Well, spell resistances have been completed. I decided against fixing the other things for now.
Hurray!
Ok back to the issues.
In the addaffect list we have the following affects to put on equipment:
20) Paralize Defence
21) Rod Defence
22) Petrify Defence
23) Breath Defence
24) Spell Defence
They exist in OLC, and they also have been set on quite a lot of pieces of equipment in the game.
Yeah, well so far whenever I see an item give one of these, I take a step back, because:
1. They are pretty uncommon to see.
2. They are on items that otherwise suck monkey nuts.
3. They are pretty vague, -5 spell defence?
Is -5 meaning I take less, or more? Does it even work? Is it 5% less damage or 5% chance to avoid? Just 5
points of damage less??
And even if it does work, and I crawl dozens of zones to find such uncommon items, because they are on such sucky equip otherwise my damroll will now be through the floor anyway, making the whole exercise pointless for anything other than PK. There instead Ill just take slightly longer to die anyway.
Putting more items with these bonuses in, will not help a mobs lack of spell defence either.
Which brings me to the second point: Caster equipment being too easy to get, no questing needed.
This is probably true, since int, wiz and cha were never cherished by the players at the time when we made most of the quests. Hit- and damroll was all they cared for, and so the player preferences have partly decided the stats of the high profile quest equipment.
Now I'd be perfectly willing to make some caster equipment as Quest prices, even if it means creating new quests in existing zones. That's what we are doing all the time in the old zones that we update, and a fact is that we often have trouble thinking of good quest rewards that would not spiral the stats on everything.
So that's not the main problem here, instead the problem is that the existing caster equip would have to be nerfed, before we could put the quests into action.
Which means balancing, plus a mass change - which is coder work, not builder.
And which would affect all casters in the game.
Scarily, I think youre seeing the point I'm trying to make.
Right now, you could remove int, dex, con, wis, and maybe even strength, and
you would lose nothing in terms of gameplay.
Everyone maxes these stats as a matter of course, leaving interest in just damroll, and charisma. They cap far too easily to leave anyone a decision on what equip to use, or what kind of strengths and weaknesses their char might have. Character growth in this respect is entirely one dimensional.
And for spellcasters it is much worse. As Toch already said, all the good quest stuff is melee centric. Why? this kinda thing is why:
(2 steps from Yorke square, is a newbie jewellery shop, with)
an emerald ring is a type of treasure made from base-material
It can be taken and worn on TAKE FINGER
Its weight is 1 and its valued at 4000 coins.
If worn it will give you --
5 to your Charisma
Plus five. And there are lots of other such high char items around the mud, easily available even to the bad explorers like me, which give +5 or greater. When you have over 20 item slots to wear things, it is pretty straightforward for everyone to easily reach 100 charisma.
Now, If I'm a builder. I want people to do my quests. If spellcasters already have 100 cha easily already, then im not going to put in items that give even more charisma than existing equip am I? Even if I am allowed to break the item stat rules, its not worth bothering: a +6 or +7 charisma ring isnt any use if you are maxed already.
So everyone keeps giving melee items as rewards. Or items that give permament spells and so on.
The problem here was having charisma, a stat that was considered weak and so given easily available + items without concern, an irrational increase to your spells power without then rebalancing all the items that increase it.
As of now it seems PK skills play a lesser role in a fight now-a-days because fights are over so quickly. Damage has gotten to the point where a encircle can do 500-2000k damage and a spell can do over 5k. We either need to significantly lower damage for PK or significantly increase hp.
...
Now on class interdependency. I.E. getting rid of woodsing. Why in gods name would you want to get rid of the only class interdependency we have. For an obvious example of why interaction between players is a great thing look at our pbase. I wish I had a chart to show it but ever since we put grouping back to normal, the pbase has skyrocketed from what it was before.
Now for my rant- Skill trees suck. Fix the basics first.
That's all for the rant
Well, if you reduce damage much you will need to adjust the HP of mobs, so I would
guess that changing the players HP is going to be a bit easiler from that viewpoint.
Id get rid of gypsys having woodsing and tinker exactly
because they are not promoting class interdependency. An ability that is utilised by logging on, tinkering a few items or singing to a few trees for half an hour, then giving your produce to another char and logging off is the worst kind of way to do it. If i want to be useful, I want to be online, in a group interacting with others; not a pet I log on once a month to give you a staff.
Cannot say whether skill trees suck or not yet, but yes, the very basic things at the core of the game: char stats, damage, unique strengths of each class are the reason people want to xp, quest and so on, to improve their chars and make them feel valued/effective. See my previous post.
Overall focuses don't need much work right now because with new skills/spells and new equipment with spell defense, we don't know how that'll help defending against spell damage. So until all that happens the quickest fix is to just lower the multi's of majors to be 150 percent of minor staves multi as opposed to 200 percent.
Also eliminating the charisma cap, and making charisma have less of an affect on damage boost.
But using the ungeared melee person, casters just because gear is easily attainble, casters are better, but an equally geared melee they are about equal. That's just my point of view.
Well, +50% is still a huge boost, I was thinking more +20% at most...
An even better solution to increasing the charisma cap: Just stop it affecting spellpower at all. Why does being a good conversationalist, or pretty, or empathetic, make you better at casting a magic fireball again?
Equal on paper maybe, but as has been said before spells are alot less resisted than melee... though with the latest change that may be less so.
I suppose this all comes down to how brave the imms are willing to be in making changes. I've not been back long, but I see
alot of familiar faces around. Are you making changes to please old codgers like us, or that will interest and draw in new people?
Is tinkering (hoho) with such things really going to have the effect you want, or are you willing to risk losing some people with changes they dislike to really make the improvements needed?
I'm always willing to give suggestions, if asked.
Brit.