Posted by Proud Blade(VIP) on May 24, 2000 at 14:46:53:
In Reply to: Interesting - ok, I'll elaborate posted by Khiravn on May 24, 2000 at 11:59:16:
> **and it's tricky for necros.
>
> I disagree. I didn't find anything, at all, tricky about it. Someone is slept, then scourged/poisoned/cursed/summoned to a closed room if possible/forgotten. I don't think they're going to survive. I landed, easily, 80% of my sleep spells as a necro, and I am serious here - I can only think of once that someone survived it when someone else didn't intervene (stupid groupmate attacking early, gangbanging enemies coming to distract me). I don't think this took a particular amount of skill on my part, I think it is an easily-abused spell, like hold person used to be, or the old invoker spells used to be.
I didn't mean it's tricky to pull off- it's the same as any other opening-only attack. I meant it's tricky to balance necro sleep without making the level difference irrelevant or removing all value from A-P sleep.
Of your suggestions:
> 2. Make sleep easier to resist, like hold.
This seems fair, but I'd be worried about leaving A-P's with a spell like hold person- one that never seems to land.
> 3. Make sleep a higher ranked spell, and cost more mana (since it is very close to a sure kill), post-40.
More mana is the better of the two. Making it a higher rank spell isn't going to help- the necros that really scare you are the high-level ones. More mana means that spelling you up gets a little tougher, and flee/sleep/flee/etc is weaker.
> 4. Make sleep unaffected by spellcraft.
This is equivalent, in practice to #2, except that it hurts necros, but not APs. Shouldn't necros be better than APs at spells? I'd rather see #2.
> Anyway, those are just at the top of my head, and I'm sure they might be easily picked apart on further reflection, but I attribute much of the imbalance between good/evil (and it is there) to sleep. :P Honest.
Nah. It's numbers. Try playing a loner evil guy. It's not much better.
Also: The classes have a slight bias towards evil. A breakdown:
Good: Paladins. They're an empowered class, require better-than-average roleplaying, and are therefore somewhat rare.
Good/neutral: Bards. Average numbers, somewhat powerful.
Neutral, but more likely to side with good: Druids. Perhaps the rarest of all classes.
Evil: Necromancers and A-Ps. Numerous and powerful. A-P's are fairly easy to play as well.
(I'm counting healers as "any", but they do have some bias towards evil.)
The result: You typically have a few paladins around, half of the medium pile of the bards, and a large pile of necros/APs. The rest of the classes can be as evenly distributed as they want to be.... but even within classes with no alignment bias, there's more evils than goods around- many players like rampant PKing, and it's easier to justify if you're evil.
I don't have hard numbers to back up what I have above. It's all intuition. I've always been fond of the idea of a "Theran census" by the IMMs: Count all characters on the system, and generate a report broken down by race, class, or alignment. I'm sure someone can do this, and it would be very interesting to see the numbers.