Wheel of Time MUD

Hey all,

One of the consistent pieces of feedback we have received is that LS (and SS) rogues are much harder to play than their DS counterparts, mainly due to movement management. Ideally, LS rogues are easier to play than DS rogues (since DS is the "for experienced players" side). We've tossed around a few ideas upstairs that involve new skills, but mostly don't love what we come up with (it often ends up being too complex, e.g., a Mat-like skill involving rolling dice and random effects).

How do you feel about LS rogues in particular? What might we do to make them easier to play when compared to their DS counterparts, but not OP relative to hunters and warriors?

The tendency for human rogues (stabby types, also applied to hunters in the past) is to just clan into the most bonussed clan for moves.
One of the two bonussed clans is less geared towards stabbing now, so that leaves the other.

I think the solution could be to extend the BT move bonus to all LS rogues.
This solves two problems:
1. No more "need" to clan BT
2. Moves manament is less problematic for LS rogues

That said I'm not sure we want more stabbers in PK.

If it was up to me I'd remove the move bonus from the bonussed clan AND make it harder/less easy for DS rogues in one fell sweep.

Don’t up LS rogues. They are very good chars with their very strong practices. A full dodge ls rogue with projectiles is a beast in a melee fight. You aren’t supposed to be able to run around on foot forever rolling stabs on unsuspecting people.

You want to throw LS and rogues in general a bone? Reduce the inherent protection notice offers someone. If you manage to get a timer through to completion it should be rewarded more than 30-40% of the time. Arjuna and Wovoka both manage just fine in Northern Pk. I didn’t find my BT a challenge before the moves bonus, he’s certainly not a challenge now.

Rogues don’t lead to good pk. They have their place but if you start upping them all you’ll see in PK is roguemud again

Very easy to play. King of wack kills. Honestly think you should remove pkstab if you want to improve pk. If you did that bumping up rogue mobility or pb or something would be fine. Would not touch.

Wovoka, Arjuna, Fermin etc are top tier players. I don't think it reflects on the class. A great player can make anything look amazing.

Haven't played rogues much so don't want to comment but it maybe some kind of vial or moves buff. Or some kind of zone sense.

Speaking of zone sense .... :'(

Similar to what everyone else has said - you really don't want a lot of rogues in PK. They're like channelers - you can have maybe one in a group of 4-5, any more than that and the PK quality starts diminishing very quickly. Rogues are incentivized to not group, to go for solo stabs, to stab mid-PK rather than be there for faceoff, and to fleestab if there are multiple rogues. And none of those things are good for PK and all of them are very frustrating for leaders and groups.

So yes, the reason LS rogues are tricky is due to move management. But just like DS rogues have been heavily de-incentivized over the years in a deliberate attempt to reduce the amount of them in PK, you really don't want to make their move management easier. Because the more of them there are in PK, the worse that PK is for everyone that's not a rogue.

To be quite frank I hate stab. Always have really. I’m in the Kryyg/Jestin boat. There’s a reason most listers besides the obvious remorts/channelers/bonused clans are stab. It’s a cakewalk kill mechanism. I’m not saying this because I die to stabs I don’t. I’m of the early generation murderers everywhere hyper paranoid type. But rogue pk and stab is just boring as fk. You put a super statted rogue in the hands of an elite player. Add on bonuses and the best set. Because we all know that all trickles to the top (bonuses and sets lol) And you have a recipe for boredom. I know it’s fun for those who have it. But it’s not for anyone else lol. If you up stabbers, please up charge to counter these fks. They’re annoying to fight against/track/play with.

Granted some rogues actually do group and are helpful. But there’s a lot of others that just get you killed. Never been the guy to like random insta killing bonused peeps rolling around. All that being said I see no issues with ls//ss rogues as is, at least not to up them. Down if anything. Honestly being stab sometimes feels like a necessity in todays low number mud. Which is stupidly annoying.

Up hunters.

LS and SS rogues were de facto buffed relative to DS rogues whenever stab landing was changed to scale with short blades beyond 84%. Combine this with everyone having essentially half of old master damage on stabs and it's a pretty potent combo -- both higher damage and higher land rate than their DS counterparts on average. Normalizing vial regen was another similar change -- didn't up LS rogues, but certainly downed DS rogue mobility. I think changes like that are better than complex changes -- also because the problem isn't that rogues (of any kind) are hard to play. They're not. They're just not super fun to play as, with, or against.

If the problem is that DS rogues are dismounted all the time and have better mobility and that is a relative advantage because they can sneak/hide more frequently, do something that's good for PK at large (i.e. not making them OP relative to hunters/warriors) but may have a de facto impact on the relative str of LS/SS rogues vs. DS rogues. As I've said before, I would look at notice mechanics; being able to move around/sneak/hide at will without considering smells/mounting/dismounting is a much lower relative advantage for DS rogues over LS rogues if notice does not cost moves to move around with. Then you can up land rate by virtue of dropping notice's inherent protection against stabs landing or reducing it greatly, which again, disproportionately benefits the class that has a higher ceiling on land rate/damage.

I have a great deal of fun on my LS rogue whenever I can get people to actually try to kill me and it's a class that shines when using mob support or fighting 1 v many. Thing is, I can't really blame anyone for not wanting to fight rogues. For as resource-intensive as playing a rogue seriously can be (in terms of mvs, vial, etc.), playing against one that you fully intend to kill can require a lot of resources too. If it's less exhausting to play against rogues, rogues will get more PK and it might be harder to confuse "not fun" with "hard".

Here are my pracs on a prerolled (18 12 12 19 19) LS rogue:

sparry - 85
hide - 99
sneak - 91
dodge - 99
attack - 73
backstab - 99
short blades - 99
search - 50
track - 30
ride - level 4
notice - 90
survival - 98

vs. a comparable trolloc (18 9 9 19 18) rogue going for roughly the same build:

sparry - 79
hide - 99
sneak - 89
dodge - 99
attack - 62
backstab - 92
short blades - 93
search - 26
track - 26
notice - 88
survival - 46 (level 3)

The point isn't that troll rogue pracs are bad or inappropriate, but there *is* a trade-off right now for the ability to run around dismounted all the time (in terms of both land rate and practices). This is not even going into the different builds you can do with the pracs -- for instance, there's not really any class (stabby hunters, even heavily bonused stabby hunters, trolloc rogues, etc.) that can pull off a stab/crit hit projectiles build the way a vanilla LS/SS rogue can, especially if they have 16 int and 19 dex. And I think you made it so you can buy unlimited projectiles in Fal Dara, so it's not particularly onerous to gather resources.

isabel wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 14, 2023 9:04 am

Wovoka, Arjuna, Fermin etc are top tier players. I don't think it reflects on the class. A great player can make anything look amazing.

Geom does/did well up north too.

TL;DR -

1 - "Harder than DS rogues" does not necessarily mean "hard".
2 - Recent changes have disproportionately been better for LS/SS rogues, so that gap is actually the smallest I have ever seen it in 20 years or so.
3 - People might be confusing "not fun" with "difficult".
4 - Projectiles exist, are easily available (unlimited purchase in FD), and are really only viable in combination with stab for LS/SS rogues. There is your separate mechanism to "buff" LS/SS rogues already implemented.
5 - Make rogues (of all kinds) more fun to play against and people will probably have more fun playing them -- assuming fun is the goal.