Tell us what you think of the May Letter to the Players

[Ibn]

May Letter to the Players (http://ac.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=235)

[LugianWarlord]

No mention of tinkering materials or spells to improve magic or missile defense on weapons or casting devices?

Reg Character Starting Skills:

Alternate Possibility:
- Change the starting skill for Aluvians from Assess Person to Item Tinkering
- Change the cost to train Unarmed Combat from 6 to 4 credits, and give Sho characters Item Tinkering

Revisit Assess Person and Deception in the future - considering primarily any impact it would have on Darktide first.

[KPD157]

Love the Ideas and that you guys are taking your time on the Bindstone :)

Especially Like the Idea of making Salvage skill something everyone has and can raise. Having the Tinker Skill of the character add to that Salvage skill would be a nice bonus for those with a Tinkering skill already I think.

[shobo-dt]

Yet another month of waiting for archers who have been essentially useless in PvP for over a year. I suppose another month of hitting for 35 while sword users hit you for 150+ and mages hit you for 200+ won't hurt since you can't even find a fight on darktide. Between belkin pads and people who Alt F4 out of game instantly I don't know why I bother logging in.

[Cash_we]

those changes are wellcome, but talking about salvage, have you considered the posibility of getting more salvage from heavier items? getting more salvage from a w5 gem than from a w4 3000 burden piece of armor makes no sense in my opinion.

Also, are you planing to make a tink to change the activation requirement to magic defense instead missile/melee def? I think the cov armor with magic def weild requirement its great, then an activation requirement also based in magic def would be nice too.

No intention to add dual weild capabilities and/or double handed weapons in the future?

Also info about the "rares" would be apreciated.

[Sizlunt DT]

Can we have more than 32 slots on the banlist please? On white worlds it may not be an issue, but on DT there are many many people who join a monarchy solely to snek in and kill the bots and mules. They are booted, delete and reroll the character, or use a different character on the account, and do it all over again. I could give you a list well over 32 people. Is this a system resource issue, or could this number be upped significantly? Don't get me wrong, it's a good ability for the monarch/officers to have, but our 32 slots long banlist will be filled immediately.

[LugianWarlord]

Reg Changes to Armor Imbues...

1% of 1 point of damage... 0
1% of 10 points of damage... 0
1% of 100 points of damage... 1
(Proposed cap) 5% of 100 points of damage... 5

Doesn't sound like a much better solution that +1 skill...

What would be an improvement, is taking that imbue, and changing the +1 to a +1%, and adding that number to the buffed melee/missile/magic defense mod of the weapon/casting device used... this method would need some serious balance considerations, but it would make the imbues something that players would consider, at least for melee defense...

[Possible Solution for Sizlunt GT: Give the buff bot the ability to /boot characters from the allegiance, and then run a plugin which looks in the allegiance for known griefers/accounts whenever the allegiance size changes... then boot any characters found to have weasled their way back in. (Hack solution - I'm sure there's a way around it)]

[Tofino]

Currently, our plans call for the development of new Item Magic spells which, when cast, will redirect to each piece of armor that you are wearing. Only Self versions of these spells would be introduced. These spells also would not redirect to your clothes.

This chanthf... this change ithf...

Damn drool. This change is fantastic :).

The salvaging skill is a great idea as well, and has been the idea bandied about forever with no major or even moderate drawbacks that I've seen mentioned.

[Gouru]

With Uziz and Sawato no longer selling lvl 5 spells, does that leave Plateau as the only place to buy them?

On Gaerlan quest, I like the basic ideas, however, my wife and I enjoying doing the 20-40 version of that quest weekly. She's archer, I'm mage, both about lvl 30. We don't kill Gaerlan, because we can't, and getting larger groups together is much more rare.

If killing Gaerlan becomes a requirement, please don't forget us small groups, he would need to become much easier to kill. (probly on a par with the initial golem for the 20-40 quest, that sucker is the longest part of the whole thing for us).

Salvaging skill is a great idea, if ALL characters got it, you could just remove the individual tinkering skills as a basis for amount tinkered, thus not making it redundant for Ghu. When Assess Person becomes as useful as Item Tinkering, this resolves the racial starting skill issues.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY!
I can't wait through patch in my bathrobe???? SINCE WHEN DO I HAVE TO GET DRESSED FOR PATCHDAY! It's a slippery slope you're on. What comes next month, Tux and Tails required???? Will you have 'casual' patchdays we can dress down for? Oh...and my daughter wants to know where the bunny ears are!

[Ibn]

Originally posted by Gouru
With Uziz and Sawato no longer selling lvl 5 spells, does that leave Plateau as the only place to buy them?

"Scriveners have been added to several towns."

So, no. :)

[MVOFJR]

free skill? good idea, or is it?? If an aluvian or sho was to become a tinking mule in the upper levels, they would be forced to get a gem of forgetfulness (provided one would exist) to get the exp back from salvaging to be able to tink.... While the Gharu would not have to do this. The Gharu's equivilant of a salvaging skill comes with uses which the aluvian and sho would lack. So even though this would be more balanced than the current system it is still quite unbalanced.

[Merubin]

Some good changes in there :)

Nice to see you guys didn't reduce all creature debuffs to only 2 minutes, and that the monster-cast inepts people hate will still be lowered in duration

[Ileysa]

/\
|

I disagree. I think 80 % of the people that go G'harundim is mainly for the salvage ability alone. The use of "item tinker" is not that great, and I doubt that many use it really. I do use it, but I can see a mule doing the same just as easily.


Thank you turbine for this great letter. I am loving the officer system -- I also like the idea of city bindstones -- I'm not sure what I think of a "salvage backpack" though. The salvaging of different types in one ust is a good idea though. Makes things a lot easier.

[Aiko II]

I am happy that you are listening to us. The proposed changes stem from topics I have seen posted. I am happy you are listening whether or not you choose to reply. as far as the individual changes I will not comment. I am just happy you are listening.

[magusofatlan]

>>Buffing Improvements – Item Magic
After accelerating the casting time of Creature and Life buffs, we’ve begun work on the most frequently requested Buffing improvement: Item buffs.

Currently, our plans call for the development of new Item Magic spells which, when cast, will redirect to each piece of armor that you are wearing. Only Self versions of these spells would be introduced. These spells also would not redirect to your clothes.

We will be providing more information on these spells as we continue development.
<<

Note: For characters who wear unbuffable armor (e.g. Covenant Armor), the worst part of buffing ARE the underclothes. Please make some sort of item buff spell that targets those piece(s) and banes/imps them! Underclothes cannot be quickly targetted, you must remove some other armor first to reach them - and if the underclothes do not cover the entire leg, for example, then it's even worse because you may have to pull off a girth, then possibly the shirt, then the legs. (Or it's the other way around, either way one of the pieces can be a real pain.)

Thanks!

[Hungwell]

The salvage skill has been a long time comming. Thanks for trying to get it in game.

I dont particularily care for the "salvage backpack" idea though. I suppose in some instances it might be good but I would have to see it in action to consider using one.

[BillBraskey]

I'm very pleased overall with the lttp.

The proposed starting skills changes are AWESOME!
One question though.

"We could introduce this as free skill for all new characters regardless of race (similar to Run and Jump)."

Does this mean that current characters would not get this skill?


Also I have one comment on the proposed changes to armor imbues. The problem is that it's hard to give people good enough of a reward to balance the risk of destorying armor in an imbue without it being overpowring. Look at the weapon imbues. People do them because the benefit (doing significantly more damage) is worth the cost (possibly destroying a good weapon).

Also, reducing damage by 1% isn't much more appealing than adding 1% to defense skills. I'm sure you guys can think of something more creative that can be done.

Edit:

One last thing. the salvage backpack is a great idea. Salvage is a pain to deal with, especially if you are salvaging all useful types of materials.

[Sorrowfull]

to target my clothing i have them hot keyed...also makes it easier to quickly remove them

edit-

question i havent seen brought up yet...what attributes will the new salvaging skill use?

[Arch Magi]

"@house storage add_allegiance: This gives your entire allegiance access to your house storage. To remove this access, use @house storage remove_allegiance. Please note that this is for your own personal house storage. To give full allegiance access to the storage in an allegiance mansion or villa, this command must be run by the allegiance monarch."

Does this mean I can have a villa and allow EVERYONE in my guild access to those chests even though I am not the monarch, or ONLY the monarch can do that?

"We received a lot of feedback asking that Ulgrim’s bathrobe no longer cover your feet. A lot of people – a lot of people – wanted to be able to wear bunny slippers with their bathrobe.

As of the May event, the bathrobe will leave the feet slot open. We recommend that folks not wear the bathrobe during the patch. If you do so, you will have to relog to be able to put any items on your feet."

YES! YES! YES! YES!


"The second tier of officer is currently nicknamed the Executor. The Executor would have all the powers of the Officers introduced in May – all of the Speaker powers as well as boot, ban, and info. Executors could appoint and remove Speakers."

When they say boot/ban, do they just mean the chat channel or out of the guild?





All in all, I like what I am reading for next month.

[Damien_Sarin]

Hmmm... no update on "rares" development... is it any closer to being put in? Or has it been scrapped?

Gbalgabalagalbagabaaaa...

[Hungwell]

Originally posted by Sorrowfull
to target my clothing i have them hot keyed...also makes it easier to quickly remove them

edit-

question i havent seen brought up yet...what attributes will the new salvaging skill use?

Being able to quickly remove one's clothes is always of the paramount importance.

[Fezman]

Distribution of mundane items – see Treasure Revisions above – will be based on the level of the town’s surrounding content. The greater the level of the town’s surrounding content, the better the items that the vendors will sell.

Does this only mean things like stamina potions, healing kits, etc? I'm still waiting for town vendors to start selling random loot equivalent items :) I like shopping around and seeing what people have sold to the vendors... it would be cool if the vendor kept a 'stock' so to speak of various random items.

[Gouru]

I only have 3 side packs currently. One is full of Death Items, one with comps and one with wands/quest items. Salvage I currently keep in my main pack as it is easy to distinguish and keep together.

A salvage pack using one of my 3 slots would force either my comps, my DI's or my wands/quest items in the main pack, where they are much more susceptable to accidental sale. So such a pack would be totally useless to me.

Now a NEW pack that only holds salvage in addition to my current packs would be greatly welcome.

But yes...I assume this is the same as the old more packs prz request....So guess I just made myself go take a drink.

Oh...and if an attribute helps salvaging skill, might I suggest coord? It a) makes sense and b) nerfs the mages again :)

[Sorrowfull]

lol maybe not so much anymore...but if an itemr an out of mana in combat (or any other time) you had ot target the iem witht he mana stone...

with clothign this could be a problem since if not hotkeyed you would have to take off your armor and at times that could be real risky

[Myk]

Ranged Attack Changes
We had originally planned two ranged attack changes for May. After extensive testing, we found that the projectile physics changes did not have the desired results. That change is being held In Development until we’ve finished a working solution.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Is this due to the size increase that was stated didnt help very much?

[Davidge]

Two questions Ibn:

Question 1: About the proposed Salvage skill:
Would the original tinkering skills continue to provide max salvage ability assuming a high enough skill? Or would a person require the salvaging skill to get decent returns regardless of what tinkering skill they train and pump?


Question 2: About the allegiance ban -account command
If "GoofOff" has his account banned from a monarchy using his GoofOff name, then deletes that character and rerolls with a new name, will the ban still work on both his re-created character and his other characters on that account?

[Scorpion73]

"Currently, our plans call for the development of new Item Magic spells which, when cast, will redirect to each piece of armor that you are wearing. Only Self versions of these spells would be introduced. These spells also would not redirect to your clothes."


Ok not all of us, especially melee characters wear the same armor to buff in. :confused:

My sword character has to wear a Minor Creature coif, and minor Item Covenant Gauntlets to buff.

So making the new buffs only to the armor you are wearing will hurt. :(

Or maybe I misunderstood. :confused:

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by Sizlunt GT
Can we have more than 32 slots on the banlist please?

The allegiance object is already very large, so we want to be very careful about how much additional information we add to it. So, the answer is no, we cannot add more then 32 additional slots on the banlist right now. It is possible that at some future date we will be able to, but I wouldn't count on it.

[Ganzor]

Regarding the new item spells...


As it sounds like you are planning to add self versions of item buffs, please keep in mind that many melee chars wear different items for buffing then for fighting. I have an almost complete major suit I use for buffing on my main. having one spell that would cover all the armor I am currently wearing would not be very helpful in that case.

If the plan is to add self only versions of item spells, why not just simply give them the fast cast times like you did for the item and life self spells?


EDIT- I see that Scorpion73 has the same concern, but another voice can't hurt.

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by magusofatlan
Note: For characters who wear unbuffable armor (e.g. Covenant Armor), the worst part of buffing ARE the underclothes. ... Underclothes cannot be quickly targetted ...

