Status affecting items/spells

[Nomad]

And why the hate for warriors?

To be fair, as someone who plays almost exclusively warriors, it's largely because my preferred playstyle tends towards the three possible monster-tackling strategies of "stab it", "shoot it until it gets close and then stab it", and "stab it until it looks like it's about to kill me, then run away, heal, come back and stab it some more". So it would be a very uphill battle to convince me to deploy a status effect over one that caused damage in any situation but the "run away" phase. (And probably make the game less fun for me if using them did become the optimal/necessary strategy for warriors. There's a reason I never manage to stick it out for long playing classes that have to faff about with spells to survive.)

[Sky]

if your status effect has 1% chance of working, it's not worth it because the alternative (TO, damage, Tp) is better. ideally, we would have a system where you have a reasonable chance of debuffing most mobs, but the effects are lowered depending on their level.

[Gwarl]

You are of course free to have your opinion, but I disagree with it. Slow and confuse are incredibly useful if they work, it's true -- which is why they cannot be allowed to work! They're too good, to the point that they make fights trivial.

So do really high damage weapons. If a caster is able to confuse a lower level monster in avg 1.5 casts and a warrior is able to kill it in avg 1.5 rounds that's a much more favourable confuse:kill difficulty than we have at present and even then a confused monster is still not as good as a dead one. If it's a tough monster that the warrior needs 10 rounds or so to kill and your chances of confusing it are 10%, you can gamble. Or just use damage spells.

Current status effects don't need nerfing, they just need to work more. They could see a large buff to chances of landing, and open up a different playstyle which the game is capable of providing without becoming optimal compared to what's already catered for.

[Derakon]

So do really high damage weapons. If a caster is able to confuse a lower level monster in avg 1.5 casts and a warrior is able to kill it in avg 1.5 rounds that's a much more favourable confuse:kill difficulty than we have at present and even then a confused monster is still not as good as a dead one. If it's a tough monster that the warrior needs 10 rounds or so to kill and your chances of confusing it are 10%, you can gamble. Or just use damage spells.

Right, in your example, given the choice between a 10% chance of confusing the target, after which I still have to kill it, or just doing 10% damage, I'll almost certainly pick the damage option, and so I'd wager would the vast majority of our player base. It's far more reliable. Not to mention that you can't actually see your chances of success anywhere in the game, so you have no idea if your odds are 1% or 10% or 50%, all you know is that usually you can't land the status effect. But you can see the impact you have on the monster's health bar.

Given that the current set of status effects have to be hard to land, because they're so powerful, you're looking at, at best, 1 in 3 odds of succeeding against a monster you actually care about. , and probably substantially less. Really the only good argument I can see in favor of giving status effects saving throws is that it lets you vary monsters by how susceptible they are to status effects (so e.g. a berserker would have a bad saving throw, while an archlich would have a good one). But you can imitate that just as well with guaranteed status effects by just making the effect more or less powerful (berserkers take a -5 speed from slowing instead of the -2 that archliches take).

[Gwarl]

While I think deterministic stacking of status effects is an interesting idea, I think status effects could be fixed simply by altering the probabilities. If I'm playing a warrior I'm doing that to hit things but a character like a rogue might want to be able to confuse/slow things occasionally at the cost of not being as good at hand to hand combat, or even a warrior might be well served filling a spare inventory slot with a wand of scare monster in case of emergency. Even if doing so makes me overall less effective than a warrior, as long as it's reasonably effective or effective enough to help me win (bad example because rogues win anyway) it gives people options.

[wobbly]

Right, in your example, given the choice between a 10% chance of confusing the target, after which I still have to kill it, or just doing 10% damage, I'll almost certainly pick the damage option, and so I'd wager would the vast majority of our player base.

In a 1 on 1 fight perhaps. Otherwise being able to incapacitate 1 enemy while you take out another? Which would mean a staff with the odds set for use as crowd control.

[Derakon]

In a 1 on 1 fight perhaps. Otherwise being able to incapacitate 1 enemy while you take out another? Which would mean a staff with the odds set for use as crowd control.

I mean, if we're talking about being able to take on groups outside of the early game, then there's a ton of other changes that will need to be made, because it's much too fatal to be in LOS of multiple high-level enemies at the same time.

IMO the way to do staffs is to still make them 100%, but make the effects weaker (e.g. only -1 speed).

[Patashu]

IMO the way to do staffs is to still make them 100%, but make the effects weaker (e.g. only -1 speed).

Now you've replaced the problem of statuses being unreliable with statuses being boring!