Originally Posted by Redscope
Originally Posted by Ayvah
Defence is worthless when you're trapped in a stun-lock.


Regardless of who would win, offense or defense, the problem itself is stun-lock.

Stun-lock is something every game should strive to remove if it exists. It's not fun for anyone besides those who enjoy having a 'win button' in their games. There aren't enough people who want zero challenge while playing to produce a game that specifically lacks challenge.

As I see it, the current stun-lock problem is two-fold:

Armor vs. Effects
For one, you have an all-or-nothing effect system. Either your Phys/Magic armor is up and nothing lands, or it's down and you're locked. No in-between. Magic armor is particularly bad because of how much worse magical effects are. At least when you're fighting physical-heavy targets, most of them have to get close to you.

The only chance you can hope to have is a shield. While that does make the shield a powerful tool, it isn't necessarily a forgiving system when you have a "yes or no" question on defense.

(P.S. I'm not advocating a shield nerf...)

Damage + Effects
Another problem is your effect on the base damage type. For added damage effects, it's not game-breaking. Things like Burning, Bleeding, Poison, etc can add to the difficulty of a fight without ruining it.

However, when your effect is a stun/knockdown/fear (air damage is the worst offender), you remove the chance of continuing combat once the first effect lands. For instance, when I co-op with another physical class, we find the biggest, heaviest guy in the fight, reduce his armor to zero, and then keep him knocked down until he's dead.

That's no way to play...honestly. Sure it makes the fight so much easier for us, but it isn't fun. That's the strategy we use constantly now. Just keep them on the ground.

Solutions?
Armor. Players need more magic armor early on. Especially heavy armor. You have to remember, melee and heavy armor targets are not meant to be weak against magic because 'magic'...they're given heavy armor because 9 times out of 10 they've got to close the distance with a target that's already putting damage on them.

I understand the resistances will eventually lead to the smaller amounts becoming more effective, but early on it's just too low.

Weighted Effects. Effects are not all equal. We should at least be able to see that setting a target 'burning' once per round is a lot less powerful than setting 'stunned' or 'blinded' once per round.

Effects cannot exist equally across the board on all damage types. Control effects should be much more limited.

Damage or Effect. Not only should effects not be treated equal among themselves, they should also be a determining factor on how much damage a skill does. As a general rule, the higher the damage on a skill/spell, the lesser (if at all) the effect should be. For example, a two-round AoE stun spell shouldn't be a high-damage Chain Lighting that can be used every two rounds.

Personally, I think anything that takes more than 1 turn to recover from should be a very low-damage (if any) technique with a longer cooldown than simply +1 turn from the duration of the technique.


Great points here. I think air damage + blood/water stun explosions are BY FAR the biggest issue with the environmental effects. The "weighted effects" provides a possible solution: standing in electrified water or blood gives you a "crackling" effect that is like burning or poisoned, dealing some amount of air damage (less than burning and poisoned though) and reducing air resistance but giving a bonus to earth resistance. However, if you're already crackling and you spend an additional turn in electrified water/blood, then you are stunned. This gives a delay effect that makes one like air wand hit not absolutely fight-changing.

Couple this with certain skills making longer or shorter duration surfaces. As you suggested, an air wand hitting some water might only make the water electrified for one turn, where casting chain lightning on it might last 4 or 5 turns.

A much bigger change would be to actually make the surfaces have multiple "levels." To some extent, cursed already does this, but it could go farther with regular surfaces. Say, a fire surface can be smoldering, which deals damage when you walk on it but does not light you on fire, burning, which is as is now, and raging, which deals more damage than now. Fireball might, for example, make a raging fire right at the point of impact, regular burning with a slightly larger radius, and smoldering on the edge. Perhaps cursing amps it up to its highest level + the curse effect, so there isn't a need for Cursed Raging Fire, Cursed Burning, and Cursed Smoldering Fire. Perhaps even just smoldering and burning and cursed fire would be enough. Most things would just cause smoldering, but powerful fire spells would cause burning.

A huge overhaul, of course, but it could help.

Bard Mod for D:OS2