For May, we've added 2 additional "quick slots" like the bracelet, ring and necklace for your clothing. So, you will have a way to target your underclothes w/o taking up quickslots or taking off your armor.

[Arch Magi]

As far as looting, selling, pack space, etc. You know what would be real kewl? Something like what they have in AC2 ... the ability to convert an item into Pyreal in the field.

I'm not talking at the same rates like a town vendor, say if you find a big heavy suit of armor that is 15,000 pyreals, and if you sell it in a town, you'd get 12,000 for it, but with this "salvage skill" (maybe it could be done as part of the "free salvage skill") you would get the ability to convert it it at 50% of it value but "on the spot".

Personally, I would love it, and would end up looting all corpses totally. Who cares if I only get 50% of the value, or even 25% of the value, it be better than just leaving it lay because you don't have pack space. Who knows, maybe it would reduce lag because it would be 5-6 less things per corpse that the server would have to keep track of.

[Davidge]

Oops, one more question about /allegiance ban -account.

Since the ban list ONLY has 32 slots, will banning an account take up 6 of those slots on your clans list? Or one?

[Willow]

Great ideas on the bindstone. Can't wait to have another option! Navigation is often overlooked, but is essential to this game.

As for the improved loot - can't say enough about how happy that will make everyone. Keep it up! :-)

Thank you!

[Myk]

Aegis-like equipment. Our current design is an item that could be used on any loot missile weapon to add a Magic Absorbing property to it. This property would be similar to the Aegis Shield and would scale based on the wielder’s Magic Defense. The downside is that the missile weapon would lose any melee defense adjustment that it might possess. Also, obviously, one would need to choose between this weapon and one’s Weeping Bow, Crossbow, or Atlatl.
-----------------------------------

Why should Missile wepaon users have to chose between an aegis property and usineg a weeping weapon? Melee charcters do not have to make this choice. They can use the aegis and a weeping weapon. This doesnt seem right at all.

So basicly my archer gets a choice I can do damage or take damage. If I use an aegis bow then I wont be able to do enough damage to kill a mage. If I use a weeping I get hit for 170+ a shot from the wand. Thats not cool at all.

What you should do is make a place to dip a weeping missile weapon that gives it an aegis property BUT removes the melee mod on it.


Also What changes are you making to balance the weeping weapons?

[Yoshitsune]

I thought the Item buff spells were coming in 2 flavors. 1) 1 cast Many targets (coming in May). And what I'd really prefer 2) Many cast 1 target.

I agree the "what you are wearing" is unrealistic. I use Ashe's Undies with the Mod Str to fight and Mod Focus to buff. I am also primarily wearing Covenant so I'm only interested in 1 or 2 targets and having an Item buff that covers AL, Sl, Bl, Pi and Fire,Cold,Acid,Lightning or even all damage at once would be something I would get excited about. ALSO, something that hits the 4 Weapon buffs at one shot would be great.

[gaandar]

I would suggest that the new salvage skill be given to all races and have a better base equation than the item tinker skill for those chars that just want to salvage -- perhaps C + F.

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by Davidge
Since the ban list ONLY has 32 slots, will banning an account take up 6 of those slots on your clans list? Or one?

All allegiance bans will be done by account, so you can ban up to 32 accounts. (One account includes all 6 characters on the account, and all characters made on the account in the future.)

[Willow]

OH!!! I almost forgot!

The idea about a seperate pack for salvage .... HOOOORAY!!!! I can't even begin to tell you how awesome that would be. I have always wished we had something like that, but didn't know how to put my thoughts into words.

Pretty please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:-)

[Tofino]

Will players know if they are banned by a monarchy? Or will they only find out when they go to swear to someone in that monarchy?

What happens if a player swears to someone under a monarch, and then that monarch swears to someone under a monarch that the original player is banned from joining? (Thus joining the monarchies)?

[EshuunDara]

"Currently, our plans call for the development of new Item Magic spells which, when cast, will redirect to each piece of armor that you are wearing. Only Self versions of these spells would be introduced. These spells also would not redirect to your clothes."

Brilliant idea. :)


"We are considering making changes to the way that the three Armor Imbues work. Currently you can imbue a piece of armor to grant +1 to your Missile Defense, Melee Defense, or Magic Defense skill.

We are looking at possibly changing this bonus from +1 skill to a 1% damage reduction."


Have you considered doing both? +1 skill and +1% damage reduction? The point of the skills are so you take no damage, not less, on the per swing basis. Long term, you will get hit, so they act as damage reduction, even though you still take full damage from every attack that actually connects. For players with these suits that already use an Aegis, this is a nerf. For people with less than optimal starting stats for these skills, this can also be seen as a bit of a nerf (for example, my mage with melee def just started putting together a suit with +1 melee def mods on them). I started with 30 coord and 10 quick, so that +1 helps, albeit not a ton.
Given the fact that the imbues are rather weak when it comes to risking blowing up your favorite pieces of armor, I think you could give items both without risking them being overpowered (either that, or make the damage reduction as a new imbue for armor tinkering and improve upon the original +1 skill imbues).


"Our proposed solution to this imbalance is the introduction of a new skill: Salvaging. This skill would count as a Tinkering skill for purposes of gaining salvage from an Ust, but would have no other use. "


While helpful, this doesn't completely remove the problem. Lets say I'm going to make a new sword character. Picking Sho would net me salvaging and UA. I don't need UA, so all I'd find useful would be the ability to salvage. The same applies to the aluvians. Who needs dagger or assess person anyway? Then we come to the Gharun'dim. I don't need staff, but Item Tinkering is still better than salvaging, since it can be used to make death items and such. I'll still make my characters gharu. A better approach IMHO, would be to find a balanced way to give Item Tinkering to all characters.

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by Tofino
Will players know if they are banned by a monarchy? Or will they only find out when they go to swear to someone in that monarchy?

What happens if a player swears to someone under a monarch, and then that monarch swears to someone under a monarch that the original player is banned from joining? (Thus joining the monarchies)?

Players will find out that they are banned from an allegiance when they attempt to swear into the allegiance.

If a player swears to someone and then thier patron (or someone else above them) swears into an allegiance that the player is banned from, the next time the banned player logs on, they will be kicked from the allegiance.

[Ganzor]

Originally posted by Tofino
Will players know if they are banned by a monarchy? Or will they only find out when they go to swear to someone in that monarchy?

What happens if a player swears to someone under a monarch, and then that monarch swears to someone under a monarch that the original player is banned from joining? (Thus joining the monarchies)?


I thought that was explained pretty clearly in the LTTP. Next time that banned person logs on, they will be kicked out of the monarchy.


EDIT- D'OH! Zryca beat me! I'LL GET YOU ZYRCA!

[Mayleth]

Lots of great ideas. Definitely looking forward to the upcomming months. Loved the last patch. The new armor is so cool!!

Thanks!!!


Ps. I hope you've dumped the idea of getting rid of the settlement portals, because I really like having those around. If you're wanting to clear up the surface, maybe move them into an underground shrine or something like that.

[sursun]

If you are adding extra quick slots for clothes so they can be buffed easier could you add some slots for multiple weapons. This would allow the creation of new item spells to buff all the weapons in the slots.

Casting 4 spells per damage type will soon be the worst part of buffing and it will be the chars with the worst magic skills that have the problem. Mages and archers would also benifit being able to buff several wands or bows at the same time even though the benifit would not be as big.

They could also make it a lot easier for people to find the weapon they want switch to when having to go back and forth between weapons if they do not have enough free hot key slots.

If you do look into doing somthing like this just be carefull you do not overpower thrown weapons.

[Sorrowfull]

Originally posted by Yoshitsune
I agree the "what you are wearing" is unrealistic. I use Ashe's Undies with the Mod Str to fight and Mod Focus to buff.

it stated it wont cover undergamrnets so whcih one of those you wear would be redundant since neither would be buffed

[Hosagi]

Someones probably already posted this but if not in april you added magic def bonus and missile bonus to items will we see spells to buff these in may? or june?

[Helbereth]

Ok most of that sounds good...

Scrap the salvage backpack idea, it's a waste of resources.

I'm fairly certain everyone separates different quality salvage especially among mahogany, steel, iron, opal, granite and anything else that is applied numerous times to one irem. I personally usually separate workmanship 8 and higher quality items for use in the final stages of tinkering.

That said, the salvage backpack - from what you say and what i understand from it - would limit you to 1 bag of any one type of salvage. That's great for imbue materials... but there are only so many of those. I personally keep all my unfinished bags in my main pack so I can add an item to the bar and then dump the whole pack to add the rest of that type of salvage. The introduction of Leather tinkering made this all the easier.

As far as having it be possible to add numerous types of salvage to the bar, that's a bad idea. I usually go for a while without usting, and I usually build up a LOT of ONE type of salvage. Seeing as how I dump the whole pack on the bar, that would add EVERYTHING to the bar.. creating a jumbled mess of 20 different types of salvage that I'd have to pick through.


Please fix Marae Lassel. I went hunting out there the other day and was bored to tears. It used to be great fun out there and you'd see a lot of people there... now the whole island is a ghost town.


The armor imbues thing does need help, but I don't think you have the right idea. The most you could possibly get out of a 1% imbue to all 9 pieces of armor would be a 9% bonus to melee defense. You could simply scale down the size of the imbues for magic and missile defense. If you use the scale presently seen in weapons, then 1% would scale to about 0.16% (based on 15% max melee scaled down to 2.5% max magic/missile d.) 0.16% * 9 = 1.44%, which I think is within reason for balance concerns.

All I know is that I stopped looting armor imbue salvage since it's completely useless at this point.


Adding some kind of aegis for archers is only fair, however I dun think it should be as effective. Melees have to run right up and tank wars occasionally, while archers can dodge much more comfortably at a distance. What I have to wonder is where they would equip it. To be fair it would have to fit onto the archer without them having to change armor, but unless you put it in a jewelry spot (another area most of us covet for various cantrips or other spells) or perhaps use the shield spot in concert with the missile weapon it'll be hard. You also have to make it visible so you can see at a glance if siad archer has an aegis or not so you can plan accordingly.


Do you have any idea how many times I've wanted to click on aluvian or sho, but realized it was a waste to not get item tinkering? I have 2 accounts... among them I have 1 Sho, 2 Aluvians and 7 Gharu'ndim . I see no viable reason to make either of the others anymore unless I want to be a gimpy dagger character or a weak UA toon. And no I'm not using staff skill either.

I really think the racial skills are a bad idea that needs to be done away with. Let us use those 6 credits to our liking rather than be forced to use some useless skill whos time has passed. Assess Person was never useful, item tinkering is nice but some people don't want it, and I've never used - nor will I ever use - a racial weapon. I can however think of some things I could be doing with those 6 credits that would assist me in traversing Dereth a lot better than any skill-I-never-raise.


Oh and a small note.... the chance of success thing needs some fixing... I really don't need it telling me I have a 100% chance of adding or removing a key from a ring.


I'm all for making towns more navigable. I always thought it was a little odd for the meeting hall - commonly in a central area of town through history - was always 3 miles out of town behind a hill, hidden behind trees. It's like you were saying to us 'no don't look at that big marble building there, that's just a figment of your imagination, move along.'


I did look at thet Bow from the temple and thought to myself 'why the heck is a crappy bow like that 335 base req when I can make a 166 CS bow that hits harder and doesn't require more skill than I already have'. It was a big thought, but I'm often an overthinker.


Can you maybe do us a favor and make it so we can get to Kara without having to set aside an afternoon to play polygonal checkers up in the backcountry of linvak? I mean it's great that Kara's a bit out of the way and all - makes it a challenge to get there, sorta I guess - but my god why does it have to be such a muddling effort to find your way there? Ayan Baqur, Tethana, Candeth Keep and Dryreach are easier to get to, and there's a better reason to be in either one those places. The closest portal route drops you 10 clicks out of town - not including the one portal that is a direct line to Kara, which nobody ever ties to because there's hardly any reason to go there - can you maybe make it possible to get there without going insane tring to figure out a way over a mountain that looks like a sheer cliff from a castlevania game?

Am I ranting...?



By the way... I hope the upcoming storyline is more inspiring than last year's jumbled mess of pointless speeches and back-stabbing politicizing that held all the attention span of a .... what was I talking about? I like cheese...

[Scorpion73]

What you are wering is unrealistic for melee characters mainly, some mages, but very few need extra armor to buff.


But then again this is probably just another reason for me to have to hunt for hundreds of millions of XP just to raise my 3 school sword characters magic to be able to buffs without fizzing 50+ times.

Right now even with the new 'speedy spells', he takes 11 minutes to buff.

My mage of the same level 100, 5 minutes, meh I can't have a perfect world I guess.

