[EenKogNeeto]

This one's more contested than a lot of balance threads, largely because its very situational: Requiring a hit check and you to act before the enemy for anything to happen due to how momentum reduction parses.

But when it does work: you reduce someones momentum by 2 no-matter what they are wearing or what their stats are. Meaning for most builds - You just lost an entire action with no counter-play or cooldown. The only limitation being your books durability.
It also can be followed up with a knockdown skill to eat someones entire turn, leaving them with only 2 momentum and nothing they can do aside from guard if they aren't a MA. ...Even more situational of course, but very painful to experience regardless.


My proposed change is simple and in theme with similar effects (Dizzy punch): Reduced effect when wearing light armor (Only -1 maximum) and no effect on heavy armor.
This allows it to still punish doomwalls in COMC as a mage while making it not quite as effective against fully armored black knights. After all - It's just a book.

Open to other thoughts, An idea was Flatfoot but ultimately I decided it just wouldn't make sense to have a skill that requires a hit check apply something to make hit checks easier.

[FaeLenx]

Mutated Ryeser meta when?

[Autumn]

I think book smack is a lot more fair than you might realize due to a lot of reasons, and the only change that needs to occur is possibly the one that I suggested where momentum cannot drop below 3, as the mini stun when combined with knockdown is the only oppressive part about it, however the drawbacks of book smack are VERY very present, that being:

1) Needing initative on your opponent or its worthless.
2) Being in Melee range of your opponent
3) Requiring 4m (No blitzing across the map to do it)
4) Tomes generally having low hit rate/damage/crit rate/crit damage so the book smack cannot possibly do an obscene amount of damage.

With all of these things and the counterplay you actually CAN use against it (1m movement, critical hit checks even WITHOUT fleur etc.) I'd wager this special attack doesn't actually need a nerf, and if I had to guess any better, it might be the fight that occured last night where I displayed just a margin of control with book smack on a slower target than I, with 70% hit rate and 4 initiative mind you, and those book smacks stopped the person I was facing from triggering a cherry blossom to heal.

I'd like to hear of a mage with initiative and enough hit rate to actually hit that isn't going to blow up from being in melee range of an opponent, 5m or not.

[WaifuApple]

Yeah, I don't exactly think the point of error is with book smack itself. Just the potential for lock-down that can be done using other things in tandem with it. I wouldn't advocate for changing it, but rather agree with the idea of things like this not reducing momentum below 3. You can take an action then, if you want.

[EenKogNeeto]

it might be the fight that occured last night where I displayed just a margin of control with book smack on a slower target than I, with 70% hit rate and 4 initiative mind you, and those book smacks stopped the person I was facing from triggering a cherry blossom to heal.

I mostly had in mind a fight where as a tank with heavy armor taking 0 damage from the book smack I was locked down and prevented from taking more than one action per round for 20 or so rounds while someone slowly hit me with their extra momentum worth of spells to win. Keep in mind a tank has no way to crit and you pretty much always get full value from the booksmack, any time you can move and hit someone that isnt a duelist with a booksmack you gurantee they can use one less skill on you.

[Autumn]

it might be the fight that occured last night where I displayed just a margin of control with book smack on a slower target than I, with 70% hit rate and 4 initiative mind you, and those book smacks stopped the person I was facing from triggering a cherry blossom to heal.

I mostly had in mind a fight where as a tank with heavy armor taking 0 damage from the book smack I was locked down and prevented from taking more than one action per round for 20 or so rounds while someone slowly hit me with their extra momentum worth of spells to win. Keep in mind a tank has no way to crit and you pretty much always get full value from the booksmack, any time you can move and hit someone that isnt a duelist with a booksmack you gurantee they can use one less skill on you.

What are you talking about? if you get hit with book smack and have 5m left over, if you critically hit the person who is now in front of you you gain 1m back from the critical hit, and thus gaining your action economy back. (5m > 3m)

Of course this is not an assured way to regain your actions, hitting elemental weaknesses is not common so that can be ruled out easily, but there is always 1m movement and a few 2m movement options as well, as well as ways to move and attack, the possibilities of how you can handle getting book smacked are pretty vast, perhaps maybe in some scenarios you may not actually have the option of being able to deal with it, but in that streak isn't that just a weakness in the build like many more before, like not having crit evade or not having status resistance?

