I'm going to post individual topics about the trapper path beneath this umbrella heading. Bear with me.

Trapping is risk-free thieving. That's the whole point of it. That they added dusts makes them a little more viable. Get someone knocked out and you can pepper a route away from you with all sorts of nasty surprises that cause damage, blind, and maledict. That they are only 56 points to go the whole path leaves you with plenty of other options. How about add weapon trip and cheat shot to your repertoire? That gives you an in-battle skill to use besides dusts.

Having played a trapper throughout its whole path, I think they're fine as is without tweaking. Bag of Tricks is the first skill meant to introduce to the path. You can't expect awesomeness from it while all the other paths have crap first skills.

It's a brand new skill and just consider this as constructive feedback.


I noticed the other day that at a relatively high level, when my bag of tricks would cause bleeding damage, the bleeding is still for "scratches." I imagine the other two effects are just as minimal. I'd like to see this scaled up, because right now with bag of tricks being the trapper's only in-combat action (aside from tripping or dusting), the low damage and weak effects make it a non-choice. I don't know if it is vastly improved as the skill gets higher, since I can't get it past the low 80's.


I'd also suggest lowering the mana cost. If, for nothing else, using it during ranking would actually net some skill improvements. I could gas-out on one npc, currently.

I spoke with an anonymous immortal about why my gentlewalking thief was getting attacked by lots of npc's who were aggro. He clarified that there is a difference between an npc that is "true aggro" and one that "murders whenever something enters a room." I see the necessity for both kinds, but I think the latter should be a rarity. For instance, dragons should always strike when you enter...that just makes sense. But drow patrollers? If I were a normal character walking around the underdark, of course. But, I am a gentlewalking, sneaky thief. I should have a chance to get by them (and, subsequently, to the handy ingredients stashed deep in the underdark just for trappers...). Right now, I have to get past an army of drow patrollers to get to this one particular ingredient. It's just not feasible.


So, how can this be fixed? How about adding a third type of "aggro"? One that allows a thief at least a sporting chance to gentlewalk past it?

Like you said, it's useful for some things, but in many cases it's just unupdated area writing that is using it. Anything with greet_murder can to a certain extent also attack duo'd people.

I would petition to get rid of greet_murder from the MUD's codebase or area writing policy options entirely but the staff is too small and there's too many niche situations the imms don't want gentlewalk to be an automatic out for this to happen. It's annoying as #### but it's probably there to stay unless the staff makes an upswing (read: more staff, loosened vetting and less politicizing that drove off some greats of the past) and areas get revamped faster.

There are similarly annoying choices for what mobs can see invis and hidden that are written off as 'Area-Writer's Discretion' when in reality it can be either argued or blatantly obvious the area writer wasn't thinking and the reviewer didn't know then what they know now. Or more likely certain game mechanics didn't exist.

Notice there are very few permasanced mobs anymore but permanent haste is generally here to stay even on some newer mobs.

Your complaints about gentlewalk aren't with the skill itself, it's probably in many cases old/lazy area writing.

Right now there are six skills related to the actual traps that a trapper can create. They can be divided into two categories: Method and Type.


Method
Physical
Direction
Burst


Type
Glowing
Knock-Out
Damage


Now, whenever a trap is successfully made a timer is placed on the trapper thief (2 to 4 hours, iirc). What that basically translates to is that it will take a LONG, LONG time to get those skills to a decent level. Add in the fact that you can have catastrophic failures, in which your trap backfires, and it gets just a tad frustrating even for a patient person like myself. What I am about to say is done so under the assumption that skill percentages DO have an effect on trap potency, NOT just the success of actually creating the trap. I've prayed multiple times in-game about this and have never received a response...I am not griping about that, as it's perfectly conceivable that nobody, or most people, don't know.

I would propose that all six of those current skills be nixed, and one new skill, Trap, replace them. At various levels the different trap types and methods would unlock on their own, becoming available in the syntax of the skill. Fortunately, the infrastructure is already there, as every trap begins with the command "trap," followed by an array of variables (ex; trap direction glowing brightdust east).

Why would this help the class?

First, the "trap" skill would replace all current variables in determining the success and potency of the traps. Since it's one skill we're dealing with, instead of SIX, it will shoot up a lot faster. Why is this important? I've placed hundreds of traps and none of my six trap skills are above 80%. Hopefully you can agree that this is a depressing thing to deal with when you are talking about your class' bread and butter, trademark ability. My damage traps rarely, RARELY do even capital damage. Their special maledictive effects don't work hardly at all. Knock-out traps? Three have actually worked in the dozens and dozens I have set. I have spent probably in the neighborhood of five-hundred gold and bartered tons to get ahold of these ingredients in the first place, so basically getting these traps to an effective level seems like it is orders of magnitude harder than it should be.

I'm really not trying to be a drama queen. I'm giving you my honest, tested opinion here.

If possible, place the "trap" skill (mentioned in the preceding post) at level 15. Unlock the various facets of the skill at these intervals:


Level 15: Trap
(glowing type, physical method)

Level 20:
(knock-out type, direction method)

Level 25:
(damage type, burst method)


Bearing in mind that trap ingredients that are beyond level 30 in potency are very rare, it's as if trappers were meant to be potent in the mid-range. But, as it stands right now they don't even have a complete toolkit to work with until level 39, and that's under the assumption that they are bypassing other useful abilities from the general thief skillset.


A note on burst traps: Just so anyone out there who is not aware of this becomes aware, a burst trap does not hit a whole group if that group enters a room. I still think that may have been the intention, but it does not work that way (possibly due to faulty coding, or just inability to do so...I really don't know). What it does is this: If someone walks into a room and hits a glowing burst trap, for example, the trap goes off and hits them. It also hits everything that is in the room. The reason it doesn't hit the GROUP is that the leader of the group enters a room first. It all triggers before the groupmates get into the room. What this means is that if your knockout-burst trap that you setup with the notion of trying to take out a group of enemy raiders goes off, only the leader goes down. The other members are free to wake him up. Bear in mind that typically these traps knock people out for two or three hours, when they actually work.