Just make timer based class defensive skills (think of transmuter skills or assassin's martial trance) - and let us go on about our business. Gear or preps that require intense area knowledge should really amount to 10% capability change or convenience - not 300%+ boost to effective hit points.

I know it's a touchy subject given how much effort there's been in keeping this system going for 15+ years or so but we're making this more complicated than it need be.

But lets say they changed the cooldown timers on ABS to 100 hours but you had them as a spell. (ex: you cast aura and it lasts 20 hours but is on cooldown for 100 after that 20). Would that be an effective system that you would want to use with your mages? Or would you want the current system that you could have up more but have to look for the wands? The answer for me is that I would rather be looking for wands.

I'd rather have the 100 hour timer. There are lots of other things to search for and obviously the timers should be "reasonable" within expectations of game balance but the point is that ABS is too strong and temporary to be tied to PVE given its role in PVP - in my opinion - from a "game fun" standpoint.

But your problem isn't the wand system. It's the one-sided cabal wars. Things change, over time.

Firstly, you are wrong about a Necro needing barrier to compete. I've done Drow Necro and you can stack on enough dam redux without it if needed, which often it isn't.

Wraith form protects from basic mithril. Now, you may point out that much mithril is wrath attack, but as a Necro you have access to resist positive too.

Secondly, with your zombies you can reach many limited wands with ease that others cannot.

Thirdly, if I remember correctly you seem to imply that you had barrier at level 36?

That's not just competitive, it is risk free mode much of the time.

Finally, there are edges that can help. Tired of taking damage when your sleep spell fails to put them to sleep? Take nightmares chilling call.

You still have access to aura, shield, wraith form, stone skin (with an edge to help resist the drawbacks of 2 common stone skin preps, that being cryptborn), desensitize, resist positive. You are impossible to permalag by solo foes, and high level zombies batter most people down fast plus you have summon to make many fights into solo ones.

As it stands, you are being told where to get sleek blacks and as a Necro your army means you can get nearly all locations without help.

Attachment #1, ( file) This attachment is no longer available.

"Firstly, you are wrong about a Necro needing barrier to compete."

The rational part of me says that if you're balanced without any ABS then you're broken with it. So either necromancers are drastically overpowered (in the context of ABS) or they're drastically under-powered in the hands of someone who isn't "in the know" about the current wand lists and locations. You can't argue that a guy with 300% bonus to EHP is on the same footing as a guy without that - that's a contradiction.

They use all protections besides barrier and barrier on top.

Basically if a Necro with barrier doesn't want to die, they won't. Meanwhile they have the sleep trump card to play much of the time.

I have a mage currently who's locations, as it turns out were really nice for my class abilities. They are gone now after collecting them in this new era of ABS. This did annoy me a bit but I have since collected the rods from a number of places and so far, so good.

I have also had the RNG shaft on the last 4 APs that I have played, having never found my blacks on any of them, and missing amber on 1 and sienna on one despite knowing 18 black, 20 amber and 23 sienna locations from previous mages I had played.

I feel your annoyance but you chose a class that has assemble zombie times constraints so that is neither her nor there in this complaint.

You are also at an advantage that you have a leadership spot in a cabal that means your frailty of hps is negated by despoil, so again not relevant.

It boils down to your annoyance of this current character having the rug pulled out from under her because you found your black and now it has moved.

This is one character, one time, think about how easy your next mage will be.

If you are an explorer like me and know 60-70% of the wand locations then surely you know a bunch of non-sleek barrier locations.

I can log in and almost every day get a non-sleek barrier source within 30 minutes.

1) You grabbed your existing Barrier spot. It was in an easier-than-average location, though not nearly the easiest. Now it's somewhere else, although you didn't stick around long enough to cause another one to reset. If it had been in a tougher area (as happens to lots of people), you might never have found it.

2) You got a hint about your Shield wand (in part because your Barrier wand wasn't available at the time), which you had never retrieved in your life. It's sitting where it was since level 30. The only difference is that you now have an area name and a physical description of who is carrying it. Given the area name, you can see it's in a mid-level area. You may not know where it is, but the area's helpfile tells you where its entrance is.

