New changes, old balance?

[Narissa]

You missed the point. Jab is % based. n00bs

[Elmak]

You missed the point. Jab is % based. n00bs

Yet often does less than stab anyways.

[Narissa]

Unless you're fighting a knight whose name starts in "T" and end in "way too much fucking health-ea".

[Trakea]

I think we're missing a big concept in this debate.  The classes that have primarily fixed damage, Thieves and Rangers, tend to have a greater ability to give afflictions.  Their purpose in the land is not to go around stabbing people to death with damage, but rather to poison the crap out of them until they lock up or die from a poison.  If Thieves were doing 500-600 damage stabs on someone like me, I'd be totally SOL, since my attacks are far more one-dimensional.  The thief is supposed to be adept at avoidance, trapping, and poisoning, something that a fixed damage stab will never change.  Sure, I can put two poisons on a JJ, but I can't flip away or unbalance my opponent with my jj (which is probably the MOST annoying part of fighting a thief...).  So, I think the rewards to a fixed damage attack like stab are equal if not greater than the cost of the fixed damage limitation.

[Narissa]

Yes, back when Avalon was young. Immunities, balance-free diagnose, advanced coding, innate allheale skills, and other changes means that afflictions are not easily maintained. You cannot ever truly lock a person in Avalon - you can delay, sure, but asthma is not absolute and there are only so many poisons you can stack with concentrate (one less now, because of the change to ajkara, which leaves us with, what whoring mouurark over and over and hoping they don't get feared out?). A slickness affliction would go a long way to helping make poisoning more viable, since spitting is essentially a novice or icing attack these days - you can put up kelventari in essentially ANY situation, making a solely afflicting fight pretty impossible.

Knights are better at afflicting than Thieves are, which is a bit sad. They can take down immunities - the best we can do is hope nobody has clear-picked bumba and try to use it for attacks (we can't even see who is immune to what), which gets very costly and time intensive, not to mention a headache to me to teach all the new Thieves enough zmud to write efffective bumba settings.

But yeah, that's another thing that was implemented without really thinking it through. Immunities have made being a Thief/Ranger fighter a much harder slog. TBH, I'm surprised there are any good ones. The skills have had a lot of downgrades, the major tricks don't work anymore or are lots weaker (shirolos tricks, slayerboxes, hammerflip, mandrake pwning, flip nerf, etc), new skills hinder us a lot (standground, fog, blankmind, grapple, stickyground, mistdome, etc), and a lot of time is needed to simply stay equipped in poisons/ore enough to be viable. If you look at old combat styles versus new ones, I think we've changed drastically, far more than any other profession, out of the necessity changes have wrought.

I'm not saying Thieves should have the damage power of a knight, anyways. I'd just like us to be more viable, since the meal change has nerfed us. YOU try fighting someone with 1700 health when your main attack does 400. That damage/health ratio wasn't intended to be, and after trying miserably for a while you'll see why.

[Elmak]

Damn, you nailed exactly what I was thinking...

[Narissa]

Just to clarify, I'm not really saying that all that should be changed. There is a perverse pride the few of us take in doing well despite all that mentioned above.

[Zenichiro]

I've no idea when you were last testing this but damage from stab was way up as of a couple of days ago. I was being stabbed by a thief for around 440 damage, up from the previous standard of 320. My current health means that 3 stabs will kill me out-right. Interestingly, a stab from a thief now does more damage to me than I do with a jab from a runeblade, and that is presuming that I am lucky enough to have them sighted, a rare prospect these days. Then when you consider that not only do they unbalance you and hit with two poisons, they also can't be defended against with fullparry or aloof. Pentacle is a momentary defence, lest you be yanked, unbalanced, stabbed and unbalanced again and of course pulled from your defences and CCC's.
 
As for bumba, I'd suggest you look towards Foxedup, as he must have used in the hundreds of poisons in our fights and everyone went straight through? Mostly resik. While I can't comment for others, frankly getting a kill on him took quite a miracle.

One other thing I would point out for all those who complain that triggers and scripting have weakened their ability to attack, on the contrary. Every combatant I come across has very elaborate and perfectly timed functions that control most of their attacks. EG, yanking, thereby unbalancing someone, and either triggering to stab them. Thereby a near perfect equivalent to NULL/JAB and yet EVEN MORE effective.
 
Bards work in much the same way.
 
Shocking.

[Narissa]

Yank balance is nearly double the disbalance it causes the thief, so if you are unable to pent, something is going wrong for you. People like Rikki actually trigger pent when I yank them, so there's pretty much no chance in getting a stab off yank.

