Let's talk about Damage Barriers.

As the first phase of the Barrier Review that will role out, we're refining how damage barriers work. SvS barriers, anti-magic barriers and so forth are another discussion entirely.

All of these is tentative and subject to change if testing doesn't go well, and there is no doubt that this is generally a nerf. I think we've been forward with that from the start - many barriers right now are far too broad and stacking becomes far too powerful. It makes barrier spells very uninteresting and hard to develop and differentiate from one another.

First of all, there will be two different types of damage barriers, Damage Barriers and Damage Wards (terms subject to change if someone suggests something I like better).

Wards
These are, mechanically, very similar to what we have now. They'll be applied through a core mechanic for more consistency and generally be narrower than they have in the past. They represent the ability to endure more damage.
*Percentage based damage reduction (With possibly a very small amount of flat reduction).
*Applied after armor.
*Applies to all attacks.
*Limited to one Ward at a time.
*NMUs will generally have access to stronger effects here since they won't have access to the second type of barrier.

Barriers
These are new and represent intercepting an attack with a magical force (Yes, many existing spells like Cage of Light appear to work this way based on messaging... but they don't).
*Flat reduction of damage
*Applied before armor, but after defenses are checked (This is a necessary limitation of the combat system).
*Chance to proc on every attack, but will not intercept all attacks.
*Ablates with every hit. If the barrier breaks for any reason before it would naturally expire a new one cannot be formed until the natural duration expires.
*Limited to one Barrier at a time.

Barriers in particular are intended to be more useful to lightly armored caster types - they're capable of soaking a lot of damage, but they're also capable of leaving you suddenly vulnerable if something does manage to break through them. Meanwhile, Wards are a more constant form of protection, but some damage will slip through over time. By allowing you to have one of each time we're avoiding just casting three narrow spells to replace the old broad ones, while still allowing some customization and active choice in how you want to defend yourself.

I'll go into more details when we're set up on the Test realm and start to dial things in.

I'll have these mechanics set up soon for some limited testing in Test (Existing spells won't be converted yet and the messaging isn't finished, but it should be testable to tune the core mechanics before moving forward with spell conversions). In this case "soon" means "hopefully late tonight or sometime tomorrow, but it might slip into next week".

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

>>Does this imply that wards will be in effect for every attack? That there is no 'percent chance' because they will be always on?

Yes, just like existing barriers.

>>And will wards be ablative as well, or will they be (as you said) more similar to what we have now?

Nope. Only Barriers will ablate, Wards will not (Again, just like most of them currently). They will have only trace flat damage reduction (Whereas a couple of them have significant flat damage reduction now).

>>Does this retool only effect magic users, or with thieves and barbarians get a minor review of their applicable abilities?

Barbarians and Thieves are included - though likely not in the initial test since I'm setting it up with two quick spells I threw together in the AP spellbook.

Since I can't think of any way to justify magical Barriers to either class the intention is they'll just use a Ward, but their Ward abilities will be, pound for pound, more effect than those from a spell.

>>And I assume my next question is a no, but any chance thieves could either get an earlier entry in the warding types, or have the sagacity khri reworked?

All existing barriers will be reworked before this launches.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

> *Ablates with every hit. If the barrier breaks for any reason before it would naturally expire a new one cannot be formed until the natural duration expires.
Raesh, this is very concerning. Does this mean that casting the spell for more power is going to penalize the caster more than it would if he had thrown up a weaker barrier? For example, if I put a spell up for 40 minutes and it breaks within 5, do I have to sit things out for 35 minutes when I would have been able to recast earlier if it had been a shorter duration?

I'm of the opinion that more power and skill thrown into a spell should always be good. I don't like the idea of having to, for instance, stance down duration before casting so as not to be locked out of the spell for a very long time.

> Keep in mind, the durations in your example are WAY too long (Right now I have barriers lasting 2-5 minutes).

I know you don't even have the stuff up for testing, so I may be talking about things that aren't an issue, but I'm going to do it anyway, on the off chance I might bring up something you guys haven't considered.

IMO 2-5 minutes spells are completely useless for anything other than PvP or specialized invasion critters. To me, if I'm hunting somewhere that the barrier is the thing standing between life and death on a critter, then I probably shouldn't be hunting there. But there are two more reasons I wouldn't use it.

1) Mana. If I'm putting this anywhere near cap every 2-5 minutes, that's going to crush everyone's mana except the very best of the best.
2) Time. If I have something I'm recasting every 2-5 minutes that's taking up a significant timeslice where I could be casting debil/tm spells, recasting buffs, or even casting a normal spell to train other magics. This is a bigger deal than the mana issue by far. That would just make for very inefficient training.
3) Unpredictability of need. Like Anti-Stun, it's a Catch-22. There are numerous problems with keeping the spell up all the time, but if I somehow knew when I was going to need whatever protection was there within a 2-5 minute window, I'd have many other ways of solving the problem instead that would be more efficient and/or effective.

Now, this may be intended that these barriers are mostly for PvP, where every little bit helps. If so, though, I would like to request that there may be some barriers left that are hunting barriers, rather than PvP barriers, especially for defensive guilds?

