Shift or Invulnerable - But not both together

I think a large part of why wizards are so powerful is their ability to be a cannon made out of granite instead of glass. The ability to shift + be invulnerable is too powerful of a combination. Once a mob finally catches up to the shifter wizard, their one hit is signicantly absorbed by the invulnerability spell.

I personally think the game would be much more balanced if you had to choose whether you wanted to be a jumping kangaroo that is hard to hit or a beefy tank that can absorb blows. I propose a simple coding solution. When your Avatar is in a shifted state, the invulnerable spelll is dispelled. If you subsequently cast invulnerable once shifted, then your shifted state is purged.

This makes the classes feel more like their roles should. A tank should be in the thick of it all and invulnerable would be important. A tosser and wizard would want to be nimble and dodgey to avoid blows. If something caught the wizard or thief, it should hurt them with one hit before they jump to another spot.

Those choices are optional. No code change is needed. You don't have to cast the spells or drink the potions or wear gear with them. If you don't want one or the other just don't use them.

Those choices are optional. No code change is needed. You don't have to cast the spells or drink the potions or wear gear with them. If you don't want one or the other just don't use them.

His whole point is that being able to use both together is too strong, wizards just invul+shift and are incredibly difficult for even groups of knights to kill if you get good shift rng, which I do agree, wizards are very survivable despite low hp because of this combo. Not sure I'd want this change in particular, but the core idea is right, something does need to be done about how strong it is.

I'm happy with how it is, however, once again, they are still optional. No one is forcing anyone to use them. Trying to level a very low endure elf wiz without them could make it too hard on lower levels. AIEW and others who have very low health rely on them to level up. I wouldn't want to see that changed. Why not just make the higher level monsters a bit more difficult to make up for these very optional choices?

I'm pretty happy when i have things that make me infinitely more powerful too, but is it really class ideology that a wizard should be able to take such a beating and survive? Hell, sometimes when i clear anvil I just shift my warrior too because he can't survive as well as my wiz/thief with invul+shift on. Being optional choices is irrelevant, if everyone had a spell that one shot any enemy would it be balanced because "it's optional to use it or not". Not really how game balance works, either way, not my thread just clarifying the issue. I'm not saying I agree with not being able to use both however, perhaps diminished damage reduction if shift is active, or have invul scale with AR so low AR chars don't get as much use out of it so it sort of maintains the cloth/leather/plate ideology.

It's only unbalanced if someone chooses to use them. But why not up the monsters AI, just make them harder, have them cast different spells or something. I seem to remember when monsters used to cast Dispell on you, and all of a sudden all your spells like greater invis were off you. It was a long time ago, I don't know when that was stopped, but it was usually the mages that would dispell you, like Orgre mages and such. Having a good chance of monsters dispelling would probably even out this issue. But for a wiz, it's like someone casting fumble on a warrior and people are going to complain either way.

Shift can't be dispelled - which is one of the issues. Only invul, mobs still dispel/spell blast etc just depends what content you do.

What I'm hearing in this thread is that it's more a matter of not feeling the mobs are challenging enough. It has nothing to do with using optional potions and spells. So it's more of an AI issue. It's ridiculous to remove or change optional potions and optional spells. All that really needs doing is making the monsters more challenging for higher level toons. There's alot that can be done there. Give them more summoning abilities, give them dispell, make their AI choices less predictable and more random. I like it when you'll get one that summons an elemental or casts summon dopple or something. They need to do things like that and make it more random so you don't really know what the AI will do once you're in the fight. I think we need to get away from needing to just mass zerk all the time. And always knowing which AI will summon what.

wizard spells need to be powerful, they don't have the HP to withstand getting hit, they' re a one shot and drop. Making a wizard is a choice, if your not happy about what they do don't make one. and if you think they are too powerful try running one solo in anvil. at level 500 with no gear, you will then see just how weak they really are.