I got Genesis to tweak stab/throttle, and it does 50 more damage at ult + stealth/thievery. The current health of equivalent top fighters (Salvador, Camaris, Orinoko, etc) is around 1600-1700, compared to the 1400-1500 of before. I could be confused, but reckless bases the health boost on base health, as does bearform, so when we factor that in, there is a HUGE increase in health compared to pre-meal levels.

Aloof stops stab, as of a few weeks ago. Has that been changed? I will test.

Re triggers, I'd laugh loudly at any who trigger balance back from yank to stab, again, because yank balance is significantly longer than the disbalance for the yankee. Some (cough, Narl) have lots of automated settings, but using them for OFFENSE is not as great as the power they have for defence.

[Salvador]

Bards work in much the same way.

I think Maximillian has set a poor standard for this, because all bards certainly do NOT use automation to beat defences, or for anything at all actually. It's perfectly possible to fight without using such measures, but obviously there are always going to be some robot cases, i.e. Strongbow, and more recently perhaps Narl and Maximillian.

As far as stab goes, I'm fairly positive that it does still go past aloofness, and I concur with Zenichiro that 2 poisons, unbalancing, AND damage, is a bit harsh, especially when it cannot be reliably defended against.

[Narissa]

Pent stops it. Malloran stops it. Getting pushed out of pent? Levitate or sata. Getting yanked and can't handle the damage? Suicide, because a Thief who is using yank to get killing blows deserves to just automatically beat you.

I find jj far nastier, since you can't heal while maintaining it, and you can't pent, because hitting pent costs no balance, opening the way for an easy scythejab. LMs have it worst, I think, although an underuse by the profession of splashing to continue damage output (rather than focusing on removing the pent) may also be at fault. Their frustration with pent (and really it's scraping that's the issue, eq-based pent is easier to get around) imho has a pretty fair balance out with the double-speed sipping, meaning that they can maintain an aggressive attack for longer to get equivalent damage.

Point is, I do agree that stab and jab both need some reworking right now, since their current calculations are based on a different health level setup than what we have now. The modification to stab is a band-aid and an oozing one, since it makes stealth users insanely dangerous to anyone with medium/low health, while fairly ineffective against higher levels (remember, lestagii curing scales as well).

[Zenichiro]

Your argument seems to be that 'yank isn't all it's made up to be' as it unbalances the attacker longer than the victim. Well (ignoring for a fact that the difference is minor) I should bloody well hope so! I don't think any other attack in the game takes down defences as fast as yank? And no other skills that take down defences also unbalance the target.
 
Also bear in mind penting, malloran, diffusion, being mounted, aloof, etc' are all broken by a single yank. The way to deal with this in the past was to simply move the battle indoors where you could have some control and possibly prevent them winding/flipping around and performing yank and moving away before you can respond. But no, trapdoors now make that impossible in all but a room with no exits.
 
Likewise, the combination of double poisons, unbalancing (again), going through some defences, potential for hyperactivity, and now damge more than a (sighted) runejab makes for quite an attack.
 
You said it went up 50? That would take it to 370, yet it was doing above 400 on me, around 420-440 I believe. That was with 1100 health.

[Narissa]

Ult plus stealth damage was 370 before the change, which brings it to 420 now. 1100 health is pretty darn low with the current system, validating my point that stab damage is insane against people who don't have high levels. I'm not disagreeing that it's rough on low levels - I think we're a bit overpowered damage wise at those levels. On the converse, though, a jab against someone with high health these days does a lot more than it used to, because it's a higher base value the % is based on.

Saying that we can yank and talking aboutthe pros and cons of it does not provide an adequate solution to the fact that stab damage  needs to be readdressed. That's what we call a straw man.

[Kresslack]

In the light of Balance:

-Stab doesn't need to be percent based. Backstab does more damage than double stab, adminsters one venom, and I think stuns. Double stab administers two venoms. Stab is mainly for afflictions, jab is mainly for damage.

-Rangers/Brigands can stab and cast a charm all in one balance last I heard.

-Magic attacks percentage based Vs. the level of Constitution of the target.

All this affected by things like good armour, good weapons, reisistances, etc. If you think an attack is doing low damage, it's probably more than likely due to someone have good equipment and high skills, or you have weathered equipment and low skill levels imo. Just my thoughts on this.

[Elmak]

There is no such skill as backstab. Stab and doublestab is the same, doublestab just requires also having Ultimate poisons on addition to stab in Stealth.

The Ranger profession allows a JAB without EQ, but not stab. Loremasters have the same ability.

I believe it is assumed here that the target has maximum armour (95%) and a well-fashioned talisman. As an additional note, stab damage does not take into account the weapon stats.