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.