Let the Qi Flow

I’m accelerating my specific suggestions to avoid receiving anymore suggestions on a system.  My analysis will be slightly out of order in that it will follow this post, instead of preceding it.

Specific Suggestions:

No Buff To Prevention Time: kick/magic arrow/mental blast/mental tempest all have low enough prevention times that they should probably remain unchanged (although kick is way worse than magic arrow and it evokes great tears of sadness from the author).

Should be Buffed Even Before Training/Constitution:  glancing pierce, bolted lightning, striking fist, unhallowed scathing.

Glancing Pierce should have a baseline 20 or 30 second prevention time if it’s to be used fairly often, according to the helpfile.  (3 or 2 times per minute is not bad.)

Bolted Lightning, Striking Fist and Unhallowed Scathing should have their 120 second preventions dropped to 60 seconds.

Improvement Contingent Upon Training:  psychic shock, ashi barai kick, yikwon hand form.

For various reasons (such as inscription incentive, already low prevention time), these abilities don't need to be improved immediately, but could stand to have reduced prevention times with training and/or high constitution.

Suggested baselines:  Constitution and training should probably have additive effects on the prevention reduction of kung fu moves.  That way everyone has access, although training remains highly desirable.  As a side effect, the maximum reduction should be reachable either by training or by constitution, the maximum benefit will need to be capped.  For example:

1500 constitution (800 over 300) can be neatly divided into 8, 10, or 16 parts.  Every 100 constitution could reduce prevention times for [standard] kung fu moves by 10% for a maximum possible reduction of 80%.  However, more readily achievable levels of constitution (500 constitution, for example) would result in a 20% reduction in prevention time.

605% training (505 over 100) is an incredibly awkward number, so let’s use 600%.  Every 50% training could reduce prevention times for standard kung fu moves by 5% for a maximum possible reduction of 50%.  At 250% training, this would be a 15% reduction:  not bad, but not game-changing, probably how it should be.  At 400% training, a 30% reduction is seen, which seems reasonable.

The prevention reduction could be additive, so that someone with 400 constitution and 250% training would see 25% reduction in prevention times on his or her kung fu moves.

Notes:

1. Obviously, balance is a very difficult; the author has no concrete way to judge the effect this has on total damage output.  Likely, only Nijlo has the ability to run exhaustive tests for balancing purposes--but does he have the time?  We can hope.
2. Endurance drains might be extreme in certain cases, although this is really only a problem for fighters (endurance bonus and fighters is a separate post--suffice it to say that one hopes fighters are NOT balanced around having a hit/dam bonus up continuously by not using their endurance).  Perhaps endurance costs for some of these abilities should be lowered, particularly for abilities that should have short prevention times, such as glancing pierce.
3. Certain abilities have added incentives, already.  For example, ashi barai kick, yikwon hand form, and banded smiting initiative have inscriptions that increase their utility.  These abilities will likely need to be “held back”; perhaps their prevention reducions be halved compared to “normal” kung fu moves.
4. Bash and Trip are the subject of a future post and/or suggestion.
5. Winged arc-bolt is not a trainable kung fu, and given it’s scaling, it probably doesn’t need to be.

A more detailed analysis of kung fu moves will be in the next post, and will include a class comparison---with the understanding that we are NOT looking for parity, and with the realization that each class benefits differently from kung fu moves.  For example, the harder someone hits, the more valuable using kung fu as a lead-in will be (valkyrie will benefit more than any pet class).  In the meantime, let me know the prevention times for breeze of hand and cyclone of the guild.

Bruce Lee Disapproves

“A unique aspect to glancing pierce is that its recovery time is nearly nonexistent. This makes glancing pierce a highly used skill.”  - helpfile for glancing pierce

“Unhallowed scathing has a very short prevention period. Basic mystical patterns can be used again after the skill's prevention has worn off.” - helpfile for unhallwed scathing

Has anyone here trained glancing pierce or unhallowed scathing?  The recovery times are 60 seconds and 120 seconds, respectively.

Introduction:

Kung fu moves go largely untrained, and this is because their prevention times are too long.  Kung fu moves are the attacks that every class has: these are the attacks that are limited by a prevention time and deal damage, but offer no side utility.  They have two uses:  (1) damage and (2) to allow lagless entry into combat (and therefore, lagless exit if no lag-inducing abilities are used.  Without exception, all kung fu moves are trainable.  But the players by and large eschew their training, and I believe the reasoning is due to the factors set forth below.

Discussion:

The lagless combat-entry portion of kung fu moves is powerful in very specific circumstances:  because an entire combat round is attached to kung fu moves when used to initiate combat, they become extremely powerful when combat ceases for that round.  Used this way, several rounds of attacks can be performed (against different targets) during 2 seconds (the normal combat round).  In this way, kung fu attacks are basically a weak version of “combat initiative ready”.

With respect to damage, kung fu moves represent a very modest portion of a player's total damage output, with the exception of two moves (kick and magic arrow).  If we say that a player is in combat with the same enemy for 1 minute, then that player has 30 rounds of normal attacks per minute.  Let's say this player has 15 attacks, which is a very conservative estimate (remembering we're not counting spammables such as fireball).  That's approximately 450 attacks.  An ability such as striking fist (60 second prevention), even if it does approximately 3x a normal attack in damage, is worth 0.66% of that player's total damage output.  In contract, even though kick (5 second prevention) is worth only approximately 2x a normal attack, it's used up to 12 times per minute, allowing it to be an impressive 5% of that player's damage output.

With both uses of kung fu moves (damage and lagless entry into combat), perhaps the clearest indication of usefulness is uses per minute.  Kick has 12 uses per minute.  Mental blast has 6 uses per minute.  Glancing pierce has only 1 use per minute.  So while improving damaging abilities is usually done by increasing the damage dealt, here, prevention time is key to improving their desirability.

In contrast, increasing the damage dealt by kung fu moves too much with training is not an ideal, because doing so would increase the burst damage potential (relevant to pk) without touching the utility of an attack.  Players already die very fast in pk, and having significantly more burst within the first 2 rounds of pk combat would only serve to shorten pk combat.

Additionally, there is the problem of certain kung fu moves which simply have too much prevention time, even as a baseline.  These include the two examples cited above, and a couple others as well.

Summary of Problems:

(1) kung fu move prevention time is too long in most cases

(2) kung fu move prevention time reduction based on constitution is capped at a low constitution.

Summary of Solutions: (more than one solution may be appropriate, depending on each move):

(1) kung fu move prevention times reduced outright

(2) kung fu move prevention times reduced by constitution

(3) kung fu move prevention times reduced by training %

Due to the size of this post, an overview of the current state of kung fu, and specific suggestions, will be separate posts. Suggestions attached to this post, especially those with numbers, are likely to be ignored.