With the greatest respect to both of you, it's becoming apparent they you don't seem to grasp the power disparity between the classes right now. Just look at the leaderboard as of writing this there are 35 wizards, 7 warriors, 4 theives and 2 adventurers at 1k. EVEN if you account for people dual boxing chars to 1k, basic math shows that there are 35-(7+4+2)= 22 more wizards than all the other classes combined - this means people are levelling 3x as many (accounting for all the 800-900+++ wizards compared to other classes) solo or wizard-only stacks of 2 or more than any other character. Classes should all be capable of doing the content just as well as one another, but the fact is levelling a solo wiz is infinitely easier than levelling anything else solo, and levelling 2 or more wizards together is even easier than that.

"Meh numbers are whatever - people just enjoy wizard because it's fun" - yes, that part is also true which is why the other classes need to be made more interactive as opposed to being able to just attack/move/guard well.

"What I'm hearing in this thread is that it's more a matter of not feeling the mobs are challenging enough. It has nothing to do with using optional potions and spells. So it's more of an AI issue" - Mehh not so much, the content is difficult for everyone except wizards - generally speaking. There are some areas where warriors/advs do very well.. basically anything without myst or shift enemies, but unfortunately for those classes pretty much all of the harder more rewarding content has those mechanics (anvil recently lost shift which is a step in the right direction). AI can only be so difficult, the only class that has "outplay" or any way of working around what the enemy has done proactively is wizard as it has a tool for most situations. If a warrior can't press attack and kill the opponent(s) before they kill him then that's all there is to it. There's no hold/heal/freeze tactic that works as warrior healing sucks, their holds never hit and don't expect to freeze anything with coldsnap, invis+summon for a warrior basically stops him even being a warrior if he can't hit stuff so that's out the window for the argument too. Basically Wizards have this entire toolkit available each round, the other classes simply don't. I'm not saying "Nerf wizards to the point where they are on the same level as all the other classes" as I know those classes have some help coming in the future, through whatever reworks/additions the devs deem necessary, however wizards do everything, they're the class embodiment of being a jack.. no.. a master of all trades currently.

"Try running anvil solo at 500…" - yeahhhh, did you basically just say "wiz is weak because it can't solo group content on level" well firstly anvil is not a intended to be a solo dungeon, secondly, the only class that even stands a chance of soloing anvil at 500 (with deaths obviously) is a wizard - warriors thieves and adventurers - unless they are made as a fake wizard with high int simply don't stand a chance. Mass zerk + invul + shift can cheese just about any fight - at least enough for the group leader to die so you can 1v1 the rest of the pack, which nobody else can do with any level of success.

This whole "how ever can I survive on such a weak, low hp and brittle character thing only shows that you aren't using them correctly, and the game should be balanced around those who know how to work the game mechanics to their potential not the lowest common denominator; changing gear, amulets and rings depending on what content you're doing to increase survivability and reduce RNG encounters to a minimum, wearing magic shield, aodmp/aofw even wearing myth/addy gear on your wiz to increase AR if their casters are getting their aoe and single target spells off before you when you're wearing your "light set" then your cast speed is basically irrelevant and you should just go for survivability - but barely anyone even thinks about that.. and if you think that sick 6% sdm you're getting from that roi is worth it when doing high level content, you're wrong.

Sorry if this got slightly off topic, but fairly bored of people bringing wizards low hp into it as a factor - when a combo like shift + invul is in the game, once you get your 6 shields enchanted you shouldn't die to anything in one round unless you're pushing high level mobs or groups of casters, and those of you running solo wizards - sure it may be hard for your wizard to clear Anvil at 500 solo, but think about what the other classes would be doing in those same situations.. are you really that weak? Or just entitled.

PS - I am also a wizard player too, as is everyone. I'm unbiased imo and just wish to see the game have more competitive class options instead of the "you must have at least one wiz in every party, and the more the better" meta.

The major problem I see with changing shift + invul is that this would hit thrower thieves and adventurers equally hard, and they already lack the area damage and crowd control of wizards. There's no question that shift is one of the strongest survival mechanics in the game - but thieves and adventurers need a strong survival mechanic.

The major problem I see with changing shift + invul is that this would hit thrower thieves and adventurers equally hard, and they already lack the area damage and crowd control of wizards. There's no question that shift is one of the strongest survival mechanics in the game - but thieves and adventurers need a strong survival mechanic.

