Seriously.

You do realize that without a valid list of those 100 locations you seem to be aware of that the rest of us have to constantly check 200+ locations in order to find locations, correct?

I'm not knocking you or the wand system. I'm just saying that you seem to have the expectation that the rest of us do not need to check 200+ locations because you know there are less than 100.

I just wanted to point out what seemed to be a disconnect.

A good idea:

Keep a list of every sleek spot you've had yourself or SEEN someone get theirs from. Call it the "verified" list.

Keep a second list of all the places you think are good bets or you've heard rumors about and check that once you've exhausted your verified list.

The real disconnect is that between the people who check 200+ spots because they have to (for a while) and the people who irrefutably claim to know 200+ verified, honest-to-god sleek spots and you must now praise their godly game knowledge! Sarcasm aside.

It's filled for 30% after two years of playing (100% verified).

First couple of months I've been finding those locatins.

I think if I'll keep playing, I'll need just 2-3 more years to finish that list. It doesn't bother me at all, too.

SuperIsisMan said everything correct: sorry, we don't have imm information to make it easier. And nobody claimed that there are 200+ verified locations - they said there are 200+ locations where one could check wands if he cannot find his sleeks.

Sarsasm is fine, no problems. Do you suggest to share wands locations list again, to make game more newbie friendly?

When the updated wand system came out the advice was to check area for appropriate mage mobs. But then you realize you have to check stupid locations like guild guards in every city as well as random ass junk containers and corpses. 200+ is feasible for check points when you have no idea what you're looking for and you've looked everywhere you think is appropriate.

With a lot of location, it is more difficult for people to remember them all and game the system by making beelines to possible sleek spots.

gr

It's interesting, it's giving goals to achieve, it gives interraction with other players and obx/expl exp. When you know what you are looking for and have detect artifact, it's easy.

But I really mind that imms are trolling players who even post on different forum. Unban coconut, if you think trolling is ok (and btw he didn't mean to troll, he meant one event in the game where he thought imms cheated, and it's not related with Qaz). Or stop trolling/attacking players who you dislike.

nt

But the thread Zulg and Nep posted a couple years ago proved to me, at least, that we're not there yet.

The problem is there is nothing as sickeningly powerful in the game as an ABS mage. So you can't give every mage unfettered access to ABS (although a Mage with known ABS locations comes perilously close). And most of the mages I've seen with access to ABS won't fight without it no matter how little the risk. So you can't limit access with cooling periods. And as any melée class player will tell you, you are licking your chops at an opportunity to fight a Mage without barrier because on an even playing field that is at worst a 50/50 fight. Moreover, removing features always seems like a last resort to me - the refuge of scoundrels. So you can't just kill barrier.

It really is a puzzle.

Remove all skills/spells. One class. One race. One command: "slay"

The game existed without A/B/S for a very long time. You could say it was less balanced but it was arguably more fun as well considering your life wasn't a hidden gamble decided at level 1 without your knowledge - and the game wasn't spent "prepping" or gathering these things to even the field. Maybe it's the long-term veteran kicking in but I don't remember people spamming skills and having such huge prep bags "back in the day".

Most games deter from this kind of balance for a reason. You don't see an equivalent of this in any other major game. There's a reason games like WoW restrict the use of "preps" in PvP. I'd say Skyrim but the balance in that game is all kinds of ####ed up like this. The point is, basing your system on the fact that the mage won't have it 100% of the time (but they can and some do) or if the RNG likes deathblow then it doesn't really fix anything considering it's either broken on one side or the other. The longer the game goes and the worse it'll get.

It's like inventing the nuclear bomb, telling people they can find it and saying "well, not everyone has it because they need to find it!" Eventually, they all will and who is going to war without the best weapons? Oh ya, the fanatical and stupid :)

Take for example your classic level 36 anti-paladin. Let's say you get one of the real easy barriers and have a few limited ones you've been "hoarding". Now take the reverse, let's say the limited ones are basically gone and your black is on something ridiculously hard for an AP (aka most). Which one succeeds in CF? Which one does better?