:p

ps.Note to any flamers of me: I am not griping I will just move on and hunt if needed I am just voicing an opinion. :D

[ufhamlet]

Spectacular! The Armor Imbue changes, the Bane tweaks, and the improvements to AL have me frothing! Thank you so much for listening to your players. Also, the quick key slots for clothing are VERY welcome.

[DraconisUmbra]

I said it before and I guess I'll say it again. I don't think that the item magic changes you are proposing will be as beneficial as just making them cast faster or having new spells that take care of multiple banes and weapon buffs at once. Which brings me to, why weren't weapon buffs mentioned? Melees like to buff faster too and let's face it mages get the most out of banes. They practically have to have them if they like living. Melees don't require them much of the time they're just handy in certain situations. Also as others have said many melees have buffing armor that they wear to help their skills since they usually start out with less Focus and Self than other classes.

Oh and devaluing all those 2 piece suits? Bad idea I think. There should be some sort of trade off when deciding how to build a suit. Go with two pieces to save yourself salvage and buff time? Or go with more so you can get more Majors and/or Minors or what have you? The Item Magic changes you propose would clearly make two piece suits far less useful and more of an aesthetic choice for most.

[_b0o]

Suggestion for the armor imbues

instead of 1% damage reduced

make it just 1 point of damage reduced

and for magic keep it as a percentage


IE if a monster hits you for 30 and u have 5 pieces of melee dmg reduction on ull take 25 damage instead. this would be great for non melee def characters, where you are getting nicked for single digit damage sometimes and having it reduced by 5 pts would be worthwhile

for magic if a person hits u for 200 with a war bolt and u have 5 pieces of mag d armor for 5% bonus, you would take 190 damage instead of 200

may sound a lil overpowering, but most pks wouldrather wear stoned GSC for the major wards, and probably only throw on mag protection imbue on solls/gaunts for +2%, and wear their hp helmet.. so theyd take 196 instead of 200 dmg from a bolt... not overpowering, but nice little extra bonus, when u balance it out with landing the imbue on the armor then tinkering it up, and probably lacking a major(whos gonna imbue a major solls/gaunts for a +1%?)

[Arch Magi]

"Oh and a small note.... the chance of success thing needs some fixing... I really don't need it telling me I have a 100% chance of adding or removing a key from a ring."

Ahmen!

One note ... how about after these changes, would it be possible to up the percentage of finding multiple Majors on Amuli? I mean that was one of the great benefits of wearing Amuli ... less to buff ... now with everyone going for Majors, if you reduce the time it takes to buff an entire suit, there is no good reason not to switch to a "piece meal" suit of armor with 1 Major per part. Yeah, you will say it takes more steel to tinker, but honestly, how hard is steel to come by? My mule has about 48 bags of it mules and I still have multiple 10 tinker suits of Amuli and other armor.

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by Helbereth
Oh and a small note.... the chance of success thing needs some fixing... I really don't need it telling me I have a 100% chance of adding or removing a key from a ring.

For May the dialog will not show up if no skill is required to perform the craft interaction. (This includes things like combining motes, removing keys from keychains, etc.)

[Jinnsman]

I must confess that I am extremely excited about the changes comeing down the pipe! May sounds great, June sounds great, and the info didn't even include info on the new content :D


Oh and TVM Zycra for mentioning the quickslots to bane undies! That is much needed and will be much apreciated, Wahoo!

[MIdnightFire7]

I like what i have read in the LttP. All changes seem pretty cool. Thanks. :)

[archer of sjet]

What about Ghau chars?

What bonus do they get for already having this skill? Your only helping the other two while Ghau gets nothing?

That doesn't seem very fair to me, the point of choosing your race was to "use" your starting skills, what wrong with billions of ghaus running around?

If people want to salvage so bad they will train item tinking with their current templete.

[Koth]

i didnt read what everyone else said, so sorry if this is a complete rehash.

I think the proposed armor imbues are a mistake, and quite honestly all but worthless.

for example :

even if you got 9 magicD-imbued armor pieces = 9%

and you get hit with a spell for 100 damage.

that only reduces damage by 9 to 91.

lets say you were vulned enough that the spell did 150 damage.

that only reduces damage by 13.5 to 136.5; with full numbers we'll play conservative and roll that down to 136.

IMHO, i'd rather have the higher chance of resisting than a few points off. Those few points will make a difference occasionally, but a higher percent of resists will make a difference all the time.

You can extend this example to meleeD or missileD as well. Since they may hit faster, it may show more a difference in the long term than the magic defense does.

[Ganzor]

Gharu chars will still have the ability to actually tink things with the skill, not just salvage.

[YekYai]

> For May, we've added 2 additional "quick slots" like the
> bracelet, ring and necklace for your clothing. So, you will have a
> way to target your underclothes w/o taking up quickslots or
> taking off your armor.

Thank you.

I was going to suggest that the 'salvage pack' auto-salvage anything dragged to it, but then I realized not everything I own is Leathered. 'My fire rend wand! Nooooo!'

How about if partial bags of salvage dragged to the salvage pack get auto-combined with any similar bag in the pack? I drag 8 units of Steel there, and there's already a bag of 56 7.2 Steel, so the 8 units get added to the existing one.

-- Yek.

[archer of sjet]

But why should 2 races be rewarded and one get screwed over?

If Ghau chars got a a reward or something for it, maybe like 2 cradits back or the ability to untrain it or something it might be fair.

But letting 2 races that don't have to design their temps to have a tinkering skill to be able to salvage and then just handing them the skill is not right in any way.

[Winter]

Heres a fix for the race balance thing: Give all new characters the ability to untrain their racial weapon and assess/tink option at creation, and allow the racial skill gems at the temple of forgetfulness to actually refund skill credits. This way. no one gets 'screwed'

Am I the only one that thought we were getting item enchantment love in may?!?:confused:


EDIT: Salvage bag sounds good...how do you feel about combining the foci packs into one? That would give me happiness. :D

[The Darkness]

I guess this one is still being discussed, but do you not think you are dumbing it down too much with this one-spell-banes-all system? I know lots of players liked this option, but some things should require thought - and armour choice was one of them.

The current dynamic of number of pieces of armour (for creature buffs and/or majors) versus the ease to buff made thinking about suits of armour neccessary and worked nicely.

I have the feeling now that everyone will go for as many pieces as possible to get as many 'slots' as possible.

Please have a think about this again - the physical and elemental banes (ie 3 spells including Brogards for each armour piece) would keep the original dynamic in place - especially if the casting times were sped up to level one equivalents. I'm all for minimising buffing times, just not in this dumbed down way.

Cheers for any feedback,

[archer of sjet]

That makes perfect sense ^

Considering all starting skills are usless except item tinkering.

[Drogo007]

Item Magic propsed changes :

ICK

Like others who have posted, I have to swap out a minimum of three pieces of my armor to buff. So that means that three pieces of armor I'm not going to wear in battle are going to be baned, while I still have go through and manually bane 3 pieces of armor.

And a valid concern someone else raised - this would change the risk(tedium)/reward equation with respect to 2 piece armor vs 6 piece armor - I don't mind you guys changing that, so long as you considered it and decided there was no problem changing that.


Salvage Backpack

Better be optional because it wouldn't be worth it to me. Most of the salvage I collect, I seperate by WS (say, 1-6, 7-8, 9, 10) - so only allowing me to store 1 bag of that type in the backpack wouldn't be much help. I know there are some people who will be helped by that idea, but I'm just not one of them - and I have to wonder if the majority will be helped or not.

[Winter]

Originally posted by Drogo007
Salvage Backpack

Better be optional because it wouldn't be worth it to me. Most of the salvage I collect, I seperate by WS (say, 1-6, 7-8, 9, 10) - so only allowing me to store 1 bag of that type in the backpack wouldn't be much help. I know there are some people who will be helped by that idea, but I'm just not one of them - and I have to wonder if the majority will be helped or not. [/B]

If the salvage pack could only hold more than one type of salvage, interfaced with the ust so that it would pull items from the salvage pack, and send the item back to the salvage pack, it might be really nice. Not having those 30-40 slots in my main pack kind of sucks from time to time.

I still think there will be a lukewarm response to this until they combine the foci in some way, however.

[Ibn]

Originally posted by Arch Magi
Does this mean I can have a villa and allow EVERYONE in my guild access to those chests even though I am not the monarch, or ONLY the monarch can do that?

The first part. You can allow everyone in your allegiance to have access to your housing storage with a single command.

"The second tier of officer is currently nicknamed the Executor. The Executor would have all the powers of the Officers introduced in May – all of the Speaker powers as well as boot, ban, and info. Executors could appoint and remove Speakers."

When they say boot/ban, do they just mean the chat channel or out of the guild?

Out of the allegiance.

[DraconisUmbra]

Also you didn't mention scrolls at all. I would much rather it be easier to store the tons and tons of scrolls I keep finding then get some salvage bag. Though that sounds okish. :p

[Ibn]

Originally posted by Damien_Sarin
Hmmm... no update on "rares" development... is it any closer to being put in? Or has it been scrapped?

Gbalgabalagalbagabaaaa...

No new development on this topic. It has not been scrapped.

[Cuttler]

The majority of the changes are acceptable. The only thing I'd like to see is the racial skills simply removed and let the players decide what to utilized the last 6 credits for. I have never liked the fact I was forced to take skills that other characters were not forced to take. I really don't care about access person on my aluvians, and I've never ever picked it up on any of my non aluvian characters. I utilize dagger on my dagger character only and its is most certainially a waste on my aluvian sword character since dagger and sword do the same damage. The same can be said for UA and staff. If I intended the character to utilize that skill as the main fighting skill it's utilized. If I intended the character to be any other skill (like mace, bow, or anything else) than the racial skill is never utilized nor it xp wasted on it.

Adding a salvage skill isn't the answer as it is still not fair to the Aluvians and Sho. You have two races who have to spend xp to only obtain faster bags of salvage but one race who can also make Death Items. Yes it's true that item tinkering is not as valuable as the others, that's why it's half the credits, but it does serve it's purpose. As it stands now I no longer make an Aluvian or Sho character unless I am planning on taking one of the 4 credit tinker skills (so only my mules). Adding a salvage skill won't deter me from this current practice. I'll take a tinker skill over a salvage skill any day of the week.

[Zol]

salvage backpack... I would prefer (if it is poss) to have 6 slots opend up in the Foci. That would allow slots for what ever a person wishes to use it for.

Other than that, Great Job!! Thanx!!

[Sizlunt DT]

Originally posted by Zyrca
The allegiance object is already very large, so we want to be very careful about how much additional information we add to it. So, the answer is no, we cannot add more then 32 additional slots on the banlist right now. It is possible that at some future date we will be able to, but I wouldn't count on it.

Cool Zyrca, thank you for the response, I guess we'll have to keep recruitment tight and prioritize our banlist. Again, thank you for the response, and I really like the rest of the changes. Wish the item enchantment ones were coming sooner :)

[Ibn]

Originally posted by Davidge
Question 1: About the proposed Salvage skill:
Would the original tinkering skills continue to provide max salvage ability assuming a high enough skill?

I believe so, yes.

Question 2: About the allegiance ban -account command
If "GoofOff" has his account banned from a monarchy using his GoofOff name, then deletes that character and rerolls with a new name, will the ban still work on both his re-created character and his other characters on that account?

Yes, it will. However "GoofOff" will still appear on the @allegiance ban list.

[Senach_MT]

I am so glad you all give us a chance to voice our opinions on game matter. The fact that you listen to us is just amazing! *thumbs-up*

After reading the letter, my only thoughts are on the salvage backpack: I agree with Gouru. Giving up a pack space for what you talked about does not sound appealing. However, if it was a backpack with 30-50 slots (sorry, I’m not sure how many different types of salvage there are currently.) that could hold only salvage, no restrictions on what kind or of how many of each kind (i.e. it could have one back of each kind of salvage or all XX slots could be taken up with gold) – that I’d like. In an ideal world I’d suggest an additional pack space on each character that could only be used for this salvage pack. I know the tech probably won’t allow this without extensive reprogramming, but like I said: Ideal world.

Thanks for reading.

[Yusuki]

Question about the new baning--will it be smart enough to bane what it can on a mixed suit? Currently, I'm wearing a mix of Olthoi armor, Covenant armor, and plate. I cast The New Impen VII. Will it Impen what it can, and just ignore the rest?

[Kyayote]

Sounds good.
Kya

[Zyrca]

The salvage pack idea comes from an attempt to figure out a way to give more pack space, without giving more pack space.

Basically, we cannot give you more "traditional" pack space at this time. The salvage pack would be specialized to carrying salvage, and due to this, it can take up much less space in memory and on disk then a pack with 24 unique items.

[Silik]

Please do _not_ change my +1magicD to a 1% magic damage
reduction! I got the major will imbued with +1magicD
because I want to resist things. I don't like getting hit
not only with war, but also with critter and life debuffs.
Yes, +1 magicD is a joke. But it's more useful to me than
reducing damage from magic spells by a paltry 1%.

