Many farms throughout Kysei and Sigrogana have reported finding humanoid corpses atop grain silos.  The corpses were all in terrible states of decay and rot, many overtaken entirely by fungi, as though they had been there for many years.  This has occurred even in newly built silos, that have not existed long enough for a body to reach such a state of decay.

Attempts to find common grounds between the incidents has revealed a strange fact.  Although the farms had average harvests, they all had significantly above average wheat exports, with some farmers noting that "the grain just seemed to stay fresher."

Rune Mage's Warding Rune can leave the field quite the horrid mess, and this could hinder greatly your allies who prefer getting up personal and close. So here's an idea.

Since Rune Mage has so many leftover points in some cases (Destiny), why not give it a new skill with that purpose? Here's the pitch:

Quote:Shatter Wards
3 Ranks
1M, 15 FP

On use, targets all Rock Pillars created by Warding Rune and causes them to explode violently, knocking back all enemies for (Rank) tiles on the direction opposite from they are facing, while leaving 'Pillaged' tiles behind for 2+(Rank) rounds.

If the Warding Rune that created a Rock Pillar is linked to a Destruction Rune, it will also remove all special tile effects and field objects from the location. (Pillaged tiles prevent the creation of new tiles and field objects in its location.)

Quote:Unblemished Stage
1 Rank
1M, 10 FP

On use, it will trigger all Runes under your command. If the Rune is currently affected by another which prevents Trigger effects from activating, its Rune Level will be reduced by half, and then it will trigger normally.

Quote:Field Engraving
5 Ranks
3M, 25 FP

Targets one rune in range. On use, the targeted Rune will turn 'inert'/'ground scriptures' (They will no longer be able to be triggered, linked, resonate or be controlled), and become a field object which grants allies within 1+(Rank) range bonus stats (Rank) to a single statistic relative to the rune type. (The bonuses do not stack and can only be obtained once per rune type)

Razor = STR, Elemental = WIL, Chilling = SKI, Haste = CEL, Warding = DEF, Smoking = RES, Anchor = VIT, Illuminated = FAI, Razor = LUC, Chronos = SAN, Null = GUI, Destruction = 2x bonus.

Something that keeps sticking out to me in GR2 that isn't really related to balance is the fact that Twin Dance was changed to work with all range weapons besides bows. Guns (and to a lesser degree Tomes) being Twin Dancable have opened up the weapon type to a lot more interesting setups that wasn't possible before, adding a bit more variety to the usual fleur spam that such basic attackers often fell into. Basically, I want bows to get the chance to feel the same love. Now yes, while I understand using two bows at the same time isn't too logical, mechanics needn't always represent the ic. In fact, this is already done anyways since a Ranger has to use two bows to get a third action via crits unless they play ghost or another duelist for fleur (which 90% do for that reason).

For this, I point toward a particular Ranger skill, namely Twin-shot. While using two bows at once is impossible, firing multiple arrows at once with one isn't, a fact that has precedence mechanically with this skill. Combined with how people rp 2x bow setups anyway as a single weapon, I see no real reason for bows to be the black sheep of the weapons in being the only non-twin dancable type.

As far as balance is concerned, I don't really see much that would turn the game on its head. Guns and daggers twin dance at range perfectly fine without being unbalanced, and those weapons are more explosive in damage output due to being much less stat intensive. Most of bow's power currently lies in range, and good skills, that latter of which aren't usable with twin-dance anyways. The only real change is opening up more opportunities for people to run bows in creative ways rather than defaulting to duelist out of necessity.


TLDR: Bows should be able to twin-dance, and it would be a cool expansion of the potential the weapons have both mechanically, and in rp flavor.

Visual effects on the character sprite disappear when a transformation occurs such as death knighting and shine knighting. I haven't tested this with chaos reflex but I think it does apply.

Steps to reproduce:
1: Equip hexer with death knighting
2: have the barrier tattoo trait
3: in battle, cast death knighting
4: observe the removal of certain effects

Note: elemental enchantments seem to not be affected

 pictured: phantom cloak, brighten, arcane tattoo (barrier), arcane tattoo (warding) (Sorry for bad quality I was trying to upload a gif)
 shine knighting result
 different test with death knighting and kraken (all the same buffs otherwise)

This may seem minor but visual indication is important info in certain cases, especially if mask of metal or Mysterious is at play.

Edit: Oh god what's going on with the pictures, it worked in edit mode!

Edit 2: Okay, fixed the pictures

Heaven kick takes about 5 seconds to fully resolve, which is among the highest attack durations around. If you add in Urawaza, it can go up to 7-8 seconds. This is fine on finishers like ether invitation or sangum ruinam, but heaven kick simply does not have:

1: enough punchiness in the animation to feel good, like ether invitation's spicy explosion
2: enough effect/damage to really warrant that duration
3: a cooldown


Suggestions:

1: simply speed up the animation a bunch.
2: make the character leap to the square without going into the sky (body fling animation!)
3: the character instantly disappears, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust, then falls rapidly on the enemy.

Overall I think it should be a maximum of 2 seconds considering it's an urawaza skill. Plus, it's an ancient cornerstone of fist builds so I think it deserves some love!

To clarify, I'm not asking for any buffs or nerfs

Coastal Squall's Hurricane effect (Capped move and reduced UL hit to range weps) is applying to allies. Seems unintended based on how the Desert Wind tome sandstorm only affects enemies. This doubly hurts the weapon's viability due to it suffering the -24 hit as tomes count as a ranged type, making the effect near Razing Salamander/Kraken's Sigh levels of the user wanting to avoid ever using the effect/upgrading the weapon.

Mixed Martial Arts will break Kensei's katana master's bonus, even if you have a Katana in mainhand with nothing in the off. You used to be able to use them together with no issues in a prior patch, but now it seems MMA counts as a sub fist for the purposes of Katana Master's strict katana lock now, which breaks the interaction.

Excel weapons with charges still benefit from the basic attack damage bonus when glancing smeone, but do not lose the excel stacks in the process. (Which means getting glances with them actually nets you higher dps than full landing, since you can use the 150% damage bonus repeatedly.)

All projectiles/lines that fire from a Talis gem will still aim the direction that your CHARACTER is proportional to the Talis rather than the cast location from the gem itself. This can be easily seen with skills like Needle, Miu, etc.

Ex: I Deploy Talis straight above me at max distance, then cast needle from the right of it. It should fire the projectiles to the right of the gem which continue to the right. What actually happens is that the needle is cast to the tile right of the Talis, then the projectiles start moving UP from there.

Crazy Coyote special actions such as rolling shot when utilized with Twin Dance will fire off the Coyote twice instead of the intended sub weapon in the attack string.