Best Of
Re: Turrets Feedback
Tecton's already mentioned in the Discord that he wants to make turrets not PvP-exclusive, on the basis that it's the only skill in the game that has no PvE application. I agree, though, that turrets should focus primarily on being PvP-useful that that PvE applications are a secondary concern.
Turrets do not need to do enough damage to actually kill someone on their own, or even necessarily enough to chase someone out of the room - they just need to be enough to give a meaningful benefit to the side who has control over the turrets in an area. Enough of a benefit that it might be worthwhile to have your side's engineer/scoundrel take them out, at the very least.
Grek
2
Turrets Feedback
As a newbie engineer, you're asked by Sprocket to learn 30 lessons in Turrets. This is entirely useless. Not as an exaggeration for effect, or as a metaphor for turrets offering a noticeable but subjectively inadequate benefit, but in the sense that your character gains absolutely zero mechanical benefit from having learned that many lessons.
30 lessons in turrets gives you four skills: Construction (creates a turret object in your inventory), Deploy (places the turret as a mob in your room), QPCBoost (increases the turret's listed charge), and Laser (modifies a turret to inflict thermal damage when it fires). Unfortunately, 30 lessons does not give you the ability to have your turrets actually fire. At 30 lessons into the skill, you can build as many turrets as you like, but all they do is sit there inertly, accomplishing nothing. This initial disappointment is, unfortunately, emblematic of the state of the Turrets skill as it stands.
But let's suppose you did learn up to Sentrymode instead, and your turrets work. At the cost of 15 to 21 seconds balance (3 to deploy the turret, 3 to place your workstation, 3 to engage sentrymode, 3 to recover your workstation and at least 3 to QPCBoost the turret so it has enough charge to fire, but ideally 6 or even 9 since it takes multiple boosts to fully charge a turret), you will now have a stationary defense which takes 5s to select a random enemy in the room with it (if they leave before 5s is up, the turret fails to hit), then starts shooting for ~60+(Power/100) thermal damage (so ~150 with a maxlevel toolbox) every 6 seconds for a maximum of six shots before it runs out of power entirely and needs boosted again.
Flamethrower does even less damage, but afflicts with scorched iif targets already have 15% muscular damage. Forcewave deals a tiny amount of internals damage, smaller than I've been able to measure (they regenerate it before a trigger to OPERATE HUD fires). Repairarm is A] bugged so that it doesn't actually do anything at the moment, and B] does something that engineers don't need done, because our bots don't typically take damage. Strobe disrupts balance with a duration based on mind damage on a class that can't afflict mind damage. The only vaguely useful turret barrel is the shardflinger, which still does awful damage, but does apply a single shard proc which could then theoretically be used with Magnetize (if EM damage was implemented), or with Magnotron (which converts the shard into damage).
On top of that, there's a few other general issues with Turrets:
-You can't tell how much power one of your turrets has without learning TURRET STATUS.
-You can't disassemble other people's turrets without subverting them first.
-The Efficiency and Battery mods are redundant - QPC is always the better choice.
-Even if they weren't redundant with QPC, they're also redundant with each other.
The subversion/transfer/encrypt dynamic is a good one, and an interesting take on the melds/groves system in other IRE games. So is the turret transfer system, which allows a non-engineer to help run a turret network. Both of these can be left as is without issue. All in all, Turrets has the potential to be a fine addition to the engineer's toolkit (pun intended). It just needs a few small fixes:
1. Increase turret damage across the board. (I leave the specific numbers up to the admins.)
2. Move Focus down to 5 lessons into the skill, make it not require the workstation, and allow it to target mobs.
3. Have turrets alert you with their turret number, turret target and room name when they shoot someone while you're not in the room.
...and maybe one or two tweaks:
1. Swap QPC and Efficiency in the skill tree, so that Efficiency sees more use early on.
2. Replace Battery with Collapsable, which allows you to TURRET COLLAPSE [turret], returning it intact to your inventory on a 3s balance.
30 lessons in turrets gives you four skills: Construction (creates a turret object in your inventory), Deploy (places the turret as a mob in your room), QPCBoost (increases the turret's listed charge), and Laser (modifies a turret to inflict thermal damage when it fires). Unfortunately, 30 lessons does not give you the ability to have your turrets actually fire. At 30 lessons into the skill, you can build as many turrets as you like, but all they do is sit there inertly, accomplishing nothing. This initial disappointment is, unfortunately, emblematic of the state of the Turrets skill as it stands.