And what does that have anything to do with besides luck?
And why the heck should I gamble hundreds of hours on that?

/rant

>Maybe
>it's the long-term veteran kicking in but I don't remember
>people spamming skills and having such huge prep bags "back in
>the day".

People (at least, the players who were winning) spamming some skills predates me playing CF, so I think it's safe to say it goes back to the very beginning of the game. The people who got me started used to talk about it before I started playing, and some of them go back to the first month of the game.

Prep bags, sure -- sixteen years ago, sanctuary and protection from evil were literally the only two ways in the game to reduce damage. (This is also why the game was rife with evil-acting neutral characters at the time.) It's a little more complicated now. The genie only goes back in the bottle on that issue so much.

I don't think a lot, if any, trivial-to-get-at-36 barriers are left. Haste pills and potions are pretty much out of the game. Chowing down a sack full of healing pills is less trivial than it used to be. Selectively we roll back the prepfulness of the game as it seems to make sense of the time, something that almost always draws more complaints than praise.

you know you want to!!!!!

Force people to fight damn it.

There is WAY too much "avoid the fight if its not in your favor" these days. Things like flight, return, and teleportation aren't just common- they're practically ubiquitous.

Several classes (tranny/conj/invoker in particular) have times of extreme vulnerability. You can't take away their easy escape mechanism just because you dont like that they can get away from your lazy man's prep whore who is always fully prepped and ready for a fight.

nt

explain to me what kind of one armed gnome whip build you're playing that unprepped mages have a 90% chance against you that doesnt involve "c sleep" and you with +50 svs, or perhaps a conjurer at midranks.

I want to be certain I understand your perspective on mage v. battle correctly.

Also stop with the logical fallacies, it makes you look even more stupid.

You are the bitch ass crying about ragers two posts up.

Its obvious by your lack of response you've never even played one.

Bet you are an expert on neurosurgery too, having never done one, right?

Why exactly does someone need to hero a villager, get 300 kills and a name on the tablet to understand that fighting a berserker without any damage reduction or ability to word/teleport is a death wish?

I get the whole "Play what you think is overpowered", but sometimes a few thousand hours of play experience is just fine.

One can be an expert on the various effects associated with nuerosurgery and indeed even the process of performing nuerosurgery without having actually done one.

Similarly, one can be an expert on how villagers fight, how to fight them, and the effects they have on the game without actually having played one.

There are many experts on animal psychology. How can this be if they have never been an animal?!?!

Asking someone if they have been/done X will never be a valid argument against their points concerning X.

All that said, I have no opinion on this matter. You though, need to take a class on "logic." Move along.

Since mages and other prep heavy classes tend to have much less in the way of preventing escape then melee builds do.

Also keep in mind that as a mage when you use up those sweet precious preps and they just teleport/word you just wasted your prep gathering time too.

And do you know what? As a non villager using the east/west/north/south/up/down commands work for avoiding fights too.

Having word and teleport out there is fine, but the fact is that they are extremely low risk (oh no I died to a mob in 1 of 90 teleports I wonder if I should try now with a close to 1% chance of bad happening or try to hoof it! such a tough tactical decision!)

how bout e/w/n/s/u/d out of the imperial lands vs gank squad?

When you don't have the easy out that means there are more dangerous places and how/when you move where makes a big difference.

I fully agree that if you let yourself walk into a bottleneck you should suffer the consequences.

But in the instance of severly limiting magical transportation maybe you can use the out the first time the gang surprises you but then you got a 24 hour timer under which you need to rely on not being stupid to survive.

sure, it's not as awesome and uber-macho as playing a rager, but playing a character that uses teleport/word potions or has these spells/communes as class abilities is not "lazy", it's playing a different type of character.

And it's perfectly valid.

>I don't think a lot, if any, trivial-to-get-at-36 barriers are
>left.

