Lychwood thread, posting
B5 Plane review
Stygia is a great example of a plane that's just a nice place to keep your stronghold for evil factions. I often wanted to spawn there.
- Easy for demons to get to. Easy for demon-allied transcended to get to via pact respawn.
- Abundance of resources critical to the evil supply chain (mostly soul ice)
- Towers which give defensive stats
- Demons can kill each other, making it a murder paradise
- Hostile to invaders, but not outright unapproachable
- Evil has good tools for getting people out of stygia to where they need to be
- the portals for intra-plane mobility for evils are pretty decent after the AP cost reductions
- The pets are useful for both evils and goods. Imps are decent xp for even mediocre combatants, and the bigg damage dealers can shred hounds using flight/tankiness for huge xp. My HC is always ducking down there to restore MO.
Elysium pre-lightspeaker endgame was a uninteresting plane, I rarely wanted to spawn there.
- goods SHing here get punished because trans characters need to spent like 8 billion AP to get home after respawn without a beacon
- The search rates were bad overall
- There was no-one for goods to kill, so no xp gain without going a long way or doing non-combat stuff
- It was mildly hostile to invaders
- It's not huge, so getting out is usually pretty easy
- I don't understand the teleporter network. Going from a mountain put me off experimenting.
- Nice river, annoying bridges
- The pets are primarily useful for evil characters.
Now, Elysium is very nice in some ways. I sometimes want to spawn there.
- Totally decent search rates support even the thirstiest alchemists and grinders.
- Permanent tower buff everywhere (weird in the context of the ability to transform any SH square into a tower)
- Still no-one to kill as good.
- Lots of people to kill as evil provided you're real quick
- Getting out is very easy with lots of end-points, though it is somewhat confusing
- It's *insanely* hostile to invaders, to the point where you better make sure you have a plan for where you're going and aren't about to go afk, cos the pets swarming inside and out are untankable for any appreciable length of time due to titan ticks and the strength of the roaming pets.
Purgatorio is frustrating. I rarely want to spawn there
- Cool lich mechanics. I like the ocean.
- 'Okay' search tables
- So far out of the way that angels and demons are usually too lazy to go there
- The worst place ever for water breathing elementalists. Awful
- The plane requiring the most flying is the one where the most non-fliers spawn. Ouch.
- It's big, so it's easy to hide forever.
- The local pets are forgettable. The zombies don't infect properly if a corruptor takes them somewhere else.
- The infusion mechanics are extremely inhospitable, to the point where trying to SH there as a good/evil is just too much of a pain in the ass to bother since your factionmates are gonna be passively counterinfusing your SH.
Some broad balance comments
At the end of the day, there's a strong negative/positive feedback reinforcement element in the way planes are experienced. Desirable places become more populated and therefore more desirable, and undesirable places v.v. This means that even small differences in desirability can lead to massive differences in population/interest in different planes. If purg was the only plane, or was acting as valhalla, it would be mostly fine (except for the lack of water). If places feel empty or remote, they feel undesirable and players avoid them.
The aligned planes should feel like easy-mode for setting up your SH, and they kinda do. You go to an aligned plane because it's favorable to you and hostile to your enemies, and go to cordi when you want to push back at the other sides. But there should also be some perks for encroaching more ongoingly in hostile territory: currently they're minimally advantageous and require an extensive infusion battle against the game mechanics (not even against another faction/group), which is an annoying way to play the game.
I think that flavor is great, but mechanics have a bigger impact on how the planes feel. A fun good plane becomes cozy, an unfun good plane becomes dull. A fun evil plane becomes a murder paradise, an unfun one becomes an exercise in frustratedly dying repeatedly while you're trying to craft potions.
In conclusion, stygia is the best, and the other planes suck.