Even for PvP, 2-5 minutes is... not easy due to the even tighter constraints on mana and time during PvP, and makes waiting for the barrier to expire perhaps a more legitimate ption than trying to break the wards down. Again, this may be exactly what you intend. If so, though, I hope that the spells are either very powerful or very cheap slot-wise.

We'll see how it all feels in testing.

FWIW they are set up as battle spells with shorter prep times, and I'm totally open to flexing mana costs (That's something I think we need to be doing anyhow - but again, that's another project).

In general, mixing ablation with long durations doesn't end up that well. It becomes extremely tricky to make both the duration and the hp of the barrier relevant - and balancing the cast time is even harder. If I have a 40 minute barrier and you break through it at the 39 minute mark - how long should it be until I recast it? What if you broke through it at the five minute mark?

I can either do time remaining until it would have naturally expired (or a fraction of that etc), or a flat time (1 minute? 2? 10?) but neither of those work at the extremes when you have a long duration. (You can also do something like allowing recasts after X time from casting, regardless of if the barrier has been broken or not but that doesn't really help our scenario much).

Note, the current system I have in place isn't perfect either - that's why I want people hammering on the core mechanics before I convert and try and balance a bunch of spells.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

The problem with the new barrier is that many players already milk critters forever for defensive purposes alone. When you add that the type will be a chance to proc, but then add in so many attacks regardless of proc will cause a potential of lockout, plus it being a rather short duration spell for what most people spend hunting, the trouble only intensifies.

Would it not be better to give the barrier a flat duration of 10-15 minutes, and then put the percent chance to proc as relatively high in the beginning and as the spell takes hits/procs it reduces the chance of further procs? Then maybe look at adding a residue effect to where if cast again before it expires, you only start with half the proc chance you would have originally (or something along those lines to encourage it to run out before recasting)

You sense the Minor Physical Protection spell upon you, which will last for about ten roisaen.
You sense the Cage of Light spell upon you, which will last for about eighteen roisaen.
You sense the Manifest Force spell surrounding you, which will last for twenty roisaen or until it has endured six more blows.


:(

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Waiting for results..................................................................................................................

>>> IMO 2-5 minutes spells are completely useless for anything other than PvP or specialized invasion critters.

For anyone who disagrees with this statement, consider that Raesh's barrier proposal is very similar to how MAF mechanically works right now. It is considered overpowered in PvP but is almost never used in PVE for the exact reasons stated by HABERLEJ. Even Raesh's fix (not being able to recast it) is pretty much designed to throttle the use of barrier's in PvP.

In PVE my cleric and moon mage both buff up fully when I first move up a critter tier and if I let the buffs drop they get killed. Some buffs are so catastrophic if they drop that I don't use them (SoL, for example. Losing my shield mid combat is so deadly that I won't use the spell. Even LW is a bit niche because its duration is only 10 minutes or so. ). Eventually they don't need their buffs and I stop using them. Then they stop learning from the critter and the cycle starts again. Any spell that I can't rely on to constantly reduce damage (i.e. MAF) becomes a niche spell because I can't rely on it to keep me alive.

> Some buffs are so catastrophic if they drop that I don't use them (SoL, for example. Losing my shield mid combat is so deadly that I won't use the spell. Even LW is a bit niche because its duration is only 10 minutes or so. ).

Minor tangent, but you can use SoL while wearing an arm-worn mundane shield. Rather than creating a shield, it just buffs shields kill.

>I don't think I have access to test, so I'll ask the questions here.

Everyone should have access to test if it is open.

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>> IMO 2-5 minutes spells are completely useless for anything other than PvP or specialized invasion critters.

From personal experience with Misdirection (which I can get to 4 minutes) and LW (which I can get to 9 minutes), these spells are EXTREMELY annoying. They make me stop what I'm doing for 30 seconds to cast, and I have to drain large amounts of mana regularly for them too. Yes, I could also cast at a lower mana level, but I want them to last as long as possible because stopping every few minutes is annoying. Similarly, I suppose I could cast without cambrinth so I could do other things during casting, but I want the best mana efficiency since I'm putting in so much mana.

Eventually I memorized RM on a scroll so I wouldn't have to deal with Misdirection, and I moved somewhere without critter TM so I wouldn't have to deal with LW.

That said, short duration spells don't have to be terrible. With a much lower mana cost, I think they'd be fine. But I do mean MUCH lower.

Also, for what it's worth, LW currently acts as one of those spells you really need to survive in certain areas. I've not yet been able to survive at all against at-level TM critters without it. I hope that whatever comes next is able to do the job, or that critter TM gets a review.

Raesh, I would just like to make sure that training warding isn't made any harder by the (necessary) changes to bring barriers back in to place.

Currently, at higher ranks, I always use symbiosis to train. That allows my attunement to stretch as far as possible.

However, if I can only have one barrier, and one ward, I will want both of those to be cast with as much mana as possible, so that I can survive as best I can. Depending on guild and spell availability, that may mean there's no spells left to train warding with.

