Gulkel's Duel Evaluation will unsummon autosummons, which includes one of the only two mainclass benefits for playing a druid: Active Animal Companion, putting the animal companion on cooldown and making it objectively worse than unequipping AAC before the battle.
What's the point of having a skill scale if it just hard caps anyway?
Can we remove the Elemental ATK caps from all Ninjutsu? It wouldn't be overpowered, since many Elemental ATKs don't directly align with the skill's damage scaling.
For example, Arashi Sanseiken is capped at 5 range, scaling from 25 Ice ATK, yet its damage is based on Wind ATK. If having 50 SKI already lets you reach max range, why even tie the scaling to Ice ATK in the first place?
I don't think this will break anything, if anything, it'll make Ninjutsu more interesting and less limited on its performance. It'd let you use things like Luminary Element for the sake of increasing range/effects, while your raw stats define the damage, etc.
Worth looking into it, imo.
(Also don't forget that, for some reason, all Ninjutsu have cooldowns to it, further limiting their usage. They're allowed to be a little stronger-- if not in damage, at least in range or special effects, dammit.)
There's two parts to this suggestion - weapons and FIs!
First, Weapon States:
I've been muddling around with regalias and stuff for a while, now, and one consistent problem I've found is that a lot of the time, what looks good for the inventory & character profile window (the latter being the more important for presentation) doesn't look good in battle, and vice-versa.
For instance, I've been working on a bonder/fb with a sword cane (yeah, yeah, 'not a spear'), but this gives me a bunch of annoying limitations: to look good with warp strike, sagum ruinam, and cyclone spear, it has to remain unsheathed and also with the tip pointing upper-left, meaning it always looks very 'sword' and never very 'cane', which is a little disappointing for the profile preview.
I also previously had issues with the artificer tomes - I'd have liked to have forgrint be a tome in the preview and a spear of light when used with roundtrip or cyclone spear, but while roundtrip *does* use movement states allowing it to show another icon while in motion, it has numerous pauses where the movement state will halt, showing the base icon. Cyclone spear doesn't use them at all, resulting in throwing a tome at the ground.
Fenri was also almost a problem - another player and I have both used regalia'd it represent our characters' claws, but this looks very weird with Freezing Round. Fortunately, Freezing Round maintains its movement states almost exclusively throughout its animation (with only one frame of the base state at the start), making it surprisingly easy to work with? We'd both still have trouble if we ever used other skills like roundtrip.
Anyway, I'm not going to ask for these skills to be changed - in fact, I think the best way to resolve this would be to give us an icon state name to use for the profile preview (and use the same for inventory/chat?). It'd fix pretty much every issue I've had with these skills.
It'd also be nice to have an additional state for weapon transformations (currently just the artificer tomes?), though I imagine that'd be more complicated codewise.
The Second Part, Skill FI States:
'madness_trait' is nice to have though I personally don't use it - but I do like to use invocation states for most of my characters, which I have to set manually! With the text FI List seemingly disappearing next update it'll become much harder to use them, but it always would have been nice to have them automated, among some other things.
States reserved for invocations and the DH stances would be nice, as would any other 'talky' skills that I've overlooked. I don't know them offhand.
These could either probably be folded into win quotes or be given state names of their own. Win quotes would allow us to set individual invocation states for different spells/spell schools, but I think either works just fine.
Based off of the Description of Sword Polisher I believe it should be reducing the durability drain of the Melting Curse, however it does not as far as my testing has shown.
How to Replicate: Simply equip a Weapon with Melting and have the Sword Polishers Trait active, it will not reduce the Durability Drain when the round turns over.
Enemies in the Minotaur Labrynth are using skills at 90 degree angles. Its hard to screenshot it, but basically. . .
Peddling Wheel from the mushroom, Trample from the minotaurs, and quaking roundtrip from the minotaurs go forward one tile, then turn and continue in that new direction for the duration sometimes.
Notice how the one with the arrow over its head, is throwing an axe disjointed. Went to the right, then straight down.
So there's currently.. what, five immunity pierces in the game? The 'ignores immunity, absorb, and reflect' effects.
And since they all have the effect of piercing immunity, absorb, and reflect, I'll just refer to those as 'immunities' here.
They're also at completely different power scales to eachother, requiring different investments for vastly different levels of effectiveness.
Dark Bard and Boxer currently get the best. Solblader's is close, but with the death of Flash of Light and the reduced usage of Solsphere in the other two stances, it's struggling - but at the same time, sphereless SBs deal vastly less light damage and will never encounter a PvP absorb or reflect.