What you're talking about doing is taking an already existing
game mechanic that people have chosen to use, and changing
it completely, _not_ upgrading it. If you want to add
damage reduction, do so..as its own imbue. If you want to
buff the armor imbues, do so, but keep the type of effect
the same. Give my magicD the benefit that I've already
paid for.

[Rhysem]

Ageis ability that loses the melee mod -> unfair to archers/mages. Melees don't loose their melee mod when they whip out their ageis.

If you're talking about global % damage reductions, put on a small % damage boost for melee damage to the ageis mod, NOT a loss of melee mod.

[gaandar]

Rather than a salvage backpack, how about a "Comps" backpack. Those needing more pack space (all of us) could get rid of the 3-4 foci and go back to comps, but only taking one pack to do so.

[Winter]

Originally posted by Zyrca
The salvage pack idea comes from an attempt to figure out a way to give more pack space, without giving more pack space.

Basically, we cannot give you more "traditional" pack space at this time. The salvage pack would be specialized to carrying salvage, and due to this, it can take up much less space in memory and on disk then a pack with 24 unique items.

Sounds good Zyrca, I definately like the idea, however I would ask that you reconsider the only one type of salvage each. Give the pack maybe 36 or 42 slots and let us put in salvage as we see fit. That I would give up a pack slot for.

[Tethys_SC]

awesome. pure....awesome. :D

T

[Tofino]

With regard to the 100% dialog annoyance question that people keep asking, why not just add a second checkmark under the first, saying "Supress chance of success dialog if 100%"? That lets the people who want to always see it have their way, and the people who it bothers have it THEIR way (it's quite annoying to see it in combat when trying to fletch :)).

[Sigma]

Woot!! I'm all for some Marae Lassel love!!! ^_^

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by Winter
Sounds good Zyrca, I definately like the idea, however I would ask that you reconsider the only one type of salvage each. Give the pack maybe 36 or 42 slots and let us put in salvage as we see fit. That I would give up a pack slot for.

You'd be able to have up to 99 units of each type of salvage. There are 70ish material types in the game, so, if you saved all types of salvage, it would be the equivalent of a 70ish slot backpack ...

(A 70ish slot backpack that could only hold salvage and only one partial bag of each type of salvage.)

[Epim-MT]

I guess I'm missing the point of a salvage pack. Will it have more than 24 slots? If it does have more than 24, I understand. If it does not, why not just have one of the current packs as a salvage pack and only put salvage in it? ****, too slow

What about a Quiver? A pack that takes up one slot and is exclusively for weapons/comps/ammo. If an Axer changes from his Slash to his Frost for something the Slash would go back into the quiver, rather than the main pack. As would a shield if the wand is equipped. ANything unequipped goes in the quiver first. All comps picked up or bought get stacked there by default.

I think the salvage skill is a good idea.

On making Assess Person/Deception better, how about when you assess a person, you see not only their basic stats but thier skills and skill levels as well. On a 95% success you can see what they have spesialized and trained and all but two skill show the current value. This would add an element to PvP that you could tell they guy you are about to fight has a Melee D of 506. FOr White worlds, you could asssess the trade bot and see it's skill befoe you hand it your weapon. You could also assess the person who claims to be a trade mule, but really just want's to have a "server outage" once you hand over your stuff.

For Deception, the change would be random skills displayed. If I assess someone who is actively being deceptive, that 506 Melee will show up as being a Melee D of 145, untrained, but a missile D of 380, or something similar.

These changes could apply to Assess Monter as well. When a monster is ID'd, we only see the base stats. If you train the skill, you should be able to see it's stats and the best form of attack to use against it. If you Spec the skill, you will see the effectiveness of all attack types, as well as the attack and defense skill of the monster.

[Scout X]

I'm one of the big supporters of trying to get the races balance. Personally, even though the proposed idea is "nice" it doesnt go as far as it should.


Chance for all races to full salvage = Great. Mission accomplished here.

Want to make a DI (a very high percent use DI's)? Want to change race req? change melee req to missile and vice versa? Gharu still wins. (not trying to flame) But why can't the devs just nail the whole issue dead right now instead of "helping some".

Let us untrain dagger, our mages dont care. Let us untrain UA, our swordsman dont care, let us untrain staff, our archers DONT CARE!!! I cant express this enough, no one cares for these skills except for the dagger/ua/staff people. (also throw in the total removal of assess person, deception, and assess monster (notice that no one mentions this)?)

If I a dev particularly decides to respond to my post, a desired answer would be to as why this idea isn't any good, not what you think is better.

sorry if i started sounding like a jerk, im trying my best to get my point across.

[BillBraskey]

If you can untrain racial weapon skills and get the credits back, then it almost completely takes away the benefits of actually using those skills as your primary attack weapon.

[Norbert Beaver]

You'd be able to have up to 99 units of each type of salvage. There are 70ish material types in the game, so, if you saved all types of salvage, it would be the equivalent of a 70ish slot backpack ...

One idea that we are investigating is a “Salvage Backpack”. This would take up a pack slot in inventory and could hold a single bag of each type of salvage. For example you could store a 2 unit bag of Steel and a 50 unit bag of Iron in your Salvage Backpack, or even a single 100 unit bag of each type of salvage; but you could not store a 100 unit bag of Steel and an additional 50 unit bag of Steel.

Does this back pack have the ability to change the weight of the salvage bags?

This bag kinda incourages you to collect all the different types of salvage because you cannot have 2 bags of the same type of salvage in it.. if i was reading it correctly.

That is alot of weight to be lifting around
70 bags of salvage @ 100bu? = 7000 bu

[Daveman]

Character start skills

Quite honestly everyone would like the ability to gain credits back from these. We dont want assess person reworked etc. the extra 6 credits would allow my Bowman to do templates as nicely as Crossbow gets. That arent exactly game breaking or unfair to anyone.

Also as far as the upcoming proposal of a skill called salvaging its should be free to all toons. After all im sure it will take xp to effectively gain 9 units of work 9 etc.

Btw love the way you guys are going. dont listen to the ignorant complaints you get alot of. If there was a way id buy you all pizza every patch day. But i heard you wont host a west coast event so :p lol.

[Albrien]

For the love of all that is holy on Dereth. Rethink those imbue changes now. They are a major nerf to what is already likely an underpowered dynamic. Here's why:

I have a 7 piece covie suit with meleed imbues. So +7 meleed

With a +19 bow and def 7 and 430 meleed before the armor I have a 75% chance to evade Devestators attacking in groups.
Same bow, but add in the armor (437 buffed melee) I now have an 80% chance to evade groups of Devestators.
For every 25 hits I would have taken I now take 20. That is 80% as many - or thought of in DoT 20% less DoT.

So the imbue changes, far from being an improvement will drop the effective damage reduction from 20% to 5%!!

The calculations were with the melee d calc at: http://home.swbell.net/chupcos/melee_defense_calculator.html
The calc *may* be slightly out of date as far as a particular mob goes, but the analysis would hold regardless.

I chose Devestators but the basic pattern would hold for just about any critter I don't already evade 99+% of the time. And who cares about 5% reduction on mobs that can't hit you to begin with.

[Lusche]

My thought on the new salvaging skill and packspace.

I don't think we should get that skill for free. Instead, remove salvaging amounts based from the tinker skills entirely and have "salvaging" skill be the following:

Salvaging: 2 to train, 2 to spec

Uses:
1. Lets us keep adding to a bag of salvage, past (100).
- If possible we won't even need those new salvage packs.
2. Can split bags to (100), with normal skill checks.
- So it's possible to lose a bag if you fail the check
3. Lets us get more salvage per item, up to 3 times at skill max out.
-pretty nice to get (30) from that craft 10 granite item

Pros:
1. More packspace
2. More salvage
3. Balance out the races, since item tink won't be as benefitical.

Cons:
1. Another skill to train
2. Another xp sink

Possible?

[Gregory_WE]

Sounds great, keep up the good work Turbine!

I'm especially happy to learn that the races are going to be balanced. Just with the salvage skill added, the major incentive for choosing Gharu as opposed to the other two races is negated. With the plans to make assess person and deception viable, that should make the three races fairly equal. Sho may be the least optimal choice (especially if not UA), but the gap is definitely narrower.

[Cuttler]

Originally posted by Zyrca

(A 70ish slot backpack that could only hold salvage and only one partial bag of each type of salvage.)

I'm sorry Zyrca but this is an item I would never utilize. As others have stated already, I carry multiple partial bags of the same salvage. As we speak I have 5 partial bags of steel on one character (4 and under, 5-6, 7-8, 9, and 10). Additionally, I probably only collect about 10 to 12 types of salvage on a regular basis. Therefore, because of the limitations to this special bag only allowing one bag per type, I'd acutally be LOSING 12-14 pack spaces.

I think it is wonderful that you relize we are tight on pack space and need help, but this is not going to do it for most of your players because in the end most of our salvage bags will end up in our main or other accessory packs anyway and then what did we save. Help us with pack space by getting rid of the need to carry around 2 packs of death items if you really want an effective solution to this every growing problem.

[Gouru]

I have to agree that I don't think even a 70ish slot salvage pack would be very useful to me.

I currently have 3 side packs free. I do a lot of looting when I'm out and store the loot in my main pack. I don't like mixing my loot with items I actually use, too much chance to accidentally sell something I don't want to sell.

To add a salvage pack, I'd have to move all the stuff from one of my side packs to my main pack. Do I move the DIs, the comps, or my wands/armor? Do I really want to mix any of those with my loot?

At least salvage in the main pack is very distinguishable, does not get mixed up with loot at all.

But the mages who need that packspace the absolute most, IMHO, are the ones least likely to use it. One packslot is 1/3 of the total side space they have.

And those melees get a WHOLE bunch more slots opened to them since one packslot really isn't a big deal.

Oh wait! I understand now! It's a mage nerf! Why didn't I see that in the first place! Carry on!

[Atticus Finch]

Oh. My. Gosh.

I'm almost jumping out of my seat because I'm so excited about the allegiance changes: the officers and the Bindstones!

Great job Turbine! Kudos!

The other stuff is pretty cool too, but I'm mostly in the game for my monarchy....not salvaging and stuff.

Keep up the good work!

[the_slept]

Item Magic:

Do not remove all incentive to wear fewer pieces. There should always be some strategic reason behind choosing your armor. Ease of buffing should be one of your concerns. I think most people would be really happy with prismatic-like spells.

Also, consider adding robes to the loot system. They could be like armor, as in they have AL, but can't be tinkered with steel... maybe make an additional tinker that would up the AL of a robe by 10 points.


Salvage skills:

I like the idea of giving all players a skill to salvage with, but I think it should be a little inferior to the existing salvage skills, maybe it could have a weaker attribute formula, like (focus +coord)/3 or (focus + coord)*(2/5). Something that would be noticed a little, but not enough to turn the tide.

I'm not too fond of the skill sellback option that so many people toss around, but it might be feasible to make racial skills partially untrainable, like you could get 3 skill credits back for untrainig your racial skills. You could combine this with a salvage skill that requires one point to train.

[Harzah]

Allegiance Storage: would there be a way to make one chest communal and others not?

Art items and casters: would things like bowls then have mana? and be rechargable with mana stones?

Buffing improvements to item: rock on =) love to see this going forward!

Changing item tinkering: Salvaging as a skills is a better option in my opinion than making it simply so that everyone can salvage the same amount of material from something. However, I really think you need to entirely revisit the racial skills. There is no "perceived imbalance in character racial skills" there is imbalance. It's not a matter of perception to say that either UA or Item Tinkering are simply more useful than Assess Person.

Going forward with giving salvaging to new players, I can see that that would make it fair for them, but how will that help the players whose race is already set? And which was set well before any of the tinkering changes entirely. I think the latter option, giving it only to Aluvian and Sho characters would be the better option. It's a bit of a mess I think, unless you simply go with allowing everyone to drop their racial skills, but then again there is imbalance because of the credits and because then what point is there to race at all, aside from simple looks?

*edit* the bit I keep forgetting to add ><

Re: salvaging: As an alternative for introducing a general 'Salvaging' skill, what about dividing it between types of salvage so that each race gets a certain bonus to salvaging certain materials? The idea being that there is still the one skill "salvaging" but that if one were Aluvian, one would be better at salvaging certain kinds of material and obtain more from it than someone of another race.

Give *current* Gharu characters the option to drop or keep item tinkering for the new skill (or just replace it entirely), and give it to Sho and Aluvians, free. I don't know how you'd divy up the materials exactly but in theory it sounds good to me. The point being there still needs to be some point to playing certain races aside from looks, but at the same time keeping it relatively balanced.

