Sun Mar 21 01:23:01 2010

At 4 o'clock PM, Day of the Sun, 6th of the Month of the Dragon
on the Theran calendar Nahiossi perished, never to return.

Race:	human
Class:	thief
Level:	43
Alignment:	Neutral
Ethos:	Chaotic
Cabal:	BATTLE, the BattleRagers, Haters of Magic
Age:	36
Hours:	86

This character quite possibly cured my CF itch. I can't think of anything good to say about it. So I'll just get the bitching over with.

We'll start with the last few moments. After not being able to escape quicksand and realizing that with a minumum set of ingredients I still wouldn't be able to get out that made Marin (the only person I had to reliably fight at the hours I play) a task in futility. Then when I had Morag down and my grenade blew up in my face and I failed making an antidote three times before being unable to make another one (because it takes 30 ####ing seconds, unless you spam it up which costs a retarded amount of money and also requires me traversing said quicksand pits with 99% of my weight allownace). I'd had enough. You need to give Thieves some more PK juice and not make them pure cannon fodder if one thing goes wrong. That's the only way you'll stop them from being the annoying pussies they are.

If any of you are thinking about playing a poisoner, don't. The only redeeming quality is that once you get apply and inhaled perfected, those opiums give you a 4-5 hour sleep that's nearly 100% reliable. Nothing else is worth a damn though.

Grenade was cool until people started resisting the poisons 2 out of 3 times and they started blowing up in my face. Being a pinacle skill it has too many drawbacks. Homard resisted 18 poisons in a row and only took mauls from the damage in a test run, which made me lose all faith in the skill.

Thanks Padwei for those 3 thief points. I needed at least 6 and devious versatility to do what I wanted though. I spent three days thinking up that role, writing it, cleaning it up, shortening it. That was as short as I could get it and it still be a nice piece of literature to read. I was suprised that by hour 56 I still had gotten 0 imm xp for a role. The ONLY thing I got was for getting 3rd in that contest. So if I do decide to play this game again, I will have basic OOC roles as they statistically give me the most bang for my time.

My original plan was to go Poisoner/Arcane and be a mage hunter. But I thought it would be fun to go Defender... oh man did I EVER regret that decision. Didn't get inducted till level 40 54 hours into the character. I'm surprised Knacnar inducted me. I was in process of telling him give me a hut or remove the applicant thing after my name because I wasn't going to jump through anymore hoops and he gave me a hut. If you are going to require recommendations, you folks NEED to take the time to speak to the applicants. I spent eight whole hours trying to talk to Knacnar before he even TOLD me that. Then I spent 4 hours trying to talk to Daegit who spent 2 minutes telling me to do something that he could have told me to do 4 hours earlier. That REALLY pissed me off. From now on, If I'm not inducted by level 30, I'm not joining. #### them. I don't need them. I was so frustrated that I started logging in for 15 minutes at a time, scouting for SOMETHING to fight, then logging off. Thank god for Marin. If he hadn't come around when he did, I probably wouldn't haven't have gotten to see who won the role contest.

Then started the petty ####. The I Win Buttons really started pissing me off. I had a fiend that I could NOT beat. No possible way. I only scratched it before I just laid down and died. The stupid bloody shackles. The stupid gate guards. The only kills against me that were commendable was Charine's in that chasm place, Marin's in that quicksand that even with 100 pounds under my weight limit I couldn't get out of, and I guess we'll count the inevitible kill Morag was about to get. That was purely that stupid ####ing grenade blowing up in my face though.

Homard had a lot to do with me not deleting after hour number 50. Sorry to let you down buddy but I can't take it anymore. The lack of enemies doesn't give me enough time to try anything so when I lose to really stupid #### it blows.

Knacnar's a good leader even though I have no idea what the hell you're saying sometimes.

That's about all I have to say.

Imms can reward roles off line and you still get the xp and the skill bonuses. You did receive 2k xp for the role. Also, you got more than 3 thief pts for RC. You even got more than double that.

Score exp will tell you the tally of all xp sources, should check on that to see if any imm love has been awarded. Thanks santa zulgh. I used it and saw a 0 for 5 chapters after maybe 20-25 hours. SO I checked my role to see if it was terrible, and saw I had none for some reason. Just a little tool that can be helpful.

I watched it quite often. But I got that divine bonus about 2 minutes after logging in, so they could've rewarded me offline and I wouldn't have noticed the difference.

My math added up to 3. I can re-add it real fast and see what I had... yeah, my math was off. I got 7. Still needed 3 more. Doesn't matter now. There wasn't a whole lot that could've saved the character short of an unknown immortal wincing at one of the fifty times my build was completely helpless. It's just too much of a pain in the ass to be a poisoner in the village.