3) You've never found your Aura wand in your life, but you now have a hint waiting for you.

As you can see, we're logging and keeping an eye on how things play out. I don't think you're in a particularly rough situation, and with even token effort you might be ahead of where you were with Barrier and nothing else.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

have posted to bug board and prayed a few times about it (I am hoping I have not got to the annoying stage yet).

I've found one with a re-set error, I'll harass the coders to get it fixed ASAP.

I got that for a wand hint and have tried praying about it.

That one means that particular guildmaster will not offer you a hint for the location you have. Try someone else. IE someone who might not have a moral quandary about sending you off to assassinate someone they thing shouldn't die.

This occurs when:
1) You're a neutral mage.
2) The guildmaster is good-aligned.
3) The wand in question happens to involve killing a good-aligned mage for retrieval. (Good-aligned mages will never draw these spots.)

The dialogue has been updated so it is more obvious that the guildmaster doesn't trust you enough to help you out. In that case, you only get a very short hint timer.

You can avoid this by only asking neutral guildmasters (who have no such qualms), but you do retain the option to ask a good guildmaster and see if you'll get help. Most of the time you will-- in part because two of our six wand-using classes are evil-only, NPCs who hold wands tend to skew evil.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

nt

Out of curiosity, if it does become too tedious still to keep finding the wands, would you guys consider extending the timer to a day or week IRLbefore it resets? That would give mages a chance to find a wand, gather a few, and be set to go out and PK before things change up on them.

This could either be a rolling change (Change whether or not they found it), or continue to change only when you've found it, but just not *instantly*. This would probably quiet a lot of the complaints about having to find a new one every time, and would give time to find all three wands at some point - and for those uncaballed who don't have backup to help them get the uber-difficult, there's still light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe?

srsly

It adds another layer of complexity and I don't think it really solves anything that needs to be solved.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

But allow me to clarify just a bit, if I may...

1.) I didn't need Sienna or Amber. There are so many aura possibilities open to Necro's it's a non issue. The shield spell is basically exactly the same as 'Nether Protection', and for the 10 or so hours I can't use it because of the timer, I'm just without shield. It's so not an issue, I honestly didn't think about it when I was posting my original message. So the hints for these two locations were all but useless to me.

2.) The main point that I was making (which so many people just glossed over and decided to focus on zombies or whatever) is that I had already done 'the deed'. I had already played your wand search game. It took a lot of time, I died, I was ruthlessly hunted, blah, blah, blah. I went through it. And I came out on top. And so, to me, it was over and done with. I had my barrier spot (the only spot that mattered to me) and it was all good and gravy from there. Then, through no fault of my own, I was tossed back into the grind again. A neverending and gutwrenching grind that I was so sure I was done with. You griefed me bro. You griefed me real good. :'(

>2.) The main point that I was making (which so many people
>just glossed over and decided to focus on zombies or whatever)
>is that I had already done 'the deed'. I had already played
>your wand search game. It took a lot of time, I died, I was
>ruthlessly hunted, blah, blah, blah. I went through it. And I
>came out on top. And so, to me, it was over and done with. I
>had my barrier spot (the only spot that mattered to me) and it
>was all good and gravy from there.

And for each Eudessa that got a fairly easy spot for life, there was another character that got a fairly difficult spot for life. And some of both categories never found their spot, and had no way to know where to start looking.

The design goal wasn't to make a system that worked for Eudessa the necromancer at the expense of others. One design goal was to make a system that was equally fair to all mages.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

>If the change is supposed to be helpful to magi, then where
>exactly is the help? The only real difference is the hint
>system. But you are forgetting that even with these hints, you
>still have to both locate the one individual in the area with
>your wand, and also navigate a potentially super-dangerous
>area to get to it

Sure, but previously you were doing this without hints, albeit only once.

>So how about this. Let those characters who
>were around before the change keep their wand locations, and

Not really possible. Your pfile knows what your barrier location is; as soon as you got a barrier wand in the hints era, that location changed and there's no longer a record of people's previous locations.

