Adrenaline update.. pertinent to thieves, rangers, ninjas

[Davairus]

The new mechanic for adrenaline is this:

- aggressive adrenaline will last for 40 seconds, which is refreshed to 40 seconds by being sighted with "where" or "where PK' commands.
- defensive adrenaline will last for 5 minutes. Same "where pk" refresh issue.


I've made a change to adrenaline because I think the mechanic is definitely not fun.. and I mean by that, no fun to the point that you wouldn't want to play the class and have to deal with it. The main problem before previous atomic-bomb nerf had been "rambo thieves" that were able to rampage because they can just flee/hide, and another issue with them was the spammed blackjack. Fixing the rambo thief problem obviously has worked.. there hasn't been a good thief in years, although a few ninjas have done well (this is basically because ninjas are better in combat with blindness dust).. this siad, flee/hide is reliable enough in dark rooms to keep doing this, so presumably thieves just have some other issues. (Maybe not knowing about using dark rooms to hide. Maybe that itself is an issue, since it isn't in a helpfile. Its a burden of knowledge that doesn't feel fair to players since whoever saw the code or read this post would now know that trying to hide in a darkened room increases their success chances.)

The spammed blackjack fix will not be reverted, regardless of what I change, because of the way its mechanics work. It is a good fix and whatever I mess with will not do much to alter this code in anyway. It will however, help to eliminate common cases where the blackjack chance is less than 15%. That seems like taking a shit on the player at that point.

A related matter to this: I have put the aggressive adrenaline update
nto combat skills as WELL (bash, overheads, etc)... previously this was switched on by using rogue skills but not any other skills. That was unfair to rogues, because adrenaline affects thief blackjack and when you cannot blackjack a guy that had actually hobbled and bashed you and puts you into a bad spot but remained in defensive adrenaline the whole time... well, that obviously is class-breaking, and I definitely don't have a problem with fixing it.


I have applied a couple adrenaline fixes which I hope will remedy the situation a little better.. right now, they may be bugged, so bear with me. This is tooling with code which is 20 years old, written badly to begin with, making it hard to fix up now. Right now I'd like to get feedback that things are working exactly as I say they should be in this post. Later on, we can adjust the numbers to get the feel right.

For claritys sake, I will restate them before I add comment:

- aggressive adrenaline will last for 40 seconds, which is refreshed to 40 seconds by being sighted with "where" or "where PK' commands.
- defensive adrenaline will last for 5 minutes. Same "where pk" refresh issue.

This means if you scramble and hide, successfully, you dont sit for 10 minutes simply waiting for it to wear off, which is completely boring gameplay, and lets just put this upfront now, I will say I'm sorry if you liked that because it meant thieves left you alone and you got to keep your rares, but we have thieves for a reason. I'm looking for aggressive adrenaline being long enough to waste your purples waiting out, while defensive adrenaline is a bit more forgiving, and makes sense to linger in battle, it (still) being the main shield against stealing bastards.

Basically, this existed before..aggressive was shorter than defensive..but it wasn't staggered enough.

Issues -- the big one here is the total adrenaline duration. I thought it was ten minutes but it seems to be only 5. I would like you report back if you find you get > 5 minutes of defensive (keep in mind where pk refresh). Also adrenaline is supposed to expire after 10 mins, and it should still be doing that, regardless of where PK refreshes. I will take a look at this myself in some detail, later.

[divsky]

A good change, I think.

I'm considering making a thief now. I didn't have one before because of this.

[Davairus]

Yeah that didn't work out for the best in the long run like most things seem to do.