For reference, DB's (Getting Into It) is a 2-rank passive that triggers if you hit into a Dark, Sound, or Fire immunity, which doesn't affect that damage instance but disables that immunity for the target for up to 3 rounds, inflicts lingering damage and battle rush, and inflicts confusion.
Boxer's (Gotthand) is a 1 rank passive to pierce blunt immunity that triggers at Sturm 4. It also lets you ignore blunt resistance.
SB's (Unerring Light) is a 1-rank innate that triggers when you are in holy aura - if you have holy aura, you pierce all Light immunities. I've.. heard it works on Lightning damage instead if you're using Divine Spark?
Verglas's (Winter's Bite) is a 4-rank 3m action that pierces immunities on a target within 3 range for 3 rounds, with an 8-round cooldown. Its 1-rank effect also disables resistances.
The Lizard is a 3m Stargraph effect, letting a targeted ally pierce immunities for the damage type of your starsign for 2 rounds, with a 6 round cooldown. It has a 1m refund if targeting yourself.
You can see a pretty firm gradient of usability here - Getting Into It, Gotthand, and Unerring Light literally only require playing your class (or playing it as intended, in SB's case) to be effective, and firmly counter the more abusive strategies against them. They can all achieve 100% or near-100% uptime with little difficulty, and are pretty much the ideal as far as immunity pierces go. Getting Into It is also always as beneficial for allies as it is the user, allowing, say, an allied fire mage to pierce a troublesome absorb. (Like Fire Elemental)
Which makes the Lizard's Boon being released after those three feel very strange, and very much a step back. It's a 2m investment (functionally 3m for basically any mage - we don't get action economy here) that barely achieves 30% uptime (1.7/6 turns is, uh, 28%.), has no benefits for astrology investment, and can be literally just waited out. I wouldn't be surprised if you could null rune it.
The ideal use-cases for Lizard's Boon are.. well, a lot of things. It's ostensibly a very flexible effect! You could use it on an earth mage to deal with the rampant earth reflects and absorbs in PVE, on a light mage to deal with YDKs, Wisps, Creepers, Shine Knighting, and Shine Knights, on a water mage to engage with goblins AT ALL, lightning mage for gremlins, verg to cover holes in winter's bite, I guess..??, and fire/ice mages to deal with summoner's 'counterplays' that obliterate your ability to play the game.
But you don't see it, because it's just.. very, very bad? 2m for 2 rounds is NOTHING. The cooldown also makes it completely unusable on allies, and it isn't super usable on allies to begin with because it aligns with your starsign, which is likely an element YOU'RE using.
Verglas's Winter's Bite is awful in a similar way - its on-paper effect is slightly better than the Lizard's Boon (jesus CHRIST), but it's a single-target 3m effect that only JUST crests 30% uptime (2.57/8 is 32%), is cleansable, requires your enemy to be in 3 range, and also eats 4 skill points from you for full effect - which is NECESSARY because the two feasible use-cases for it (yukionna and relei) are BOTH innate reflects that COMPLETELY wall you out of using ice, and are only covered by the 4-rank effect.
You generally don't see it because it's a miserable investment for little effect, and its one spicy use-case (nailing ice-weak opponents through their gear res, which is pretty niche) is a 1-point 1-skillslot investment.
Winter's Bite and Lizard's Boon kind of NEED an adjustment. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with increasing the duration and reducing (or getting rid of) the CDs to a point where you can achieve 100% uptime with them with maintenance. It turns battles against enemies with immunities into something you have to manage a status for, which.. is fine?? It'd put them on the same level as Getting Into It and Gotthand, which both require minimal investment for better effects.
Winter's Bite DOES want some deeper changes, though - it's single-target and cleansable, so even with CD reductions and a duration extension it could end up being useless into cleanses.
There's the possibility of making it 2m, so you can crane hop > winter's bite > verglas action, making it self-targeting like Lizard's Boon, or a mix of both (enemy targeting gets the resist/immunity pierce and a short cooldown, ally targeting gets a 1M refund but only gets the immunity pierce??)
Whatever the case, it does want to be competitive or equal with whatever The Lizard gets.
..... Nihilist Is There Too. I actually completely forgot it existed while writing this? It covers absorbs. ONLY. For a glove slot, it's miserably weak, and could stand to get like.. full immunity coverage + a 30+% elemental pierce effect or something? Like Idol, but it serves to save you from Resist! procs and 100% resist builds rather than help you get Weak! procs. Idk, it really needs looking at, whatever happens to it.
