This is a whiney rant so feel free to stop reading now.

I *hate* the wand system.

How many f-ing hours is this supposed to take? So far I'm around 40-50 of pure exploring, have Legendary Awareness and several edges. I haven't sound a single god-damned sleek. Not in any magey areas, not in places people suggested looking, not on mobs people suggested killing, not in hard to reach crevices, not in explore areas. I'm on the quest to get detect artifact, but of course I can't actually complete that because, well, if you've done it you know why.

I honestly like exploring (to an extent), but if I have to look in one more empty desk I'm going hit myself on the head with a rock until I can't even remember what a mud is. I've always felt like CF is the best game out there, but now I'm thinking that maybe CF just isn't as great as I used to think.

So what's the deal? If only I was an a-hole and could just go on irc and start cheating. I'm really beginning to think CF's dedication to secret knowledge is just retardedly outdated and not fun.

We need to face reality and that reality is that the days where mages could go one on one with melee classes, prance around the village or kill people at their gardians are extremely rare now.In short tactics and way of thinking need to change. As a mage you need to consider the fact that you may not find all or any of your wands.

If you have no wands then you need to use hit and run tactics, ganking, being simple support and attacking the weak as they rank. Otherwise make use of limited preps, if you find one wand say for example shield, you'll need to make use of limited aura sources. Mages will need to start getting used to the fact that with one or no extra dam redux the best you can do is charge in there and cast a spell or two before dying or wording out. Is this fun? Is this what was intended? Who knows but its just my take on it.


Again, you either have to be very lucky, an Imm or have much time and patience on your hands to find all your wands. Even then, i still have a mage from before the change with the easiest set in history and even with full A/B/S i still get my rear handed to me regularly, sometimes by one person.

Personally my own solution to the wand change has been learn to play and love another non-mage class. At hero its mostly about groups and ganks anyways so i'm learning with a class that can potentially deal with that alone. I might still play an invoker (5 path) but otherwise with this change its obvious mage classes were not designed for people like me.

But detect artifact wont really help you.

It seems new mages get their sleeks in new added locations.

With my mage I got all troubles you've described. Found only one location (old, well known place). Though, I've found a bunch of possible new locations, but all are empty.

Rolled new, and I wont do anything serious, like role stuff or cabal join until I hit 30 and ensure that I can find my sleeks. If not, I reroll.

Adn though that question was not to me, I will answer.
No, exploring and checking all those areas is not fun for me. Tedious most of the times.

Get detect artifact if you don't have it. That might help some.

You guys are making me want to roll a mage, just to test whether you're both whiners or if you actually have a point.

(The question are at the bottom, sorry)

>You guys are making me want to roll a mage, just to test whether you're both whiners or if you actually have a point.

Well I a freely admit that I'm whining here, in the sense that I'm complaining about something many people don't have a problem with, and not offering any solution. Whether I also have a point is a matter of debate.

Here's how I see it:

Having played on and off for 9-10 years or so, and had about 7 reasonably long-lived characters, 3 of which have been basically pure-exploration characters, I think my overall area knowledge is pretty good, though not exceptional. I simply have to conclude that I'm unusually bad at exploring. Given how easy everyone seems to say it is and how little result I've gotten for what I think of as a lot of effort it seems only reasonable to conclude that I'm just very bad at exploring. Probably other people are just more patient and thorough, I'm really not a meticulous person, and I don't want to be.

What's the point in posting, then? If it's really just me then probably I just want someone to confirm that yes, I should just go ahead and quit cf, because I'm wasting my time on something that is never going to work out and causing myself needless frustration. CF may have been extremely fun in the past, but maybe it's just not (for me) anymore. That's an answer I can accept, though I don't think that's true and it would be a sad result.

If it's not just me then I don't know. The staff clearly wants to keep the part of the system I hate the most. I'm not sure what to say. Apparently they think that drudgery for *viability is a good mechanic. I just don't.

I do have two serious questions though:
How long does the staff expect it to take to find a full set of wands?