I agree Eden, I don't fully support this topic and my discussion has largely become off-topic, but regarding the shift+invul balance it does bring to light how incredibly survivable a low hp cloth wearing class is in the right hands. I still think shift + thrower is pretty op for thief and Dex adventurer - so much so I swapped from my high AR life steal fist build to thrower as the damage is the same but it's way more survivable to just throw and shift than try to out-leech anything. But currently they don't "do" anything else that well, if you've stacked Dex to throw well then your spells suffer so in that sense it's more balanced than your cc/healer/dps wizard.

I did propose than invul scale with AR or at least type of armour struck so that low armour users are not gaining the same damage mitigation as tanks. This would mean thief/adv with their mediocre strength and medium/heavy get still get a decent amount of mitigation - not to the degree of a warrior but more than a wizard, which is how it should be really.

Like I originally said, shift and invul are optional. It's insane to remove something that's an optional choice, just like creating a Wiz is optional. If you don't like what they do, don't use them or don't play as a Wiz. And there are other reasons everyone makes so many Wiz, it's because people usually want to chant their own stuff, and by the time they get to where they can, they've already invested time into the character and end up sticking with it. Why would you play a class you seem to hate so much anyway? Everyone plays for their own reasons and in their own style. Just because you don't like something that's optional doesn't mean that option should be removed for everyone else. And many do like to solo. Also, this is a new server, so you're seeing everyone leveling their Wiz first. In a few months, you'll see it start to even out as people begin to make their other toons, and they will.

I do think if you give the dev team enough time, they will bring in other classes and more items and they will make better changes. And they won't have to destroy the Wiz class to do that. They've already started with new armor, but that's just a first change. They will add more things as time goes on.

Technically, if you get into how weak Warrior spells are, why can they even use spells to begin with? Shouldn't Warriors and Thieves not be able to use spells and only use potions and scrolls? Really only Adv and Wiz should be able to spell. A Warrior is never going to be able to cast well. And the Thief class never really gets to use their own skills much. There is alot of imbalance in the game. However, if they cut out letting those classes use any spells, then they probably wouldn't make it in most of the dungeons. So that's a whole other issue. If you look at the core of the game, the dungeons and monsters are geared to being able to use the spells, so that's why the Wiz class is so important. They would have to add caves geared more toward Warriors and something else for the Thief class to even begin to balance that out.

Like I originally said, the game isn't balanced around optional choices, if in starcraft 2 you had an OPTION to build a zergling with 500hp or the regular zergling with 35hp for the same cost and supply with no tech advancements, does that make the 500hp zergling balanced? If I send a rush to you with 500hp zerglings at 6 mins and you're sat there with your default zealots does it mean it's balanced because he should've just played Zerg? In this example Protoss are clearly thief/warr/adventurer while Zerg are wizards.

Or here's another one for you as it's so simple to disprove your "optional" logic. If you are given an option to wear gear on your wizard that makes him more survivable and swing swords harder than a warrior and dodge and attack more often than a thief. Does that make it a balanced set of gear? Because wearing the gear isn't compulsory and it's optional choose that path or not?

The game should be balanced around everyone being able to play whatever they want without feeling as though they're just gimping themselves by not having a wizard in their team. Which they are - because wizards are such an integral part of game balance, they literally bring everything except the raw single target damage, and in a game where the best loot is gated behind large packs of mobs single target loses out to AOE most of the time.

I'm all for removing spells from the other classes, but they'd need something in return. The ideal solution would be introducing warrior/thief/adventurer specific skills/spells which offer some of the wizard utility (AOE/Healing/CC) but in a way that's more relevant to those classes respectively. Powerful swings that confuse/stun opponents for warriors, thief using misdirection, smoke bombs to cc etc. However, it's very unlikely we'll see anything like that for a very long time - most likely the client rework will give the devs much more creative freedom.

Going even further off topic now but I will say it's absolutely infuriating responding to this "optional" thing you seem to have latched on to which bares zero relevance to how a game should be balanced. I'm all for options in games, but the way you're using the term is just straight up incorrect.

