Reading this makes me wonder if you've ever really had lore at a high percentage. Most of your first paragraph is false, and I don't see the skill changing anytime soon.

You know, I just don't see it as a "skill" if you can walk out of the Academy, handle strange objects, and instantly know everything about them.

I like the way Lore works right now. If you're a young and inexperienced adventurer (and probably have lore at 75% or less), you don't have a good feel for what all those fancy items are about. However, any seasoned old veteran who has used the skill reasonably often can pull the "Ah. That sword looks like it was made by duergar... let me take a look at its edge...." angle.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

I'm not arguing that it doesn't work at high percentages.
What I was thinking is people usually have to lore multiple times to get an accurate idea of an item even at 100% anyway, and the stats that you can tell accurately for the most part can be actually calculated faster by doing rem/wear and checking score.
The few things you can't gauge by doing score are the things lore jumps around with, forcing you to check multiple times. I usually end up doing 5~10 depending on how 'random' my results are, often doing it a few more times to be sure instead of just pretty sure. And at 100% I've still lored a piece of gear 10 times, gotten the same stats 3 times to later find out the stat I'd gotten was wrong, so it's not exactly foolproof.

And the way it is now it is useless at 75%, giving a failure message instead of inaccurate stats would make it marginally useful even at that low percentage.
After you've been playing for a bit if you have a decent memory you know the critical stats for most pieces of common/useful gear by heart, you end up loring only once in a blue moon. And unless you spam practice lore it is useless in those rare situations where it would be nice to have it actually give you usable info even at 75.
I just thought a slight modification to lore would be in line with all the 'no spam practice' changes that have been going in recently.

Course... if you tell me I'm not RPing right by not using lore on a piece of armor before I know the stats...

well, yeah... okay.

I can think of a lot of situations where rem/wear would be a heck of a lot more complex then typing 'lore' once. If I'm wearing a whole bunch of stat enhancing gear, and I wear some more, chances are, score won't tell me a thing.

Lore isn't going to get better. Making lore better makes similar, more rare skills worse. Appraise loses it's fun, and identify as well.

Lore isn't changing, and the way it is, it's plenty useful.

any armor, weapon, can just be lored once. That will tell you the stat mods, flags etc with 100% accuracy.

>Lets face it, lore sucks.
I can't disagree with this more. I'd rate lore as one of a warriors critical must-have skills.

>I've tried using it with various races, and bards and gnomes,
>and even at 100% with a high int/wis it's not really reliable.
>You have to use it multiple times to even get a decent idea of
>the stats on a given item, and at low percentages the IDs jump
>all over the place making it pretty much useless.

Only certain stats jump around, weapon average being the most notable of those. Some stats are absolutely reliable and after loring something 3-5 times, I can usually tell you the exact stats.


>
>at 75% with a normal int/wis warrior I've lored 20 times and
>gotten a different result every single time.
>
Lore at 75% I do agree is mostly useless IMO it is only a stepping stone to get to 81% where lore starts having meaning to me

>How about giving em a small boost in success % and giving a
>message instead when it fails?
>Along the lines of 'You can't recall the properties of this
>particular xxx'
>
I'm okay with this part, but not if you increase the mana cost like you suggest below

>And increasing mana costs to make up for it? Maybe up to like
>100 or so that you can't spam it too much but it would still
>be marginally useful even unperfected?
>

So if I kill a mob with 6 pieces of gear, that means using all my mana and then some just to figure out what the things do? No thanks. Besides, lore is the only skill warriors can just hang out and spam. I have to have something to do when I don't feel like venturing out anywhere, and spamming lore makes that time feel semi-productive.

lore is very reliable and useful if used properly. The only thing that lore won't reliably id is average damage of a weapon. But you can get a fair idea of that using lore.

I can use lore reliably to work out any spell effects on an item (few repetitions and see what comes up regularly), any stat modifications including hp and mana etc (100% reliable), flags (100% reliable), armor (100% reliable), value etc.

What exactly is it that you can't use lore to find out? Weapon damage average is one. Anything else lore can do for you.