Don't think this is the skill for rangers. Agree they need something more, but let's not water down gypsy eh?

This is the first step towards making poison more interesting and introducing other variety to combat. Just voice your concerns and bare with us as we add new things.

Poisons now drain mana and move a lot faster depending on the type of poison. This will make poison an interesting weapon against casters. Look forward to more!

The way to look at Staves is based on their elemental multi, not just the 2.15. You still won't see a lot beyond 2.15, but the elemental multis mean they can be more powerful than the elephant pike in an elemental situation. I made an update to the elemental multis to create a higher base elemental bonus too. Do a bit of woodsinging after the next copyover and let me know what you think.

What you need is a stat system that doesn't just prize damroll as the be all end all stat. That's the fundamental problem. Everyone one ups the other's gear because the only stat that they can one up with is damroll. Tweaking VE, Punt, etc is really just like treating the symptoms and not the cause.

It's hard to lose cool points you never had.

Fucking copycats.

The key question to answer here is how many vnums off are the logs from where they're supposed to be. Once you have that you just fix the offset.

If you want an easier way to level, choose a different class. If you want to be a commerce king and be able to sell things to or help your fellow players, Gypsy is still the way to go. Why would a class that gets tinker and woodsing, two of the best skills in the game for improving others damage also be a competitively powerful combat class? It just doesn't make sense.

Gypsy is still playable, it's just a little bit more work to play them. Not the end of the world. If you don't feel like the benefits you get from Gypsy are worth the loss of dodge, simply remort or petition for a class change. This wasn't simply a nerf, it was a rebalancing with both good and bad. Dodge should not come back in. The HP bonuses were too high for gypsy. That's why half the mud were actually gypsies.

We're also working on other classes while doing this. Ranger and Warrior have both been tweaked in positive ways. Ranger is more competitive than it used to be. There will be some other tree based skills for them shortly but in terms of actual combat they're more playable. Re-balancing may be painful, but it's essential to making a game that's equal fun to play and that isn't primarily made up of Gypsies and Priests.

Code:

struct weapon_type_data {
int hands;
int speedtop;
int speedbot;
int evasiontop;
int evasionbot;
int accuracytop;
int accuracybot;
int balance;
const char *name;
};

In sequential order.

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

That's exactly what happened. It's meant to be a stop gap from hardcore wimpying.

This feature is now in and live. Enjoy.

[ordinary]

From the previous thread:

Doesn't look like I'll be able to get to that tonight, but the good news is we now have working elemental focuses.  Fire focuses can cast fire spells with more power than a normal focus (but are standard issue for other elements).

Sounds great!
Of course, what Zsijn is talking about is the ordinary trees that you trade to the lumbermill, not the magic ones that you make staffs from.
But I suppose a certain  number of the ordinary trees turn into magic ones, so the loading percentage should be about equal for both kinds?

I am also not sure that I quite got the part about the elemental focuses.
How do you assign the fire focus to them? Do a certain percentage of all the staffs get it, or is it based on what kind of tree the staff was made from?
Will other focuses get elemental ice or water to counteract the fire spells?

I'd also appreciate some ideas on which trees should give which elemental modifiers. Please limit it to one modifier per tree.

Like I said, there are 50 different kinds of trees, and some of them are a lot more common than others, which I suppose should influence the value of the modifier.
I could post a list of the trees, but that is not much use without the percentage load.

Which elemental modifiers are available?
Are all the available spells sorted under any of the elements fire, water, air, earth?

Also, like Jaros pointed out, the age of the trees should make a difference to the factor - as well as the level of the players woodsing skill.

I'll break this down into question by question:

How do you assign the fire focus to them? Do a certain percentage of all the staffs get it, or is it based on what kind of tree the staff was made from?
Will other focuses get elemental ice or water to counteract the fire spells?

It'll be dependant upon the type of wood. Check "help trees" for a list of magic trees. These I've found out are actually completely different from what are used for lumberjacking. Only about 8 elements in total will get elemental staves: Fire, Ice, Electric, Water, Earth, Air (the newbie element, will make quite nice staves), Spirit, and Death.

When casting within that element of your stave you will get a bonus multi based on:  The age of the tree, the skill of the woodsinger, the reagents you used when singing (gathered via crafting), and refinements made to the staff itself.


Which elemental modifiers are available?
Are all the available spells sorted under any of the elements fire, water, air, earth?

Essentially any damage spells and any spells currently modified by staves such as Battle Rage, etc will get a benefit if you're using a stave of the appropriate element. This lets you focus on being a specific type of mage. We're currently lacking a lot of the types of spells that do receive bonuses from focusing on an element but I think with time and a little work on Graham's part we could actually see that being part of the gameplay content.


The long term goal here is to make this part of a crafting system and as such these sorts of stave settings will NOT be available to builders. Doing so just encourages yet another arms race as we've seen with damroll, innates, etc for every new zone that comes in. Every single zone will try to push things just a little bit further thereby creating additional balance problems. The Pike is a good instance of this. It's essential that as we build out this feature we focus on how we make crafting more usable by players, how we create a player market, and how we make focusing on a specific element a core piece of gameplay.

Gonna create a new thread for this and reply to your topic so we don't get too off track with the lumber stuff. I suggest you get Thotter to write you a fancy little lisp script to calculate your tree loading rates for lumberjacking.