I want to note, that this is in fact a /downgrade/ from where things were before, for Celestines - barring Astral and Muud, all that undead goodness has always been there and has always been primo bashing ground for Celestines. Now they do less damage vs undead (slightly) but they do do more against all soulless-touched entities.

ENVOYS NEWS #683
Date: 7/21/2011 at 21:25
From: Iytha
To : Everyone
Subj: Excorable v. Divinus attacks and hunting.
Currently very few high level denizens are weak to excorable damage or
resistant to divinus damage. While this is perfectly understandable from
a thematic standpoint (most of the high level denizens are undead or
soulless related) it does present a mechanical imbalance between the
organizations that have access to divinus damage (Celest, Hallifax and
Serenwilde) and those that have access excorable damage (Magnagora,
Hallifax and Glomdoring) as well as an imbalance against Gaudiguch,
which has access to neither effect.

I propose a simple solution to resolve the issue, one that does not
require the addition of new areas or denizens to hunt. Three simple
changes need to be made:

-Change the damage types for some of the attacks made by creatures found
on Astral, Muud and other high-level hunting areas to deal excorable
damage.
-Give Magnagora and Glomdoring access to excorable resistance via the
Crow, Night, Necromancy, Geomancy, Shadowbeat and Necroscream skillsets.
-Give Gaudiguch access to both excorable and divinus resistance via
Pyromancy, Paradigmatics and, in the future, our bardic specialization.
This is to balance our lack of both excorable and divinus attacks.
-As an alternative to the above two points, introduce the effects via
constructs. I am hesitant to suggest this due to the fact that it would
introduce a disparity between the constructs owned by various
organizations and present a host of other balancing effects.

I feel that this change would be much easier to implement than the
alternative suggestions made, such as building new areas containing
angelic, vernal or otherwise divinus-affiliated denizens. It is also in
line with the themes laid out in the histories, with excorable-powered
attacks and tactics, such as Fain's Elixir, Urlach's ur'dead warriors,
the Soulless's regeneration and so forth all being of a defensive
nature, while the divinus powered attacks were all primarily of an
offensive nature.
-Iytha, Envoy for the Illuminati

Penned by my hand on the 23rd of Vestian, in the year 301 CE.

Or I am misunderstanding and theres an automatic damage buff to excorable damage against anything without a line against it?

That's just the breaks. While they get better bashing, you get influencing, quests, etc that they can't/won't - so everything goes in circles.

That's what I read it to mean. Maybe people could calm down a bit if this was clarified? Unless you're undead, you're a little bit weak to excorable, was my understanding.

But how weak? And it's not just undead.

OH. This just in. Excoro only does extra damage.... to players. It's baseline against mobs.

Copy Catacombs, with living things.

I don't think we need another bashing area where 50% of the mobs are left alone because of health leeching making them unviable.

How again do you justify excorable type doing more damage against players and wanting to equalize it to divinus damage in terms of bashing?
I somehow feel people would complain all the same if excorable suddenly had a slight disadvantage in pvp...
Also, what is it currently about the astral mania? It's not as if everyone bashes there nonstop, and people make it sound as if it's the one super bashing area all of a sudden. In fact, I'd reckon that the hardcore bashers bash more kephera and uv tunnel trash, but I'm not omniscient, so who knows...

And guess what, Kephs have no resistance to Divinus! Bypass resistances are a go, even if your other attack is resisted by them.

The only players with divinus type attacks that I can imagine ever bashing kephera are researchers. Everyone else is going to run into surefire consequences eventually.

Or just make Excorable not do extra damage to players; who cares? I'd wager some people do.

And guess what, Kephs have no resistance to Divinus! Great, except that everyone with access to divinus type damage aside from possibly Hallifax cannot bash them for rp reasons that cannot be ignored if you want to stay friends with your org.


I can feel the annoyance by melee users since they're generally a bit more limited now in terms of choices for damage types than the caster guilds. Especially kephera are tricky, but that doesn't really relate to the excorable/divinus damage unequality. One solution to make Astral more feasible overall is to return the symbol damage to magic type and change radiance/demonweb to pure divinus/excorable.

Great, except that everyone with access to divinus type damage aside from possibly Hallifax cannot bash them for rp reasons that cannot be ignored if you want to stay friends with your org.

We have been informed that the Administration is still in a quote "review and (re)design phase" on this, for those of you who have been actively involved and / or concerned.

So, a bit more patience. It is not set in stone as things are.

I believe the easiest/best course for balance would be to remove the new damage types since most skills can deal it but dont resist it and it will take awhile for many skills to all be updated for these new types. Additionally they are the major cause of the imbalance so removing them should fix it no?

I forget what the split is on scalpel, but is the bitching mainly just about Radiance? My divinus attack really isn't all that great; a lot of divinus weak mobs have cold resists, and it's a 75/25 split. Moonfire is what, 50/50? I haven't really looked into the rest, but besides two astral spheres, Wildechord isn't amazing.