Party in the forest at midnight wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:19 pm
Scrying is a horrible, low-effort spy mechanic that absolutely dunks on mundanes. Why are wizards the best cloak and dagger class. I have absolutely no idea where "it's bad for information gathering" comes from, you're just doing it wrong and not learning your targets. Even now I hear reports of scry-gathered intelligence. Prior to the nerf, the people who were good at it brought in a *lot* of information.
This entire argument comes across as condescending at worst and disingenuous at best. Prior to the nerf, you didn't have to be "good at it," you just spammed the hell out of it in combination with drinking tons of alcohol. So of course, that brought in a lot of information. That's not, really, in my opinion, a good benchmark for the new scry, other than to say that the old version was ridiculously able to be abused and needed a change.
This isn't a case of "git gud scrub," it's a statistical fact- despite the prevalence of internet media in the world today, typing 50-60 words a minute is still a very
high benchmark; in the US, you can get a clerical job that pays well over minimum wage by typing 45 words a minute.
The current
average WPM speed of the world is 41.4 words/minute. This equals a total of 82.8 words in the roughly two minutes allotted to a scry, assuming your target does nothing but hammer away on their keys for the entire duration of your spell
and completes their emote and hits enter before time expires. (For the record, this paragraph makes up a total of 75 words, including what's in these parenthesis.)
The previous paragraph also, I'm fairly certain, exceeds the maximimum character limit for a single post in NWN without using wordpad shenanigans, cutting into the two minutes you have to successfully post something before the scry wears off.
Please explain to the rest of us how, without metagaming or being
exceedingly lucky, you're supposed to "learn your target" to make efficient use of your two pre-epic feats and epic feat under that kind of restriction?
It's not completely useless- but claiming it's amazing or even above sub-par blatantly ignores a boatload of facts to push an opinionated narrative that mundanes are helpless against it when they're anything but since the UMD/Lore change. And if you aren't running lore in the current meta, shouldn't you be the one "just getting better at it?"
Like I said- I accept the old version needed a change. I even accept that it needs to be a careful balancing act to not give scrying
too much usefulness. But I also think that ignoring the fact that being in an area transition
eliminates your two out of ten minutes worth of scrying down to zero of ten minutes based on an entirely OOC circumstance is putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "I'm not listening to reason," when there are plenty of slow typists out there who render the feat useless through no fault or malice of their own other than not being a faster typist.
I wasn't interested in scrying before, and I'm less so, now. I can accept that may be the design goal, but telling people it's great is anecdotal and ignores hard, statistical fact.