My necro already has a version of this problem. If I am hunting a magic using creature, I want to have CH, MAF, and LW up all the time, and that doesn't leave anything to train warding with. I am afraid these changes will leave more guilds in the same boat.

>Funny, we have been repeatedly accused by GM's of drastically underhunting.

Not in the same conversations as people discussing needing 40 buffs to stay alive though, and you know that.

>The fact that all three of my favourite characters are light armour users and are supposed to depend on this mechanic that appears to be customized for PvP is even more concerning.

The idea with light armor is that you try to avoid getting hit hard rather than soaking damage. The barrier should protect you from lucky hits. If you're getting hit hard often you're doing it wrong.

Will barriers be set mostly to take a certain number of hits or will some take a certain amount of damage?

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>>Everyone should have access to test if it is open.

Who has access to test changes every so often. Sometimes it is GM only, sometimes it is Community Leaders (I think Plat accounts are bundled into this group, too), sometimes it's everyone.

I do agree this should be an "everyone go test it" thing once it's set up enough.

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>>> How quickly do you burn through the six MAF charges currently when you're hunting while depending on it?

I don't use MAF to hunt. It is just a bad idea to hunt something if you have a short lived barrier with a low number of charges in order to survive. If I needed to use it on top of Seer/CoL, Bene/MPP/MaPP or PHP I would find something else to fight.

I clearly have done a terrible job of elaborating my point, so let me try again:

Facts:
1) Raesh wants to change our current damage barriers into a wards (non ablative percentage barriers) vs barriers (ablative static damage reduction with a very short duration)
2) The Barriers Raesh described are at least superficially similar to how MAF works now
3) Raesh plans to make it impossible to recast a barrier if it is breached until its duration would have expired.
4) Raesh stated that he wanted to make Wards (more) useful for heavy armour users and barriers (more) useful for light armour users

and a less global fact:
5) I already have difficulty finding optimal creatures to hunt with between 180-250 weapons and 200-300 armours and, consequently, occasionally rely on a damage barrier - CoL or MPP - to help bridge the gap to the next tier (note one, not several)

My Opinion:
1) MAF is not a very good spell for increasing survivability in PvE (for reasons covered above)
2) This make me wonder if the new barriers will be useful in PvE since the spell they are modelled on, MAF, is mostly a PvP spell.
3) Short duration spells (like LW and MAF) also take up a large amount of in combat time to recast and are significantly less useful as a result. Example, if a spell lasts 5 minutes (300 seconds) at 100 mana and I can cast it in 15 seconds of round time (which is a low estimate), keeping it up takes up 5% of my in combat time.
4) The short duration and inability to recast barriers means that if they are breached you have to be able to live without them or get used to dieing/being severely wounded and needing to flee combat and be healed.
5) If you have to live for several minutes without a barrier in PvE then you can't rely on it to keep you alive/in good shape.
6) Any defensive spell you can't rely on to keep you alive is not worth casting in the first place. (another way of putting it is if I can melee with a creature without a barrier and do fine, why would I waste time casting it, especially if it takes up 5% of my in combat round time).
7) Since Raesh wants to make Barriers more useful for light armour users I worry that CoL and MPP will be converted to barriers and become very marginally useful spells in PvE.

On the other hand, it always irritated me that I need to spend slots on burn to get CoL so I guess I could drop CoL and burn if that happened so it isn't all bad.

>>4) Raesh stated that he wanted to make Wards (more) useful for heavy armour users and barriers (more) useful for light armour users

That's not a goal. It's more of a natural consequence of before/after armor.

>>Everything related to MAF

MAF isn't a great comparison. MAF works on a strike system (Doesn't matter if they're large or small). The new barriers work on a hit point system - so they can soak a lot of minor hits, or a few BIG hits.

>>Raesh, can you ask the folks in charge of such to do a character update for us to test this?

I can try, but I don't have much pull with that sort of thing.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

Yes, MAF will be converted like all barriers - what I'm saying is it's current model isn't a great approximation for how Barriers will work in the future.

-Raesh

"Ever notice that B.A.'s flavor text swells in direct proportion to how much one of our characters is getting screwed?" - Brian Van Hoose

>>The new barriers work on a hit point system - so they can soak a lot of minor hits, or a few BIG hits.

I like this. It'll allow MAF to be more functional for day-to-day hunting

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>> Hmmm. I am still concerned about the short durations because that is another downside of MAF (see the 300 second duration + 15 second cast time = 5% of in combat time spent keeping the barrier up) but I am very reassured when you put it like that.

1) I believe Raesh said that he's intending to make the prep times similar to TM spells; in other words, like 1-2 seconds.

2) The reason this is being put into Test is so that we (or more accurately Raesh, as a result of our testing and feedback) can find the sweet spot.

Your concern is warranted, but don't get too worked up (not just you, I mean everyone) until we can get our hands on it and see how it works. Personally I'm expecting to find the ideal balance to be a 1-3 second prep time, max duration of 7-10 minutes, cooldown recast timer of 3-6 minutes. But again, we'll see.

I

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"[A]ll PC necromancers are now redeemed good guys..." ~ GM Raesh