"I cannot express just how much this change has crippled my character. To the extent that I almost fell over laughing in complete disbelief when the first wand I discussed with my guildmaster was in an area I had never even heard of."

Just imagine how bad it would have been if that was your original spot.

I'm not saying that the system is perfect. I'm just saying there were flaws in the old system. Now, as far as I'm aware this did not affect any of the other non-sleek locations. I'm sure any feedback is good with the new system. Going back to the old system is not really a good solution for "fixing" the new system. Even if it is just for you.

I am not sure how difficult that would even be coding timewise to do. But I would guess it would be substantial or impossible. I have not coded anything for a program since high school though so what do I know.

From what I've seen the hint timer is roughly 12 in game hours (6-7 RT minutes?). I'd suggest getting your hint on the nose while you are building your army until you have all three.

I know that the hints don't specify which wands it is for but having all three you can probably make an educated guess by the process of elimination or just by the hint itself as to which is the black rod.

Having shield and aura (along with other preps such as protection & stoneskin) should provide you with enough to at least survive while you are looking for the black.

Get the barrier attunement edge immediately. This way you have 2 options to find your barrier. You might get one that's easier than your CBL

There will be a learning curve for sure with the locations that you aren't familiar with. Use the helpfiles and wiki maps if it's an area you aren't familiar with to get you started. Eventually, you'll have seen most of the hints and will know which are for which wand and what exactly it takes to get it.

There will be tough times and easy times. I found 2 blacks, 1 amber and a sienna in an hour with a mage that wasn't in hero range recently so it can go fairly well. Just remember to keep farming your hints.

I know as a Scion you don't have a huge ally pool but there are always some you can at least hit up for information. I usually could find at least one person who'd rather be my friend that day instead of enemy, even if it was to get some info out of instead of traveling. Make use of Heralds and Nexuns!

Perhaps for AP's and Necro's, who tend to be heavily hunted, it might be a good idea to have evil mage mobs that can give hints.

Make these mobs summonable and possibly for high enough level characters make it so that some form of demand can work. Instead of bribing them they bully the info out of them. I could see that is legit evil mage RP to use fear as motivation to get what they want. This of course wouldn't work on guildmasters.

What about giving players the option at character creation for using the old system or new system?

Can't imagine it would be that tough to do. Either the slot number is always the same or it is random.

While I'm not exceptionally adverse to having a few more options of people to talk to, I can't imagine it would ever be allowed for these NPCs to be summonable. Even the basic cities are spread out throughout the land, no need to hide your favorite mob inside your cabal or in some hidden corner no-one can find you.

Secondly, you *ARE* aware that evil PCs *can* ask neutral guildmasters for hints, correct? Neutral can ask any alignment, etc. Just anyone asking an evil NPC has to bribe said NPC.

As far as being able to bully information out of other NPCs...I feel like if the NPC is low enough level that you can bully them, they probably don't have enough resources to know where sleek wands are.

As a final note, keep in mind that there are *very* few reasons mechanically to choose good over evil. I personally really have no complaint about the concept that a Scion necromancer (who may one day become undead as well) actually has it hard because everyone wants to kill them. You have such a power ceiling it's almost ridiculous.

(Also, for the record, the only mortal I've played since I became an Immortal was an uncaballed dark-elf necromancer who chose the frail edge. He never found a single one of his sleeks, and did just fine. Just don't plan on taking on berserkers or groups of 3-4 head-on.)

And, yes, I *AM* aware that evil PC's can ask neutral guildmasters for hints.

It was just an idea I had to throw out in response to some of Eudessa's troubles.

I've never played necro. I have played AP and have hunted both heavily. I do know they have a ton of enemies and I have been of both sides of the frustrations of being over hunted by nearly everyone in the mud. It was in sympathizing to this frustration that I came up with the idea. It isn't so ridiculous to suggest an idea that allows them to avoid heavily traveled areas like cities.

Maybe they don't need to be summonable, although, I don't see why not. It's just a hint you are after. And if you can gain a black rod at level 35, why can't a 35 level mob give you a hint for one? Taking that one step further, why can't a level 51 AP bully a level 35 mob for a hint?

