Making some abilities better by plat

[MacEros]

I have this great idea where Paralyze and other fatesender arts should go through protection arts. Let's call it "breakthrough." The higher the Fatesender art is plateaued, the higher chance it has to breakthrough! That way, once it's at about 50 or 60, it breaks through almost everytime!

Seriously though, I like party sizes of 4, that's how it always was in classic Lyra-ul, and I don't think they should be bigger. It kind of sucks right now since we're all just BSing and genning together, but once the game launches we'll all be in different houses and hate each other, you're not going to be sending more than 4 people to go gen in the same plane. More than 4 people in a party effects combat negatively.

The more we change art/mechanics around, the more we get away from the lyra-ul that we loved and get to the SoT-ul that we hated.

I wouldn't mind the meditate change since that doesn't really effect combat at all, but I liked how evoking judgement on people was controversial.

[Onyx]

Meditation - you regen another point with each plat, so at 10 you would get 2 each tick and so on.

This could be useful. 2 per tick with no plateau, +1 per tick for each plateau following. However, it's a Willpower Minor meaning that GKs will benefit much more than the other foci (not that it's necessarily a bad thing).

Locate - each plat would give you an extra spot and maybe making a stopping point? I donno

This would be handy for those who end up with a long list of friends and/or enemies. I can't really see changing anything more than the number of names on your list.

Judgement - Chance for your target to not know that someone is evoking on them. As long as the chance is low. Advantage DS. Counter with Soul Shield with this change.

Soul Shield - See above. In other words, make Soul Shield useful...ish.

Join Party - More party members is interesting, but I think the current max is comfortable. The XP split is not too horrible, and I honestly don't remember ever having too many more than that in hunting parties anyway. That would speak to the population. I don't see a better change, however. Leave it as it is.

ID Curse - Um. Yes. I've never really seen an actual good use for this.

Anything else? I have no idea.

[Star Scream]

I'm always opposed to making changes to the game mechanics of Lyra-UL like most of you. I feel like Lyra did a fantastic job keeping the game balanced and when the did make changes they tried to make them subtle and moderate. These ideas that Kailee has are the kind of subtle changes that I could live with although I would prefer as few changes as possible be made. I for one found it nearly impossible to enjoy SoT due to the lack of balance in combat, the absence of mares, and the inconsistency of beliefs and other IC roleplays. As tempting as it is to seek changes and "improvements", I am always fearful that we will have a repeat of SoT and lose players because of it. Lyra did one thing right for certain, they created a game that was balanced and had a core set of mechanics that made us all fall in love with the games environment, I say let's stick with what we know will work. Good ideas though Kailee, like I said, if I was going to be in support of changes these are the kind that I could live with.

[Miriel]

Just starting a thread that will get this going. Some of the arts that I think that could be tweaked a bit are:

Join Party - Each plat adds a space to your party. This gives you an incentive to plat it and also it makes you think twice on who should be party leader.

Judgement - Maybe make it to where people cannot sense you evoking it on them if a certain level.

Locate - each plat would give you an extra spot and maybe making a stopping point? I donno

Meditation - you regen another point with each plat, so at 10 you would get 2 each tick and so on.

These are ONLY ideas. Maybe someone else can come up with something better or come up with more!

Join Party: Those of us who were really old school platted everything to ridiculous heights. Samarina's JP is 50 something. That's a party of 9! The main objection to enlarging parties back in original UL was the xp gain for the party leaders.

I always wanted larger parties to be able to protect more people from Firestorm and Razorwind. My thought was that you could "chain" parties. Each person in the party could form a secondary party, but party leaders would only get xp from the 4 people in their original party. So you could have as many as 13 in party: 3 people each with a party of 4 and all of the party leaders in a party with the 13th person as leader.

Judgment: I thought it did work that way in old UL? I vaguely remember hanging out with some Dreamseers testing high levels of the art and finding that only a % of the evokes were detected. No idea when that was, so it may have changed later on. Old UL was notorious for unannounced changes to arts.

Locate: I like the idea of having a few more names on the list, but do you set a limit? 12 is a fairly decent number already, + one for every plat would give you 17 at 50. I know, not everyone was old school/crazy enough to plat these things to those levels, but that's still an awful lot of locates. As a non-techie, I assumed that originally it was limited to keep down the load on the servers. Perhaps with modern servers that's less of a consideration.

Meditation: This one might get to be too powerful, although I do see some point in giving GKs some advantages. They always had the fewest arts of any focus, even though some of their arts were among the most powerful in the game.

Edit: I think the impulse to have larger parties comes partly from FS (Kailee and Sama) wanting to be able to protect more people from mass arts. It also stems from having to protect houses. Does anyone else have "fond" memories of trying to defend their house with far too many people getting in one anothers' way and making it impossible to use mass arts or any sort of strategy?

[Gerroz]

Locate Dreamer plats is better than most people think. When you're chasing someone, tenths of a second here and there really helps you keep up. At really high plats it is almost instant


Same thing can be said for Judgment, I think it is fine the way it is. Instead I would love another high sphere art which could see other things in a dreamer, like their energy levels in Dreamsoul, and/or their XP count. Would be great for combat


Meditation I agree with fully. It should increase somehow with plats. Either by adding 1 extra point per plat or making it tick faster.



About Join Party I am not so sure about these suggestions. It would just mean that the very few with a high JP would be the party leader every time if they had more slots in their party. And 4 in a party matches the amount of foci in the game so it is pretty balanced.

One change to Join Party I would like to see is the XP ticking faster for haloed teachers. This was implemented to let teachers get rewarded XP for teaching others instead of being out hunting for themselves. In reality though, when you're 7th sphere or higher, this XP gain accounts for as good as nothing compared to what you lose from a single collapse. It is weeks of JPing a pop. My suggestion is a certain increase for each plat the teacher has in the train art.