Also please explain to me exactly how in this situation you just described where book smack doing 0 damage every turn gives your opponent superior action economy, literally how aside from dual wielding duelist shenanigans? Doing 0 damage with 4m just to deny your opponent 1 action a round but then limiting yourself to only 1 damaging action per round is just a neutral state where in both you and your opponent are taking only 1 action per round.

[EenKogNeeto]

>What are you talking about? if you get hit with book smack and have 5m left over, if you critically hit the person who is now in front of you you gain 1m back from the critical hit, and thus gaining your action economy back. (5m > 3m)

How is an average tank/mage/etc going to crit someone reliably enough to regain action economy?

>Of course this is not an assured way to regain your actions, hitting elemental weaknesses is not common so that can be ruled out easily, but there is always 1m movement and a few 2m movement options as well, as well as ways to move and attack, the possibilities of how you can handle getting book smacked are pretty vast, perhaps maybe in some scenarios you may not actually have the option of being able to deal with it, but in that streak isn't that just a weakness in the build like many more before, like not having crit evade or not having status resistance?

A weakness that takes no investment to exploit and has no counter - not to mention makes no sense from an IC perspective. Your book isn't a 30lb sledgehammer to the helmet. Its a book. Hitting heavy armor. Not every class has 1-2m movement options to invalidate this, in my case my only option was to do half damage and then guard (I think while their teammate healed off in the distance completely out of reach, but that wasn't as relevant to this)

>Also please explain to me exactly how in this situation you just described where book smack doing 0 damage every turn gives your opponent superior action economy, literally how aside from dual wielding duelist shenanigans? Doing 0 damage with 4m just to deny your opponent 1 action a round but then limiting yourself to only 1 damaging action per round is just a neutral state where in both you and your opponent are taking only 1 action per round.

Teamfights exist. One person sacrificing an action to halve the actions someone else can take can vastly change the flow of a fight. In a 1v1 maybe its balanced out by the fact they spent that action, but the game shouldn't be planned around those.

[Autumn]

>What are you talking about? if you get hit with book smack and have 5m left over, if you critically hit the person who is now in front of you you gain 1m back from the critical hit, and thus gaining your action economy back. (5m > 3m)

How is an average tank/mage/etc going to crit someone reliably enough to regain action economy?

As per my last post I did explain it afterwards, its not always a solution but it is certainly a very common solution for a lot of classes.

A weakness that takes no investment to exploit and has no counter - not to mention makes no sense from an IC perspective. Your book isn't a 30lb sledgehammer to the helmet. Its a book. Hitting heavy armor. Not every class has 1-2m movement options to invalidate this, in my case my only option was to do half damage and then guard (I think while their teammate healed off in the distance completely out of reach, but that wasn't as relevant to this)

The book still does magical damage when it hits someone so I don't know how to explain that to you, but certainly in the explained scenario you are being controlled away from their team mate, thats just tactical play and not anything strictly OP, the person controlling you is still using their momentum to do it, further limiting their own actions in the nitty gritty of things while your team mates can do other things.

Teamfights exist. One person sacrificing an action to halve the actions someone else can take can vastly change the flow of a fight. In a 1v1 maybe its balanced out by the fact they spent that action, but the game shouldn't be planned around those.

Of course it changes the flow of the fight, you're spending your momentum to control someone who is able to change the flow of the fight in their favor, but in doing so you're sacrificing a good portion of your turn on very little damage and only control, changing how the fight works can absolutely go both ways and you shouldn't only think of yourself when considering these sorts of things.

I fail to see why it should be changed, its not egregiously powerful or anything, and I've already listed its downsides majorly, if for some reason someone is solely book smacking you to limit you and no one else, I think the problem might just lie on your team mates for not doing well and responding accordingly there.

Building a little bit of CEL for turn order is never a bad thing either on tanks.