Anyway! I'm also curious about the design ethos behind immunities - right now resists and immunities are highly uninteractive, and whatever their intended purpose their actual effect on gameplay is to stop certain classes from interacting with certain content at all, including in some instances of PvP.
This is a part of why you just don't see earth mages anymore - earth magic is chiefly locked to mage, which wants an 'all-in' approach to spells because of how enchants work, but going all-in on earth magic is consent to your magic being reflected, immunity'd, absorbed (and also getting 100 base evade against it?) in virtually every corner of Korvara. Tie that to effects like Isenshi being a little cryptic and wanting more investment for its bonus effects than, say, Vydel's 'Blink And Shoot' approach that threatens any enemies standing within a 5x5 square of eachother, and you've got very little reason to touch it.
The Lizard was almost a solution to this, but fell DRAMATICALLY short.
We've had some interesting leaders in the past on Korvara with 4/5 of the originally randomly selected ones since being perma-banned, and the last having left of their own accord.
Looking to the present and future, we've retained roughly the same crowd for the past year or so, for better or worse.
In the present it's seemed that leadership is largely an afterthought. That international discussion is seldom if ever conducted, leaders largely being relegated to points of contact for Eventmins to coordinate with for hosting events that may pertain to that nation in some manner.
It brings the question of 'What are leaders actually meant to do?'. In the past this tended to be handling discussions with other nation's leaders and organizing their respective cabinets to handle the day-to-day of the nation as needed. Korvara in its earlier years, for all its flaws, lent itself to having a more active political sphere as nations closed upon the current status quo we know today.
Nowadays there is little drive, desire, or incentive for the nations to interact with one another on a macro level. Understandably, from what I can perceive, leadership all around Korvara is as a whole stagnant and largely only concerned with their own affairs if they even do anything at all.
So the question comes back: What are leaders meant to do? If there are no expectations, no incentives, and no support for these people who are intended to lead the major factions of Korvara, that inevitably leads to the stagnation we have been witness to. That people are almost entirely reliant on events to produce activity, because leadership ultimately means nothing but being the person who stamps map requests/event requests.
I'd pose the following questions:
1. Are you content with the current state of Korvara's leadership positions? Why or why not?
2. What should be expected of leadership positions?
3. What do you want from leadership?
I'll give my own answers.
1.
Honestly, no. As could likely be guessed by the fact I'm making this thread, I'm of the opinion that as it stands, leadership has been made into a meaningless title that serves only to filter events and map requests.
Korvara was advertised as a place where players could control the narrative and the world they live in through their IC actions. Where certain players could ascend to positions of power with creative licenses over their slices of the island by which they could push the story of that part of the world.
We've had poor leaders in the past and much drama that's since been resolved, and lessons learned. Nowadays it seems people are too afraid of bad actors to allow the status quo to be challenged by new faces in high places. Few if anyone seems to want to get involved with other nations on macro level because the initial dynamic of Korvara, where Geladyne had the metals and stone, Meiaquar facilitated the trade, Telegrad had the food and wood, and Duyuei needed everyone else to sustain their war at the Wall? Everyone gets what they want now, no one has reason to push for anything more. The deals are done and nothing happens to change that.
From what little I know, leaders are given little if any guidance or support by the staff/headmin. They're on their own aside from when they have to be told they cannot develop certain areas. The past inferences at Korvara's launch that leadership positions could be subject to higher forced danger levels was quickly discarded. They're at no more risk than the average player beyond being more prolific by nature.
Much of this is a result of the community's collective desires as far as I'm aware. People largely do not want larger scale conflict, nor to deal with international disagreements be they physical conflict or otherwise.
So quite frankly I'm at a loss as to what Korvara is meant to be if players have no real ability to shape the world nor the narrative, if not a sandbox akin to what we already had with G6 before it was abandoned. Where events are the only way by which one can feel they have impact, as the world we collectively share, Korvara, is seemingly immutable, much like G6 was.
2.
Leaders should be expected to push for activity and growth within their nation. If nothing else to keep a finger on the pulse of the various factions inherent to all of them at this point, and address concerns or stagnation as necessary. They should be held to some kind of standard, and if they don't wish to maintain the position it should be given to someone more willing and able.