Going even further off topic now but I will say it's absolutely infuriating responding to this "optional" thing you seem to have latched on to which bares zero relevance to how a game should be balanced. I'm all for options in games, but the way you're using the term is just straight up incorrect. <

No, I think you don't understand what optional means. Optional means, you have the choice of not using it, it's a choice. It has nothing to do with balance. It has everything to do with wanting things your way or the highway. You want to play a certain way, and that's your choice. Some of us want to play another way, and that's our choice. It's wrong to take something away from those that want to use it simply because you want things your way. What if I told you I hated your favorite weapon or your favorite piece of gear and I thought it should be removed from the game and no one else should be able to use it simply because I don't like it and I don't like how it affects your playing style. There is no difference. Like I said before, we all play for our own reasons and we each have different playing styles. There is no official way to play this game. It's an open world. There are no rules of you must cast a certain spell or you must fight a certain way or wear a certain weapon. Some things are definitely not balanced evenly, but no one is forcing anyone to do certain fights or play a certain class. Some dungeons are more geared toward groups, others are more geared toward solos. No one is forcing anyone to do either. Taking away choices from those who choose to play differently than you do is wrong. Making things more balanced does not have to mean removing choices. Changing AI or adding different gear or designing new and more challenging dungeons can all be done without removing things others like to use and buy.

Telling people they are simply "playing wrong" is ridiculous. It's an open world game. And that's one of the biggest attractions of this game. You make your own rules and your own choices. Not everyone does use Mass Zerk all the time. There are many different ways to handle a fight. It does depend on the mob and where and what you're fighting and if you're grouped or not, but everyone has their own playing style. And my point is about letting others have their options. If someone wants to carry around ten shift potions to level through a dungeon and be invul'd and in full gear, that's their choice. If you want to go in there and only use a weapon, that's your choice. But you shouldn't force someone else to play it your way.

Everyone also has their own ideas of how it should be better balanced, but because it is an open world game, no one has a perfect answer for that. These are very old issues, and any time they have ever tried to fix them, they end up making one class stronger than another. It never really works. Giving warriors a super weapon that lets them sail through caves just makes people complain about that, or nerfing Wiz and making them weaker just makes people complain about that. There will always be issues.

What if I told you I hated your favorite weapon or your favorite piece of gear and I thought it should be removed from the game and no one else should be able to use it simply because I don't like it and I don't like how it affects your playing style

Well if you were removing it because you didn't like it, that's one thing, but if you were removing it because it doesn't match a) class philosophy b) class balance c) straight up busted d).. you get the idea. If it was unbalanced in any way I wouldn't care if it got removed, because ultimately it should never have existed in the first place. The game has a lot of out-dated ideas and concepts, though mechanically it's mostly sound. The aforementioned mechanics (stun/hold/myst in general, Freezing, AOE, Healing, any skill interactions) need to be added to other classes in some way to keep it interesting. Having one button on 3 classes and 120 on another just doesn't make sense.

The game being open world has nothing to do with balance. WoW is open world, yet every class in it has roughly the same utility, dps and control aspects - and yet, each of them does it in a way that's unique to their class instead of copy/pasting the same buttons. WoW has hundreds of dungeons, raids, yet, they're all balanced appropriately. Yes, it's still an open world. There are many options and choices you make while you explore the open world, and you MAY choose to play however you see fit. The game however, at it's core, must be balanced for equality, that means each player - regardless of their choices along the way - when they reach the end game, they should be capable of being just as useful as anyone else they group with. This again, to reiterate, has nothing to do with the open world aspects of the game. When it comes to the main PvE elements, every class should have something useful in their kit to make them appealing to play. There are many many many players who prefer warriors or rogue type characters - who after seeing the options available on the market in 2018 will take a look at the realms warrior / rogue (thief) and just think.. Why would I play a game where I can only press attack, when I have 50-60 abilities in every other representation of my class in basically every other game on the market. I WANT so bad for the realm to succeed and grow, but having a single class that can literally do it all, and well, I just fear it will not happen.

