I've been thinking for awhile now that parrying could be buffed greatly without unbalancing pvp or pvm. The way I believe it currently works is: Shield type+parrying skill effects your chance to parry in this way: [(Parrying Skill -Shield Type Handicap) /2] resulting in a less than 50% chance to parry and absorption based on armor of the shield. Bigger shields are more difficult to successfully parry with (chaos/order shields at the top), and smaller shields are easier (bucklers). Let me first say that I like the idea behind the above; parrying chance being greater for smaller shields and lesser for bigger shields. And damage negated typically working the other way around. What I propose is a higher chance to parry and more effective parrying all around (especially in pve). For instance double the handicap based on shield type and then take the /2 out of the equation. So chance to parry with a chaos shield would be something like Parry-32. With a buckler something like Parry-9. More importantly, the parrying would greatly negate the damage from mobs to where a parryer would mainly be concerned with incoming spell damage. It would give a shield user the tanking feel that is expected (although one would still have to run from certain spell combos.) I think ideally you'd be able to frequently fully negate incoming physical hits from all but the biggest of mobs. I think this could help bring dexers in line with other classes at events without having to design mobs so that they only take damage from dexers or make followers do 1 damage to mobs/bosses in order to make dexers relevant. I think this can be done and be a benefit to pve and pvp. The changes wouldn't have to apply to pvp, but I don't think it would hurt pvp balance. One handers are pretty much non-existent in pvp because they don't proc special hits. The exception here is with poisoned weapons, and even their effectiveness at getting kills in pvp is debatable. Also a template that has access to poisoning and parrying is pretty tight (has somewhat limited access to magery healing, in any case). Parrying is largely non-existent in pvp. In pve it could make the design of bosses/events less annoying to everyone. What seems to happen now is tamers are super strong up until the point where bosses/mobs are designed to take significantly reduced damage from followers. At that point the tamers are still ideal for tanking and often find themselves working hard to heal their pets while the dex classes get to do full/plenty of damage and steal looting/drop rights. (I say steal here, because the tamer takes the brunt of the damage on pets but loses the damage competition). Pure mages and bards get left behind as well, it's never as efficient to cast direct damage spells on these mobs because of mana regen by comparison to the damage over time of followers and dex-based damage. So they are either in a situation where they can flood a boss with ev's and bs's or they're ineffective. And even in the ideal situation, likely to have issues with friendly fire. Although this is pretty tangential, I think a good change here would be more effective direct spell damage from players (they should do double damage already, but this isn't really competitive because of mana regen rates. And often boss mobs seem to take less than normal damage, like 20 from EB's where you'd expect 60 against mobs). So I think if followers/tames/spells could always do expected damage this would be less irritating to characters that use them. And if dexers could use parrying to tank as effectively as tames/followers this would go a long ways to bring them in line with the other characters. Dexers using one handers might have trouble doing consistent damage under the proposed by comparison to tames/followers, but I think that could be fixed by increased slayer weapon availability. How parrying works would still be familiar to people learning the shard (which is important, if you ask me, it's a little off-putting to hear mechanics are much different than expected.) But parrying would just be more effective. Also: I think it would be ideal if normal/low->mid end shields would be moderately effective but high end magic and ore color shields would be greatly effective. TLR buff parrying chance greatly buff parrying absorption stop designing mobs/bosses that take reduced damage from followers/tames increase slayer weapon availability Thanks for reading my novella.
All of these sounds good to me. Regarding slayer weapons, it seems to me that they drop with worse modifiers than non-slayer weapons. I could be wrong. But I've killed a lot of Elder Gazers, and got only two Silver Power weapons and five Silver Force. Regarding parrying, there are some significant issues with the skill, and shields, at the moment: 1) Shields here do not have the appropriate base AR that they did in era. Here's the base AR on UOR: ...and here's what the base AR should be (derived from the block percentages above): 2) Shields here do not have the appropriate modified AR if they are magic. See images above for what we have; it should be a flat +25 AR for Invulnerability, +20 for Fortification, etc., just like Armor should be. 3) Finally, here are block numbers from these store bought shields. This appears to be working right, formulaically. Closing thoughts: 1) Bronze, Metal, and Heater shields did not spawn as magical in this era. TBD if they *should* on this shard or not; personally I think it would be nice to continue to have them do so. 2) All shields should have their base AR adjusted to the era-appropriate values. 3) All magic shields should have their AR adjusted to the era-appropriate values. 4) Block percentage should be changed to the *base* blocking chance of the shield type. As it currently stands, it appears magic shields are useless, because their extra AR makes them block less frequently. This is the one thing I cannot 100% validate from testing. Thoughts?
I appreciate the work you put into this and I want to take more time to look at what you've recorded. My first thought is that if your chance to parry is reduced by the AR of the shield then that is really a shame. I would much prefer it be changed by shield type and not shield AR, as you said.
I was definitely hoping the two of you would see this, so thanks. Also, I think the worst effect of this in pvp would be the contribution to a really undesirable paper/rock/scissors element of pvp: pure mage > parry dexer > two hand dexer > tank mage > pure mage (ie, wow style pvp) but I think that this already exists minus the parry dexer to some effect, and is not very rigid. These are not hard counters here and any of these styles are currently quite capable of beating the other. (Put hatecrime in any of these roles and he still beats the rest of them.) The only thing I think that would be important would be to make sure that the parry dexer doesn't counter the two hand dexer too efficiently.
I like the concept and would love to see Parry get a little massaging to make it more useful/desirable. I have a 7x GM Parry Macer and he's one of the most fun classes to PvM with. I can't really cope with mobs like my tamer can but I can solo Executioners and take on the Visor of Chaos, albeit with a lot of run and heal. I can tank Titans, Lich Lords, Ogre Lords and Daemons, as far as I've tested anyway. I would love to be able to use some balron damnation weapons but man they slaughter me in two hits if they're not focused on another target. If I could negate a significant portion of the damage there it would still not be remotely as fast as tamer farming but at least a feasible alternative. I personally thought it would be a great thing to see a magic resist buff from parry, only in PvM. Perhaps a chance to even reflect a spell back on the caster. This would bring on a whole new wave of PvM dexxers out there parrying down mobs. There's a ton of players out there who love to swing weapons but also want to make good money so they end up making a tamer because it's cleaner and easier to work with. I also feel that the damage rates on armor/shields is too high but I could be just picky. I just don't feel like I should be getting messages about severely damaged equipment 2 hours after putting on all brand new gear.
I had a PvM parry/macer but realized it wasn't really helping so I dropped parry for discord. I've also stopped collecting shields because I don't see a need for them really. In the current state of PvP I don't see Parry being useful at all. Dexxers are few and far between already so having parry would be a waste. I would attribute this to dexxers being fairly weak in pvp. Not to derail the thread, but honestly, whiffing 3 times then hitting for 5 of the 4th swing is silly. I understand I can also hit for 50 twice in a row, but that hardly ever happens.
Love this idea! 1. Increase the availability of slayers would be a huge bonus 2. Maybe a 5% increase for 1h damage when a shield is equipped at GM parry could be an addition to the skill