RE: the skill credit part. Well, now, For Sho... it's a bit like getting an extra 2 skill credits and I don't really see a way around that. For Aluvians... if it's free, it's fair, since they've 2 skill credits wasted in Assess Person. Personally I think you ought to let Aluvians completely drop that, if they wish, and replace it with the salvaging. For Gharu, it'd be fair since Item tink is 2 skill credits.

I love the idea of the Salvaging bag - storage is at such a premium in AC, everything helps. I also had a thought, regarding telling bags apart - if something were say work 4 and another bag of the same material were work 5, would it be possible to have those numbers on the bag icon? Or possible a "mouse over" event that would let us hover our mouse pointer on the individual bags and would show the work, without us having to click and hit examine on every bag we have. I realize that would mean more artwork but honestly telling different works apart and keeping track of them is just a big pain.

Changes to armor imbues: I think this definitely needs a change, the failure rate of the imbue compared to the benefit received from the imbue just makes it worthless to imbue armor imo. The percentage would seem to be a better way to go, though I'm not really certain. 5% seems extremely conservative to my mind. /me shrugs.

[Sorrowfull]

if you know me youll know i carry insane inordiante amounts of stuff on my main char (i.e. 14 various title tokens-mainly due ot the difficulty of attaining them or they are retired) as well as a quite a few no drop quest items

then you add in di's, comps, healing kits, stam pots, fletch supplies, dispell gems, etc. etc.

all of these are in side packs + 2 foci...but i plan on using the proposed salvage pack to its fullest extent


with a lil rearranging my comps can move to the bottom of my pack (heck its even easier for stacking) as well as stam pots and heal kits and ill be able to easily pick one up


and yes i pick up insane amounts of salvage (easily have over 40-50 seperate sacks on me at once) i seperate by everything less then 8, 8+, 9+, 10+

thoguh a lot of those sacks the 8+ only mater for a few things (mahog, steel, iron, opal, etc.) the imbue ones wont

so ya ill be having a few extra bits of salvae laying around outside of the pack...but not that much...

and im imaging what this could do for mule space as well

im really looking forward ot the change

[Jinnsman]

Originally posted by Zyrca
You'd be able to have up to 99 units of each type of salvage. There are 70ish material types in the game, so, if you saved all types of salvage, it would be the equivalent of a 70ish slot backpack ...

(A 70ish slot backpack that could only hold salvage and only one partial bag of each type of salvage.)

This sounds great, and would be even greater IF it automatically combined salvage that was added to it. Otherwise, we would have to move salvage out of the pack, combine, and move back in, which would become very frustrating very quickly.

The auto-combine does introduce another problem, however, in that it means those of us that like to keep the workmanship separate now have a problem, but that will be a problem anyway since as i read it, we can only have once instance of 'mahogany' - for example - in the pack.

Perhaps this has already been addressed in which case i apoligize for not reading everything closely enough.

[Stout]

I don't think I'm in agreement with the item enchantment changes either.

I think I would just rather see Creature and Life get put back to full cast cycles and just reduce Item to Instant Cast.

Item was the part that everyone complained about the most. After the changes I've really only shaved about 1 minute off my normal buff cycle.

I know you were trying to provide an incentive for people to not use buff bots, but the fact is that people are still going to use them even if it takes longer than doing it themselves. Even if they can InstaCast 6's they will wait to get 7's from a bot. This goes for Item enchantment too.

I think your making this out to be more complicated than it needs to be.

-Stout, LC

[Sucamarto]

Sho characters start with Unarmed Combat trained.

I am SHO and have absolutely no Use for UA, so changing it to Salvage Skill would more than please me :-)

[alphadoom]

If I'm reading this incorrectly please slap me and straighten my thinking out...

So, with the allegiance bindstones you're saying that anyone who is not sworn into a large monarchy (ie, a person with 2 accts) can use a bindstone just like any othe monarch and have all of his characters have an additional tie, just like @lifestone?

I love the idea if that's how it's going to work. This will bring towns back to life! It's so disheartening to wonder into Qalabar and see no one there, but here the familiar chants of laughter and geese coming through the speakers.

@bindstone... great idea if that is, indeed, how it will work. I've been pretty independent up to this point, no need to join a large allegiance unless you are wanting to use their buffbots or that is where your friends are.

I can't wait to see how things continue to improve in AC. Turbine is doing a wonderful job!

[Blau]

Will Executors, Speakers, etc, have these titles visible when you assess them? If not, that would be a nice feature and a good way to reward your most trusted allegiance members.

It should be optional, of course, for those that don't want this information available to the public just like their @age and such.

[Blau]

I hope the goal of your weapon changes is to restore the viability of using tinkered weapons. It's hard to tell.

I like the idea of the salvage skill, but how about you just make racial skills untrainable? That would also allow me to trade in UA for Leadership (since you now require it for decent pass-up whereas before you didn't have to train it). Basically you'd give us the option to undo the damage of choosing the wrong race at creation if we could untrain these skills and train something else. The only problem then would be the added possibility of being able to train more things than you could before - but many of us will choose to train leadership whereas before that was effectively a free skill.

I like the idea of the salvage backpack ("in concept" - I didn't see a post to reply to about that so I'll put it here). I'd rather not be limited to 1 bag of anything. How about you just let me move anything I want to salvage into the salvage backpack and put a cap on how many things I can carry total? So instead of a single bag of steel, let me hold up to 1,000 units of anything. I can carry 10 bags of steel or 5 bags of steel and 5 bags of iron. That would be much more useful.

[ToiletDuk]

Regarding Item Magic changes
I agree with many people here in that your proposed changes eliminate the advantage of certain armor suits people have spent months/years collecting and refining, as well as making the added feature almost completely useless to anyone whose buffing suit differs from their hunting suit.

My main, a level 89 swordfighter, can cast 7's in life and item, barely, thanks to a wide array of horrible looking, low AL pieces of armor with various cantrips on them. When I buff, I buff in a focus helm, life boots, item sleeves, and willpower leggings, none of which I'd want to take into battle. This means that over half my armor slots are occupied by items I never want to buff.

Especially given the changes to Life and Creature, which benefit all character classes equally (for now let's ignore the fact that arcane is less useful when spells only take a second to cast), I think it's important to make item magic changes which would provide a clearly balanced advantage for all players instead of favoring certain styles of gameplay, or people with certain levels of stats.

I would propose one of the following systems:
Multi-buff spells: Physical Bane (slash/pierce/bludge), Elemental Bane (fire/cold/acid/light), Buff Weapon (BD/HS/SK/Def), Buff Casting Implement (HL/Def).
Reduced spell casting times with no change to the actual spells, just like was done to Life and Creature.
Keep the concept of multi-target buffs, but give the player the power to select the targets without equipping them. There are multiple ways I could see this happening: Give players a "target" shortcut icon somewhere on the paper doll where they can drag items to. The items dragged to the shortcut would behave just like items dragged to the existing keyboard shortcuts. They physically wouldn't move, so you could keep them equipped, but they would be added to a list of targets for any item spell cast on that target icon. This list could easily be limited at any number you wanted for balance purposes, and should also have a clear button so you can easily reset it.
Allow players to target containers with item spells. If you cast an item spell on a container, the first X number of items would be selected as a target for that spell. You could make it a hard limit, like 9, which would match the number of armor peices you could buff with the current proposal, or scale it by spell level. Something like 3 items for levels 1-3, 6 items for levels 4-6, and 10 items for level 7.
Introduce the concept of item linking. Add an tool similar to an ust which magically attunes one item to another. Example: I drop my breastplate, sleeves, and leggings into the Linking Tool window and click the "Link" button. Then if I examine my breastplate, it will include a line saying "This item is attuned to the energies of: Silver Koujia Leggings, Armoredillo Hide Koujia Sleeves." Then any time a spell is cast on one of the items it gets echoed on all other items attuned to it. If an item falls out of your control, it gets all its link data removed, and other items you control no longer become linked to it.

As you can see, there are myriad options for improving item magic, but I fear you have chosen the solution with the most imbalance and the least benefit, and I beg you, as a melee who spends well over 3/4 of his buff time casting item spells, to consider my alternative solutions, or at least come up with one of your own that does not penalize people with low skills who rely on cantrip armor to buff (not to mention ignoring the fact that my character buffs 4 weapons to run around the wild).

Regarding the Salvage skill
I think the Salvaging skill is a good idea, but I want to highlight a question that someone posed earlier. You say the skill will be available to all new characters, but does that mean that existing characters would not receive the skill? If so, I believe that this change is practically pointless, as anyone who cares about salvaging chooses Gharu'ndim as it is, so new characters, although lacking diversity, still get the benefit of maximum salvaging capabilities.

A much better solution, regardless of whether Salvaging is available to existing characters, would be to allow players to untrain their racial skills. An extra 6 credits wouldn't kill the challenge in the game, especially considering all the truly powerful skills are more than 6 credits anyway. It wouldn't mean every melee can pick up war as a secondary skill and every BM can train sword, it means that we can all ditch those skills we don't use and choose whether or not we want to spend skill credits in addition to XP on the promise of salvaging the maximum amount.

Regarding the Salvaging Pack
Honestly, I think this is one of the most shortsighted and infexible game design ideas I've heard from Turbine, who usually is quite creative in their solutions. This concept is so narrow and restrictive that I bet you could count the characters on each server that would seriously use it on one hand.

I agree that some sort of solution to ease pack space could very well involve salvage storage, but I think Turbine needs to do more research on exactly how people salvage and what they want out of an alternative system. Think of the target player who salvages while hunting. Are they really salvaging every single item? Would they ever need a pack to hold 70 different materials? Doubtful.

The average person probably salvages 10-20 materials. You can bet on steel, iron, brass, opal, mahogany, granite, and between 5 and 10 materials for imbues, depending on whether they're just collecting for themself or to sell. Add 7 additional materials for those who care to increase their armor's protection values, and also a few for people who collect gold, ivory, leather, pine, etc. So you've got no more than 30 materials for the average player, and chances are many keep less than 24 which can already fit in one pack.

Salvaging 20 different materials means that you can already fit one bag of each type of salvaged material into a pack, and still use that pack for other items. It also means that if you salvage less materials you can combine salvage and items to be salvaged into the same pack and drag it all over to the Ust at once.

Would it really be that difficult to make it a salvage-only pack and just let you put as many bags of whatever type you want into it? Or is allowing a 99-capacity pack with only one slot for each type a way of ensuring that the average number of items in a salvage pack for each character across all servers is still around 24?

Furthermore, since foci have been in the game for years, hasn't there been enough usage of them to free up some server resources and allow either larger packs or another pack slot? You could even have larger packs with pick-up requirements. Make them no-drop and require a certain level, or a certain magic skill in order to pick it up. This would eliminate mules from using them, as well as people who don't cast spells and therefore don't use foci and already have enough pack space.

[sylphia]

Allegiance Changes
Glad we finally get officers. Please make it where the monarch can choose how many of each type he can have, though. For example, our clan has 7 Councillors, including the monarch. All of them are equal in status and "power" in the clan. The monarch should be able to choose if he wants all 6 of the others to be "Right Hands", or if he wants 2 Right Hands, 3 Executors, and 1 Speaker--or however he wants them configured to best serve the needs of the clan. The different tiers is a good idea, ut it should not be hard-coded at a set limit per tier--so long as the clan does not excede the cap of 12 officers, the monarch should be able to appoint them as he sees fit, to best serve the needs of the clan.

Ranged Attack Sliders
I still think you should just make the far left side = 0 modifier, and leave the right side at 50%. Archers are robbed of the bonus of Heart Seeker and any attack bonuses that could have been on the wpn--the slider basically only replaces that, at the expense of a slower firing rate. When a melee turns up the slider, they get higher damage rate sin exchange for the increased attack times, with no change to their likelihood to actually hit. Archers only get the bonus to hit (again it replaces HS, thats all), with no increase to actual damage. Archers should be able to hit at normal accuracy on lowest setting, and THEN the bonuses to hit make a bit more sense as it scales up. The archer is stil getting screwed on damage increase, but at least they arent being PENALIZED for firing on low speed.

Heal/Revite Changes
Good.

Item Magic
Currently, our plans call for the development of new Item Magic spells which, when cast, will redirect to each piece of armor that you are wearing.
So this means we will have to learn a whole new suite of item spells in order to gain this functionality? Why not just make current spells work that way, and restrict the way they cast on "other" targets?