The game MUST be balanced around the people who min-max their characters, it has to be balanced around the greatest common divisor as opposed to the lowest common denominator. If a game is balanced around the more casual players, the people who do min-max and play in a purely optimised fashion reap benefits that can ruin a games economy for anyone who doesn't do what they do and make it incredibly difficult for there to be any challenging content created by the developers.

You go on about choices here and there, in fact, basically your entire argument is about choices. Yet It's not really a choice about using the abilities, it's choosing if you want to actually survive a round or not. You either use both and live or you don't. That's pretty much all it comes down to, you talk about it as if it's philosophical, as if your character is the type of person who uses invuln and shift or he isn't.. Like.. It doesn't really change your roleplay whatsoever. It's just an incredibly powerful combination of abilities. Arguably too powerful. Yet, sadly I still find myself responding to you in this thread, just to prove a point. Not so much about the combo any longer as I never truly believed in the suggestion in the first place. At least not in the OP's form.

I don't think we'll ever agree on what each of us think "balance" is, I prefer my games with more challenge and interaction than what the realm is currently giving me - though I still love the game at it's core for all the nostalgia it has. Mechanically for it's age it's incredibly solid, but it's development team had no idea how the game market would change in it's demands in 22 years, and i suppose a lot of the people who've come back are the same market the game was created for in 1996, and it's awesome to see that support there, but I do think the game has to see big changes if it's ever going to see growth.

I do agree with you that it has always been a half finished game. The Thief class alone is proof of that. There are many areas of the coding that were just plain abandoned all over Realm. But this time we have a much better and much more dedicated dev team. And I think if we give them some time, they will make it far better than it was. It's not meant to be a modern game. It is a throwback and always will be. To make it modern, they would have had to have rewritten the entire engine and done higher graphics. I think most of us like it because it's so old and simple. But it still has the same old problems.

I also agree on that there needs to be more balance for the different classes, even just to make it more fun to play different combos. I never thought it was right that everyone always felt they needed just two characters, AIEW and ASGW. If that's all you need, then there is a problem if you can't get through most dungeons unless you're one or the other or boxing or grouped.

What I am saying is, don't destroy one class or take away choices to fix it. There are other ways. And give the dev team some time to do more. This is an old throwback game, it's probably never going to be like the more modern games. And it was never coded to be even halfway what some of them are today. But I do think it can be made better. There are many areas that can be improved, not just the balance, even the customization with clothing and houses. Those also show the game's age.

they would have had to have rewritten the entire engine and done higher graphics

I don't mean to drop this on you, but the game is being reworked within the next ~2 years to be ported across all platforms, IOS, Android etc. A complete client rewrite and updated graphics which will also allow them to introduce much larger ideas as they will be working with a much more familiar code.

But this time we have a much better and much more dedicated dev team

I absolutely agree, the development team is doing an amazing job, both creating their own changes and listening to the community feedback both on the forum and discord.

What I am saying is, don't destroy one class or take away choices to fix it.

I agree with this as a broad spectrum statement, however invul+shift is just as strong on all classes as it is on wizard, it's just that my AR scaling suggestion does impact wizards the most, but it makes the most sense. If you're magically strengthening the armour of the spell target, surely plate gear should still be stronger than cloth? Which should correlate into plate(heavy) taking the least damage with invul, leather(medium) taking a medium amount of damage, and cloth(light) taking the most damage. It should be that way, logically.

And give the dev team some time to do more

I have faith the dev team has great ideas and work on it as much as they can. They've already said on discord that they have a roadmap which they're working their way along and have their own rough schedule of things that they want implemented and by when. So naturally any suggestions I ever throw out there, whether on the forum or discord I don't expect them to make it into the next patch, merely flagging it up as one players concern for X so that the devs can register that as an issue, and if other people agree then they may look closer into it. I understand that, and like I say have great faith in the development of the game.

