GP just needs a duration, if you ask me. It doesn't have one right now, right?

I'm fairly sure you can get into a GPed room by radding yourself or gusting yourself, right?

I've never tried radding in. I have more fun radding the holder out.

This argument has been covered many times over. I'll refer you to reread the related threads, find people who used it talking about how effective it is, and the responses of everyone else. I don't see any reason to bring it all up again at the moment. Let's let the test go on and see how things work out. This isn't really related to the discussion at hand.

Doesn't work if they're shielded, which most are.

Personally, I like my idea that if you cast GP, you can't use normal pentagram or be salted

No, no Avaer.... its like a child with a cut on his finger, but we seem to want to amputate the arm to solve the issue. Heh....



And so rads go throught GP? If so why are we arguing about GP at all, you all just need to call Collvan, the rad rabbit.

I don't know for certain, I was asking. I know you can rad the GP user, but only if they are dumb enough not to shield.

You'd be surprised.

And I have class now.... that I should be going to...

I'll be back in like an hour to test maelstrom. Just have someone ready.

That would be a good step to take, and see how things work from there.

Yes sir, oh wise and powerful bathrobe mage!!

While I don't know if this is relevant to the thread, it is extremely true, and worth memorializing. One could add mention of a lot of small but germane details, like the great disparity between getaway skills and hinder skills, but Shiri's words here sum up the most fundamental and most intractable element of this conundrum. And every time an ever-more-powerful skill is added to further broaden the bewildering variety of moving parts, to please the folks that love combat as it is now, the silent majority becomes even more marginalized, and combat becomes even more irrelevant and tedious to them.

My point was simply that you like everyone else who claims that empress was this be-all/end-all into nexus guards on Cosmic is incapable of providing any evidence to back this up. Realistically, this is expected because by virtue of mechanics, we all know that it isn't easy or viable for a single person to enter a room with a group, lust a target, escape, retreat to the nexus, and empress said target before he or she can reject, shield, -or- drop a monolith (which could have been placed in advance). The -only- example I have heard of how this could be remotely possible involved trueheal, which no longer restores equilibrium/balance, and as such would no longer fit into the former theory (enter, lust, trueheal, hermit, empress).

I also am a firm believer that combat prowess and understanding requires indepth experience. As you have said, you are not Krellan (but a Moondancer fighter). This leaves you to be either Derian or Asmodea. What actual experience do, as a player, have regarding this technique? You can point me to logs of other people all you want, I want to see a log where this happened to you.

I know that for a -very- long time, I fought against people who tried this on me - and it never worked. It was very easy to stop /and/ very easy to expect from certain people.

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In the end, I asked myself if this change made combat anymore dynamic. I certainly do not feel it did. Cheap tactics such as empressing/beckoning into a nexus were easy to prevent - but still possible. It gave some slim opportunity to a vastly out numbered group of defenders. I would even go so far to argue it made combat far more strategic.

As it stands, battle on cosmic planes is very much dependent upon raw numbers (which does not add any dynamics to combat). At the very least on ethereal, you never have to worry about an enemy demesne. And in terms of city-vs-commune, saplings/trees in Ethereal are insane (4 chops for just a sapling).

Regarding Fury/Maelstrom/Pollute:

Tests inconclusive. I was wrong, sorta, maybe.

Fury is not effected by armor. I do not know about racial resistances.

Maelstrom does FAR more damage, but is effected by hold breath, proofing, etc.

Pollute may be effected by snake totem, we weren't able to test that well.

However, Pollute and Fury did the same on someone who had no racial resistances to either and whom I don't THINK was bonded to snake, and different on someone who was both bonded to snake and racially cutting resistant.

Meh.

Actually you say quite a few things here that I could agree with, but as I poitned out previously I believe most of them are beside the point. There have been posts in the other thread on this topic where the users themselves mention how the ability to summon into guards gave them an advantage, so we might as well not pretend that it's completely useless. I've given examples of how I've seen it used (though no, it has not ever worked on me personally either). The fact still remains that it was an abuse of mechanics that were put in place for a completely different purpose. Guards are there for defensive purposes, not offensive. And if it never actually happened or made much difference, it never would have become such a major issue.

Raiding is not necessarily a numbers game, it depends a bit on skill - you, for example, have mentioned raiding solo. I would like to see more dynamics added for raiding, but I imagine they'll come through nexus worlds. Strategies should be in place to help the defenders (i.e. summon/gust/whatever into Avatars/Lords), but they should not allow for the misuse of mechanics, nor the ability to drag people from one kind of area to another (conceivably even from non-enemy into enemy territory), or anything of that sort which tarot/beckon/etc to Nexus could do.

-- By the way, I am Derian.

For the record, I was hit multiple times in a row with the following combo: A warrior comes up to me and whores pinleg, lunges and gets it in the first hit or two and keeps whoring it. Meanwhile, a Celestine hits with vapours + lust. While I'm writhing and cannot reject, and cannot afford to reject because I'm in the middle of fighting a warrior and don't know for sure I was lusted because of the blackout, said Celestine recovers, moves to the Nexus, and empresses. I have not dropped a monolith beforehand, because I was moving about, and only ran into one warrior, which is far from uncommon.

Did anyone every notice how auto-enemy ever worked? Did you notice it didn't auto-enemy on wisp (when it was around), demesne summon (when it was around), gust, whirlpool, currents, psychicpush, etc? But it did work on things like Empress?

Care to guess why? This is (as Xavius posted) relic Achaean code. In Achaea, it was illegal to empress/vodun summon/etc. someone into guards; however, it was possible to use most means that just moved a target one room (like gust). It was coded for a few specific abilities that passed over to Lusternia and never changed:

+ Upon mass moving someone into guards by Empress, Vodun Summon, etc. you were automatically enemied
+ You could not be unenemied for 24 hours

Thus, there never was any real abuse of mechanics. It was just junk code carried over.

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Furthermore, this change didn't address most of the concerns you posted. You can still, for example, drag people (off prime) from area-to-area regardless if they are or are not enemied (ie. you can summon from faethorn into ethereal serenwilde). This isn't abusive because there are -no- summoning rules off Prime (not that I agree with this, but it is the stance of the administration). In the end, there isn't much of a difference between empressing a target to a Supernal/Avatar/Demon Lord than there was empressing a target into guards imo.

IMO the abuse in mechanics was in using the guards at all. It wasn't actually an illegal abuse like abusing a bug, but it was using the guards offensively, when the guards were only put there in the first place so that defenders could not be picked off while they transversed up. The avatars/etc are designed to be used and to defend Celestia. The guards were not. That's what I see as the difference.

EDIT: As for wisp and things, I thought they did auto-enemy as well, but I didn't get to play a whole lot with wisp before it was removed. I don't have a problem with saying this is old relic code, but we need to either support it or remove it.

Wisp DID autoenemy. I died to it twice once because the Serenwilde lift doesn't count as being in the Serenwilde when it is moving between floors.

Wrong. Wisp -only- enemied in your freakish situation. I have wisped many many people to both the Mother Moonhart on Ethereal and Prime - and I was never enemied.

From outside Seren territories?

Keep in mind that when Wisp was around. Ethereal Serenwilde was completely Serenwilde territory, so wisping someone would have no effect as they were already in Serenwilde territory. The same holding true for Prime Serenwilde. So you were never wisping someone into Serenwilde territory as they were already in it.