Earth Stance too strong?

By Sedda, in Rules Questions

On 4/24/2020 at 3:29 AM, Avatar111 said:

Earth Stance is not too strong, it is too boring and badly designed. Big difference.

What do you think is the better way to solve it? Increase the difficulty to crit in 1 oportunity, or maybe 2? Or what did you do with this?

The way @Avatar111 did was to copy from Air Stance and make it so that any critical strikes or conditions applied because of opportunities require one extra opportunity (2 if Rank 4+).

Honestly? Earth Ring is only a problem for lower ranks characters that don't have a wide pool of techniques to use and mostly bypass/ignore the Earth Stance bonus.

On 7/14/2020 at 7:31 AM, Diogo Salazar said:

The way @Avatar111 did was to copy from Air Stance and make it so that any critical strikes or conditions applied because of opportunities require one extra opportunity (2 if Rank 4+).

This is quite a bit worse than the standard Air bonus. As it stands, Air is pretty good for protecting against crits (and many conditions) because it increases the number of symbols you need to keep. For a starting character, trying to hit TN 3 and 2 Opportunity is very difficult, and against a standard Strike, Air will always reduce the damage by 1, since they had to spend that success just to succeed. Modifying Earth this way does make it pretty tough to Crit you, but it's as easy as ever to succeed at strikes against you. Air protects you from success and the crit pretty well, but this version of Earth would only protect you from the crit, and only a bit. With either version of Earth, your opponent is better off just switching to Fire or Water and trying to push you over your Endurance, either by lowering your Resistance or by keeping Strife to deal extra damage.

Well, of course it’s worse. The whole point is that Earth Stance is too strong as it is. Being immune to oppo crits and oppo conditions is way stronger than just adding another oppo to actually cause the crit or condition.

He compared it to Air. It's making Earth stance weaker than other stances, not just weaker than it was before.