The thing that's my main concern is the 1996 loyalist fanbase are not wanting the game to change and argue against any large decisions, and this fanbase is currently what the game is living on, so annoying that community with big changes will be very dangerous for the development team - but the game will never see growth if it stays the same, if not enough LARGE parts of the game are changed/modified/developed upon then it'll go the same way that it did previously so it puts the dev team in a difficult spot as there's no clear cut right/wrong way as staying loyal to "the realm ideals" is obviously very important, but so is moving forward and introducing new concepts and ideas.

But it still has the same old problems.

Very much this.

I appreciate your more open minded approach in this post, a different vibe to what i was getting from your other ones. There is clear issues within the realm, and really discussions like this are often what give the devs a greater insight into the playerbase than they would otherwise get. I just wish more people chimed in with valuable feedback more often.

I wish more people were active on this forum. It seems alot of returning and new players aren't even aware there is a forum or even a wiki. We keep seeing n00bs on channel asking the same basic questions they could easily find in the wiki. I'm not really sure why they aren't using the resources here. I would hope it would become more active on the forum as time goes on.

I did hear about the porting for other engines, and I'm all for that. I think it would be awesome to play this on a phone or my tablet.

Alot of people play just for nostalgia. That is the thing, they want it old skool. Even the old graphics, people just like that crazy older style. To upgrade it all is really making it Realm 2.0 and not what it currently is. The dev team has to decide on if they're just going to upgrade old code or redo it and make a newer, more modern version. And the thing is, I think in the end, you're going to still see the old core players reverting back to the original old skool version. There's a reason we all wanted to come back and have come back over the course of twenty something years. There's something about this game world that is different from all the others out there. No matter what I played in terms of an MMORPG in all these years, none of them felt like Realm. Not one single one of them made me as happy as I am when I play this game. And if I had to really say why, maybe it's just that simplicity. It's less complicated. I really don't want a hundred different spells and combos. And I like the simplicity of the storyline, too. I like being able to get on here and Realm and not have to worry about learning fifty different techniques and trying to calculate my AR and balance that with another fifty different combos and things. I mostly play to treasure hunt anyway. I like to find stuff. Once in awhile I like a challenging fight. I like this gameworld, just to even walk around in. I think they should keep it simple. I am a coder, I spent over twenty years coding game files. So from a coding perspective, I wouldn't over code this game. In fact, when I tried working on my own game, I found I had to literally code down. I was over coding the files, when it actually needed to be more simple. And I think that's the draw of it. Those of us who are older and were here since the beginning, we're looking for that. If we wanted a more modern game with a million addons and combos, we wouldn't be here.

I hear you about the old school vibe, but as all the legacy folk are coming over to the Finvarras Fortress server and are experiencing The Realm "Mistwalkers style" as they play, generally speaking they seem to be dubious at first but once they play for a while they see how great the QoL changes are that the devs have put in. The key for the development team is hitting a happy medium that keeps everyone here happy, while making it modern enough to pull in a newer audience. Graphically it needs to be very similar just slightly more HD, I've spoken to and seen Grumpys work who is doing the graphical rework for the new client and it looks great so in that sense I have faith it's staying loyal to the original sierra style but it's just being brought up-to date. I think the realm has always done well as a casual players game, but I do think the market has changed and it needs to have a few more intriguing combat functions added at least to non-wizards, so there's more options available for those who don't want to cast spells to be able to clear content just as smoothly as those who do enjoy the caster play-style.

Overall I do agree with you, and the outward simplicity of the realm is one of the more charming things about the game, underneath that is actually quite a complex system of interactions, such as how AR actually functions, enchanting %'s, on-hit procs, diminishing life leech with the wrong enchants, there's a lot of small things you learn as you become a veteran of the game. So in that sense there's a very approachable start to the game, but enough interesting things mechanically to keep those with a more hardcore approach to gaming intrigued long enough to get them hooked.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the mobile versions, and that's probably where we'll see the newer players mostly come from.

I still think shift + thrower is pretty op for thief and Dex adventurer - so much so I swapped from my high AR life steal fist build to thrower as the damage is the same but it's way more survivable to just throw and shift than try to out-leech anything.

I had the same experience: swapped from Imp Talons to Uruz at 300 and realised I'd never need the Imp Talons again. :(