

Way of perfection or Shadow refuge is my heal...not sure which I want. Shadow refuge I can use in between battles, but way of perfection I need to hit stuff.

From Assassin skills and attributes I have roughly 42% to crit. I don't know how much my sword attribute adds to that.

My regular crits against
60AL = 30dmg
80AL = 21dmg
100AL = 15dmg

I can use Sharpen Daggers + Gash to cause bleeding and Deep Wound at the same time.

I cannot use Sharpen Dagger + Malicious Strike to trigger the critical hit bonus and +27 dmg. Target has to be conditioned first.

I can pretty much maintain critical defenses as long as I have stuff to hit.

[Zed-F]

Ok, that proved to be a bit too far in the other direction. Having paragons standing back throwing spears and powering 'shout webs uber alles' was not really what I had in mind for 7 Samurai. Originally I wanted Samurai to focus heavily on swords so tha they would have to get stuck in and perhaps not have quite as much time to run shout webs, but that's probably not an effective solution.

So, some simple thoughts:
1) Disallow peasants except for those missions where we must have them. Cuts down on shout healing by 1 paragon worth out of a group of 8. But it may not address the core problem.

2) Disallow chants.

3) Disallow echoes.

4) Some combination thereof (most obviously 2 & 3).

5) Something else. I think the changes we made for assassins are good to promote assassin self-protection, at least I didn't see any particular concerns there. But mayve there's some other considerations that deserve attention.

Thoughts?

[FoxBat]

I'd try nixing chants next time. Half a good motivation bar is all chants, they are the centerpiece; also Anthem of Weariness is very strong, as weakness is the physical shutdown of choice in PvE. The strength of echoes will also diminish significantly without chants to trigger them. This does leave some modest regen from mending refrain, and some OK healing from finale of restoration, which will help keep dumb NPCs alive and take a little pressure off players, but you won't have the powerful party heals that are especially good on warriors clumped around the same target getting super AoEd.

Besides, songs are for the geisha.