[the_logos]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by a war of attrition in this case, but if you mean health, then no, attrition has very little to do with our PvP combat. Our combat tactics are very complex at the top end, and honestly, they're beyond me - I don't understand combat in Achaea well enough to compete with the big boys any more. (The producer and one of the full-time devs are where that expertise resides on the Achaea team.)

As a random example, which probably isn't all that illustrative as you won't be able to really follow it (I don't fully understand the subtleties involved), here's a post from one of our top combatants about proposed changes to an ability called 'evade'.

It's from a system called 'classleads' in which players propose changes to combat, and other players vote (with some hand-selected players getting more votes, effectively) on those changes and discuss them. We then decide which changes to make based on player feedback combined with our own sensibilities.

"Re: Evade

I think a better solution is to make Apostate more mobile. That's an all around Apostate problem. They're built around camping one room with outrageous nightmare prep time, gravehands, bloodworm, etc. Make Apostate more mobile and you help the class all around.

I don't think it's fair whatsoever to make evade affected by dizziness. None of the single room movement abilities like leap, MJ, backflip, etc are affected by dizziness. Those abilities are the main counter to dizziness(among other effects). Making evade uniquely terrible versus dizziness would cripple Serpent really badly. Those abilities, evade included, have the drawback of having a balance time in order to move a single room.

As long as hypnosis is in place, the class does hinge its offense on needing to be able to maneuver, because it's very possible that you're giving the other person uncontested stretches of 8 seconds(minimum) or more of momentum at times. This is something that has to be done regularly throughout a fight, and can take over 20 seconds with bad luck. You also have to consider that it's generally quite easy to slow down a Serpent's offense with running. Pinshot is ok, but it costs momentum to put up every 17 seconds, and is still fairly easy to move away from(or fly from). Would really put Serpent at a disadvantage if for example, an Apostate can move a couple rooms and reset a Serpent's momentum trivially, but the Serpent gets boned by dizziness/ghands when the Apostate has the upperhand. Serpent is pretty good at escaping momentum, but that feature is clearly weighted in by the fact that they don't have nearly as many other frills as tons of other classes do. And the fact that it's easy to escape from a Serpent is a large balancing factor to Serpents themselves having a good escape.

Most momentum classes aren't affected by evade. Occie [Occultist]/Alc [Alchemist] definitely aren't. You're killing yourself if you evade vs those, because they're just going to follow you instantly and you're still stuck in their tentacle/homunclus. If you have literally perfect timing, you might be able to move after your evade. Occultist is probably literally impossible to evade/move away from with a fast chase, and alc probably comes down to milliseconds if you time the evade perfectly. I notice that most top tier fighters have extremely little trouble chasing evade."


You can take that for what it's worth, but that's one random post on our combat council forum about one PvP ability out of 1000+. Any game with real depth to its combat can have a similar discussion I'd imagine, but attrition it's not.