I was going to write it in Bakrmarr's farewells, but his BF thread doesn't want to show up. I checked few times - he isn't denied or anything like it.

So Bakrmarr tells goodbye to evil Thera and makes his suggestion:


Remove all limited abs locations. Make these locations a locations for sleek wands. Remove the hardest abs sleek locations - the ones an avergage hero mage cannot get by himself alone with 1 rest.

What will happen after this change?
1. The easiest abs limited locations are gone so no more spending just few ticks to get full set of abs wands. It means not using full abs in combats where it's not needed. A mage will think twice if he really needs full set of protections to fight average enemy.
2. Newbies don't know limited abs locations anyway, so no more great advantage for mages for expeirenced players.
3. The average time to get abs wands will increase, but the time to get sleek abs wands is decreased. Right now it takes almost no time to gather limited abs wands and it breaks game balance a bit.

Sleek black can be hard to come by. Sometimes you have to get help. This especially depends on your class/forms. The limited barrier locations are usually illusions.

Some foes just require full prep and you still aren't winning. If you're way over prepped for less dangerous foes, you're not going to kill them, because they will just flee. So, there's already an incentive to not over-prep. That's unless you can prevent them from getting away. Most characters who will be impacted by the ABS change you're proposing cannot stop someone from getting away.

I do find it ironic that after playing Bakrmarr, you think that ABS is a game balance issue. Bakrmarr with ABS was a game balance issue.

The chars who full prep for every fight will probably, when faced with not having ABS, just not fight.

And also seriously considering what should be limited when it is in potion/pill form, since those are available to anyone/everyone.

Random add-on thought:

If you tracked quaff vs zap vs recite vs brandish, across all chars, I'm guessing quaff (which is only half, since it ignores pills) is an order of magnitude more used than the rest. Possibly two. Has anyone ever thought to track those usage stats?

It's too obvious because you can quaff blind.

Quaffing flight like it is candy probably dwarfs all other quaffs by a wide margin. Woe is thief.

Everyone with scrolls doesn't use venom