It is a position of power and responsibility. That we have seemingly zero standards outside not being a perma-banned player/having another character already in a leader or leader adjacent position/inciting the ire of the vast majority of the community is absurd to me. I understand that nations have lulls, attention drifts and goes toward where the people are. That's only natural.
Allowing stagnation to set in at the highest echelons of power in a nation inevitably results in that apathy trickling down. If the guy above me doesn't do anything and doesn't care to do anything, why should I? Especially when I'm not allowed to contest their spot.
It's a multi-faceted issue. The way I see it, leaders end up in this state not because they have no drive or passion for where they've chosen or otherwise been forced to become leader by the circumstances handed to them. The game is simply designed to have leaders ultimately end up not wanting to try to push for anything, as they'll get push back on anything beyond their own nation when it comes to development. Very few things are allowed when it comes to innovations, and much of the game world is off limits for expansion. Rather than beat their heads against a proverbial stone wall, leaders opt to simply focus inward and try to make what little content they can for those who still care within their nations.
So to summarize: I believe leadership needs change in both how they're handled at an administrative level and how the players themselves act with said position. Either that, or we simply throw our hands up and agree to never alter the current status quo, as we have been for the past year or so.
All I really want is a definitive answer to what leadership is meant to be after the nebulous state it's been left in for all this time. If I can't get one from Dev or the GMs, the community's will suffice. Or well, whoever feels like answering.
3.
A lot of what I want is largely tied to what I believe the expectations of leaders should be. To push for activity in their spheres and promote international communication, even if only to ascertain present deals are still valid and to maintain rapport. So you don't end up in a situation where neither representatives from a nation even know who the other person is.
As it stands this isn't made easy by the system. There's nothing to aspire to, and leaders are largely left to fend for themselves when it comes to trying to craft their own goals, only receiving negative feedback if any to attempts to influence the world.
I should expand on what exactly I mean by 'nothing to aspire to'. Everyone is roughly equal in terms of power. Everyone dings level 60, gets their gear and their classes and that's as powerful as they'll ever get outside their personal clout. Research projects and construction are about the only tangible means by which to effectively progress a nation, and those have been historically heavily restricted in scope. The things one can accomplish in events is far more grandiose compared to what one has to fight tooth and nail for to receive as tangible influence on the landscape of Korvara itself.
So what I want from leadership? It largely rests on the shoulders of Dev to make it more feasible, honestly.
The most leaders can do right now without anything changing though? Try to talk to each other more. Follow up on correspondence from other nations if there wasn't any resolution. Don't let things stagnate. You're where the buck stops, if you see something hasn't been done? Bring it up. If you're struggling, you have the leader chat and your own personal nation chat for support, and ideally GMs/Dev can offer insight if inquired with.
Doing absolutely nothing shouldn't be an option that can be taken for as long as it has. Otherwise what point do these roles of power have, if they can simply be held indefinitely without any expectation?
If I happen to be the minority in wanting more out of leadership then so be it. I simply want to be sure that how things are presently is the state people actually want, rather than begrudgingly tolerated.
Leadership is but one of several facets of what comprises Korvara's RP environment, though can be vital as a driving force for kick starting and encouraging individuals to pursue their own RP goals. It was among the biggest selling points of transitioning from G6's environment, that players could be the ones in charge. If that no longer matters, what are we left with?
While Korvara's leadership is not the sole contributor to the present issues faced, it's perhaps the one that we as players have the most control over, even if only in maintaining consistent communication amongst each other and pushing for progress as much as we're reasonably able to do so.
Hence why I'm making a thread about leadership rather than shouting into the wind about the fact we barely have any GMs left willing to do active work anymore, the majority of EMs are no longer active with several departures, and EM apps pushed 5+ months back. Look forward to another wall from me around late October if there's still silence on that one.
For now I pose the three questions above to any willing to answer, to see if we can't improve things, or at least identify where most stand on this topic.
The Karakuri weapon, Hidden Blade, currently benefits from the two-hand talent even when another weapon is equipped with it. The other weapon will likewise get the two-hand bonus, since the Karakuri blade is a bare fist slot.
To replicate:
1. Make a Karakuri, take the Hidden Blade trait.
2. Martial Artist, take MMA and equip it.
3. Equip a two-hand compatible weapon, such as a sword or spear.
4. Attack a Prinny, and record debug weapon power.
5. End fight, learn the two-hand: full swing talent, and then fight again.
6. Note that both weapons have gained 10 SWA from the talent.
![[Image: 7e15c6e185.jpg]](http://puu.sh/KzqAG/7e15c6e185.jpg)
