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.