[MakeshiftWalrus]

Death Gaze is currently pathetic.

It requires your opponent to be marked by Claret Call as well as marked by the 'Feared' debuff for it to even work, but all it does it providing the opponent with a tiny 50 tick of damage(In max rank) and a meager 'Silenced' debuff for two turns, which is easily curable via skills or crafted items. What makes this skills absolutely horrendous however is the fact that the price of this is being unable to mark your opponent for four turns.

I propose that we change the skill so that it either has the same CC cost as all the other Ghost skills, that being two, or that we change the 'Silence' it applies to one that cannot be removed for anything, like the Hexer skill Strangling Etacof.

[Sarinpa1]

Extend the Silence duration to three. Four at max rank.

Edit : Feel ike I should mention why permasilence is a horrible idea.

Strangling etacof as is, is a simple punishment for lack of foresight at this very moment. Be in someones range for Black Bubble and Strangling etacof. (Replace bb with anything else). You can avoid that.And it isn't whole "RUN RUN RUN" until status effects run out. You cannot prevent being feared, much less CC'd. The only thing to save you from both (Not reliably even) is high dodge, or one of the two(?) classes that can get rid of fear. (And well Shaitans get a free nope for fear too.)
When you're a Hexer/Something hybrid, sure, you probably won't mind a permanent silence that can be spammed, since you can kinda still fight.
Pure mage? Yeah no.
Now to explain what Silence pretty much is. Since silent prayer is on everyones mind when Silence comes to question, I'll separate it into two parts

Both : It fucks up invocations. Anyone that can inflict silence flips the bird to all nonmage invocations. And mage invocations need hdsw to be executable.
No silent prayer.
You're knocked down, pretty much. Or bound to wait. And if you're a pure mage, that's very likely not a viable option. There, chug that sal volatile for three momentum and get back out there, soldier! It's worth a mention that most of the games combat is friendly spars, during which people DETEST any sort of combat supplements.
But to get back on track, Silence is still a hinderance. "But it don't do no damage and it cost me 3 momentum tooooooo" hello dense thunder.


Yeees Silent prayer.
Invocation ded, FP sink, can't repeat that same action twice (muh graft spam). Which still makes it viable. If not, I believe your possible complaints could be directed rather to Silent Prayer itself, rather than this skill.

tl;dr - Silence is a powerful status and since this is a reliable inflicter, I just believe it needs to be less ignorable, extending the duration. Permanent silence that is pretty much unavoidable by anyone that can actualy be hit, (Or gives the Ghost enough time, or has a ghost built around this Read : Red Rain - Haunting combination) is overpowered. Incredibly so.

[Trexmaster]

Yeah Death Gaze seriously needs to be looked at. As it stands it's completely worthless for what it does, especially when it can be cured even with a throatopener for less momentum than it took to prepare the skill in most cases.

Any of the suggestions made would be beneficial.

[MakeshiftWalrus]

Sarinpa1 » Mon May 11, 2015 2:05 am[/url]"]Extend the Silence duration to three. Four at max rank.

Edit : Feel ike I should mention why permasilence is a horrible idea.

Strangling etacof as is, is a simple punishment for lack of foresight at this very moment. Be in someones range for Black Bubble and Strangling etacof. (Replace bb with anything else). You can avoid that.And it isn't whole "RUN RUN RUN" until status effects run out. You cannot prevent being feared, much less CC'd. The only thing to save you from both (Not reliably even) is high dodge, or one of the two(?) classes that can get rid of fear. (And well Shaitans get a free nope for fear too.)
When you're a Hexer/Something hybrid, sure, you probably won't mind a permanent silence that can be spammed, since you can kinda still fight.
Pure mage? Yeah no.
Now to explain what Silence pretty much is. Since silent prayer is on everyones mind when Silence comes to question, I'll separate it into two parts

Both : It fucks up invocations. Anyone that can inflict silence flips the bird to all nonmage invocations. And mage invocations need hdsw to be executable.
No silent prayer.
You're knocked down, pretty much. Or bound to wait. And if you're a pure mage, that's very likely not a viable option. There, chug that sal volatile for three momentum and get back out there, soldier! It's worth a mention that most of the games combat is friendly spars, during which people DETEST any sort of combat supplements.
But to get back on track, Silence is still a hinderance. "But it don't do no damage and it cost me 3 momentum tooooooo" hello dense thunder.


