real artifacts

[horus]

I was thinking, the current artifacts in the game are slightly weaker than quest items - I wont discuss the reasons why this is the case. What I would like to see is true artifacts, true items made by the gods, with real powers and real curses. Not powers like more stats, or more damage, but something more useful.

Here are some of my examples of their powers/curses (I will leave their stats out)

Soul Whip of Hades
Power: 10% of all damage heals the wielder (yes yes, the old vampiric system gets resurrected)
Curse: The whip must be fed at least once every 30mins or its powers fade irrevocably, until it dies out.

Death Mask of Set
Power: When a normal death blow is dealt to the wearer, the Mask intercepts that blow and delivers sanctuary to the wearer. This can happen once per week.
Curse: Any mortal that touches anything made by Set will cause their health to drain constantly, similar to a poison type 1.

The Sun Sword of Ra
Power: A flaming hot lava blast erupts to all those that gets hit by this sword, dealing an extra 6d6 damage that cannot be healed magically.
Curse: Because of the heat of the blasts, the wielder's hands become moulded to the sword. This means, the wielder cannot grab any other item, nor can they use them (ie. no hold item, no dual wield, no light, and cannot use potions/wands/scrolls)

These are just some examples, if you have others, by all means, suggest them. Also, because these are true artifacts, they cannot be dropped or passed on.

[Molly]

Okay, I'll bite; here are some more ideas, (some of those actually exist in the game):

Scourge of Tisiphone
Power: The serpent thongs paralyze the victim with their venom
Curse: Occasionally a snake turns on the wielder, biting him instead

Midas Touch
Power: Turns everything the wearer touches into gold (nuggets and coins alternately)
Curse: 'Everything' really means EVERYTHING. Including food, drink, weapons and armour. The only way to get rid of the curse is to junk the item.

Sandals Of Hermes
Power: increases speed considerably and reduces normally recquired movepoints by half when worn
Curse: Sometimes unexpectedly takes flight, teleporting the wearer to random locations

Head of Medusa, mounted on the Shield of Perseus
Power: Blinds everyone who looks at it  (actually it's supposed to turn you into stone, but that might be a bit hard to handle). Also the head has hair instead of snakes, which could poison the opponent everytime a blow is blocked with the shield.
Curse: Everyone of course literally means everyone. 
(And it means that the code would need to get fixed so that you actually can look at objects worn or wielded by others).

Evil Axe
Power: Unusually high damage, for instance 13x13 + 2hit and 2dam as addaffect
Curse: Causes the user to believe that his leg is a tree trunk, so he sometimes tries to chop it off, causing 30% hp damage and constant bleeding

Also Horus suggested the following 'cool' curse that he forgot to post himself:
Curse: Changes any command the wearer types randomly.
   

[Tocharaeh]

Scourge of The Destroyer (creation of Lolth):
Power: Call upon random vermin to attack the mob in question (during combat)
Curse: Mana by 10% every time it's not in battle until you've reached below 30% of your normal amount and then it will vanish
          but not before summoning a giant icky insect of nastiness to attack you on the spot.

Pretty please?!

[horus]

Great ideas, keep them coming. Bear in mind, these artifacts are so powerful, that a wearer can only have one, and can never have that item leave the wearer voluntarily.

So the powers has to be unique, and the curses have to be as powerful to counterbalance it.

[Virisin]

I dunno if there'd ever be a way of making that Midas Touch not easily abused, Molly. Otherwise these are cool, I never liked the fact that artifacts were nerfed and timered and removed from the economy.

[Prometheus]

Horus could probably add in another type of object which isn't timered to get around that issue.

Prometheus

[Xeriuth]

A place I played at for a short time had artifacts that were powerful items. You could only have one, but to keep it you had to use it a lot to make it happy. If you didn't do a lot of killing and sat around or didnt log in often, it'd leave you and go to some random mob in the game. At any time you could type artifact list, or something along those lines and see where or who currently had the artifact. Idea had merit.

[Virisin]

That idea does actually have merit, sounds quite nifty.

[Kvetch]

I like the idea of items you have to use - makes it so people have to leave recall.  Always looking for ways to make recall empty.  But, having said that - do we really want to get spammed by an item that's going "I'm hungry... I'm going to leave soon if you don't feed me.."  So at recall the owner of said item is going "great discussion, but I gotta go feed my weapon before it kills me instead of a mob".

*shrug*

Sounds almost like the hunger/thirst message that everyone goes nobat to avoid because it pops up so frequently.

[Xeriuth]

Item wouldn't kill you, it'd just poof away and be ready for someone else to take it.

[Virisin]

Bringing up artifacts again, can normal artifacts please be changed back to being untimered but extremely rare? I think we're doing away with maxloads now, and that was the only reason they were made timered in the first place but basically all it did was stop anyone bothering to sell artifacts.. And though people seem to have some artifacts now, it's just about 4 or 5 artifacts that seem to constantly load that everyone has.

I think we can have normal artifacts as well as god items as Horus suggests, seeing as they're fairly different.

[Virisin]

Also on normal artifacts if they do get changed back to being untimered and rarer, I think it'd be cool if Molly were to relocate artifacts if there were to be a pwipe. It'd be another good way of equalizing people without resetting quest knowledge, artifacts are only hard to find because of their rarity, none of them are really on hard to find mobs. I think it'd be awesome if after a pwipe everyone was racing to find artifacts for themselves and hide the knowledge. Everyone knows where all artifacts are these days and it's silly.

[Kvetch]

Not everyone.  *peers around*  I'm an IMM and I don't even know where the arti's are.  I just know that they keep spamming my syslog with not being able to load.    But.. every once in a while one gets in and.. wowzer!  It's like I"m stunned for the next hour.

[Virisin]

Well, most people know where all the artifacts load these days.

I think it'd be another nice way to revive the mud without having to change all the quests or anything. It's not like most of the artifacts are really special items.. 'The bloody teeth of a vampire' is just a random item that happens to be an artifact and so get's pretty good stats. Other's like 'The golden horns of the sun-oxen' are pretty self-explanatory in their whereabouts, but it's not like they're a really special item other than being artifact anyway. It'd be pretty easy to just make them normal items and make a new bunch of artifacts on a different set of random mobs.