Teras Kasi Archive
Thread: Could anybody tell me why my berserk only works ever 2nd or 3rd time i try to use it?
well....almost every time i try to go berserk it doesn`t work...my ham is lowered but i dont go berserk. i had it that i had to go berserk 4 times (!!!) till i really went berserk.
maybe this has already been discussed here or in brawler forums, but i didn`t found a thread...but i have to say i didn`t want to search all threads here 
It's because "You're too calm". I hate that message. I'm fighting for my life, getting my ass whupped, and the best thing they reason anyone can give me for the last chance I have a saving my miserable life is that I'm too CALM?
I feel your pain......
Chewi
TKA Expert
Pet Master
berserk 1 fails alot, and is pretty much useless
berserk 2 hardly fails, does no more dmg then berserk 1 but lasts 2 minutes instead of 30 seconds.
I honestly dont see why i am unable to use styles with berserk, getting master brawler to get berserk 2 to have it last 2 minutes and fail less, puts extra disadvantages onto myself.
Alot like how the TKA's second knock down adds a benifit of getting a dizzy added to it, but also adds a negative that the dizzy hardly ever lands when you knock somthing down, and in that case you are unable to dizzy that target again beacuse of the 30 second timer on Knock down. That disadvantage surpasses the benifit of having the duel combo knock down much like berserk twos disadvantage of lasting 2 minutes, not being able to sit down, not being able to intimdate style, meditate over takes the usefull ness of a berserk that lasts longer and fails less.
Its almost as if as we progress in our skills that the more usefull things acutualy become more of a hinderance, and thus making us worse as a player.
The only real way to combat this is to make most everything we depend on a utility and situational. trying to combine more then one thing together or using more skills and abilities as we should be able to as we grow stronger in our profession simply if X applys then use.
The TKM is often plagued with the problem of too much utility and not enough effectivness. Trying to be more effiecent and play with diferant combinations results in finding out that simply targeting somthing and hitting the attack button is just about as good. This berserk issue is one small wrinkle in our woes and troubles. Its not specificly a big deal, but if you apply it to the over all picture, then it becomes clear that becoming TKM means nothing but increased dmg mods and speed mods, and a little more passive defenses. our abililies fall short to meet the needs and minimum requrement of our class exspectations.
in short we need some somone to take notice and balance these problems out.
I almost never use berserk especialy if I am fighting more than one opponent. The extra damage you take from enimies plus the ham costs and failures, evens out when fighting one on one. However once a second third opponent is added into the equation berserk kills you faster than it kills your enemies. Berserk does have one situation where it is very useful and that is when you are fighting opponents not targetting you. However in that situation you will usualy win anyway which makes the skill in the end pretty moot
I am beginning to think balance will never happen for melee classes. The devs seem to think that balance requires a mathematical equation. However they lack the logical skills to properly write said equation. The largest thing which they are missing in thier variable is that for us to do anything we must be right next to it. So it would be logical to make up for the fact that our attacks areonly usable in veryspecific situation that our attacks should just be better, but they are not. Our attacks are worse and specials mostly unusable or always resisted.Melee fighters are the ones who should be able to string specials and ranged fighters should be the ones killing themselves for using too many since they have the inherent advantage of always being able to use said specials. That is balancing a game. I wish the devs would just fess up and say that is what they consider balanced. Then go back and print in every melee profession and clearly state that your character will completely be useless compared toeven novice marksmen and you are only playing this inferiorprofession for roleplaying purposes.
Balancing any game means that there will be situations that will occur that will make any character choice an advantage. There is none of that in this game. There are several uber professions and any of the useless professions will only be able to do well if used in concert with an uberclass. To balance a game properly means that there are no uberclasses or useless classes. It also does not mean making everyone the same (I am sure some idiot will say that, they often do when thier uberclass is in jepordy of loosing it's status and come into balance with the rest of the classes). What it means is having situations where one choice is more advantageous than another. The more easily engineered said situation, the less advantage such a situation grant. The more difficult a situation is to engineer the more advantage you should recieve for being able to engineer that situation.
example: Ranged classes can always use thier attacks and specials so thier specials should NOT be very special or be offset with severe penalties. Melee classes have a tough time engineering thier advantage so thier specials should rock the world because they are so easily avoided...even more easily avoided in this game.
Lastly, there is also the idiot who screams but in reality my X will kill anything miles away. Well idiot, reality has NOTHING to do with balancing a game. If you desire reality get your bum up off your chair and go outside, there is more than enough of of it there for everyone. Developers need to understand that in a game there should only be enough reality present to allow for a suspension of disbelief. For example SWG has all the bad parts of reality police when it comes to ranged vs melee. And then they ruin thier reality by having three life bars and autosuicide??? Go figure. They also convienently suspend reality when things like running and shooting come into affect or having rifle shots to the head only give you a bad headache until you are unconscious. If they want to go the more "real" rout they should just make all combat first person shooter. If they want a diverse fun "game" then they should balance or just remove melee professions from the game. Of corse a refresher corse in Kantian logic would do them all wonders, assuming that they have such capacity; which is easy to question based upon seeing what they have created and are trying to call soup.
You have to know the history of berserk to understand why it's so screwed up now. The first thing to keep in mind is that it's a novice brawler skill, and should therefore be pretty weak.
Berserk used to tripple all melee damage. It was insanely powerful. The only thing that melee characters ever did was hit berserk and go to town. Even then, people complained about the failure rate... people even complained about the graphic, if you can imagine such a thing. But in general, the skill was considered over powered. The trade off for 3x damage was, in part, the unreliability of the skill.
They then nerfed Berserk to 2X normal damage. People completely fliped out. We saw the same kind of end-of-melee armageddon posts you saw when they nerfed KD. Still, KD was just about the only thing people were using. Slowly it began to filter around that you could chain KDs, and people decided that it was better to use that, however, low level brawlers were still dealing too much damage, according to the devs. And yeah, it was still a very good skill for the novice brawler box. The unreliability was still somewhat justifiable considering that it doubled your damage (and therefore your XP).
Finally, they ensured that the skill would not be used beyond the brawler level and made it just give +75 dmg. This makes the skill useless for mid and high level combat, but as a novice brawler skill, that's probably ok. However, in all this nerfing they forgot to balance the skill's reliability. The skill is now only marginally usefull, even at lower levels, yet it retains its high fail rate.
So basically, the devs forgot about it. It sucks, but I'd rather have them working on the real TKA skills than the novice brawler box anyway.
Heh, sorry if that got a little long.