Sigil: City of Doors

These have hit the test server recently:

Invigorating Challenge renamed to Vigorous Challenge.
- No longer spams the floating text "xxx is attempting to draw the attention of enemies".
- No longer works on hostile PCs (so can't taunt other players in PvP)
- No longer interrupts spellcasting
- Will now apply a -50 penalty to Hide and Move silently skills of the Stalwart Defender for 30 seconds. (this is maximum allowed by the engine).
- Cooldown reduced to 30 seconds (down from 60).

Defensive Stance
- Cooldown increased to 30 seconds (up from 20). The original 20 seconds was a compromise that we reached because the cooldown was applied both on activation and deactivation. Now that the cooldown is applied only on deactivation, the cooldown can be raised to 30 seconds as originally intended.

There was also some code change to Ultimate Bulwark in response to some bug reporting of buff stripping in certain areas, but I doubt this will really have any effect, and the bug may not be lying within the ability (even non-stalwart defenders are reporting it), but with something else, maybe area or enemy related.

The wiki will be updated if/when the changes go live.

>No longer works on hostile PCs (so can't taunt other players in PvP)

Why?

There are both technical and balance issues for that.
Technical is that the player could have bypassed it anyway by casting a spell, balance because, well, that's a scenario that clearly favors casters (who get their way out of taunt) over non casters.
Also, done to avoid any potential PvP arguments over the usage of an ability that was tailor made for PvE because, well... Obsidian and Bioware totally forgot this aspect of the game.

Also, by design, this ability was intended to allow for SDs to attract the enemy's attention in PvE, it was never really intended to be used as a form of interruption (I had reports that Weapon Masters may be dipping 1 level in SD for interrupt), it was merely a side effect of the code to make it work in the first place, without the interruption, the targets would ignore the defender, but I managed to fix that in the latest version of the code. (hopefully!)

Last but not least, if the ability is buffed in one way (cooldown halved), something else has to give (no interrupt, no PvP usage). For its original purpose, the ability should be a lot stronger than before anyways, most of these changes were done so to avoid any potential unwanted side effect.

Clangeddin,Aug 16 2016 wrote: Invigorating Challenge renamed to Vigorous Challenge.
- No longer spams the floating text "xxx is attempting to draw the attention of enemies".
- No longer works on hostile PCs (so can't taunt other players in PvP)
- No longer interrupts spellcasting
- Will now apply a -50 penalty to Hide and Move silently skills of the Stalwart Defender for 30 seconds. (this is maximum allowed by the engine).
- Cooldown reduced to 30 seconds (down from 60).

My biggest problem with this is that if we are to assume that in this setting of heroes and villains that mass battles and clashes between them are expected, then PvP is expected. So if we turn to PvP implications, the Defender is the quintessential tank whose imposing will can hold back the tides of war, And a player looks at that beefy tanky imposing man, goading them to attack him, any player ever will simply . . . ignore him and kill hims friends. The taunt was the only real way in PvP which one could utilize taunt as what a taunt is by definition, as well as temporarily distracting his opponents attention away from his allies and onto himself.

So now, without this only ability that allows for it, tanks in PvP are left with two choices:
1) don't tank and join the 300 critters club.
2) don't tank unless your opponent is dumb and attacks you for reasons and join the 50 dmg hitters club.

Without having tested it in PvP, or without knowing the exacts of the script, I'm pretty sure even before it didn't prevent you from simply re-targetting someone else just about right away. Making it at best a minor nuisance, especially since if far away enough, they could likely cancel it before you ever even landed a blow. Unless the player in PvP was super inattentive.

it lasted about one round where you were under an effect similar to confusion which only had the option of attacking the player. Though sometimes it didn't work.

If you're forced to attack with mundane attack for even one round, then it's absolutely good it's going away. Taunting doesn't make people stupid to utilize unoptimal attacks, it just prioritizes their targetting. And unless you can make people prioritize their optimal attacks at anyone who is taunting, it's better to not have taunting at all.

It had a save. . . >.>

So? It still made characters act out of the way they should. A wizard wouldn't come hit you with his staff, he'd slam you down with a bigby and snicker afterwards. :P And they'll probably do that anyway.

>It still made characters act out of the way they should


So does dominate person or control undead though.