State of the Shard's PVP...Factions, O/C, PK

I respect all of your opinions and agree that some changes need to be made to bring more pvpers here (mainly pretty neon colored mounts lawl). While a nox mage works, they could use a little working on so that the different levels of poison aren't resisted so much, its definitely irritating to the point of making the class not really useful as a whole. As far as an archer mage goes, I'd disagree with you. I use a bow on my archer mage and its ridiculous. The amount of DPS you can put out with precast spells, archery shots, explosion pots etc is pretty ridiculous. Its just not the old Heavy Xbow > big damage synks that your likely used to from other UOR or T2A shards.

Zen you keep saying things like 'quirky' 'buggy' and 'can of worms'.
The can is open and has been for a long time. If you have an opinion that can be specific, I would love to hear it, in detail. If it's just going to be "eh, doesn't feel right" then that's fine. You're entitled to that opinion and no worms have escaped the proverbial can.

While I'm not the most active mage and couldn't give two shits for 5x duelling, I will say that some of the biggest issues folks who are more experienced seem to have, are spell recovery delay and damage delay being really long on lower level spells.
I'll also agree that more needs to be done for the nox mages, which I think has been discussed. There's some intention or at least discourse, around adding a nox buff to Poison Field for nox mages, which I'd wholly support. There's nothing I dislike more than seeing someone grind out a long hard training process on a character only to rebuild it later because it is ineffective compared to the alternatives.

Oh, that and stun-punches should disrupt spells or at least have a chance to.

I'll sign off on that. In order to land a stun you have to actually land the punch, which does some sort of damage. That, in my mind, should have a chance at a disrupt. As it stands now you can just toss up a recall, get stunned, and still get out scotch free.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scot-free

It's a reference to being exempt from royal tax.

WTB Mana Drain wands. PST

I think spell delay is my personal #1 issue. I've been doing this whole PVP for a good bit and I've never had an Exp/Corp combo fail so often. Waiting for to recover from casting a spell my ass!

I appreciate everyone's responses. I am really enjoying this shard, and I hope I can bring some PVP fun to the table. If nothing else I know the Moonglow bank thief loves me. Fucker. haha

lol

Stun punches can disrupt spells. Doing 0 damage with a punch cannot. As most people have 30 armor and most wrestlers have 0 tactics this rarely happens. But it's false to say that stun punches can't disrupt spells.

I wish I could delete every post Zen the Witcher made here because it just wasn't factual enough to add to this thread. I apologize for how rude that is, but we pretty much ruined the thread trying to explain to him that almost everything he said wasn't true at all, just for him to say "eh well its just off."

If anyone has the expertise to comment on the state of cast recovery and spell delay's it would be Mandevu or perhaps Theo(who doesn't use the forums.) These things were revised a year ago by a GM here who is a pvp expert. The outcome was the potential for very high skill, twitch 5x duels in my opinion.


If I could change one thing about pvp mechanics here it would be for heat of battle to be fully re-introduced. I don't believe players should be able to attack and engage in combat and recall back to their house in the blink of an eye. It has started to remind me of why the no recall mechanics in T2a and dungeons were such a good idea during AoS and briefly prior to it on OSI servers. What you have now is players that show up to faction fights and swing spears with recall prepared so that they can disappear if anyone casts on them. It's much safer for them to recall away instead of bothering to heal or fight. I wouldn't even mind if this mechanic was extended to entering houses.


As far as the state of pvp on the server and what it takes to break into it or enjoy it, that's a complicated subject that I think is fully decided by the community and not staff.

During AoS on OSI servers champ spawns motivated large groups to get together to share PvE rewards. In time those groups got into pvp in order to defend themselves from pks or chase out any unwanted moochers, and after that they became the pks themselves. In time the largest spawn guild would become the dominant pvp force. In time after that the server would be dead. I know I watched it happen on baja, atleast, and from my stints on Pac against FL and on GL against BC I believe it was the case on most servers.

My point for bringing that up is that it's difficult for solo or small groups of players to enter that pvp climate to say the least. If you and your friend join a faction and you patrol a town for oranges what you're likely to find is nothing. Instead, someone's blue scout will see you and they will call in a large group on you every time. Eventually you realize your only option is to join a zerg or not pvp. I think that is the number one factor preventing players from breaking into the pvp scene. Typically this happens and then a large group has noone to fight and they break up and fight each other and new factions/groups emerge. But a spawn guild has no incentive to do this, since it was chiefly the pve rewards they were after all along.

As odd as this may sound for a pvp fix, I think a step in the right direction would be to reduce the amount of players that can receive a reward at a spawn or harrower. Scaling it down overall and designing it so it's profitable for 4-5 people to do instead of 10-15.

Meditation needs to raise mana faster.
After one sync you are already out of mana.
Lighting wands do close to none when it comes to damage.
After being attacked or attacking you can recall.

If nothing else, it's obvious plenty of people care about this shard to fill these pages so quickly. I should probably apologize for coming in here as a new guy posting such a thread. But that's just the kind of prick I am. I'm def the most important dude around. hhaha

Great post. I can agree with everything that you stated. I would love for the heat of combat to be put into effect as well.

Uknown Hero:
I think mana regen rates here are fine, you have to be careful with your mana and cannot dump endlessly. I myself am constantly meditating, even for a split second, as I move around the field. Lightening wands here used to do a lot more damage, but this was nerfed down due to a lot of complaints. I still carry lightening wands on me and even though they are low damage they are perfect to throw onto the end of every synk dump. I couldn't tell you how many kills I've got as someone attempts to run off at 0% after a synk; but I get lightening wand kills pretty much everytime there are large faction fights. I'm not apposed to wands doing more damage but the issue was a belief that one or two people would chase you down toggling lightening wands and purple potions and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

I can get behind heat of battle restrictions on those who choose to engage their combatants but never those who choose to flee BEFORE returning the aggression.

Agreed. But if the person so much as targets one harmful spell back the heat of combat timer should be just as strict on them, not some super short reset where they can run for 8 seconds and then recall out when they realized they made a bad choice by fighting back.

I can see that being a ton of fun in factions, as soon as you've engaged that solo combatant and he calls out in voice to his buddies "Ok, he's engaged, deploy zerg squad."

All told, everyone needs trapped pouches and a healthy right click to run like the dickens should the battle sway against you. I'll still never support travel restrictions for victims or those not intentionally engaging in combat.

I don't support that either. But to me the second you put a faction tag on your 24/7 engaging in consensual combat, like it or not.

Much like the last time this came up, regarding Factions specifically (I think Double Vision started the convo), Factions is not a combat-only facet to the game. If I don't want to fight you on my Faction crafter (duh), I should not be restricted from fleeing an attack simply because I'm in town crafting weapons for my Faction.
Perhaps if there was some flag for crafters and combatants, I could get behind that. However, I'm not going to support getting my crafter booty raped because an entire enemy faction rolls in para-spamming after one of their non-faction alts saw me at the blacksmith.

Learn to smuggle your Val hammers in your anal cavity, much less likely to be found should you get rolled up on.

With the amount of butt-play UO PvPers seem to like, chances are it will be found in short order.

how is it the people who dont pvp ... have the most to complain about it?

Not sure who you're referring to here. I've PvPed with everyone in this thread who didn't just join the shard in the last 2-3 months.