I saw a post where someone suggested that sacrificing a large enough unholy weapon should also kill the person who destroyed it. I really like this idea...to a degree and think that they are right. It certainly should have a chance of killing you outright, but perhaps also a chance of just doing something like defiance does.

Thoughts?

Half of these ideas would require nerfing AP weapons because it makes it too hard to actually lose the weapon. Once it becomes impossible to stop an AP from a net-gain in power even after dieing, you just get unlimited power snowballing. Monster characters are fun in moderate doses, but an AP with effectively infinite charges would become a rather un-fun feature.

It's bad for the game.

I think it would be much more healthy for the game if the first few kills netted you many charges (more than they do now) and the later ones had diminishing returns.

In combination with making it harder to sac the unholy it makes it a cooler idea for the AP class.
Then again, I found it really hard to get any good amount of charges before losing my weapons.
But it has been a long time since I've played an AP. I think my highest was 5 charges on a single unholy.
I might be able to do better now.

The problem is, what this discussion is really about is something you've hit on the nail: the downside and upside of the AP. Remove the snowball effect and you've lost the adrenaline and appeal of the class.

The massive upside of the snowballed AP is why current obstacles are in place. It's kind of like the World Series of Poker -- even the best player can't be guaranteed finishing, and that sort of rush is what adds heartache and triumph to the class.

Approximately how many AP charges is Defiance worth, with regard to a two handed sword or axe with X control?

If you can answer that without using lightning control you'll have a rough starting point for justifying saccing a large weapon, particularly if the damage ignores dam redux.

The 'problem' with large AP charge weapons is that they are destroyed /before/ being disseminated across 2-3 AP's prior. Leech Unholy Weapon needs to be taken into consideration for this abstract calculus as much as progging lag/shaman dispel. With this in mind, it should take time, request lag, and a 24 hour cool down timer for every 10 charges drained from a sac attempt. Blood, sweat and tears should be expended to destroy such a thing, it's not a matter of tossing it into Mordor's volcano.

Don't forget that the weapon should call it's location out to the current AP with each sac attempt. Need to allow an opportunity for thieves and AP's both, and Paladins could use a blessing from the freed souls equivalent to a portion of the max HP/mama/dam for a hundred or so hours that stacks with each sac attempt.

Corollary: how many AP charges is Bloodseeker worth on an unholy dagger with an appropriate control?

Huge, huge, huge caveat here. I am not on team balance nor am I on team code but just to share my own thoughts on this matter as well as ideas.

I think killing outright wouldn't be all that fun. You could still grab the unholy, find someplace safe and sac it and eat the death. I'd face a death over letting superAP get their 150 charge weapon back any day. It would still suck just as much for the AP to lose what they made over the life of their character.

However my thinking was maybe an unholy weapon can't be destroyed in a single action. So everytime you 'sac' it...you take damage and take a big bite out of the charges. This means you couldn't destroy a weapon in one go, but you could take a bite out of it. Weak weapons you could still torch right away, but if someone built up a super weapon it gives them a chance of getting it back in a weakened state. It also grants RP opportunities for people to just weaken the weapon instead of nuking it. The numbers would be something like 10'ish charges per sac.

Once again. This is an idea. I want to make it really clear that this is the first I've even thought of it so don't assume this is in the works or anything like that. :)

What about...if someone considered an enemy sacrifices it the AP gets a portion of the stats as permanent affects to themselves. Maybe you could make it a boost to a spell such as bloodlust. However, if an AP or fellow cabal member were the sacrificer there would be zero stat gain. Would make for interesting dynamics in Empire.

Accomplishes a lot of the same goals.

I still think, however, that a big enough weapon should possibly kill you. You should always feel like you're rolling the dice when you sac it. That way, a little less incentive to get double-deaths on an AP (killed once, then killed again once unghosted), among other things.

I like the idea of unholy weapons being somewhat un-sacrifice-able in the general sense, and you're whittling it down. I also feel like a paladin's remove taint would be perfect for more effectively destroying unholy blessed weapons.

That a paladin can more easily destroy an unholy weapon where as it might take longer for a warrior for example.

Something that could make it cool would be to turn it into a ritual.

Say you must be outside of the safety of your cabal. The person doing the sacrificing must be able to concentrate for a while, not leaving the place they are in(If they move, the ritual fail and must be started over). The AP in question get an echo of where it is taking place, maybe something similar to track the wicked. Gives the AP some time to find his weapon and take it back before it is too late.