The issue isn't that there are trivial-to-get-at-36 spots. The issue (for me at least) is there are spots-that-are-gettable-at-36 (but require work/risk), and spots-that-you-cannot-get-at-36 (without hero level help, sometimes multiple heroes). I know this was the case with my last AP. I found aura and shield, and that just wasn't enough against my most common enemies (rages) so I needed barrier. My barrier wasn't in the list of getable-at-36 so I basically felt had to abandon the character.

The difference between fighting an NPC you have to be careful with, but can ultimately defeat and one that you have zero chance of killing is where I'm not happy with the current system.

Like I did with Dartis and Victoria.

Why should an ap have abs at 36? Why shouldn't you have to rank up to get barrier the same way you rank up to get certain gear from mobs?

Barrier on a level 36 ap is overpowered. Sure, a rager -may- drive you off, but you're at near-zero risk of death and against non-ragers it's overkill.

But I have a hard time just avoiding fighting while I try to rank up. I play the game for pk... a character where I'm just sitting around waiting to essentially play the game isn't fun for me. Probably a character flaw on my part.

My point wasn't that I should have barrier at 36, but that the difference between having it and not having it at that level is a complete game changer, especially for APs.

Also, I'm not sure what universe fighting RBW as an AP (with no bash protection) = near-zero risk, but that has never been my experience. Sure you can enlarge/reduce, but even with that you can be permalagged by bash.

He was immune to everything except poison and plague. I was the only one to have Loki's tat, and I would be working skills and the frigging tat would prog and kill my practice mobs. Ahh the good old days. Le sigh.

Heh. Re: spamming, back in the day, there was one cabal that REQUIRED you to master your skills (Battle), and another that required you to master ALL of your spells ... Including detect magic before it was worth a damn :p. If anything, spamming has gone down since people realize only a handful of skills/spells make a difference.

Also, re: protections back in the day, my recollection is that only a few excellent players popped sanctuary like candy and dominated over the noobs like me that didn't fully comprehend the value of wasting time farming hobgoblins for a couple-hour sanctuary potion.

I guess what I'm trying to say is everyone got a lot better. People can read logs, and though some of us are emotionally unstable, no one is stupid. You see Dwoggurd, who up until then had been a very average player, lay on watershield, shield, stoneskin, aura, haste, spiderhands, flight, and reduce, and just walk into the battle cabal dominating people until he's half health, go to the Pico priest to heal to full, and then return to finish off whoever's left just by spamming flurry, and you think, "Damn, I want to steamroll everyone, too, and prepping is the key!". And he posted like fifty logs of doing that so it was kind of hard to miss. I'd bet $5 that starbright was influenced by Dwoggurd/Elhe style logs when he rolled that first overprepped giant sword spec back in the day (can't remember the name but I remember the logs).

Whereas before I don't think people would have recognized the value of crazy prepping without ooc connections. If you had this kind of community "back in the day," I think usage of the sanctuary preps would have gotten to be stupid enough that all of us would want balance tweaks.

Drive by thought:

Make a/b/s ablative. That is to say each time you get hit (probably depending on the damage done) there's a chance it weakens the spell. When one of the spells is sufficiently weak, another successful "weakening" hit removes it entirely. Optionally reduce the damage reduction the weaker the spell gets.

Making ganging a better solution than it already is doesn't seem like an improvement to me.

How does what I suggested uniquely benefit gangs? As opposed to, say, just weakening the damage modifier of a/s/b across the board?

It was in response to Malakhi's assertion that a/s/b mages are "insanely powerful". I was trying to come up with a way to make them less "insanely powerful" and yet still able to compete with top-tier single opponents (e.g. RBWs).

This has always been my biggest complaint with these spells. All your class abilities, etc, and finally the biggest chunk of dam-redux, and now you can't even dispel them? Sleeks are already lvl 60 spells so would be difficult to dispel (even lvl 51 + spellcraft I don't think would reach 60), not to mention your sleek wand at lvl 40ish.

