For word I don't think a change is neccesary. While it is a huge transportation ability it is also predictable and so the hunter can still use this knowledge to even the playing field.

It all comes down to risk and reward. with word you have the reward of distancing yourself from an enemy. the risk is that someone is waiting for you, that your already near your word point, and that your enemy can word to the same city or point and be right on you. As an escape tool it is good but a skilled opponent has a reasonable chance to overcome this in a variety of ways.

Teleport has the same advantage of creating distance between you and a pursuer. It also has the advantage of allowing someone to search for enemies over a great distance in a short span of time. On the risk side you have the risk of teleporting somewhere nasty. It can't be reasonably overcome as an enemy except by preventing it from happening. the risk of just teleporting into a bad area are just not that big. I mean healers are the only ones who can truly harrass teleporters and then I mean your getting hunted down by a healer thats not much of a threat as evident by the high kill counts of healers.


I don't think that near perfect escape ability afforded by the current institution of teleport is great even as a non rager, as pretty much anyone who wants to kill someone who just has to get off one or two commands to escape you taking the time to try and kill them. Look at it this way, both ragers and non ragers hunt people who use teleport, but the rager doesn't have to spend the time to go get another set of sleek rods because they preped before the guy teleported) Non rager benefit the most from this.


I say give teleport a chance to fail while pumping adrenaline, you fumble the potion or mispronounce or whatever. That way the instant thought isn't flee teleport at least force them to move a few rooms and get some space so they can try twice, give it just a 30% fail rate. So conservative players need to get about 9 rooms of space on a truly fast opponent to garuntee escape or they just have to buy 2 teleport potions instead of one, you just make knowing how to run short distances more of a valueble skill in pk.