Isn't part of the idea behind this change is to make the wand system more friendly to players of all skill level? Just because you can play a frail drow necro with no issues doesn't mean everyone else can, with the original post of this thread as proof of that.

Surely you haven't overlooked that the old system enabled people willing to replay until they got an easy wand set a significant advantage?

Better that that isn't an option, especially given that ranking up repeatedly is much easier for those abusing ooc connections.

Also barrier on necros and aps gives risk free chances to pk almost anyone. It's not a right to have it 24-7. Learn to compete without it.

Having said that, I wouldn't mind seeing cabals give dam redux of 5 percent for each excess raider (relative to number of defenders) so that defenders facing a massive gank have more free redux and a chance of survival.

To your other post my suggestion wasn't really aimed at addressing how easy it is for a necro to kill a mob. It had more to do having entire pk ranges gunning for you.

Is your comment about the old system aimed at my suggestion to let characters choose the system at character creation? It did occur to me that there are players that do this. I have no idea how many do it but with the number of people bitching about hard spots or not being able to find their wands in the old system it certainly isn't everyone that's doing it. To me it sounds like an awful waste of time to repeatedly throw away 50 hours ranking up and finding wands but for those masochistic enough to do it, yes they would have an advantage under the old system.

As for the comment about barrier not being a right to have 24-7 I don't even know what to say to that. Eudessa clearly felt like she did need barrier to compete. Not everyone wants to play the game on death incarnate mode. Nothing I suggested guarantees anyone barrier 24-7. That would be giving them the barrier spell.

As I said before. They were just ideas for discussing.

EDIT: it occurred to me. Do you think I was suggesting that mobs with wands be summonable? If so that is definitely not it.

>To your other post my suggestion wasn't really aimed at
>addressing how easy it is for a necro to kill a mob. It had
>more to do having entire pk ranges gunning for you.
>

Yeah. I've been there. In some ways, I like it. What I don't like is when a group of five raids you when you're on your own, so you are under some rp obligation to defend. I'd like to see something in place to encourage people to raid before it is certain death for the defender if they show. Something like dam redux for defenders = (# of attackers - # of defenders) x 5%

>Is your comment about the old system aimed at my suggestion to
>let characters choose the system at character creation? It did
>occur to me that there are players that do this. I have no
>idea how many do it but with the number of people bitching
>about hard spots or not being able to find their wands in the
>old system it certainly isn't everyone that's doing it. To me
>it sounds like an awful waste of time to repeatedly throw away
>50 hours ranking up and finding wands but for those
>masochistic enough to do it, yes they would have an advantage
>under the old system.
>

It's not uncommon, and once someone gets an easy barrier they have a big impact. Bit like how shifters often reroll for certain forms.

>As for the comment about barrier not being a right to have
>24-7 I don't even know what to say to that. Eudessa clearly
>felt like she did need barrier to compete. Not everyone wants
>to play the game on death incarnate mode. Nothing I suggested
>guarantees anyone barrier 24-7. That would be giving them the
>barrier spell.
>

HAving said that, there are plenty of logs of Eudessa killing people without barrier. People shouldn't expect to have it whenever they want it. Also, necro is easy to gather limited wands with.

>As I said before. They were just ideas for discussing.
>
>EDIT: it occurred to me. Do you think I was suggesting that
>mobs with wands be summonable? If so that is definitely not
>it.

No. I thought you were suggesting letting people summon the hint givers.

Than ap.

Much more easily. Necros are actually good at getting gear and wands.

A wand hint wouldn't be too out of keeping with what demand can achieve

This new system will be harder for some people and it will be easier for others. It will take a couple of months to really gauge the impact in the field so I recommend you exercise patience. The amount of times the wand system has gone through change control is high so we can be confident that the admin is actively monitoring and brainstorming and that change cycles will come (unlike the fabled shaman revamp we heard about for a decade)

In the meantime you have the same option today in terms of how to deal with not having access to sleeks as you did a month ago. Use uniques or change your play style to succeed with less dam redux. There have been plenty of people who have found success without having all their sleeks on a stick.