>"You say that reducing the effectiveness of summon is a
>drawback. To who?"
>
>To all of the summoning classes, for starters. One of the
>main strengths of the Paladin, Shaman, AP, and Necro is the
>ability to summon. Shaman have it earliest, but require
>empowerent. AP's and Necros get it considerably later, and
>must work harder to reach the point where 'summon' is
>effective and practical for them. It is not an ability that
>is attained easily from a design standpoint.
>

Well, in my experience summon is such a useful spell that even given its cost it quickly rises to high levels of practice. At lower levels, people don't tend to gear for saves as much, so fewer summons are needed (it seems to me). At higher level, you have around 1000 mana and 50 mana per attempted summoning is very little when you won't be needing your mana to kill the summoned people (your group will do that for you).

This will then defeat much of the purpose of having a necromancer, paladin, AP, or shaman in your group. Summoning is one of the main selling points of these classes.

>This change would also
>impact the conjurer class. They will be less feared in
>groups, and conjurers will be less potent.
>

I'm not convinced. The use of deny summoning immediately prevents you teleporting, wording, tesseracting. That's a pretty big handicap. I know I've killed people who used it to stop me summoning them before.

The ability to completely negate summoning should be costly. However, you're leaving out another important point. What about 'Kaubris's Inverted Summons'? Doesn't that introduce an additional anti-ganging remedy when conjurers are present? After all, the group must now contend with the possibility of losing their summoner.

I just don't see summonings into large groups as adding anything to the mud. Summonings into smaller groups, sure. Summon into larger group, if nothing else, at least might force the summoner to use some preps in case they find themselves deposited by their intended victim, under what I've proposed.

I'm still skeptical of transporting the summoner as a solution to the ganking problem, though. Why should she be penalized for doing exactly what a summoner should be doing? Player fun? Maybe. However, we already have 'Kaubris's Inverted Summons', which maintains the utility of Conjurers and introduces that inverse-transportation risk element.

Again, much of the ganging is a function of the players. The classes and races in CF complement each other so well that group-oriented PK will always exist. Complementary abilities are what is fun about CF in the first place. It's very hard to design around that, with anti-ganging in mind.

In the wake of the anti-gang code, I might consider adjusting the success rate of summon when group members are present. But again, that's up to the design team.

For what it's worth, the game culture seems to be evolving more toward individual reliance. We have now have the PBF, public IMM comments, and the Gank-O-Meter to call out the sissies!