Shattered Kingdoms

It's the most recent code change, from January 16, tacked on as an update to the January 1 change. There wasn't any discussion on the update thread, perhaps because the change was added on so it wasn't part of the initial posts on the update thread. I also don't believe anyone posted about maledictions on NPCs being OP, nor would such an accusation in my mind hold a lot of water given that most boss NPCs are dangerous on account of their large HP pool and scripts, which maledictions don't affect, and because maledictions were already on the verge of being mana inefficient to bother with.

http://www.shatteredkingdoms.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25924

If there was going to be a code update that nerfed specific classes for PvE, it shouldn't have been to necros, shamans, sorcs and hellions, it should have been to warlocks, like a nerf to how water elementals are immune to all acid attacks from everything except big boss NPCs, including the overwhelming majority of fytrysks and zabashis.


Again, I'm not particularly arguing that all NPCs should be able to be one-shot by a max art sorc or maledicted with 100% success by a shaman... but that was already handled by the fact that the majority of NPCs were barbucklers anyway and if you tried to hit them with petrify or maledictions after they berserked you were going to waste a lot of mana regardless. Right now it's common with a max art sorc to cast petrification 3+ times on a NPC that's furied to no avail.

After some more testing, I'm in complete agreement with Finney's assessment. There's 0 reason to roll anything other than mercenary/barbarian/swashbuckler/priest/shaman in the current system. There's no reason to try to cast any maledictions from a shaman though, just use it as an armor/sanctuary/heal bot and let melee reduce their hps to 0.

That's rather sad considering that priest and shaman are the two hardest classes in the game to level.

I don't think art affects these saves. Testing on another character with non-boss NPCs has shown that with 0 art I was able to hit about 70% of my spells at competitive levels (plus or minus 2 levels of the NPCs I was fighting). Art as a stat to train is completely worthless if you don't intend to do PvP. And unless you're a warlock, casting spells are pretty useless because if it doesn't do HP damage, it's not worth expending your mana points, unless it's heal.

I'm kind of confused about this statement. Are you saying that when you cast maledictions on normal NPCs that are NOT in the special race category, that your spells succeed 70% of the time with 0 art?

Because that seems reasonably high. I'm also not sure how it's proof that art is worthless here, unless you also did the same tests on the same NPCs at the same level with art trains afterwards and noticed that the percentage didn't change.

Also, if these numbers aren't with respect to one of the "powerful races" then I'm not sure how exactly it relates to the point at hand.

I was fairly sure D made a statement at one point saying that art only lowers + save bonuses not innate save from stats/class etc. As in a merc with one willpower has the same chance to fail a will save as a merc with no willpower against someone with high art. I never did do testing myself to see but Murcia seems to be seeing that in their testing. It is only once your + save starts to beat out the casters art that it has any effect on save chance.
If this is the case perhaps there is a miss communication regarding these high end NPCs and their saves are being considered innate stat/class and so are immune to art rather than + X willpower which would be reduced by art making it more reasonable.