I started playing some time around 2001. I pretty quickly became a fairly competant thief and was relatively deathful. I dunno, maybe everyone could be deathful with dual-backstab. Anyways, I was really starting to come into my "stride" with respect to finding my way around, being able to prep with everything a fighting class might want/need (just about). Then Boom, thief revamp. I was pretty devastated. I played a few half-assed characters here and there but really just couldn't get into it.

What changed it for me, recently, was detect artifact. Before d/a I knew one barrier location and two aura locations, but one of those could only be used by a particular class. I literally hadn't played a character in years, but I rolled a mage and I've been wandering around looking for wands now. I still haven't found all my sleeks but I HAVE found enough wand locations that I should have a steady supply to meet my meager needs. Adding detect artifact has opened up a whole new world for me playing mages where before I just could not invest the time to randomly kill unique things just to hope to find a wand. Incidentally, one wand I've found isn't carried by a "unique" mob. Is that a bug?

I still sort of suck at CF but at least now I can pretend to hold my own 1on1 as a mage. Next I'm going to work on upping the ante with roleplay as well. I really suck at that so we'll see how it goes. I finally feel like it's worth an effort though. Detect Artifact, along with some of the other newbie helpers like the improved outfit and limited xp loss from a mob death have made my crappy comeback a cozy one.

I'm sure if you go back and read a lot of my posts on this forum you'll see me whining about how ridiculously difficult CF was for a newbie. Apparently someone finally decided to make life easier for casual players like me and I want to say that A) I'm sorry I whined so much, and B) thanks for making it better/easier.

Cheers,
Rade

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