I was curious how much it was worth.

I liked you enough to let you throw grenades at me.

Village thief is a very difficult road (I know.) I looked through
the graveyard and realized that there hasn't been a hero thief
in The Village in almost a year.

I stand by my assertion that as a support character a Village thief
is incalculably valuable, so I'm sorry to see you go, even though
I completely understand your frustrations.

Good Luck With Your Next

Village thief is a very difficult road (I know.) I looked through
the graveyard and realized that there hasn't been a hero thief
in The Village in almost a year.

Scafferdous. That was me. I got a thing for village thieves. Scouts have the best village powers. Spell evasion rocks and being able to use powers and remain in the shadows rocks for stealth classes. You can prepare right beside them instead of in the area next to the area they are in. If earclap had a longer timer, village thugs would be a force to be reckoned with. It would be alright if being a poisoner wasn't such a pain in the ass in the daily maintenance (everything costs gold). It costs 200-1000 coppers to put someone to sleep. It costs 700 coppers to coat a blade in poison. It costs 1100 if that poison is fear poison. One grenade made from an item sold in a thief guild explodes in wrath or divine power. It's REALLY expensive. 3500 coppers. But it does the most damage that I saw. I saw a *** DEVESTATES *** from it both times I tried it out. If grenades made from damage trap junk maledicted, caused bleeding, str loss, or 1 tick blindness that would be sweet.

The big problem with village thieves is that they are ALMOST doable. Thieves just need a small bump in defensive skills or get about 200 more HP and they'd be a lot more dangerous. There hasn't been what I would call a successful thief pker in a LONG LONG LONG time and that should be a sign that maybe the balance thingy is out of whack again.

Frankly, I think if all of the possible effects of neurological disruption were applied instantly rather than over time, and if grenades missed less often at 75%, them blowing up in your face was rare, and the damage from them across the board was more consistent and higher from all ingredients, they would be viable, especially for cabal raids even though they don't tank well. With enough preps, or being a villager, with enough grenades, especially a combination of emetic and trap grenades, they would be able to solo raid cabals, though they would still get their ass beat same as anyone else raiding solo unopposed. Neurological poison can be moved above fear poison in level to compensate, and the prices on ingredients can change accordingly. In fact, neurological poison should probably be a level 42 skill that is stronger than mind control poison, and it's thief point cost should go up accordingly when it gets the above tweaks.

Weapon nick also needs to be one round, but do less damage than sucker hit. Additionally the poison application rate on plain weapon swings or non-weapon nick skills needs to be tweaked to double or triple what it is now, so that poisoning an entire raid party's worth of weaponry makes it worth the time for the thief to stop and convince them to let him. Currently you can go an entire fight and not have it applied when it really should be applied every 3-4 rounds with it occasionally taking 1 or 2. (5-10 on a resistant target) The 'possibility' of it happening that way isn't currently high enough, the rate needs to go up.

You tweak these things and make shopkeepers tell what poison ingredients they sell make what, and I think poisoners will be just fine, yet not as powerful as thugs or binders.

Additionally, now that 'drink' works on potions, you ought to be able to poison potions again. The reason it was removed in the first place was because of the PWK thing and that's ####, it's the PWK potion that should have just ceased to exist to begin with or changed to a crimson scourge or something.

Further, as a svirfnebli I would imagine you cease using apply and start using your grenades to apply poisons. Which understandably eliminates just randomly tossing them at people in group combat but KO grenades worked just fine for me with what little I toyed with them.

Grenade should be what makes going poisoner worth it (if you aren't in the mood to be clever or subtle) but it currently isn't. It wouldn't be unbalanced to tweak grenades to where they didn't have a save (for damage) and their damage output is comparable to a bard or invoker.

Bard Repertoire Clarifications:
http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=23735&mesg_id=23735&page=

Grenades were at least 75% less effective than applied knock outs. I can count the number of failed knock-out applications through the inhaled method on one hand for the ENTIRE character's life, and 3 of them were in the 20's, and two of them were on the same bard. Once you get apply and inhaled perfected, it's really effective. What sucks is that they yell when you knock them out, so you can't do it in town. Probably a bug, now that I think about it. I didn't notice that they yelled until that last fight with Morag.

I looked for the rot-worms. I was going to give them to Glastrom if I ever saw him again. If they hadn't been taken out of the game yet, I was going to see to it that they were. They might still be there, so if anyone wants a really cheap way to kill a powerhouse, that's it.

