These things are explore items, to my understanding. I think it's safe to say that exotic weapons are also most explore items--or at least the skills which they grant.

That said, why not treat the aura, shield and barrier spells similar to exotic weapon skills? What I mean by that is, through use of these "nontraditional" skills, you improve at their use and learn to tap into their source better. When you begin to use aura, it shows up in your skill list just like an exotic weapon skill might:

Rip: 0% (53%)

I am not certain of the exact numbers for the damage reduction aura, shield and barrier provide. But I think it's something like:

Aura: 15%
Shield: 20%
Barrier: 50%

Give or take, of course. So instead of gaining the full benefit of the spell upon immediately finding some foreign object through your exploration travels, how about having these spells increase in potency (both amount of protection and duration) through the percentage of what your skill is in the respective spell?

Maybe instead of aura granting 15% (give or take) to boot, how about having it start at 8% and increase through usage.



What this proposal would do in effect, in my opinion, is reward veteran players the most. By veteran, I mean the characters who have reached 3-4-or-500 hours in the game. The character with longevity. It would require more challenge for aspiring anti-paladins, or any mage class for that matter. Instead of immediately becoming far more powerful at level 36 (which is the level you can have all three, A/S/B), they would gain a smaller measure of power and have to rely on skill (as opposed to iceball spam, neurological disrupt spam, rake-rake-rake, etc.). Then as time goes on, they gain in much greater power (which is the current stats for A/S/B), just as a master mage should.

As far as spam practicing goes, I'm okay with that. If a mage wants to suit in a study someplace, and actually have to learn their magic before it gets powerful, that's a grand idea. Or you can have the less dedicated people, and they can just live with reduced effectiveness, and eventually garner the full benefits, should they make it that far.



Thoughts and opinions?


P.S. Since it's been a couple months, I've cooled off. I want to apologize to Gabe and Yhorian for my rude comments here, and elsewhere.

nt

How about an automatic improve rate based on char playing hours?


Something like 20 hours + 1% and +age eq will not help, because it will be based on hours, not on char ages.

n.t

The answer is yes.

Instead of improving the skill through use and skill percentages, I'd rather see a variable sliding scale hidden to the player based on hours.

That is, a character with 80 hours using barrier has a range of garnering 50%-75% of his barrier wand. He just isn't learned enough to pull the full effect of the spell from the wand and onto himself. Conversely, a mage with 320 hours might have a range of 85%-100%. He is well-adjusted to zapping and excising the wand's power.

Tweak the scale however would best benefit game balance and the promotion of longevity. But the important thing would be in keeping the %s hidden. All I know as a player or opponent is 'Barrier up!'.

Oh, this would apply to shield, aura, and barrier.

>The answer is yes.
>
>Instead of improving the skill through use and skill
>percentages, I'd rather see a variable sliding scale hidden to
>the player based on hours.

Because the players LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE things that are hidden.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Hastur and Dhaevor are gone so who else is going to spend all those hours trying to figure our the hidden scale?? Isildur will of course want to know and will just want someone else to do it.

I think we'll be ok, Zulgh!

Its most of the player base in general that really seems to hate hidden affects, period. The trend has been positive in that the Imms have started moving away from that area, largely in an attempt to aid new players.

From the immortal perspective, it just creates one more horse corpse for our few but very loud provocateurs to beat ceaselessly. Luck Stat, anyone?

>That said, why not treat the aura, shield and barrier spells
>similar to exotic weapon skills? What I mean by that is,
>through use of these "nontraditional" skills, you improve at
>their use and learn to tap into their source better. When you
>begin to use aura, it shows up in your skill list just like an
>exotic weapon skill might:

I've got to say, this is a unique approach that I hadn't thought of. That being said, I'm not really a fan.

>Give or take, of course. So instead of gaining the full
>benefit of the spell upon immediately finding some foreign
>object through your exploration travels, how about having
>these spells increase in potency (both amount of protection
>and duration) through the percentage of what your skill is in
>the respective spell?
>
>Maybe instead of aura granting 15% (give or take) to boot, how
>about having it start at 8% and increase through usage.

SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! Woot! 100%

>What this proposal would do in effect, in my opinion, is
>reward veteran players the most. By veteran, I mean the
>characters who have reached 3-4-or-500 hours in the game.

I don't understand how you come to this conclusion. You find one wand, sit in a corner and spam until it's at 100% and now you're a veteran with 3-4-or-500 hours? Pretty sure I could do this in about 25 hours with any mage class.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

n/t

Based on previous experiments (example: old version of shapeshift spell/skill), I'm pretty sure everyone would just go off and spam these for a few hundred hours before 'really' playing their characters, if that's what they had to do to be 'optimally effective'. Most likely complaining about it all the while.