But let's suppose you did learn up to Sentrymode instead, and your turrets work. At the cost of 15 to 21 seconds balance (3 to deploy the turret, 3 to place your workstation, 3 to engage sentrymode, 3 to recover your workstation and at least 3 to QPCBoost the turret so it has enough charge to fire, but ideally 6 or even 9 since it takes multiple boosts to fully charge a turret), you will now have a stationary defense which takes 5s to select a random enemy in the room with it (if they leave before 5s is up, the turret fails to hit), then starts shooting for ~60+(Power/100) thermal damage (so ~150 with a maxlevel toolbox) every 6 seconds for a maximum of six shots before it runs out of power entirely and needs boosted again.
Flamethrower does even less damage, but afflicts with scorched iif targets already have 15% muscular damage. Forcewave deals a tiny amount of internals damage, smaller than I've been able to measure (they regenerate it before a trigger to OPERATE HUD fires). Repairarm is A] bugged so that it doesn't actually do anything at the moment, and B] does something that engineers don't need done, because our bots don't typically take damage. Strobe disrupts balance with a duration based on mind damage on a class that can't afflict mind damage. The only vaguely useful turret barrel is the shardflinger, which still does awful damage, but does apply a single shard proc which could then theoretically be used with Magnetize (if EM damage was implemented), or with Magnotron (which converts the shard into damage).
On top of that, there's a few other general issues with Turrets:
-You can't tell how much power one of your turrets has without learning TURRET STATUS.
-You can't disassemble other people's turrets without subverting them first.
-The Efficiency and Battery mods are redundant - QPC is always the better choice.
-Even if they weren't redundant with QPC, they're also redundant with each other.
-Focus is pointless, as you can just unenemy everyone but the person you want shot.
-Turrets do not inform you who they're shooting at or where. You just get a "you deal X thermal damage" message, at best.
The subversion/transfer/encrypt dynamic is a good one, and an interesting take on the melds/groves system in other IRE games. So is the turret transfer system, which allows a non-engineer to help run a turret network. Both of these can be left as is without issue. All in all, Turrets has the potential to be a fine addition to the engineer's toolkit (pun intended). It just needs a few small fixes:
1. Increase turret damage across the board. (I leave the specific numbers up to the admins.)
2. Move Focus down to 5 lessons into the skill, make it not require the workstation, and allow it to target mobs.
3. Have turrets alert you with their turret number, turret target and room name when they shoot someone while you're not in the room.
...and maybe one or two tweaks:
1. Swap QPC and Efficiency in the skill tree, so that Efficiency sees more use early on.
2. Replace Battery with Collapsable, which allows you to TURRET COLLAPSE [turret], returning it intact to your inventory on a 3s balance.
Grek
3
Re: Scoundrel - Skill Feedback
Lol. "I love the little jabs", makes jabs.Wuff said:
I love the jabs about how I'm inexperienced and don't understand the balance of the game and all this thick guru-crap you keep trying to pull. None of you are anybody ingame, and you're barely even known in your home MUDs, so get out.
Tye
3
Re: Scatterhome Administrators
@Solus The system is for what people make use of it, ultimately, not for what you think it is.
Arsentar
3
Re: How long will it take to reach max level, for EVERYONE ELSE?
Quests across the board need some tuning for rewards - I haven’t found one yet that was better than just bashing - even the kill quests are hard because the spawn rates are too slow to finish before it times out.
3x or so on the experience might make them worthwhile to track down. I think if quests have a chance to drop mods then those would also be more heavily incentivized.
3x or so on the experience might make them worthwhile to track down. I think if quests have a chance to drop mods then those would also be more heavily incentivized.
Re: Upcoming PVP changes
Antidas said:@Tecton what are the chances that we could also get greater rewards for killing someone? I feel like having any mark cost associated with death is rough when the only benefit that I've noticed so far from winning a pvp fight is being able to scan an INR that gives no more xp than a single mob would.
How 'bout no. PvP already has a goal which is either to stroke your e-peen by showing you're better at pretend combat than the other chump or to kill enemy raiders in a cosmpiercer or something. This happens regardless of any potential rewards. You make open world PvP actually profitable and you end up with people PKing each other en masse only for personal gain.
Cubey
3
Re: Fury Thread - Stay on topic.
Every test I ran showed more str = better at upper levels. Next best stat for pve is regen. Lifeforce is great for pvp though.
Albion
1
Upcoming PVP changes
Hey everyone,
Just a quick post to let you know about some upcoming PVP-centric changes that will be going live soon:
Just a quick post to let you know about some upcoming PVP-centric changes that will be going live soon:
- We're going to be increasing the time taken in the regeneration sequence by a factor of 3
- INRs will be encrypted for (tentatively) 30 minutes after death, preventing anyone bar the owner from being able to scan them.
- INRs will drop on logout/death.
- MS TRACK will show the location of your INR while it is still in the corpse.
- If a player dies in PVP defending their faction (in an area that's affiliated with their faction org), reduce the cloning fee by 90%.
Tecton
17