Yeah, if you could poison a potion that'd be cool. Steal return, poison return, plant return, backstab, quaff Oh crap! Combine that with blindfold and you'd have a retardely powerful character. That's probably why they don't let you do that.

The worms aren't as sure of a kill as you think they are.

Every time I ate them it killed me. Cool echoes though. I always like death traps that give cool echoes.

It's got a pretty great chance to kill you if you eat it and then don't do anything about it.

I had some really nasty stuff I wanted to try, at one point, but it came down to the fact that I'd have to wait for the entire knockout duration to expire so I could suggest something to the person immediately upon their waking up. Rarely do you get the full duration. This is all theorycraft- I never actually played one. I just had all these great ideas for stuff I wanted go suggest people eat/drink/wear.

>We'll start with the last few moments. After not being able to
>escape quicksand....

Did you drop your inventory? Might have worked. Yeah, I know that would suck for you.

Better solution: don't do rager or be an arial. Or be a svirf and get those cheesy wings.

>Then when I had Morag down and my
>grenade blew up in my face and I failed making an antidote
>three times before being unable to make another one

I didn't read that log super-closely, but it looked like you were trying to make the antidote while Morag was still nearby. Why? Couldn't you run off somewhere? You said quicksand was in the way, but was there only one direction you could run in?

>I'd had
>enough. You need to give Thieves some more PK juice and not
>make them pure cannon fodder if one thing goes wrong.

Really depends on the build. Yeah all of them are gimmicky to some extent at hero, but some more so than others. I'd say poisoners are in the latter category.

>Didn't get inducted till
>level 40 54 hours into the character.

Inductions seem to be taking longer for everyone these days. Except Empire. Not sure Battle is unique in that regard.

>I had a fiend that I could NOT beat. No
>possible way. I only scratched it before I just laid down and
>died.

Part of being a rager. There are plenty of builds who have zero chance (solo) against Knacnar. Just to be clear: there's no source of resist mental available to ragers, right?

And being a svirf villager poisoner is impossible. To stop apply you just have to enlarge and then you're two sizes bigger. No jack, no apply. You're screwed. That makes about 60 thief points useless. So no... I thought about being an arial, but then I'd have had to rewrite my role and it was a very cool role. Winning the role contest was a requirement from the start. I knew that role would do it to. Placing 3rd was cool. I can mark that off my list now.

Yes, I dropped my inventory the second time. I was at 250 pounds out of 377. You saw all those grenades in that log? I had just converted all but 20-40 pounds or so of my entire ingredient stock into grenades. I had to take the strong back edge to cart around a full set of dragon skin to two different merchants so I could get enough ingredients to practice neurological, fear, and mind control poison. Having concoct poison at 100% won't let you make poisons 100% of the time. You have to have the specific poison skill at 100% too. But the sad thing is that any ingredient not sold in a guild shop weighs 2 to 10 times more than one that is. The average ingredient weight for a guild shop is 1 pound per ingredient. The average weight for anything found in the wilds or bartered at the barter only shops is 3 pounds. The average ingredient costs 700 coppers so if the mud has been up for a while you won't be able to sell anything for coins so you have to barter and that's not going to work for anything except emetic and knock-out unless you use the barter-only shops. IF it was 100%, you could get by with carrying around 15 pounds of ingredients and be able to make two of everything really quick. But you fail the concoct, you fail the apply, or one of them evaporates (it takes about 30 minutes real time to evaporate though, so that's not a big deal).

When the grenade blows up, you get a smaller dose than your opponent would have gotten. Every time that grenade blew up on me, it stuck me with a 8 tick neurological poison. Neurological poison makes it so you run in random directions. I basically had one tick to get as far away as I could before the random direction thingy started. And since I'd never made any antidotes (there's no reason to), my concoct antidote skill was only improved from level ups and what not. And the speed is based on your skill %. At 91% it's tolerable. Anything less is slow and anything below 80% is REALLY slow.

Thanks for the compliment. Getting you when I had you and Homard in quicksand was a highlight for the week. The other fun fight was me and Audrelle against your group in the past, that was a fun fight.

I really wonder if you know how dangerous your build was. You could incapacitate me pretty quick and for group on group fights or cabal wars you would have been a great addition for the village. Not in sealing kills so much but as causing chaos (you gave me a 31 tick neuro poison last night and neuro is a huge pain) But you should have gone arial, in my opinion, because in hindsight quicksand would always have been your bane.

I don't know if the heart-aches and growing pains would have been worth it, though. I think if you were a scout then yes, stick with the char. You needed spell evasion and critical hit, discern would have been icing. But you just had way too many bad matchups.

Good luck, old timer.