Salvaging Improvements
If you REALLY want to improve salvaging, impliment the UI for the UST plug-in. It allows us to customize which types of salvage we want to UST, it allows us to dictate a range of combinations for each type, and it keeps track of how full our bags are, to ensure that the best combines result for maximum amount of total salvage in the end. Also, fix that stupid BS where the UST yields fewer pieces of salvage per item if you salvage multiple items at teh same time. For example, if you salavge 2 items seperately, you might gain 4 pieces of salvage from each, whereas if you salvage them together, you might receive a total of 7 form the combine. I realize that it probably has something to do with the way the system roudns the "total" amount of salvage currently in the ust, but I cant believe you cant tell the ust to treat each slot in it individually, rather than grouping them all PRIOR to the salvage. In other words, if I would have received 8 total pieces by salvaging those 2 items individually, and then combining the bags, then I should ALWAYS receive that 8, whether I salvaged them seperately or at the same time.

The idea of a "salvage pack" is nice, though clumsy really. For example, I only really salvage about 6 or 7 different types now, though I generally have several "levels" of salavge in each type: 1-4, 5-7, 8-9,10. If another player salvages 30 different types, he gets 6 "bonus" slots in his inventory (remember the pack takes up a pack inventory slot, so we "lose" 24 inventory slots unless we get to at least 24 different types f salvage, leaving a net gain of only 6 slot sin this case. Meanwhile, I only actually salvage 7 types of salvage, but because of the different levels of combines, I may have up to 28 actual bags working at any given time. Since there are only 6 actually different types, I get only 6 inventory slots in the salvage pack, thus LOSING 18 actual inventory slots. Obviously in this case I would choose to use a "real" pack, as it would hold almost all of my salvage. But the Salvage pack would be completely useless to me.

It would be better to have one slot alloted in the salvage pack for each salvage type in the game, and then allow US to choose if we want one of each type, or if we want to put multiple of the same type in it. For example, lets just say there are 50 types of salvage (a made up number here). I should be able to choose if I want one bag of each of those 50 salvage tpyes in there, or 4 bags of steel + 6 bags of iron + 3 bags of Red Garnet...etc. to a TOTAL of 50 bags, regardless of how I mix them. You would accomplish the idea of giving us a little extra space, while still keeping it restricted to ONLY salvage, so we cant use it to carry another 26 items of normal loot. Please compromise on this; I understand its propbably harder to code and more memory intensive, but it works better all the way around, and ensures the pack would have equal usefulness to EVERYONE who chooses to use it.

Also, one final note: If the salvage pack is implemented, we should be able to have it become the default "drop" pack for our salvage. In other words, when I ust something, I should be able to tell it to drop to the salvage pack, rather than my main pack; otherwise I spent all day long transfering salvage from my main pack to the salvage pack every time I ust something.

Changes to Armor Imbues
Good idea; it certainly makes the imbues much more appropriate in terms of risk vs reward. You MAY want to consider making it so that the imbues ONLY work if the skill is actually trained, however. I can see both sides of the fence hollering at this: (1) The proposed change would give players a freebie reduction without having to invest in the actual skil itself; a player with melee untrained would receive the same bonus as a player who had it trained or even speced. (2)The imbue earns players right to the bonus reduction, since it IS an imbue and the armor must survive the process. However, given enough salvage and armor pieces, anyone can eventually get the bonus.

Either way, this is a bit sticky, and no matter what, you arent going to please everyone. And I agree, start out small--it can always be tweaked up later...reducing it from being too high would start a riot.

[Brind]

Well last poster had some good ideas.
As most have said salvage pack is not a good idea. I carry 13-15 bags of salvage on my mage. Low steel, High steel, Low mahog, high mahog. So I would not be using it. In my opinion mages are the hardest hit when it comes to pack space. We have the 4 foci to carry or we can go back to comps and gain maybe 6 pack spaces. I think as mentiond above somewhere the place you need to look into is Death Items. Create a Death Item be it a quest item or purchashed. Make it so you drop X per level before you drop equipment. I know this also has problems but I think the player base would nelp solve them. Another Idea would be doing something with Foci, Or as the other poster said make some special packs with a weild req or something. Maybe even once you hit a certian magic skill you no longer need the foci. I guess I dont have all the answers. But I do know a salvage pack is not the answer to the pack space problem.

[alphadoom]

If it is Turbine's intention to give us more pack space then why not go back to the way it was set up in beta? In beta you had, IIRC, 10 pack slots and the pack slot area had a sliding bar, much like at the side of this web page. For some reason it was cut back to the current number of pack right before retail.

...nostalgic moment... hehe, this made me recall the time before the implementation of spell tabs. Every spell had to be cast from the side menu of learned spells :) boy, was that ever fun! but, that's why they have beta.

[Bob_Jones_LC]

Just make salvaging 100% for anybody and everybody. No skill to check, no skill to spend XP on, no skill to train, nothing fancy to code.

If the item is work 2, you get 2 units of salvage. If you're lower level, you're probably already pulling lower level salvage, which should balance things out, sort of...

The way it works now, I think people transfer most of their salvageable items over to their mule, apply it with another mule (or better yet, somebody else who is kind enough to offer high-level tinkering services), and call it good.

Because of this, a ws3 item is doubly worthless, not only for the low unit yield, but because it would devalue any existing salvage supply. Likewise, a ws10 item is doubly (if not exponentially more) valuable for the number of salvage units it provides, as well as its likely improvement towards tinkering success.

The result of the current process is that if it isn't quite near the high end of the benefit scale, it becomes worthless. In fact, close to an all-or-nothing proposition even at mid-range values.

[Shon_Tsu]

Looks pretty good guys, very excited in particular about the item magic changes, been needing them for a LONG time! For those complaining that it ruins their armor setups, I fail to see how. Even if you switch out half your suit to buff then you'll speed up your buff time by nearly 50%, and as for affecting the choice of suits it now rewards those who put together one suit to both buff and hunt in. It doesn't remove choice, it changes the choice and AC has always been about changes. Any new changes by Turbine has always changed the choices we need to make.

[Unspoken]

For some time there has been a perceived imbalance in character racial skills. Currently:

Sho characters start with Unarmed Combat trained.
Aluvian characters start with Dagger and Assess Person trained.
Gharu’ndim characters start with Staff and Item Tinkering trained.
Unless a player plans on using Dagger or Unarmed Combat, there is a strong incentive to choose Gharu’ndim – Item Tinkering. Putting experience into any Tinkering skill allows you to gain more salvage when using an Ust on an item. The ability to gain more salvage by putting experience into a free racial skill is very valuable. Assess Person in comparison is not very useful, and Sho characters have no additional racial skill at all.


And Staff is good for what??????????

[Rojon]

The Aegis ability is a large reason for the current balance between mage and non-mage PvP characters.

Giving mages and Aegis-type ability when their primary stats are used to calculate magic defense will once again make mages the obvious character of choice in PvP.

The Aegis ability was designed to give non-mages a break in PvP. Don't hand that same ability to the very class it was designed to balance!

[Kyllyr]

If you are giving aluv and Sho characters free tinkering, then what are you giving Gharu charaters? Asses person?

You are leaving Gharu with a 4 skill point skill while giving the others 6 skill points worth of skill. Or are you going to make Staff equivalent to UA in weapon damage and usefullness?

[Rebel Yell]

"The salvage pack idea comes from an attempt to figure out a way to give more pack space, without giving more pack space. "

The salvage idea won't play due to workmanship seperation. How about a pack that would hold DIs, perhaps you could charge it with pyreals rather then items. This would provide a better DI system then we have presently. Might want to exclude it from DT.

[deltas]

Just the fact that you are listening to people so well is a huge benefit. The better 'Self Item' spells sound really great.

[KF_AC]

Ranged Attack Changes

My experience with archers, and it has been extensive, is as follows:

in PvM, any creature worth fighting requires half bar and above to be hit.

in PvP, anyone with trained missile requires half bar and above to be hit.

So decreasing the penalty at the far left side from 50% to 40%, is not going to change anything for my archer.
Don't even bother spend time on this.

If you want to help Archery, you need to introduce new arrows with slightly higher damage than deadlies.
Nothing else is worth waiting for at this point.

[Ryori]

Not sure the salvage bag is useful. While I keep several types of salvage in process, I seem to be down to the 7 rending imbues (still backlogged on the old ones), iron, steel, and granite. And as someone else mentioned the bags are graded (W7, W8, etc) so that ubber bag really wouldn't help that much it seems.


On the imbue... from blah to a request to unimbue my armor. 1% of a few points is zero. As noted by a few 1% of anything under 50 would round down to zero subtracted. Given the bonuses on casters now, making it a % bonus might be too much. Making it a flat 1pt with no cap might be useful. Although, only on my rerolls would I do that. Look at the market. Imbued weapons and rending salvage is hot. Jewelry imbue cheap, and armor imbue barely traded. Not saying armor imbues need to be at the level of the weapons, but right now and thre proposal do not beat a level 1 spell.

[smaweet]

Work on the backpack/salvaging methods!!!!! This is is one of the most annoying things to handle in the game right now, next to banes.

[Ghent]

Underwhelmed by the minimal change to the aiming meter, and somewhat disappointed over the delays to bow projectile love.

Also, Aztek made some great points a while back about how the Aegis dynamic won't much help archers if it is only good with loot bows, since weeping is the only viable bow in PVP.

[Daliaeod]

Love it, I was thinking of posting threads about this stuff before reading it. It was like you guys have ESP..n lol.

Sweetness, guess when I get back to AC in July the game is gonna be sweet, taking a break in May and June,

[Skull-Crusher]

As others have already mentioned your idea for the salvage pack doesn't take into consideration having several different ws bags for higher steel and such.

Here is an idea that would solve that:

Let the salvage bag hold a higher amount of material (200 for this example) and let us draw the WS we want out of it as follows.

ws 5 costs 100 units
ws 6 costs 120 units
ws 7 costs 140 units
ws 8 costs 160 units
ws 9 costs 180 units
ws 10 costs 200 units

These numbers could be modified.

This would even reduce the server load as there wouldn't be multiple bags of each salvage.


Any thoughts on this idea?

[Rojon]

Question:

If Joe Shmoe is banned (by account or name) from an allegiance, then deletes the character...

And another account comes along and creates a new character Joe Shmoe, will the new character be banned from the allegiance?

[Jet-eye-nite]

Loot still needs alot of work,I hope you don't think its a done deal by a long shot. I have seen results from all 3 areas ,high lvl,mid lvl and low lvl and the 1,3 have too much and the mid lvl fall behind very badly. I see no mention of plats in the loot but feel most would enjoy seeing them even if they are not in pea form.
I see no love for the mid-lvl sword swinger out in ext area unless you feel a lvl 80+ is going to be happy with a 17-32 type sword and then add in the high ws on things except in the low-lvl area and there you have it . Maybe you should work on ways to spend the 100's of MMD that are readily available on a few days of fighting as there sure is no other reason to open a corpse now .



Salvage Backpack

how about having 0 burden in that pack

Starter Skills

#1 Aluv assess person = useless
why not move dagger/staff to 6 skill credits and make each a viable weapon
And give salvage as a freebie skill to everyone

Salvage

Is the only reason I continue to play and it needs so much work (its almost in-line with staff/dagger as a viable skill)

I like many others would truly love to be able to spec these skills

Be able to remove Majors from items and re-apply them to other items

Be able to add lvl 7 or maybe even although not yet IG lvl 8 spells to an item ( maybe lvl 8 could be some of the quest spells)

Be able to add a hilt to any fighting item even wands

I myself think Alleg is dead issue

[Rafein]

I don't really think the adding of a salvage skill would really change what we see now, it would just move the problem around.

If salvage is a free skill to everyone, then everyone, instead of being Gharu, would be Sho, because UA is the suprioer race based on weapons. GHaru would still see a little use for tinkering, and we would still not see any new Aluvians, unless they were going dagger.

[Bruiserk]

Salvage pack wouldn't do me any good as well.

I was thinking that if you want to look at addressing the pack space issue, why not look at foci? I think you should look into creating a prismatic type of foci that can cover all schools, but you have to buy a charge that imbues it with the properties of a particular school. When charged with a school, the prismatic foci increases in burden at the rate that the current foci weigh in at. This way we still have the burden penalties that we currently have, but it opens up the pack slots. This takes care of the salvage problem, and the need for more pack space in general.

Existing players can turn in their current foci to a town crier who then rewards the player with that particular school's foci charge. The existing players can then buy a prismatic foci from a scrivener, charge it up, and continue about their business.

New players should, if they have trained a magic skill, start with the prismatic foci, and a charge equal to each class that they have trained, or their foci is already charged for that school.

I'm sure something like this would take quite a bit of work, but I think it is probably a workable solution, and more to what the players need, than the salvage pack solution.

[Tehanu]

Originally posted by Winter
Heres a fix for the race balance thing: Give all new characters the ability to untrain their racial weapon and assess/tink option at creation, and allow the racial skill gems at the temple of forgetfulness to actually refund skill credits. This way. no one gets 'screwed'

Am I the only one that thought we were getting item enchantment love in may?!?:confused:


EDIT: Salvage bag sounds good...how do you feel about combining the foci packs into one? That would give me happiness. :D

...and...