Is that process expected to be fun? I.e. if you don't like exploring for wands, do you not like cf? Or is it a way of rewarding people for doing not-fun work?

*viability I don't want to get into the do-mages-need wands debate. Bottom line: nepenthe can kill 6 thirsting berserkers at the destructor using Pen and Haggle. I need wands to compete.

DISCLAIMER: this is also a whine, the views and opinions expressed here are my own and I do not claim them to be anything else.

If it is of any consolation, it is NOT just you. CF has always leaned toward the hardcore and playing the game in any less time consuming mode you're bound to suffer immensely. And as another European player I feel your pain on the active players in our time slot.

What I really find funny is that in spite of the efforts of goodnature from the staff to kill OOC knowledge sharing groups, with each of their attempts so far what they actually do is kill the casual player's ability to compete. The OOC groups still exist and they will accumulate the new knowledge extremely faster. And CF has always been big on the "secret knowledge". Whenever anything of worth becomes public knowledge it is changed, or you can just look at some posts and wander how could it be possible that even veteran players have different opinions after 10+ years of playing about how certain skills/spells work, and how am I as a casual player to find out which is the real deal? Should I try to get into one of those notorious OOC chains? Or should I roll countless of characters and then spend hours analyzing data from logs? Granted imms have been far more straight forward in the past years when asked about this stuff, so I guess we should ask more questions here?

On the ABS issue. My last mage found all his sleeks. I had spent 80 hours or so in searching on my own (in the old system) and I also had found nothing. And then in a span of 5 hours I was shown by three different characters the locations of all my sleeks. Now granted these days people seem more inclined to share knowledge in game than they used to before, but still if those people that share get hurt by doing so.. why would they bother? Especially when you take into consideration that I might draw out one character for the better part of a year, and they will have maybe five or six characters in that same span.

And as a last note I will dabble a bit in the do mages need wands debate. Mages might not necessarily need wands because it is true that nepenthe can kill 6 thirsting berserkers at the destructor but not with Pen and Haggle, but by only using the Infravision spell. However while it might be true that a mage might be viable in PK without the wands, it sure as hell also does not immediately imply that if a mage has the wands it will undoubtedly win any PK encounter. I am a living proof :}

I hate the wand system too. I haven't found a sleek yet. I did get the detect artifact quest and completed it in about an hour and I still haven't found a wand. You should be able to do the same.

>I hate the wand system too. I haven't found a sleek yet. I
>did get the detect artifact quest and completed it in about an
>hour and I still haven't found a wand. You should be able to
>do the same.

What you've described is not possible for me. Perhaps the quest has a random element to it or something. Or maybe I'm just not understanding. After all you can't ask an npc "what the hell do you mean?'"

If you can't find what he's looking for, you sure are not looking very hard AT ALL.

>If you can't find what he's looking for, you sure are not
>looking very hard AT ALL.

Okay, so this is why I think automated mud quests aren't for me. Because what you've said here basically tells me that what I thought was a clear, obvious and logical set of instructions was not.

He's my attempt to describe it by obfuscating a few words to protect the precious secret of the quest:

Archmage says "I have a geological detector, bring me a marble rock"

I think "Oh, okay I've been looking for a marble stone, guess I need to find one and bring it to him"

It didn't begin to occur to me that a marble rock and a marble stone aren't the same thing, because those words are synonyms. Also I'd never heard of a literal "marble rock" but I had heard of a "marble stone." Furthermore, it fit my understanding of cf that the staff would want you to find one of those marble stones before someone tells you where the rest are. So in my mind finding one example of a marble stone made perfect sense.

But I'm guessing from what you've said that I was supposed to realize that a rock and a stone are *totally* different things and that a rock would be laying around nearby. Unfortunately I thnk it's now too late for this news to do any good.

And this is why I don't bother with automated quests 90% of the time.

If I remember correctly the 'quest' command gave a pretty straightforward explanation on what you were supposed to do.

You just come and she either speaks to you or not.