New concept: "Wielding" lags

[Davairus]

Sorry for the delay, I was uh.. busy..


I've got the helpfiles up for these skills now. There's a couple things I'll mention besides that.

1) quick wields... you're not going to experience a skill increase just yet, because skill wasn't tied in. I seem to have forgotten about that in the coding somehow. Basically, the quick wield skill is supposed to get better from improving in it, so you're currently using the 100% version of quick wield. I guess I will get around to fixing that sometime this weekend.

2) wild smash / berserker rage in general. There is a void (or two) in berserker gameplay. One of the most obvious "old" voids is the rescue w/ autoassist off problem, which makes easy meat of berserkers. Then the "new" void is their lack of affinity for switching weapons - besides the neat trick of going from shield block to dual wield by raging, berserkers dont switch weapons well. Nothing like double grip or quick wield for them, and there won't be. Wild smash fills both of those voids, and from what I'm seeing so far, its doing that fine. I'm really looking forward to seeing if the function of wild smash is going to help the rampage situation,btw.

3) throw is a bit of a problem, in retrospect we might have been wrong to give berserkers that. Mainly when rangers were changed I was thinking it such an interesting skill and a shame to see it leave the game, so there it is on berserkers instead. Bit too easy for berserkers being able to just throw their weapons like that, we need people to be able to counter rage damage bonus with advantages and ummm.. well, that's that. Its not right that they can get out of the applied counter. So that'll get some treatment but it wont be in the form of lagless switches (ho ho).

[Davairus]

Harm spells (causes and 'harm") damage are now partly int-based. You'll have to go drow shaman for the best harm.

[ryokan]

freakin excellent, i was reading some forum *files just a day ago that were really helpfull about bad combos for race/class and this should help those out plus having high Int gives you a better natural save vs. spells so it makes something.

* http://abandonedrealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3347

[Slade]

Int doesn't give you higher save vs. anything, and that thread is a bit outdated.

[Davairus]

Well harm doesnt have a save either. I'm sure we'll agree the legitmacy of a strong harm is felt better when it comes from the race that definitely needs it - fire and duerg both have great fighting stats (even vulns rewarded easily in solo equipment gathering advantage), and we know the score with humans.

Also: added some minor hp loss to rend life spellcasting. It won't seem significant - but its enough to wipe off the regen gained from the tick. So its got a bite, but the class retains its explosive damage and is affected in the long drawn out fights,which as we've said, an acid blast/zombies type necromancer is better suited for.

I've made these changes sooner than planned because I noticed the wield lag change sent certain people scuttling for the next obscure "cheese", and instead of that might as well nip it in the bud now. Game is pretty balanced right now, if everything has worked out. But there's some moreodds and ends to take care of. I apologise if it looks reactionary but I assure you that its been planned a long time and I'd rather just take care of it before we end up posting in graveyards that someone was a cheapass. Also I took an enforced break from doing anything from a bit, due to some problems accessing wolfpaw's server.. so thats why nothing has been happening for a while.

[Davairus]

No longer able to wear shields without shield block. Its mostly the mage classes that account for this absurdity, but anyway - what'd happen is mages would wear shields for their offensive bonuses. The exemplary case is a rend life necro wearing a 50 hp 5/5 ac-granting justice shield, which clearly defies common sense. Other examples would be the use of "shield of defense" to proc shield/armor and get hp. Or uber-illusioinsts wearing warshields on top of stoneskin, armor, blur, etc. So that's now out of the equation.

Also I've been evaluating recently-added items held in the off-hand for offensive bonuses - which is fine to an extent, but I want to make sure that, for instance, when a rogue decides to go counterbalance, his main-hand damage isn't going to be able to get boosted very much considering that its supposed to be a defensive posture. Similarly a rend life necro benefits easily from those sort of items, not a HUGE deal, but certainly I'm evaluating how easy those things are to get compared with their rewards, and especially whether they've displaced other rare items that existed before them.

[Davairus]

Some more odds-and-ends that are bit overdue and related, I don't really have a category to throw these into other than just "maintenance".

Rage
* no more quaffing potions while raged
* throwing a weapon will throw it into an adjacent room

Magical items
* hysteria now increases likelihoods of failing quaff, recite, brandish (they have to fail a save, again, but its much more likely than landing hysteria spell) ...may become a useful spell to throw on people who're trying to just no-saves/gyvel ftw your new harm-nerfed shaman
(this is in addition to the difficulty of quaffing potions in combat, so if you have hysteria on top then you know its not worth trying it.)

Items
* pets no longer will hold rare item
* ghosts may remove/drop cursed items

The gist of things here is that its some new drawbacks to rage, which owns even more now due to the wield laggys, and besides that just more wayyyyy overdue odds-and-ends I forgot last time also.

[Grayden]

so... can you "snipe" somone in the next room with a throw command? Will you ever incorperate a longshot with the bow? For example I scan all, and see you in the next room. command "snipe you" and you get an arrow has struck you from the west. This would be fun with the new wielding lag.

