Talk:Prayer/@comment-4536066-20140907141140/@comment-5523905-20140909001648

I have four contributions (I'm putting these here because they're actually about prayer, not about the validity of considering things overpowered):

I'm not saying that there's no scenario when these prayers can be okay, because there absolutely ARE those scenarios. I just got the impression that several people in this comment chain didn't really understand the origin of why protection prayers have a bad rap. It's key to understand what the problem is before you can come up with a solution people can accept.
 * 1) Several people in this comment chain seem to be talking about this issue like someone is suggesting ALL prayer is overpowered to use in RP. I'm pretty sure nobody is saying that. The issue is whether or not specifically protect from / deflect prayers are OP.
 * 2) Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think talking about the technicalities of how it could sometimes be okay will change the fact that a lot of people are uncomfortable with autoblock prayers. The only way public opinion will widely change is if a good example shows up in public RP and people embrace it, after which the opinion will have changed. My suggestion would be to continue acknowledging the public opinion (pretending the issue isn't there doesn't make it go away) until it's no longer public opinion.
 * 3) An important piece of information for this discussion is the origin of the bias. Back in ~2011, use of prayer in RP was rampant. This was BEFORE the release of EoC, when protection prayers protected you pretty much 100% from most of the type damage, minus an occasional hit. Most roleplayers had characters who were at least a little religious, so they translated this into an ability to use prayer protection. These players would get into fights and say *starts praying against melee* and instantly be totally invulnerable to all attacks. I think most of us would agree that, for most characters, that's pretty absurd and unfun for the other players. The trouble is, that's actually what those prayers do. Now, post-EoC, they're less absolute protection, but the principle of the thing is still basically the same. It will still be stupidly easy to end up in a fight where your enemy will dodge 70% of your hits and be immune to the other 30% because of his prayer protection because he's a 30-year-old knight who grew up in a monastery for the first half of his life or had a super religious mother. But if you treat protection prayers just as defense buffs, what's the difference between them and the defense-boost prayers like thick skin? And all this isn't even considering the can of worms you open with deflect prayers that autohit-back at your opponent.