Yeees Silent prayer.
Invocation ded, FP sink, can't repeat that same action twice (muh graft spam). Which still makes it viable. If not, I believe your possible complaints could be directed rather to Silent Prayer itself, rather than this skill.

tl;dr - Silence is a powerful status and since this is a reliable inflicter, I just believe it needs to be less ignorable, extending the duration. Permanent silence that is pretty much unavoidable by anyone that can actualy be hit, (Or gives the Ghost enough time, or has a ghost built around this Read : Red Rain - Haunting combination) is overpowered. Incredibly so.

The problem with simply extending the silence is that it doesn't do anything to buff or nerf it in the long run. Mages are going to pop out of the silence a turn afterwards, because why would they sit around with a silence debuff on them? That's stupid. They're going to chug a Throatopener, because otherwise they're going to be destroyed. Regardless of this, mages deal a ton of damage with or without invocations. Hell, a CM'd Sear is going to take half of your HP regardless of you stacking that 30% fire resistance or not if the mage is at all average. Getting perfect Willpower gains isn't a rarity these days, it's a norm.

I see your point about the irremovable silence, but there's a lot to consider if you ever decide to use Death Gaze.

Let's say that the two-turn irremovable silence is added. You pop it once on a mage, who you would have you be close to in order to even inflict the debuff to in the first place which more often than not leave you completely wide open to an attack before you can apply it.

Let's say you manage to afflict them with the irremovable silence. That's two turns where the mage is going to run, or try to focus on some other way of combat now that they can't cast spells. It's also four turns from that point where most Ghost skills are unusable on them due to the lack of Claret Call. That means no Ether Invitation. No Last Chance. No extra damage. If the mage bulks through the damage and believe me, tanky mages are popping up quite a few places due to LE'ing making them actually viable, that's two completely safe turns from nearly all the good Ghost skills, which of course leaves the Ghost at a huge disadvantage.

Let's also go over the ways to actually apply the skill. See, there's only two ways to apply both fear and Claret Call in one move. Those being the Specter Sword and L'au-Dela, a Duelist skill.

The Specter Sword is a very rare drop from dungeons, being the only weapon in the game which applies the fear debuff from normal attacks. A very powerful weapon when used like this against a mage.

L'au-Dela on the other hand, deals darkness physical damage, an element which is possibly the most resisted in the game currently. You could argue that having it so easily accessible to the Ghost that could use this would be overpowered, which I'm not entirely against myself. Disregarding my current opinion, these two are the only ways to apply both Claret Call and fear at the same time using one attack.

Both of these require you to be one tile away from the mage as well, which spells suicide against any prepared mage. You're going to be nuked before you can apply the silence to begin with.

[Sarinpa1]

First of all you don't need to apply the statuses in one turn, that's ridiculous. Secondly, you don't need to be in range wiht some of the skills. (Red rain, haunting, again. Sanguine star. Other things too, probably. Like crystal rose. ) Third, you can spam it. And "just pops a throatopener" It's still a knockdown. Dense thunder is being used and it's litteraly the same result in the end.
And no, CM sear doesn't take half your HP if you're prepared. Will may be common, but even more common is res and resistances. No. "Bwah evokr nook me to death" is hardly a relevant issue nowadays. Refer to past threads involving magic to see how many counters and how easy to obtain they are.
If irremovable silence is REALLY the only way, double the duration of unmarkable should be applied, to prevent spam. Because as said, IRREMOVABLE Silence you CANNOT avoid is instant kill to full mages. And that's like what, six different class combinations?