Well, maybe some of the complaints will die down, now.

Maybe.

Given all that, Pollute does seem to be the best in the hands of a competent user, though Glomdoring does have the added edge against it (crow cloaks and shadowdance garb, I believe).

Fury, though. Hmm. Not modified by armour, but IS stopped by rune of absorption... that's just odd.

Just as odd as splendor robes not giving 20% resistance to the fire and electrisity components of Maelstrom, only giving 10% instead.


Oh, and randomly, I just learned through that testing that frost potions are 15% resistance to fire damage, not the 10% I thought they were.

Actually, I'd say it's far more odd... at least splendor robes are providing *some* resistance.

But yes, this does rather emphatically demonstrate why blunt is a bad choice for a skill like this... if it was actually being modified correctly, at least. It's probably better off the way it is, but shouldn't be stopped by absorption.

Cutting, actually, but yeah. I wonder if Putre resists it... but eh, not a big deal. Personally, I'm fine with the skill's damage type since it ignores armor, even if Pollute will do 5-25% more damage in most situations.

I have to agree with this. I have rarely seen maelstrom/pollute/fury successfully used in group combat, and when it is used I doubt those few hundred health are going to make much difference. It might be barely better, but there are more important things that we should focus our attention on. That is, unless the racial weaknesses are shown to make a major difference - major enough to make the skill actually unbalancing in group combat.

You do realise holding your breath requires equi and balance right? Which means you have to stop your offence/defence to keep balance.

As your results have proven malestrom will do the most ammount of damage to a target with no elemental weaknesses while holding breath. Without holding breath and its very easy to not have it up even if you are sapmming it trust me, then malestrom does a lot more damage.

You have to slow your offence to make malestrom equal to pollute/furry.
You also have vast elemental weaknesses to increase malestroms damage.

You went through and checked most other damage reductions-- might as well try to make it as complete as possible. That, and I'm interested if putre does reduce it.


As his results have proven... if you time pollute with your geomancer demesne effects, your damage will be *FAR GREATER* than Maelstrom could ever hope to accomplish. Ever.

Yes, this requires a bit of skill and competence... but it certainly isn't impossible!

Draconis is magic resistance, not physical, btw.

Yeah, I was ignoring racials for all of this.

Maelstrom does an extra 15% damage against mugwumps, 10% extra damage against merian, 7.5% less damage against dracnari, 5% less damage against Tuarians, 5% extra damage to orclach and aslaran, 2.5% less damage against trill, loboshigaru, and dwarf, 2.5% extra damage against lucidans, furrikin, krokani, and igasho

Fury does 10% less damage to viscanti, dwarf, and lucidans, 10% extra damage against krokani, 20% less damage to igasho and orclach, 30% less damage to tae'dae

Pollute does 10% less damage to viscanti, dracnari, loboshigaru, and igasho, 20% less damage to dwarf, 30% less damage to tae'dae

Actually I think each level of resistance/weakness is something like 7%, isn't it? So it matters even less.

Valid point, but the mage holding the demesne just exhausted all of his demesne effects, losing a significant portion of his offense to cast Maelstrom. You stopping your offense for 1-4 seconds is hardly a big drawback in comparison. You only lose a SINGLE attack.

Remember that these "vast elemental weaknesses" are only to 1/4th of Maelstrom's damage. Mugwumps are the only race to really suffer from this, taking a grand total of 15% extra damage.


Oh, I was assuming 10% per level. I'll have to test that. Testing racials though is very difficult, because you need two people of different races with the same health to test properly.

I'm not saying its overpowered, but to me from your results malestrom looks better. It does equal damage to pollute/furry when you hold breath. It does a fair ammount more than pollute/furry when you don't hold breath and it also does more damage to a fair ammount of races. Skill by skill malestrom I would say is better than pollute/furry. Yes there are other factors to take into account such as xenthos pointed out the demence of a geomancer does more damage than an aquas and that an aquas direct damage such as staff and hailstorm will in general do more damage than a geomancers direct damage there are other things to take into account but skill wise malestrom just seems better than furry/pollute.

That's really odd, because to me Pollute looks better, skill-wise. It may do a tiny bit less damage to a *fully* defenced person... but then add in demesne effects, and it does more. Thus, when used wisely, a pollute will always have more effect than a maelstrom-- you just make sure to time it. If you're incompetent and don't time it, yes, it will be slightly worse-- but consider the demesne tick to be a *part* of the skill, since it can be timed to be so.

Yes... but it's exactly those factors that should be taken into account when "comparing" abilities... which is something I greatly disagree with, but that's beside the point. The whole point of having different factors matter in combat is to make skills diverse, and the game less monotonous.

I'll argue that expert discipline gives 25% resistance to Maelstrom if the defender holds breath, and expert resilience gives 6% resistance to fury/pollute. Not many people have trans resilience, and plenty of people have expert discipline.

When comparing group combat skills, I don't agree with looking only at omnitrans, but the average case instead.

Shorlen,

You didn't factor something rather crucial into your tests: staff/cudgel damage.

Maelstrom has a recovery of 4.0 seconds. It is delayed 10.0 seconds. Thus, I have plenty of time to hit a target with staff -before- Maelstrom fires... and given Maelstrom strips shield, the second it hits. Thus, the reason you see people die to it is because they end up with: staff -> maelstrom hits -> staff.

This will kill just about anyone. In fact, I've killed many a persons instantly with just maelstrom/staff. Likewise in group combat, I've killed 15 people at once with hailstorm, maelstrom hits, hailstrom.

As a result, Fury is vastly inferior because druid cudgel doesn't deal decent direct damage -and- they have no room attack. Likewise, you also have to bear in mind with Pollute that with perfect timing, you could feasibly time it to do:

Pollute starts -> staff -> tremors/rockslide -> pollute hits -> staff.

Or switch boulderblast/hailstorm in for those staves, right? For some really nice group damage.

In that case though then an aqua can do more damage to one target by staff casting between the break what with an aqua staff doing significaly more, or do more/equal damage than a geo with hailstorm and the bonus to cold damage before deluge gets killed by the malestrom. You can't just compare demence damage with pollute/malestrom without comparing it to everything else. Malestrom still looks the better skill to me with shorlens results.

Although I don't trust shorlens results to be complete as I take about 3.4k damage from malestrom and aprox 2k from pollute with a max health of 5k trans Resilience no other poision protection, proffing against fire, can't get proofing against lightning and a level 2 fire weakness. According to his results pollute is apparently doing about the right ammount of damage to me but malestrom is doing a lot more.

I got

I actually noted hailstorm/boulderblast. I agree that fury is weaker than the others because of a lack of hailstorm/boulderblast, but there's no way to really do anything about that. Communes are gimped in group combat when it comes to multitarget damage, this is a fact. I guess some of us have desert smudge, which can be so easily avoided...


Did the person maelstroming you have a war blessing? Forren is rarely without one. That adds a nice amount of damage. If you weren't holding your breath, that's another 25%. By my math, if you take exactly 2,000 damage from pollute at trans resilience, you should take 2,733 from maelstrom if you aren't holding your breath when it hits, and 3,006 if your attacker has a war blessing and you aren't holding your breath.

Axelord changes....

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