Throttle and Garotte, Shadowmask and Shadowcloak

[Molly]

While you are going through the skills and spells, why not revive the old thief skills throttle and garotte? They were subskills, not skills, and it took a long and hard quest to get them. Throttle required that instead of your normal weapon you had to wield a garotte, which could only be bought in the Fenizia weapon shop if you'd done the quest.

For some reason they were disabled. Most likely garotte was overpowered, but why not balance them instead of disabling them totally? We want 4D to be unique, so why not use the things that are unique and directly integrated in the zones?

These subskills could be changed into normal skills, which of course means that the questscript would have to be changed a bit in the appropriate places, but the quest itself would have some meaning again.

Two other thief skills were planned but never implemented, shadowmask and shadowcloak.
Shadowmask would mask the identity of the player in the room, so that the long and short desc would say 'a masked figure' instead of the player name.
Shadowcloak would do the same with the who-list, so that it would display 'a cloaked figure' instead of the name. It would also not display the player's equipment when looked upon.

There were some issues with those two skills, since they could potentially be abused, but personally I thought they were cool and perfect for PK.

[Prometheus]

Not sure why Garrote and Throttle were removed. I could take a look and see why. As for the other skills are these going to be subskills as well? They seem pretty powerful. Not sure we want those skills to be vanilla skills?

Prometheus

[Molly]

The reason why they are subskills is that at that time the code didn't allow more than 200 skills and spells totally, and that quota was filled. That's why all subskills were created.

We no longer have that problem. Of course the questscript checks for subskills, not skills, but that cam be changed I suppose.

Garotte was a bit too powerful, I hear that it sometimes would mean insta-kill.
Still, they could have been nerfed, not removed totally.

[Jaros]

It never meant insta-kill.  If everything worked it would mean a kill after about 7-10seconds, which was very rare even with garrotte and throttle maxed.  More likely was that a check would fail about halfway through and the target would be freed to fight back while you were left swapping your garrotte for a melee weapon as fast as you could.

Mask and cloak sound great.  They should be available for more than just thieves though.  So should garrotte.  Also I'm pretty sure poison_weapon hasn't worked in years.  (I always check these things and then forget.)

[Kvetch]

Check them, then bug report the things that don't work.  Then send a note to Bane and Thotter so one of them will possibly look into it since they don't check the bug file, but if you don't then maybe Prom will, or Once could if you mention it to him or post it on here... whew...

So... after all that... report it and good luck!

[Molly]

What irritates me a bit is that all those skills - poison weapon, throttle, garotte, mask and cloak, were created specifically for Fenizia, and the entire zone with its numerous quests was built around them. When they were disabled, it also made the zone more or less worthless, and that saddens me, because I put a lot of work into it.

I would really appreciate if those skills were brought back to life again, since now I feel like my work went down the drain.

I think they should be reserved for thieves however, especially if we want the classes to be different. All of them are typical thief/assassin skills.

[Once]

Talk to me about that tomorrow. Should be straightforward to get them back in.

[Prometheus]

People need to use bug since I do look at that. Not typo so much but others tend to move things that are bugs from typo into bug report.

Since Once is going to look at this I won't do it so we won't step on each others toes.

Prometheus