If I hadn't been a villager, I'd have been nasty. I can see immense potential for a imperial poisoner. For one, you can eat villagers alive, or at least once you hit them with fear poison they can't do anything to you. I don't know if bloodthirst over-rides fear poison. It probably does... but that could at least be a way to get them to do that in a place that's unhealthy for them to. For two, curse scrolls are relatively easy to get and you have PLENTY of time to use them. If you get a curse+forget... yeah. I haven't played an Imperial since Istendil's day, but back then you had to donate stuff or you got chewed out, so you'd have a second reason to take locksmith and that opens all kinds of doors to preps and makes the money grind not such a pain in the ass. Imagine raiding with the whole defense/offense team with the proper poisons on their blades? Warriors get a LOT of bang out of a coated blade.

Maran poisoner might be doable if you sit in the low ranks long enough to rack up the evil-kills. After a certain point, kill sealing gets REALLY hard without a gank.

One tactic I never got to try was to backstab, weaponnick some neuro on someone, then flee and knock them out and apply mind control and fear poison. Wait for the forget, then knife away. Bash terrified me so I never worked up the courage to attempt it on anyone that might stay around long enough for me do it.

Neuro poison has a highly variable timer on it from what I noticed. Some folks got it for 8 hours, some folks got it for 30 hours. Elves seemed to be the easiest to nail. Probably has to do with the low con.

An assortment of comments relating to you:

I've gotten a handful of complaints this week from people that some of the #### you did to them with thief poisons is overpowered, and they mostly weren't complaining about what you said you thought the one bright spot of poisoners was. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I think poisoner is one of those odd things that you don't really see the full power of until you're on the bad side of one.

People with resist poison and high con are pretty much always going to be your bane.

I'm pretty sure the arcane thief skills do not mix well with being Battle.

Having played Battle scout thief relatively recently, I wished I had picked defender about a thousand times. I think that's just one of those 'grass is always greener' things because both sets of skills are really, really useful for a Battle thief.

I wasn't a huge Nahiossi fan, mostly because (my opinion -- I know Kastellyn's, for example, would be different) you got a lot of use out the town healers and progging items before getting inducted. I remember thinking, "This guy makes better use of town healers than almost anyone I've seen recently -- which means things are going to go downhill for him in a bad way when he can't." I never really got past that, although since there was nothing you would have wanted or needed from Daevryn in particular it didn't really matter.

I know... I had a plan and I ditched it. The original plan was to be a scroll using mage hunter. But I changed my mind. Then I was going to go for something Trewyn-esque but the villagers won't give you the time of day if you don't have Village Applicant after your name, so I wasn't going to get any "nudges" towards becoming a villager. And then I saw Knacnar online and decided to advance my plan by a week... which was a dumb idea. It was another week before I saw him again.

There was a bunch of stuff I did that was non-prime villager stuff. I'm surprised no one mentioned the eating yellow and blue flowers. Once I switched gears though I my secondary plan was to be a less than quality villager. I figured that wouldn't be too much of a character change and I could validate it with the tormented soul role I had. I remembered Hyshrawr writing a note to the village how everyone should strive to be on the Pillar and I wanted to do something quite the opposite. I carried around a chest of inebriation, but due to weight constraints I ditched it. I was going to start using that and hope someone caught me. But the magic-laced bottles probably would have zapped me.

And yeah, I DID figure out some cool stuff about the healers this time around. I kind of wowed myself with that healer stuff. That was among the regrets for choosing the village path. As for the progging items, you guys REALLY need to put in writing somewhere that that's bad. Somewhere where applicants can see. Basically to me, if Tahren doesn't mention it and it's not in the Helpfile, then its free game. You can't expect characters to know #### they don't have access to.

As for those complaints, I bet I know what they were. They were the one trick ponies that fear poison completely shut down. You can't sleep a poisoner that doesn't want to be slept. Only ONE sleep spell ever was cast upon me and I spellbaned it. If that wasn't it, then it was the neurological poison. I saw it completely shut down Marin once in the battlefields. He STILL out melee'd me though. If the RNG is kind to you, neurological poison can be a real bitch. I experimented with every poison on myself enough to know what they do. Once I knew what caused a sleep protection timer and what didn't and how long everything lasted, I was good to go. Mind-control poison is a joke. The best use it has is to stop a flee/teleport routine, which requires a curse to bring forth real fruit. Suggesting that they eat something only works once. I suppose suggesting that that invoker deshield himself would be a good idea too if they are using that fly shield. Emetic poison can be a pain in the ass too though, now that I think about it. It has no limit to how long it can be, so if they are dumb enough to stick around and get dosed three times with it, yeah they are going to die. That could be 30-120 hours of emetic poison.