I mean, we had people who never in their life would ever win any kind of a PK even if the other guy was linkdead feeling like they 'had' to get shapeshift skill ASAP to compete in PK. I don't see this playing out any different in practice.

Currently, I don't think there's a seperation between tiers of mages. Okay, maybe there is. Mages with A/S/B = ubber powerful. Mages without A/S/B = pathetically weak (in most cases). Most warriors don't perfect the majority of their skills until about 200+ hours. Sure, they have all the skills they use in every fight perfected well before then. But the little skills that can make a big difference, like dash, drive, rescue, all the weapons, enhanced reactions, etc., generally won't be perfected until the character has been around for a good while.

Mages with A/S/B don't necessarily have to have all their stuff perfected, because they have a gigantic cushion of survival with these spells. A mage without A/S/B better have their stuff perfected if they want a chance of winning OR surviving. Their life literally depends on their spells working.

I just don't see a problem with there being unofficial tiers of mages, i.e. novice, apprentice, scholar, and so forth. With A/S/B the way it is, you go from novice to master. Especially with sleek wands, which will be there every time you go to look for them, given that another character logged on with the same location didn't get it just minutes before you did. Sugar coat it anyway you want, but mages without A/S/B don't stand much of a chance, and mages with A/S/B get too powerful too quick. Cabdru was a prime example of this.

And to take away from the spamming involved, have the spell cap off at certain levels, so that way you learn the spell in incriments. Much the way parry does for a warrior. Then you could up the learning rates so it would take less time to get to the next tier (thinking gates of the forge here).

And let me ask a question here. Do you see a problem with mages at 80 hours getting all their wand locations (with wand lists most likely) and beating a mage of the same guild who has been playing the character for 500 hours and doesn't have their wand locations? From an IC perspective, this makes absolutely no sense. From an OOC perspective, there can be many explanations. The number one explanation being player skill. A runner up being who the player is and who they know.

>Based on previous experiments (example: old version of
>shapeshift spell/skill), I'm pretty sure everyone would just
>go off and spam these for a few hundred hours before 'really'
>playing their characters, if that's what they had to do to be
>'optimally effective'. Most likely complaining about it all
>the while.

Have everyone improve on skills via both hours and levels based on int. E.g. you get an improvement of int * 5 randomly distributed every level and int / 10 improvements every hour.

OR

The 75% cap on practicing at the guildmaster increases with level and hours. Practices are used with diminishing returns e. g. your first practice gives you int * 2 skill, then int, int / 2 etc. You can put the practices in anytime, but your skill can only go as high as your hour and level-based cap.

Note: All numbers given are for demonstration purposes only and would would produce a horrible result, in practice.

Disparage people spamming. Seriously.

"New payment options w/ Iron Realms"

I am part of everyone, but I never complain all the while.

It's not disparagement so much as fact given the way people play CF. If there's a way for you to spam to get extra skills or more power for your character, most people will do most of it whether or not it actually helps their particular character.

History shows that "not everyone should have this, but, only a few will bother to spam to get it" doesn't work.

nt

"New payment options w/ Iron Realms"

While I think the concept of sliding scale damage reduction is a neat idea, I think this would be a poor way to implement it, because:

1) The way your propose to do it would just make mages spam ABS like spells until they improved. This is both boring and lame.

2) In order to spam these spells, they have to find the wand first. This can be time consuming in itself sometimes as a young mage. Once they have it, they'll hoard it for hours and hours and hours until it is spammed to max damage reduction, keeping it out of the hands of those who would actually USE it. Sleeks are a different story, of course, but this is still lame.

3) You can bet your ass you'd see mages using ABS constantly in this case whether they needed it or not for every fight as long as they had it available. More wand hoarding, more time spent gathering wands, and I think fighting classes would generally suffer due to this rather than benefit.

I've given this some thought for various reasons in the past, and I haven't been able to come up with a good solution. Sliding scale damage reduction based on level isn't really a good idea either... I'm at a loss.

--Nightshade

My problem with A/S/B isn't that it's available, or really even the top end production. It's that these spells make an average or even sub-par character instantly much (much) better. These spells were the direct result of Cabdru (Nepenthe) getting the uber amount of charges he was able to acrue in such a short amount of time, with the only effort of knowing where to find these wands. If there were more limitations on how A/S/B worked, you wouldn't see anymore ridiculously powerful characters like Cabdru (216 kills in 176 hours).