Obviously, it would probably make a noticable shift definitely in mage vs. mage fights, but I never have understood why these three most coveted spells can't be dispelled.

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=32131&mesg_id=32131&page=

Now that's some A+ search-fu.

Wow, do I feel dumber. Though it makes me think of perhaps a better question as far as ABS goes. What key factors would a "different" ABS system need? I've anyways thought of situations from more 1-1, but it turned into gang considerations also, which is a good point.

Like, what's the purpose of the spells? General dam-redux eems such a blunt solution.

They're not actually level 60, FWIW.

If you dispel someone's flight, it's easy to restore (unless they never come out of lag).

If you dispel sanc, same thing.

Protection, same thing.

etc.

Dispel abs... they can't keep replacing them.

Sure, mana's a limitation, but not much of one.

Why is it a puzzle? For years I've just suggested giving barrier as a class spell, usable whenever. They already have shield on a super long cool-down - any class that still isn't adequate can have aura also on a super long cool-down.

This is like a 10 minute fix.

Well, this is just my personal opinion, but:

A. I think ABS mages are disgustingly powerful, so powerful that - setting "just for fun and experimentation" choices aside - I can't see why you'd play anything else if barrier, aura, and shield were provided as an inherent class ability; and

B. Giving those abilities a cool down would just mean less fighting while everyone waits for the cool down. In other words, almost no one with readily-available ABS at their disposal is fighting without ABS.

I know one thing I disagree with you about is the ease of gathering ABS once you know your sleek set - you think it's super time consuming, and I think it's relatively quick and easy. So maybe that and the above is why we disagree :)

(again, the above is just my personal opinion having played tons of melee classes and just recently an ABS mage).

Yeah I'd remove aura btw from most classes. Shield + barrier feels about right balance wise. Of course - if you got rid of deathblow, this is a whole different conversation, but sadly with deathblow around shield + barrier is a minimum.

Re: cooldowns - as the aggressor it allows me to dictate when I'll face full dam redux versus partial dam redux. I wouldn't put barrier on a cooldown, just shield and optionally aura if the class in question has really awful tankability (necromancer is the only one I can think of that probably needs aura). Right now some people either always have full ABS or almost never have full ABS - nothing in between.

By the by, I don't think it *has* to be super time consuming - but in my case I had a sleek in a friggin maze that I had to navigate every time I went to get it and it didn't respawn unless I left and navigated the maze *again*. Very, very annoying.

Then of course you have *finding* the wands, which is the real problem. It's a massive waste of time that only leads to information sharing and cheating. It favors high profile info/quest sharers and Imms (not to sound like a jerk, but if you know the locations then obviously its pretty good for you) and doesn't add anything enjoyable to the game.

What's so beautiful about taking the classes that:

1) Are the least desirable groupmates.
2) Are generally the most fragile and skill intensive to play well.
3) Tend to get steamrolled throughout the low and midranks.

And making them spend time exploring all over Thera to achieve balance against their most common enemies?

It makes no sense - it favors elitism, info sharing and cheating. I'm still waiting, years upon years later, to hear where the upside to this system is - aside from being really easy for cheaters and really hard for everyone else.

I don't have any advantage over the rest of you, and I've found abs with every character bar one without checking even 100 locations.

How? By talking to people in game and checking verified locations, plus the ones I've verified myself. I think a lot of people seem to be checking old locations that got scrapped because people circulated them.

If I knew what motivated this post. Can those of us not "in" on the conversation you're contributing to get some context?

More specifically:
http://www.qhcf.net/phorum/read.php?2,910411,910414#msg-910414

I think I've said less than 100 total for all three types of sleeks in the past, too. That's still correct.

the randomly assigned wands you get are not in the 64 sleek spots you have confirmed over the last 2 years and in the 36 you haven't. God dam the RNG! (but thank you for giving me one of the two forms I wanted for my major focus and not making me waste edge points on rolling bones!)

Will just have to hero, as I said in my initial whinge-post, and then check the other 100+ possible locations.