A few things for it to even work:
* Weapon cant be sacrificed while the AP is a ghost.
* The person doing the sacrificing cant just word and run somewhere else if the AP shows up. Not sure how to stop this without tossing in something like an insect affect on the sacrificer.

This would put the person sacrificing the weapon in some risk attempting it. It gives the AP a chance to get the weapon back. Ofcourse, a ton of allies on either side will make the success rate for that side extremely high.

Just a quick idea on the subject. Not too well thought out but I gave it about 5 minutes before I posted.

Some other fun ideas here but one thing to note is the more things you tack on and the more ideas, the harder it becomes to actually implement.

Also this is purely brainstorming. There's to my knowledge no actual imm movement to make these changes. Plenty of other staff members get ideas that are pipe dreams or ideas that for various reasons we don't want to implement into the game.

It's more a notion of "Hey, this could be cool in this instance."

We might not do it because it's tricky. We might not do it because we like things the way they are. It's a particular element of the AP class experience to have a ####load riding on that one weapon. This idea diminishes that aspect somewhat. Whether or not that is ultimately the right idea? Who knows. (Or if making any tweaks to how that works is a mountain of coding? That also could be a factor)

Anyway, just wanted to make sure folks realize this was just a brainstorming session.

Is that the game when it was implemented with the AP class as it was has changed drastically. It is not as easy to make a Cabdru kind of character anymore because there just aren't nearly as many players to make a weapon out of. Lots of things were good at the time because numbers were descent, but what do we average now? 25? 30?

I agree that we need to think about the size of the playerbase as we continue to balance and add content to the game. I agree the uber weapons of the past benefited from a target rich environment. However there's a lot of ways to approach this. Do we keep the weapon element as is and tweak the class in other ways? Do we tweak other aspects of the game entirely?

There's a lot of potential ways to do it and one of the fun challenges with keeping a game like this balanced making sure it grows with the game and how the game grows. We also have to make sure our response is measured since if we make a sudden drastic change to a problem we later find out isn't there, we could break things in a different way or make a situation worse. There's a lot of balls in the air here.

Either way, the main meat of my post was just to say to not take my voice as a "This is officially being considered" and more of a "Just a guy with an idea and some opinions"

Dodge please!

A-P's should be akin to a 'magic spec' warrior IMO. As it is they're closer to being a mage class with bash instead of spellcraft.

Seen logs where some people will give 5 charges into the weapon
and then others where it will only give 1.
I'm guessing it's your pk status. But is there a way to see this?
Is it just the about of kills you have gotten or does it also
account for the deaths taken?
I.e is it ratio or PKkills?

Depending on the power of the weapon it could give the person trying to destroy the weapon a affect like -svs or soften or something nasty. It is an interesting idea.

A-Ps can leech a weapon's Souls - it'd be interesting if a mechanic similar to the one you describe accounted for where that energy went. You could even make it be useful - while you're experiencing the negative side effects of damaging an A-Ps weapon, maybe some of the soulpower accidentally rubs off on you/some of your equipment and buffs it slightly. Thematically, the rest dissipates.

I guess someone maybe has an alchemy class brewing. Unsure what the details are of that, but maybe alchemists could use soulpower more precisely.

Maybe we can power some soulplanes, or soultrains.

Individual PCs could be worth more - so that more powerful A-Ps become common again, to support the soul-energy economy's demands.

I don't see much of a downside to letting the guy with 10 charges keep his weapon but anyone worth their salt would either sac the big unholy and eat the death OR give it to a paladin and convince them to do it (hehehe).

But really, I'm ok with a guy with 150 charges losing their weapon. I mean that needs to happen or those people would never go away. By 150 charges you've had a decent ride, you've done your thing, you're notorious in CF history and its ok to lose your weapon.

In other words, I'd make a "disincentive" to sac weapons that have 0 charges rather than making that 'ok' and leaving big 150 charge weapons out there.

...is that for especially the higher end AP weapons (20+ charges), I always wondered (in an RP CF sense) what the #### happens to those souls that were trapped?

So much so that the last 2 AP weapons I wanted to sac I ended up just holding on to them (and loosing them re: death + loot) waiting for an immortal to give them to to sac.

Definitely hate the idea of it killing you outright, like the idea of doing damage to you based on it's charges.

nt