Damage/Game mechanics: The damage and game mechanics in this guild are not
good, and have been substantially hurt by bad, poorly-thought-out tunes.
Basically the guild combat mechanics work like this: the player does damage
with slow death and buffs party damage with barbs. In addition you can curse
monster casting with rabid thoughts, and you can slow regen/healing with
rotten flesh. On paper, this looks really good, cause there?s lots of stuff
you can do, but things break down quickly in practice. Aelenas depend on one
thing to do their stuff: the mob has to scream poison. I?m *fairly* certain
that mobs resist sting somewhat equal to their poison resist. Thus, a mob that
writhes poison would shrug off a sting 20% of the time, a mob that shudders
would shrug off sting 40% of the time, etc. This is in turn modified by your
insight which probably adds something along the lines of +1% per insight. So
if you face a mob that?s 50% resistant that means you?re often having to cast
2-3 stings just to get one. ON TOP of this effect is the fact that your spells
are 50% as effective?so your slow death does 50% of the damage it would
normally, etc. Basically this means that aelenas are facing a DOUBLE
resistance to a mob that resists poison. Even with mobs that resist many
types, it?s just not really a smart or effective technique to use barbs to
reduce damage resistance because the aelena has to try 2-3 times to get barbs
in, and by that time, the run is basically over. You might as well just take
another blaster who could at least have an impact on the fight. Nuns also have
just one damage type (it?s pretty much the only other guild that is limited to
a single damage type, although with Tiamat and Valentina relics, you get three
types); however, with nuns you can cleanse *most* mobs to scream nun damage,
and in addition they have many utility spells that offer great benefit to the
party, life haven, pfe, soul/mana shield, etc. Aelenas have nothing. Long
story short: Aelenas are a one-trick pony that require the mob to s
cream or writhe poison to be useful.

Wound: Wound is really cool and useful skill on certain mobs, but its utterly
useless for exp. That?s because the initial damage is very small and it
requires a significant time to tick out. You also need a lot of dex to do
real damage with wound, which hurts noobs pretty badly.

Thrust: I don?t get the point of this skill. This is a really neat skill with
a lot of cool hit messages, but the fact that you stop attacking for four
rounds means that its not at all useful in exp. In eq, the skill is now
limited to people who invest in chaos weapon familiar tree. Why not tune down
the damage and make you attack but with a hit penalty or something? Then
aelenas could have a single attack skill that would complement wound.

Stunned Maneuvers: its my opinion that every single guild that?s oriented
toward front row fighting should have *some* stunned maneuvers and some switch
weapon. Both skills are essential.