Originally posted by gaandar
Rather than a salvage backpack, how about a "Comps" backpack. Those needing more pack space (all of us) could get rid of the 3-4 foci and go back to comps, but only taking one pack to do so.

...and...

Originally posted by The Darkness
I guess this one is still being discussed, but do you not think you are dumbing it down too much with this one-spell-banes-all system? I know lots of players liked this option, but some things should require thought - and armour choice was one of them.

The current dynamic of number of pieces of armour (for creature buffs and/or majors) versus the ease to buff made thinking about suits of armour neccessary and worked nicely.

I have the feeling now that everyone will go for as many pieces as possible to get as many 'slots' as possible.

Please have a think about this again - the physical and elemental banes (ie 3 spells including Brogards for each armour piece) would keep the original dynamic in place - especially if the casting times were sped up to level one equivalents. I'm all for minimising buffing times, just not in this dumbed down way.

Cheers for any feedback,

---------------------------

Those three statements completely sum up my opinions that question the matters discussed in the May letter. I could not have said it better, thus the quotes. I LOVE the bindstone ideas, and moving the metting halls. You seem to have left out Candeth Keep and its meeting hall from the list (and please put a lifestone or bindstone there. I know there's one nearby at the slysfear drop, but...I hate running throuhg packs of rats and mumiahs. Maybe a portal drop to just outside the keep?).

As for the "unequality" of the races, when this game opened, everybody was Sho because UA was by FAR the best of the three racial weapons. The you added triple strike daggers, and everybody went Aluvian for a while. Then those were nerfed, and you then added tinkering skills, and Gharu is the most popular fo the 3 now.

I have played Gharu from day 1. Staff has always been the worst weapon of the 3. You changed assess item skill, based solely on Focus, to item tinkering, based on focus and coordination, hurting people who were mages. There were a lot of us that actually read that initial booklet on Dereth that came with the original game, that played Gharu mages because it seemed to follow, in role playing terms, from the text. The impious staff was one of the few mage specific items that was specifically for Gharu's. Amuli armor, best for mages (lightest and two pieces for easy buffing), was Gharu racial armor. Some of us play Gharu for role playing reasons. Back in the day, assess item was actually a useful skill (before you changed it so every item could be Id'd all the time by anybody, except, of course, healing kits and locked doors and chests), I never saw anybody complaining about how Gharu's got this useful skill...

You could make it even stranger...give everybody two tinkering skills at character creation...

Everybody gets Item tinkering. Gharu's get Magic Item Tinkering in addition. This fits well with the tradition of Nuhmudira being a Gharu leader and proficient magic item tinkerer (adding minors and majors to items). Aluvian's get Armor Tinkering, fitting with their ability to make the best and strongest armor in Dereth (Celdon, Plate, etc.). Sho get Weapon Tinkering, fitting with the seeming correlation between the top weapons available being Sho weapon types. You'd have to beef up the possibilities of Magic Item Tinkering to make it equivalent (give them a 1% chance of imbuing Majors maybe? Use a skill enlightenment gem on a bag of "Major" salvage, conferring property to imbue a Major for that skill, but the imbue success being 1%, on any item). Just an idea to toss out for the wolves, that's all...

[Hamster]

Originally posted by Bruiserk
Salvage pack wouldn't do me any good as well.

I was thinking that if you want to look at addressing the pack space issue, why not look at foci? I think you should look into creating a prismatic type of foci that can cover all schools, but you have to buy a charge that imbues it with the properties of a particular school. When charged with a school, the prismatic foci increases in burden at the rate that the current foci weigh in at. This way we still have the burden penalties that we currently have, but it opens up the pack slots. This takes care of the salvage problem, and the need for more pack space in general.

Existing players can turn in their current foci to a town crier who then rewards the player with that particular school's foci charge. The existing players can then buy a prismatic foci from a scrivener, charge it up, and continue about their business.

New players should, if they have trained a magic skill, start with the prismatic foci, and a charge equal to each class that they have trained.

I'm sure something like this would take quite a bit of work, but I think it is probably a workable solution, and more to what the players need, than the salvage pack solution.

I was just about to post a suggestion about combining foci, but this is a much more thought out version.

THIS is what you need to do to help with the pack space issues. It accomplishes the goal of giving extra pack space without actually giving extra pack space, and it provides some burden consideration for having extra school on your foci.

I'm another person who would have no use for the salvage pack. I would much prefer you spend time integrating the UST plugin functionality into the game.

While I'm excited about the item changes upcoming, a few people have voiced the same concern that I have. There should be something that doesn't negate the benefits and drawbacks of different numbers of pieces in suits of armor. I think the grouped spells of physical (includes impen) and elemental is a better solution, and it also addresses the issues of people who use different armor for buffing than for fighting.

Last month's changes are great, and having come back from a year+ off, the changes in general over that time have been really nice, but I hope you put further consideration into both these ideas.

Originally posted by Tehanu
You seem to have left out Candeth Keep and its meeting hall from the list (and please put a lifestone or bindstone there. I know there's one nearby at the slysfear drop, but...I hate running throuhg packs of rats and mumiahs. Maybe a portal drop to just outside the keep?)

There is currently a lifestone that's just to the right if you exit Candeth and run out from the "bridge" at the entrance. It's not a completely safe drop, but it's substantially closer than the Sylsfear LS is.

Not that I wouldn't like seeing LSes in the middle of all the towns.

[MaddyFF]

Originally posted by Rojon
Question:

If Joe Shmoe is banned (by account or name) from an allegiance, then deletes the character...

And another account comes along and creates a new character Joe Shmoe, will the new character be banned from the allegiance?

My guess would be no as it probably is doing things at a different level then the player name. Zyrca would know for sure though :)

[Sake]

Not to sound lazy, but is there any chance we could have these new item spells just be put in some quest where we're given a full set of the scrolls at the end? I'm sorry but after blowing three keyrings full of siks and having nothing to show for it but a eradicate life magic other scroll and then spending four hours killing bugs to get the bloody eradicate life/creature self scrolls, I'm kinda tired of depending on random chance for these things...

Of course, I suppose even random drops would be better than sticking them in another unsoloable quest that has to be repeated at least six bloody times where you fight your way through an annoyingly long hall filled with monsters...

[Wing]

One idea that we are investigating is a “Salvage Backpack”. This would take up a pack slot in inventory and could hold a single bag of each type of salvage.

While this may sound like an excellent idea for melees but it really kills for mages. True, it opens up more spaces in the mainpack but mages use sides packs for

1. Comps
2. Death Items
3. Items that are no drop no give, items not used often, spare wands

Well that's all their back pack slot so they still packing salvaging in the mainpack that gets mixed in with loot.

Whoa is the limited carrying mage.

I once remember in Dungeons & Dragons an item that was only carried by a mage. Bag of Holding. Burdenless carrying bag is what it was :)

[RedSeptember_WE]

I personally think 12 is way too many Monarchy helpers. By the time you get to the 2nd rank of helpers theres gonna be trouble as its already beond the monarchs direct command & 2nd rank has the ability to boot/ban members.

I think this will turn into untrustworthy people ending up being in 2nd & 3rd rank of this operation. Friends recruteing friends for positions reguardless of how honorable they are.

I can already immagine monarchies falling apart because people wants to show off their power.

12 is ALOT of people, there will be problems with at least half these people.

[_AbBaNdOn]

Turbine plans things out in advance right?? Before you started giving us information on the coming months you guys kinda knew what you wanted to do ahead of time.

So who the hell planned doing some magic changes one month and not doing the rest until a couple of months later? Why didnt those things all get done at once BEFORE you moved on to other things.

I believe people have said that the speed changes have only made the item spells even more pronounced. I also didnt see jack about peoples concern on people who have to equip pieces of armor to buff up and the changes you have planned.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

-your gonna give archers and mages Aegis abilities on LOOT weapons and wands?? thats insane. Melee'ers have to do a quest.

-aegis shield and new imbued armor for war magic SHOULD stack.

-Marae Lassel should be an 80-100 zone on the plateau, 40- on the southern side and 60+ on the north side. It SHOULD NOT have an extreme area. jesus why dont you just make everything caul and vod and add XP levers so everyone can be extreme

The olthoi arcade tunnel to the mainland would be a great way for the swarm type olthoi to get to marae lassel. perhaps a new dungeon with hollow olthoi or some new type of hollow eviscerators.

IN CONCEPT:

-Salvage skill.... This is kinda retarded. Are attributes gona affect it or will it start at 0. If it started at 0 is it gonna have different skill check ranges for getting max salvage?

I think giving everyone item tinkering would be better.

-Salvaging backpack.. i dont know how useful it would be especially since you cant have multiple types of salvage in it?? Maybe if you explained the reasoning behind it? I think most people would agree killing the need for 4 different foci and opening up 3 more normal pack slots would be 10x more useful.

Now if you made a salvage bag that was totally normal except that if u click a button somewhere it would move up to 24 bags of salvage to it

-Being able to ust several different qaulity of a given material and keep them seperate would be awesome. This would probably be impossable but being able to control what qaulities get squished together would be even better. Like everything between 5-7 get squished together

-armor imbue changes no comment on the proposed changes but i think the material that changes protection values should be raised. They are not very useful in the current day and age of AC. Most monsters do 2-3+ types of damage so using several tinks to max out one protection type is worthless. And then lv7 banes will max out just about every protection level except poor.

I think making each protection material add +2.0 to a max of 2.0 would make them extremely useful and they still would not be overpowering. If people maxed out several different types of damage on a piece of armor that takes away from the max AL and they wont be able to bane it. Even with new item spell changes they would still be underpowered. A material would have to start altering 2 damage types from one bag of material to keep up with item magic changes.

God this sucks i gotta wait till june to come back =(

[Wolfpaw]

Regarding the new item spells...


As it sounds like you are planning to add self versions of item buffs, please keep in mind that many melee chars wear different items for buffing then for fighting. I have an almost complete major suit I use for buffing on my main. having one spell that would cover all the armor I am currently wearing would not be very helpful in that case.

If the plan is to add self only versions of item spells, why not just simply give them the fast cast times like you did for the item and life self spells?


EDIT- I see that Scorpion73 has the same concern, but another voice can't hurt.


I agree with this very much. I wear a full suit of majors for buffing, and while I *can* buff without it, and thus could use the full cover buffs, a quick cast or several banes on one spell would be a much better way to improve item buffs in my opinion.

[Stonefree]

Note: For characters who wear unbuffable armor (e.g. Covenant Armor), the worst part of buffing ARE the underclothes. Please make some sort of item buff spell that targets those piece(s) and banes/imps them! Underclothes cannot be quickly targetted, you must remove some other armor first to reach them - and if the underclothes do not cover the entire leg, for example, then it's even worse because you may have to pull off a girth, then possibly the shirt, then the legs. (Or it's the other way around, either way one of the pieces can be a real pain.)

Thanks!
------------------------------------------------------

eh`

You van put them in hot bar down to the left and buff them from there. or target them there.

[Harzah]

Originally posted by Kyllyr
If you are giving aluv and Sho characters free tinkering, then what are you giving Gharu charaters? Asses person?

You are leaving Gharu with a 4 skill point skill while giving the others 6 skill points worth of skill. Or are you going to make Staff equivalent to UA in weapon damage and usefullness?

Item Tinkering is 2 skill credits.

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by _AbBaNdOn
I believe people have said that the speed changes have only made the item spells even more pronounced. I also didnt see jack about peoples concern on people who have to equip pieces of armor to buff up and the changes you have planned.

If you want to be able to take full advantage of Item magic, you will need to train Item magic and put experince into it. Or you can drop down to a level of spell you can cast without swapping out armor pices to take advantage of it. Life is full of trade offs, this will be one of them.

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by RedSeptember_WE
I personally think 12 is way too many Monarchy helpers. By the time you get to the 2nd rank of helpers theres gonna be trouble as its already beond the monarchs direct command & 2nd rank has the ability to boot/ban members.

You don't have to assign out all 12 spots. It is up to the monarch to decide how many officers they will have and what level of access. We are trying to provide flexible tools so that allegiances can make thier own decisions on how they should be run.

[magusofatlan]

>>
You'd be able to have up to 99 units of each type of salvage. There are 70ish material types in the game, so, if you saved all types of salvage, it would be the equivalent of a 70ish slot backpack ...

(A 70ish slot backpack that could only hold salvage and only one partial bag of each type of salvage.)
<<

*IF* this is a new pack slot on the side it'll be awesome, if you are replacing an existing pack slot it'll help, but not as much as we'd like. A few posters have already mentioned the biggest reason - we just don't collect 70 different types of salvage, we collect 20-40. normally.

If you make it so you can just drag an item to that pack, and have it auto-salvaged and placed into the appropriate partial salvage "bag", then I'd be a very happy camper! (So you ID the item and just drag it there to salvage and "combine" all in one step. No long mouse dragging, dragging a pack/salvage back to the UST, then clicking Salvage...)