And yeah, you never realize how many duergar there are till you try avoiding them. My complaints about the poisoner class come down to the daily maintenance and the time it takes to concoct. You could shorten that time and reduce the weight/cost of a LOT of ingredients and they'd be doable. 3 pounds is on the high end when you're going to either fail the concoction or the application 2 out of 3 times. The lightest recipe for any advanced poison is going to be 2 pounds unless you harvest up the rarer one ingredient stuff. As it stands now you have to have knowledge like mine on how to squeeze the economy and make it work for you if you plan on doing poisoner stuff very often.

Put some where prog items are bad for villagers?

I can only assume that's sarcasm.

Not anti prog. If you're going to use the "You have to rely on your own skills", then how come envenomed daggers are allowed? They have a "prog" attached to them.

If you're going to use the priest approach, how come the village leaders have a weapon that can shapeshift? How the hell is that not magic? Even if it's divine magic. And yes, that's a prog.

Thrym's sword has a prog attached to it. It's okay to use cause it's village friendly. There's some other items out there that will shake the veil that aren't magical.

You can have assumed policy, but what made Trewyn so great is that I'd NEVER been a villager before and so I had no pre-concieved notion of how the game was supposed to be played. So I changed the rules because it was my perogotive to do so. Remember before Trewyn it was kosher for a non village enemy to stand right outside the village and they couldn't be touched until they came into the village. Trewyn extended the parity break to include the ruins of Thalos. If you were in the ruins of Thalos, you were on Village soil and you would be ganked down. Look at how commonplace that line of thought is now.

If they are going to have these notions about stuff like progging items, they NEED to have it in writing for the applicants. Otherwise it's OOC knowledge unless EVERY single character is some proud I'm too tough to need that sissy crap type of character.

The neighbor does it! Why can't I??

I harken back to the days of when people bitched over and over and over about village "Honor" when it was possited ad nauseum that the village was not about honor, but -Pride-.

Pride man pride! Ya dig? No? Ah sheit dawg! Yeah!

Daevryn? Dude, man. You should have done something as an Imm to nudge the character in the appropriate direction. That's the sort of laxidasical leadership that causes the player base to lament.

Alright I'm out. I've been drinking.

>Daevryn? Dude, man. You should have done something as an Imm
>to nudge the character in the appropriate direction. That's
>the sort of laxidasical leadership that causes the player base
>to lament.

It's neither my job nor my wish to run every cabal, but I still have opinions.

With all due respect, Daevryn did say something about this to the Battle God (s) - me in particular. I have to say that my stance is exactly where his is.

Unfortunately, I was gone for a few years and some things have changed. I'll have to get clearance from Kastellyn before I make a very public stance on how I feel about some of these things.

On another note: you can't hard-code common sense. Some of this stuff (to me) seems like common sense. Getting the resources to hard code anti-magic flagging some items will take time.

I'll make it clear publically quite soon.

Captain Morgan that is.

I'm a stickler for people following the rules and I get frustrated when there seems to be an injustice within the appropriate frame work.

No worries. Sorry for being kinda goofy.

Was a bit busy after you first approached me.

Not to mention that thing with Daegit - the way I see it, I need to trust the opinions of villagers more than village applicants or other people, even if I think they're being a complete douchebag ahole (don't think Daegit was, but I'm not 100% sure what happened).

Which led me to being a bit hard on you when we did our talks. And coming from Knac's rp with the entire Noldarian thing and his background, I was just waiting for that one 'ah hah!' moment to induct you.

To be frank, I don't think I ever had that one 'ah hah!' moment - however, I did feel bad because of all the hoops you had to jump so I gave you a chance.

Oh, and based on our talks, I didn't think you would last much. There wasn't the 'I'm really into this character' implication anywhere...it was just moreso 'I want to test out poisoners'. My experience is that unless you're an ap, you won't last long without having that mindset - even if you're an ap, if things start going downhills, you won't last long.

I want to play with characters who last long in the village :P

Anyways, good luck with your next.

Nahiossi was passionless. You weren't going to get the noldarian aha moment out of him... ever. If you did, I was doing it wrong. He was a drunk hellbent on tearing something down. Didn't care about anyone, much less himself. He didn't give two ####s for the village when he joined. He only became a defender because he thought it'd remind him of the time when he was happy. You nailed it, just going through the motions. I wasn't expecting you to induct me, I was expecting you to stop stringing me along. Nahiossi probably would've been more fun if you had turned him down.

Was somewhat fun while it lasted.