Grayden Grim of the Bloody Fields of Flesh

[Grayden]

Sorry I cannot edit in this forum.

After thoughts
- no shooting into no escape rooms. Maybe some message like, "That shoot is too compex for you, or something.
- people should yell, "So and so hit me with an arrow from the East!"

If sleeping
-You are awaken to the burning pain of an arrow. (being sniped while sleeping should wake you up)

[Faelon]

I know this response is a little late, but here goes;

[Davairus]

We talked about the snipe command sort of thing, basically exactly how you described it Grayden. You have to remember that the AR Imms have mudded on more than one place, and actually more than three for the oldest Imms. So we've already seen this sort of thing implemented and, to be frank, we know it just opens up all sorts of cheese and abuse.. how does soloing 20,000 hp mobs at level 15, for 2500 exp sound? Yep, it worked. You'd have a major headache trying to cover all the potential abuses.

As an aside, one of the things I've seen/heard of on muds that I really liked (though unlikely to ever materialize on AR) was the outright removal of the "flee" command. You could just walk right out of a fight any time you wanted. None of this spamming six flees trying to guess where you went and scrambling away. Your opponent could just walk right back in afterward, and he'd still be in fighting with you. It is interesting. Spells like "slow" from illusionist would of course be how to keep people close, as well as the hobble-like affects.

There's a million ideas out there that are great but on AR they don't work.


As for overhead, I'm sorry but double-disarm + lag is awesome, and with a 1 round windup is all it takes, you can EASILY slip it in after a miss dirt, or whatever. It can also still be used on people sleeping. And disarm is no longer on the "unused skill" list, unless you guys don't like lagging people with wield triggers. God, that could be sick you know. Imagine shield disarming some warrior and causing them to doublegrip. Sick.

[Faelon]

True, however, I worry about the fact that if missed you are a sitting duck. Everything has its downfalls, to be sure, I just see it as a hell of a downfall. Still I may be wrong, I haven't in fact played with it as much as Id have liked. So I suppose I will see what I see and take your suggestions on how to use it.

[Grayden]

Maybe snipe could work as a pk only, or make it work like assassinate skill dose on mobs. If a mob was hurt, or one of thoes you cannot assassinate, you would get a message that the mob is too aware or something. Pk only would probably be the easiest.

Grayden Grim of the Bloody Fields of Flesh

[Davairus]

That's precisely why overhead is able to remain as strong as it has - because it does also have the potential to go wrong. If you want to see the way a fairly risk-free skill would be implemented, take a look at kick or something. I don't think screwing up an overhead is going to kill a warrior outright though. Despite the risk, a well-placed overhead is devastating.

Think about this... haven't warriors and thiefs spent years trying to dirt and missing frequently, because of how good it has been? Its a buff skill. Look at shamans that still spam blindness against saves, doing absolutely nothing every single fail.

So whats different here? Well, with overhead, its NOT "sustained" effort that makes it work, its the "situation" that affects the outcome. This means the chances are, if you can wait/create the opening first, and employ a bit of care, you'll nearly always nail it without problems. This is different to the other skills you have experienced.

The sustained vs situational problem is something very important to the pk balancing of a mud. If you look at 1998 AR warriors, it was sustained effort required to get equipment, sustained spam skills to 100%, sustained dirt spamming to get one, sustained spam bash to win when a chain of them finally lands... basically its fun for mindless powergaming but kinda garbage to be serious, everything just boils down to who logged the most hours in Winter, and after that its chance and/or how well the two fighters pair off against each other. It has a place in the game, obviously, and we don't want "twitch" to count for too much either, with players connecting to our PVP game from places like australia and estonia, against pip on scripts (or maybe meth) in the US. We want the game to be competitive for all people that want to play, and we have a world audience. But situational skills are always going to where its at for pvp logs worth actually reading. We have no intention of making those go away, so the obvious solution is, slow things down a tad, to balance the extreme difference in connection speed and reaction times.

To counter-point further, would you like to see the lag upon the summoner go away? How about a necro just summons and sleeps you before you have chance to read what happened and move. Most of the time, even with 1 round lag, that works because you were busy while he was focused. Same deal with overhead.

http://www.invokation.net/logs/view.php?id=2854
^ This was an absolutely wonderful log and a working overhead is in there.

[pip]

or it could be my state championship keyboarding fingers along side a genius brain. it's a dangerous duo to mess with this guy, even you should know that davairus

[Faelon]

I think maybe you posted this in the wrong spot pip.

[pip]

[Faelon]

Hah! Didn't even read it all the way through. Heh.

[Davairus]

[Davairus]

Goofed - flying vs flying murder was supposed to be 1 round. Sigh.. anyway, there's enough disadvantages to dissuade a warrior from flying, plus a mage can dispel the fly on top of that. So that should have been left that way. Sorry for the confusion.