First, a bit of questioning the gates of the forge legacy.

I've spoken to three players who chose the legacy, they are all skilled players who know what they are talking about. And they all agreed that it sucked. One player said that even with -430 ac from equipment, he still barely could notice a difference in damage reduction. The reduction they had ahieved was lower than any of the A/B/S/S, about 10%.

Compare that to soul of the mountain, which gives 200 hp(approximately 20% extra for the average hero warrior). Plus other bonuses. And that is without having to make sacrifices in form of using eq with worse stats but better ac. And aditionally, +20% hp is better than 20% dam reduction since there is stuff that penetrates the reduction.

Now of course I might be wrong here and everything is well balanced and dandy. If so care to enlighten me where my reasoning went wrong?

1) Gates of the forge doesn't in fact reduce damage as main feature but something else instead

2) Gates of the forge isn't based on AC(I mean ac from armor here, not from dex or -ac flags).


Now, to a more simple question. From how far back is it possible to get your characters to the premium battlefield? And how much will be tracked from the past? Asking since if I'm going to go through the hassle of setting up a paypal account and all for my next deleted character, I'd want to donate for all my past characters if possible.

PS. Sorry about the double topics, but i figured that if an imm can answer one, he/she can probably answer the other too.

P.P.S Be nice to the players. Making players so disgruntled that they leave is bad for all the mud's stakeholders. :(

Id always been under the impression that gates was based on the actually weight of the armor, not the -AC. So a breastplate that weighed 200 lbs and was made of like steel or adamantite would be ideal. All of this is of course guessing, and evil number crunching.

Your numbers are off regarding Gates of the Forge. There are definitely scenarios where it is a lot better than the alternatives you give.

And aditionally, +20% hp is better than 20% dam reduction since there is stuff that penetrates the reduction.

Damage that ignores resistance is very rare. However, all characters deal with the issue that healing/regen is positively leveraged by damage reduction, something I think outweighs the rare case where it does not help.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

<i>Damage that ignores resistance is very rare. However, all characters deal with the issue that healing/regen is positively leveraged by damage reduction, something I think outweighs the rare case where it does not help.</i>

Yeah I forgot about that :/

All legacies are not created equal. Are you sure gates is working properly because I know Mercy of the Typhoon was broken for a long long time before I took it and bugged it. Even after it was fixed it didn't seem worth taking ever again. I think 90% of the time I only got one extra attack out of it, and one time I got a high of 3 extra attacks. Are some legacies supposed to be much better then others? I know from all the vteran players who picked it and said it sucks I would never take gates of the forge. Maybe take another look at it?

Are you sure gates is working properly

Yes. During the first round of bitching, I put in some temporary logging which spit out exact numbers during fights. It performs exactly to specs, and Nep/Zulgh/I are happy with those specs.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

>Now, to a more simple question. From how far back is it
>possible to get your characters to the premium battlefield?

December 2003. See HELP GRAVEYARD.

>And how much will be tracked from the past?

Depends on the character. We added a lot of new infrastructure along the way to track new things. You can compare the character sheets from the beginning to the end to see the trend.

>PS. Sorry about the double topics, but i figured that if an
>imm can answer one, he/she can probably answer the other too.

And yet I didn't :P

>P.P.S Be nice to the players. Making players so disgruntled
>that they leave is bad for all the mud's stakeholders. :(

P.P.P.S. Be nice to the immortals. Making immortals so disgruntled that they don't want to innovate anymore with their volunteered time is also bad for all the mud's stakeholders.