Let's face it, there are plenty of wand-sharing lists out there already. And since the cat-is-out-of-the-bag about how sleek wands work, it really doesn't matter if you share every location or not. Because you'll always have your location, no-matter-what. So I don't buy the "takes forever to find wands" argument anymore. Anyone that's been playing longer than six months could easily find wands if they make that their focus. I use myself as an example (despite playing much longer than six months), I made a character recently with the sole intent of finding wands (with next to no previous knowledge of any wands) and I managed to find all three sleek wands, several other potential locations, and about a dozen other non-sleek locations. I was able to accomplish this in the span of about a 200 hour exploration character. And even with that amount of success, I'm sure there are a couple dozen more that I have absolutely no clue about.

I stand by the opinion of A/S/B makes characters instantly strong, without a whole lot of effort. Getting wands isn't the darkhorse that you make it out to be.

As for spam, what about invokers? They have to sit there and spam 90% of their spells for mastery. Necromancers spam plenty of their spells. And any mage worth a damn will too. So again, I don't buy your senseless spamming argument. Because all the good players will spend the time to spam the spells their guild teaches. Why should it be any different for A/S/B? You find some rare artifact and you're automatically a master at it? Because that's how it is now.

>My problem with A/S/B isn't that it's available, or really
>even the top end production. It's that these spells make an
>average or even sub-par character instantly much (much)
>better. These spells were the direct result of Cabdru
> Nepenthe) getting the uber amount of charges he was able to
>acrue in such a short amount of time, with the only effort of
>knowing where to find these wands. If there were more
>limitations on how A/S/B worked, you wouldn't see anymore
>ridiculously powerful characters like Cabdru (216 kills in 176
>hours).

Yeah, because it's like, you zap yourself with a barrier wand and amazingly there's a hundred corpses suddenly at your feet.

Do you think it's more fun for (and let's say that neither of these A-Ps are me, because #### if I want to get into that whole set of arguments again) a skilled A-P to

A) Rack up 100 charges in 100 hours, taking a lot of risks to do it, or

B) Rack up 100 charges in 400 hours, 100 of it spent spamming, 300 of it spent PKing very conservatively and taking no significant risks?

It sounds like you want (B); I think (A) is a lot more fun to play against.

You're missing my point. The point is, A is next to impossible without A/S/B, leaving B as a solid option.

I have yet to see a mage reach top end success (the history altering success) without A/S/B. Then again, I don't have the greatest memory.



---"It sounds like you want (B); I think (A) is a lot more fun to play against."

Yes, it is more fun to play against A when I have a chance of actually killing them. But generally, the people who play the A type characters are people loaded with wand knowledge, therefore making them survivable to the point where they can amass power.

Some highlights of A/S/B (feel free to add your own):

* Makes characters extremely survivable, even against bad odds.
* Makes one on one matches (people with A/S/B vs. those without) extremely uneven, in most cases.
* Makes people even with subpar skill uber.
* Makes people instantly more powerful, with minimal effort put forth (comparatively to other classes that actually have to master things in order to survive, instead of loading up on gobs of damage reduction). All that is required is knowledge of wand spots. It's fair to say there is a good deal of information sharing at this point. Plus, if I can find roughly 20 or so locations with as little effort as I put into it, anyone can. It's not as hard as people claim.


What I am proposing is that you actually have to build up that skill in order to be that good, instead of the instant gratitude A/S/B currently provides. Why should A/S/B be any different (or better) than any other ability?

Obviously you have not use wands enough to understand that they are not the immediate *I WIN!!!* button.

* Makes people even with subpar skill uber.
--(false)

* Makes characters extremely survivable, even against bad odds
--(sure, doesnt anyone who preps for what they are going to do make them a lot more survivable?)

* Makes one on one matches (people with A/S/B vs. those without) extremely uneven, in most cases.
--(Dont fight someone when they have the advantage on you? isnt that obvious?)

* Makes people instantly more powerful, with minimal effort put forth (comparatively to other classes that actually have to master things in order to survive, instead of loading up on gobs of damage reduction). All that is required is knowledge of wand spots. It's fair to say there is a good deal of information sharing at this point. Plus, if I can find roughly 20 or so locations with as little effort as I put into it, anyone can. It's not as hard as people claim.
--
It takes effort to time your zapping... Collect safely.. oh and of course with the changes heal! It may look like no effort to YOU.

I think you just have lack of experience using them and moreso the victim of prepared foes. Sorry.

CraftedDeception

And yet, for all of that, I've noticed that your fighty characters are both A) Much more numerous and B) much more PK-successful than your mages.

I don't buy the 'I played mages and it was easy, so they need to be powered down' argument; this feels more to me like a 'The stuff I don't like playing as much should be made weaker, because I don't feel like I'm beating it by enough' post.

Incidentally, you're overrating the DR power of those spells. More than once I've seen one of your warrior-y characters (back in the day -- I couldn't even say who you're playing now) go into a fight with more DR than a full A/B/S mage.