In that long thread below there are people posting different ideas they have to modify and change the system. Instead of adding more things to that long list that is getting more difficult to read and find what you want, perhaps start to post them as replies to this thread.

One idea is to remove all sleeks and make both aura and barrier a class spell similar to show shield is. You could make it so that stacking one with another increases the cooldown by an additional 24 hours for all of them(or whatever the current shield cd is).

The logic for that being that if you feel the need to blow aura shield and barrier for a fight, you are putting yourself at a severe handicap for another strong foe. Or even removing you god-mode mage self from fights for a longer period if you prefer to stack your protections

Taking my current character as an example, if I had barrier, there's basically nothing people could do to prevent me retrieving. With retrievals, you pick the time, so the fact you can't use barrier spell often isn't really of huge significance.

I'd also be able to improve my gear. There's a number of things out there that I can't get because of a lack of barrier. I don't see that as a bad thing.

Finally, my pk style is such that I'm usually the one jumping on someone else and rarely the one getting jumped. Having barrier would just make those fights more one-sided.

Having barrier as a spell with a timer though basically removes your chance to defend against large groups. They'll just make you put it up, then pull back and hit you again once it's worn off.

So overall, I think it would be both overpowered and underpowered, depending on the situation.

Right now, there are specific spots (maybe 100ish) where sleek wands pop. There is much value in knowing most or all of these spots, hence the passing of info IC and OOC.

All numbers are hypothetical and chosen for easy of math and to demonstrate the idea. Actual game balance not considered except in the abstract. Adjust as according.

What I propose is to completely de-link the popping of wands from specific spots entirely. Basically, that every mage or mage-ish NPC and every hidden room container in areas that contain mage or mage-ish NPC's be a "potential" popping point.

This would greatly increase the number of potential spots, and basically make it infeasible to pass a list of them along. There is no need at this point. Everyone will know that every mage might have a sleek, and hidden containers in mage areas might have a sleek.

You come up with an alogrithm that determines which spot can pop what kind of sleek based on mob level and area level, so that say, anything level 25 and under is a sienna, 25-40 is amber, and 40+ is black. Let's say at the end of this there are roughly 1k shield, 1k aura, and 1k black spots.

At character creation, you get assigned a certain number of these "spots" based on your character race class align ethos, etc. In order to make it feasible, you get say 20 of each. Meaning you essentially have a 1 in 50 chance that any sub level 25 mob or hidden container you encounter will be one of your spots. Over the course of exploration and observation, you *should* be able to find no small number of spots for any given wand.

Now, obviously you still want to limit the number of sleeks any individual can gather, (and not to 20) so there would have to be some sort of counter to determine when you have 3 of each kind. I would also make it such that any individual spot has a much longer repop time than current*. So that you don't just farm a a single spot or you can, but you accept that you'll have to use wands more sparingly.

I would also add the potential of a sleek wand popping on any PC mage at a particular rate, as sort of a throw a bone thing to those that are struggling. Nothing to rely on, but if you play a character for say 8 hours real time, you'll get a random wand.

What this achieves (IMHO):

1) Increases benefits of real exploration (not just checking a handful of spots) and observation and promotes doing this as early and often as possible.
2) Increases the usefulness of detect artifact.
3) Decreases (removes to the major extant) the benefits of have a list of dubious origins. You could still have/want a list of likely areas to check, but this should be fairly common knowledge and easily gathered. It doesn't take a genius to figure out HTOS might have a spot for you.

I also think this would be fairly easy to RP justify. Say that sleeks are distilled magic of some sort leaking through the Veil, and some chaos mage messed with it trying for power of some sort and boom, it backfired and created a new paradigm.

I think you could also do something similar with other preps but instead of making it specific spots, that aura potion is just going to pop somewhere randomly to be gathered by whoever stumbles upon it first.

* I currently believe the repop formula on wands to be something similar to the length of time you could keep say barrier (or shield or aura with pop times adjusted accordingly) up if you just zapped yourself each time it fell (no failures) and then when the wand exploded went and regathered. You'd want to at least triple this time IMHO, and my estimate of the time is almost certainly not perfect.

All preps pop randomly everywhere at limited rates and are all easily identifiable.

As the human sergeant falls to the ground dead, a potion labeled "Shield" rolls from his belt.

The preps you use for the random system can be duplicate versions of every limited prep you take out of the game.

.

nt