Shattered Kingdoms

Post questions about the update here.

I could be very behind in my priest spells, but I have no idea what this might do. There is no helpfile, could could you please give me an idea of what this does?



Were they tweaked up, to make them stronger or down to make them weaker? Something to do with damage, dodge or speed? Gotta give me more I am curious!

I'm really just curious what and how much you tweaked ranged combat. I'll look at the compulsion help file when it gets written.

sleeper

Edit: i.e. Did range combat get a massive/moderate/slight nerf/boost?

I just completed help file changes for remove compulsion:

Cancellation is now greatly reduced in effectiveness against the spells that remove compulsion can tackle. As stated earlier, remove compulsion is only going to be available to the cloth armor faiths and you won't normally learn it until Expert. Because remove compulsion is limited to a small set of characters, I judge this to be an overall boost to casters that use the compulsive spells. But it's also a good new reason to consider playing a member of the cloth priesthoods.

I just completed changes to the help file for stance:

There haven't been many questions about this so far, but that's probably because you can't read my mind. The problem with the mood system was that you had to be aggressive or defensive, so neither option could offer extreme changes in the way of benefits or drawbacks. Now that there is a neutral stance to fall back on, aggressive and defensive can both be more tactical in nature.

Before you might have set your mood during creation and never changed it again. That is unlikely to be the case now. Fighters who used aggressive before will probably still want to use it now, but they may want to be judicious in using it, especially at earlier levels. Defensive is even more tactical. You will normally only want to use it when you are or expect to be the target of attacks, since it will cause you to both fight and cast slower.

However, in addition to the dodge bonus, defensive stance makes a shield much more potent for everyone who is holding one, regardless of whether or not you have the shield block skill. Your shield will absorb more damage more often and it will have the capability to block leg attacks. People who do have the shield block skill will also block more often. In conjunction with other changes, I also expect this to help defend against ranged attacks.

As I stated, the other changes were fairly minor and miscellaneous in nature. The real ranged tweaks got their own categories, as part of defensive stance and with heavy armor giving hit penalties.

You can accurately say that ranged combat got nerfed, but it is a very targeted sets of changes instead of anything affecting the whole system. You might also say scouts got a ranged boost against mercs, since now a merc will have to reduce his armor to shoot as accurately. The complaint was that there were not enough options when being shot at, so I provided a new defensive tactic to use against it. But the tactic has its own cost.

As always, the numbers on all of these new features are subject to change depending on if they turn out to be too good or not good enough.

Are there actually trainers for Remove Compulsion already in the game?

The only thing I didn't see was a change to mode stun. This is something that really irritates me in that to stun someone, you have to bring all vital parts of their body that you're aiming at down to 0% hp.

This is why I haven't used the duelist guild in about 4 years of playing, and why I think that fighting to stun is a waste of time. Given the nature of the combat system, that you can randomly tag any body part in the range that you are attacking, you can end up attacking the same body part that has 0 hp and yet that will actually result in you doing 0 damage overall because that body part can't be hurt anymore. On mode kill if you reduce a vital part to 0 hp then they're dead, period.

It should be changed so that either you cannot hit a body part that has 0 hp anymore or (preferably) once they are at 0 hp on a vital part they are stunned.

Agreed.

Stance affects non combat spells? If yes, why? (spells like create food, create water, etc)
Also, shouldn't spells take longer only if you actually are in combat?