Shattered Kingdoms

Are the innate saves on powerful races/boss NPCs too high?

I was actually about to make a post about this.

In my experience, the saves on powerful races usually mean that you're going to land maledictions less than half the time even at max art. I think this is way too high. Not only are maledictions already very costly to use in PvE, because they're not guaranteed to work and most NPCs die than faster than maledictions usually warrant, but a large amount of powerful race NPCs also have fury, which boosts their will and fort saves even higher, making it virtually impossible to land any maledictions at all.

Before this change, moderate level slow and weaken wands worked most of the time and cast petrification pre-fury was almost guaranteed. After this change, even cast petrification from a max art GM sorc fails what seems like over 2/3 of the time.

Can we not find a happy medium in there somewhere? It was already absurdly rare to actually find anyone who bothered using maledictions in PvE. Let's not drive that niche playstyle into extinction with this unnecessary nerf to sorcs, hellions, necros and shamans.

I wouldn't say it was absurdly rare. Most good shamans/hellions used debuffs to trivialize fights. Necros never had to learn this trick historically since they had a party of GM barbarians with them.

Weaken is insanely powerful when it lands, curse is pretty incredible too (I feel as though the acc debuff portion got buffed at some point), and when it's not a barbuckler, blindness does a lot. Slow doesn't suck either.

I don't have the info to make a vote. If you are saying debuffs and 14-art petrification succeeds 1/3 of the time in tough PVE right now, given what those spells are doing, I'm not sure that's a problem.

You're exaggerating those results, patrisaurus. I can post a log where I went and killed a mercenary NPC recently and applied weaken, curse and blind and it did 0 to prevent it from hitting all of its attacks a round.

This change is about as annoying as when a blu-ray disc stops playback because of HDCP and making me have to adjust my connections cuz I run everything through a capture card.

Three petrification casts from a GM max mana max wis gnome takes 28% of his mana pool. You don't think having to spend nearly or over a third of your mana pool and 5 rounds on average to petrify one NPC is pretty harsh? That seems to make petrification pretty much a waste of time to me, given that you can usually guaranteed kill a NPC of the same strength with melee damage and less than 10% of a comparable priests mana pool, plus you get to loot the NPC afterwards.

It's all about the costs involved, and let's talk about "what those spells are doing" when it comes to PvE: When I go to the dreamscape, and I fight one jelly blob, it's going to take maybe 10-12% of my mana as a hellion, necro or shaman to weaken the NPC once: If it furies, I may as well not bother at all because it's fort save is going to be absolutely through the roof. And what do I gain by doing that if I happen to be lucky enough to land the spell? It's not going to A) reduce the damage that the NPC did before weaken landed, and B) it isn't going to reasonably reduce the amount of healing necessary to keep my front line healthy even once it does land. As Turon, even -before- this huge nerf, I gave up trying to maledict NPCs on PvE trips because the damage I did to the NPC with hellfire was actually more useful to our healers and tanks because it ended the fights earlier and made them require less healing than even if I'd landed weaken.

Think of it this way: Say that I'm a hellion and I'm tanking a pegasus in the dreamscape. It's doing 10% HP a round to me, and on average our group takes 5 rounds to kill it. If I'm lucky and manage to land weaken on it, it might do let's say 7% HP a round to me instead. I could either spend 12% of my mana trying to get lucky and land a weaken on it, which might make me take maybe... 9%HP less damage, assuming I can manage to get the weaken in before the third round of combat (unlikely), or I can otherwise hellfire it, allowing us to guaranteed kill it an entire round early, meaning that I take 10% less HP damage guaranteed. Unless I just like playing the lottery, it's stupid for me to bother casting weaken. I know this is a contrived example, but my point is that the numbers feel so skewed now that you're extremely unlikely to land a single malediction before a NPC is half dead except for boss NPCs. You can run the same numbers as a shaman: In almost every circumstance you're all but guaranteed to be more mana efficient by healing your frontline than by bothering to maledict in PvE.

There's only a handful of NPCs in the game, boss NPCs and guardians in particular, where maledictions were even remotely worth casting. Petrification used to be somewhat useful at least in some areas where NPCs didn't have any items that you wanted to grab. Now, they're all just a dice roll and waste of mana most of the time, even with max art casters.

It isn't like sorcs, necros, shamans and hellions were overly populated or anything. I don't see the point in the nerf being this hard. It's one thing to make it so that wand slows from moderate level store-bought wands miss more often than not. It's another thing entirely to make max art GM casts miss more often than not, and that's what we have now.

It is sort of silly when your class is utterly reliant on specific spells to even up the fight, and the game has a change that skews the balance heavily toward warriors once again, the classes that need the least amount of help in the current game.

I wouldn't even recommend anyone roll a hellion or necromancer in the current game. Shaman is a little different because they have other stuff to fall back on.

this is just a symptom of a problem that has always plagued sk when it comes to pve...casters r useless for most sk pve content, unless they r capable of healing. between most creatures in "end game" zones being immune to magic or immune to most magic, anti-magic rooms, wily e coyote barriers/gates that tyrannosaurus rekt charmed/controlled pets, and how inefficient mana is as a resource compared to both HP and PE...

the correct solution to every pve challenge on sk is to bring more melee and healers. u might occasionally need a bard or a rogue, if there is a door that has to be picked cuz there is no key for it. other than that - u shouldn't even be bringing bards or rogues - just grab another merc or barb. jacking up the saving throws of powerful races is just icing on the lulz cake - yummy!

One thing that I'll say has changed this up more recently is that now that magma's damage has been pumped up and always does full damage even after cling, magma is a legitimate way to add to the damage of a group without being mana inefficient.

However, that's only true for warlocks, and only recently, and also only works half the time because half the NPCs in the end-game content are immune to magma.. Hellions, necros and sorcs have had their skillsets completely massacred in PvE with this recent change, while even before the change their contribution to end-game PvE areas was still less desirable than having another healer or melee fighter.

What was the reasoning behind this change, and why was it justifiable to nerf necros, hellions and sorcs (and partly shamans) in PvE with it? Was it meant to target using store-bought wands in end-game content or potentially targeted towards one specific cabal with a room affect spell that made many end-game areas ez mode?

That's just wrong. Magma spray is usless in PvE because most boss races are immune to fire. I rolled a warlock once, saw that, deleted. It still is that way.

Just for clarity, because I've been offline a lot this year (and because I can't remember back to what the last set of code updates did), which change are you referring back to? Wondering if there was already an answer to the "why" in the associated code update discussion thread.