[Zyrca]

Originally posted by Rojon
Question:

If Joe Shmoe is banned (by account or name) from an allegiance, then deletes the character...

And another account comes along and creates a new character Joe Shmoe, will the new character be banned from the allegiance?

All bans are done by account, the name is only there to provide you a way to list and remove accounts from the list without displaying account names.

The new account with Joe Shmoe will not be banned from the allegiance.

[Cheapo-SC]

But Zyrca, the Item changes are so silly.

Why can't we just increase the speed of the self banes and impen to level 1 speed and be done with it.

All other level 7's in item would remain the same.

Less changes on your end, easier for the playerbase to understand because it's consistant with Life, Critter.

Why does Turbine have to make things so difficult sometimes??

[Truth Seeker]

Allegiance officers are individuals only.

Allegiance bans are for the entire account.


Is there any chance officers could be setup for the account?

If I am the only clan officer online at the time but I am online with a mule making THE's by the time I stop robochef, log out, log back in again its pointless as the moment has passed.





Auto drag salvage is a BAD idea for those that suggested it. I don't leather everything because they are made from material I am not going to be salvaging. If I can accidentally drop it in a pack and lose it I am gonna be mightily annoyed.

[Hamster]

Originally posted by Zyrca
If you want to be able to take full advantage of Item magic, you will need to train Item magic and put experince into it. Or you can drop down to a level of spell you can cast without swapping out armor pices to take advantage of it. Life is full of trade offs, this will be one of them.

Zyrca,
Let me precursor what I'm about to say by saying, I appreciate the time and effort you and the other devs put into developing and improving AC.

Having said that, these threads are posted to acquire feedback for the ideas you are mulling over. I take that as an indication that you are open to ideas/suggestions regarding the changes in consideration. This is the second time on one of these threads that I have read a dev post a condescending response to someone's concerns. Now, I understand that you guys put up with a lot of complaints and general bs from the people posting on these boards, but these are, for the most part, your customers, and you are professionals. As such, I really would expect a more professional response from you and the other devs. If that is an issue, perhaps you should just run your responses by Ibn and have him post a response reworded in a professional manner.

Can you please explain the reasoning behind sticking with this method of improving item buffs vs the combined spells method that some have posted which seem to resolve all the concerns I've read on this thread while still providing a marked improvement over the current system?

[_AbBaNdOn]

wow no wonder you have a fraction of the people you used to have.

Maybe your slack/non-existant stance on cheating and your "trade-off theory" arent exactly working.

[Harzah]

Originally posted by Zyrca
If you want to be able to take full advantage of Item magic, you will need to train Item magic and put experince into it. Or you can drop down to a level of spell you can cast without swapping out armor pices to take advantage of it. Life is full of trade offs, this will be one of them.

And I have to say I fully agree with that. In order to buff myself currently with 6s I have to equip focusing/willpower jewelry, my saudaloi for the life buff, my minor item guants, and martine's robe for additional item buff. With the new spells I won't be able to do that at the same level, I'll have to use a lower level or, presumably do it the old way, since I cannot wear the armor I would want to buff. However, so what? My skills are low. I accept that and will no doubt be working to raise them. I've needed to frankly anyway as I've begun to seriously hate buffing in what amounts to being nekkid, between several spawn sites. This will simply give me more impetus =)

Regarding the Salvage bag idea:

For those who are saying it's useless because they won't use it - try to think of others. Maybe you collect only a few kinds of salvage but there are many people who collect more than a few types.

Also, think of the mules left holding the bag, literally. A Salvage bag, even if it's only one kind of each salvage, is still very beneficial and gives them more room for other things.

As others have stated, if it could be coupled with some form of auto-combining, it would make Usting go a lot smoother.

[Winter]

I personally think the item magic changes are a good idea. My main was well into her 80's before being able to start casting 7's with any sort of skill. Of couse I also started her with 10/10 F/S.

I know there are a few people here who have bound their skill with majors. I wont lie and say majors arent nice, but seriously these shouldnt determine whether you cast 7's or not. Quite frankly the difference between 6's and 7's, other than the 15 mins, is really quite negligable.

[Dom on TD]

Big LttPs need big feedback, so here it is in order of appearance.

1)Allegiance Improvements:
A)Monarch/Officer Commands: I can't imagine why it's taken so long to give us this. Currently, monarchs are just the people with allegiance housing. Sure, they can boot people, but then those people can reswear. You still haven't given me a reason to become a monarch, since there's no perks whatsoever, besides a mansion. At least you gave them power.
B)Allegiance Storage Access: Great idea for the allegiance chest access. Do you think you could let us have account storage access too? I hate having to relog my account to get into my chest with my brother's mules.

2)Allegiance Bindstones: I'm so glad you didn't restrict this to non-housed allegiances.

3)Treasure Changes, Part IV:
A)Art Items and Casters: Thank you. You must have gone out looking for Granite finally. Too bad you did this after you improved the variances on melee weapons (UA in particular needed a ton).
B)“Mundane” Items: I have mixed feelings on this. While treated kits dropping on corpses will be nice, I don't like the idea of 3 types of health potions and 3 types of stam potions. It's already hard for me to see the difference between a potion and an elixer without selecting it 1st. I usually have about 15 Health Elixers on me, and 8-50 Health Potions (which I drop once I find out they're potions). Please make the new potions' artwork unique so that I can tell the difference easily. I have the same problem with mana stones as well.
C)Chests and Fishing Holes: No comment as I use neither of these. Just put it in to make sure I cover everything:D .

4)Ranged Attack Changes: I quit playing my archer months ago. But if I ever play a missile character again, I'm sure I'll appreciate this change.

5)Negative Spell Timers: So now I can just wait out Level 6 debuffs instead of wasting a gem? Hooray!!!

6)Healing Spells: I think it's a waste of time for a pitiful 6-15 point average increase. The low level increases are fine, but the high level healing spell increases seem weak. It just seems like a Level 7 heal spell should heal for more than 115 (average), since it takes so long to cast, alot more mana, and has the probability of consuming a Platinum Scarab. Any chance on speeding these spells up? Seems like they'll be the only thing slowing the buffs down, since my melee's Mana Conversion is practically nothing.

7)Temple Quest Weapons: I had to reread this 3 times to be sure you weren't nerfing my weapon. It is already the most powerful weapon I have against Drudge Seraphs, and by the looks of it, it will be even better next month. Do I need to get a new one, or will this affect the one I currently have?

8)Ulgrim’s Bathrobe: Wasn't that quest only up for a week? This seems kinda like a slap in the face for people that didn't have a chance to do that quest. You wasted the Devs' time on a cosmetic change for a useless quest item that is no longer available. Well, at least the trade bots' feet will be warm. @sarcasm off

9)Palenqual’s Living Weapons: No comment yet. I'll have to redo the quest and see the upgrade to know what I think about it.

10)Town Revisions: Sounds like good news. Was there ever a point to having portals drop you out of site of the towns? It's not like the PKers don't know where the drops are for their ambushes.

11)In Development:
A)Improved Allegiance Officers: I like the sound of this. It allows Monarchs to have helpers, but it doesn't require them to give all of the powers to them. Thanks for listening to the feedback on that.
B) Buffing Improvements – Item Magic: It looks like you're dodging some issues here. Some people have to wear armor with cantrips to buff/bane themselves. It's possible to add 23 points to your buffing skills while wearing Major enchantments, but most of these armor pieces have junk AL and high workmanship making them useless in battle. Are you intending to penalize these people for not having a high enough Item Enchantment skill? (Ignore the last question. you answered it while I was typing this 2 hour response.) I see you also conveniently left out shields, again. Why won't the spells redirect to underclothes? Seems odd that we'll be baning it seperatly, when I thought the 1 piece raiments were intended to make the underbanes less painful.
C)Aegis: Does the Aegis only work in PvP? I've been told to use it in VoD, but never really looked to see if it had an affect, but since you brought it up in the "PvP Weapon Changes", I thought I'd ask. Why is it only going to be available on Missile weapons and casters? I see this as a nerf to melees. You should allow it on all weapons, so we can use our shields again. If the effects don't stack, then what would be the problem? Shields are the bonus to being a melee. By not giving this to all weapons, it's like increasing damage done to melees, since ranged/magic using characters will get reduced magic damage.
D)Gaerlan revisited: I love the quest, but unfortunatly ran out of rewards. I hope this goes well.
E)Marae Lassel: Will it be getting anymore Lifestones? Will any of the portals become recallable? Seems like most of my newbies' lives are spent running to the arcade.

12)In Concept:
A)Character Starting Skills: I like the idea of the salvaging skill. I'll go get untrain gems in the hopes of one day not needing those skills on all of those characters.
B)Salvage Backpack: Bad idea. I keep different grades of salvage, but only 10-15 different types, so it wouldn't help me at all. I may have 45-50 partial bags of salvage, but only 10 different types. If you want to give us packspace without adding packspace, give us a Prismatic Foci or stackable mana charges. How about doing away with Keyrings and making all keys stack? Ever consider a scrollpack? Seems like I'll be carrying a ton of scrolls looking for the new item spells. Why not make scrolls stack? They're paper, so it seems like they would stack better than potions. If you want to give us packspace there's alot of better ways to do it without the salvage backpack. The only way I could see this as anything but a nerf is if you introduced a way to break down our bags of salvage into the smaller bags which would represent the items that were salvaged to make the bag. That way we could recombine them into grade-specific bags later.

If you read this far then, thank you for your time.

[Suxor]

Changing the armor imbues is not a very popular idea in my book, well, lets just say i have very mixed feelings. Changing to a percentage does give better results. Say a 120 melee d (very low in my opinion) with 5% bonus gives 11 extra points, which is more than the 10 from a fully imbued set of covenant or plate, and that is real nice. But I can help but feel like I've lost out on all the work of putting together a full set of imbued covenant. I guess I'm not really gripeing too much since the new way would allow for being able to replace some pieces with majors without having to sacrifice a +1 (unless of couse the major contributes toward the melee d, then there is no sacrifice), but then where is the thrill in trying to imbue a major (which I've successfully done before I knew what I really had). I just wanted to express my concern about it, but after the math it all works out. I guess if this goes into effect, I'll still try to blow every piece of cov i get up with peridot. I still don't like the cap idea though, I think that for those hard headed enough to make full +10 sets, they should be able to benifit from it.

[Winchinlo]

Salvage pack sounds like a good idea, will be really good if a UST is not required and anything dropped into this pack is salvaged!

Only problem is my 4 school mage going down to 2 packs :( but good for melle's with fewer focci.

I would also cast my vote for being able to untrain racial skills rather than having a salvage skill, more flexibility and training a tink is only 2 points if you want to salvage more.

Guess this will not happen but how about 2 school foci ?!?! there would never be more storage than all back packs and it would not penalise space the more magic you learn.

Over all very good plans - thumbs up.

[Li of LC]

Item buffs: Please think this through all the way.

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Zyrca
If you want to be able to take full advantage of Item magic, you will need to train Item magic and put experince into it. Or you can drop down to a level of spell you can cast without swapping out armor pices to take advantage of it. Life is full of trade offs, this will be one of them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One could also argue that one of those trade-offs that has been part of the game for four years now was the choice between taking the time to fully buff and bane each piece of armor. Or, if one wants to avoid melee damage, to take melee D and put xp into it.

Yes, I hate having to buff my armor to survive on the "extreme" fringe areas, especially when hunting solo. But speeding item spells to only equipped armor is not the answer. My item-only archer, for instance - arguably the type of character this improvement would most benefit - changes legs, pauldrons, guants, and helm out when buffing (for major foc tassets, minor self pauldrons, major item gaunts, and foc 6 kasa, respectively). Even my lvl 96 3-school melee changes legs, gaunts and helm. And the proposed change does not address clothing or weapons, and offsets one of the big advantages of covenant. Not to mention being of much greater utility to mages than melee/archer.

Any number of Decal plugins allow targeting specific pieces of armor/clothing in the character's inventory (Nerfus Buffus, Infinity, Saphire, Einstein...) so it's possible to add that functionality to the client code. Please take the time to listen to the players, and if you make this change, do it right.

[Rojon]

Originally posted by Zyrca
The new account with Joe Shmoe will not be banned from the allegiance.
Thank you for the reply.

I enjoy trying to break things, you see.

:)

[Hungwell]

I like the idea on the racial skills and the salvage skill. I do not believe any race is getting 'screwed' by this change. Even with a salvage skill for all races, Item Tink is just as useful as assess person. (lol) I have as much sympathy for the folks that took gharu for a race to get the free tink as I do for people that made aluvian dagger toons back when bandits ruled. You played the rules not the game and it is time for the rules to change. Suck it up.


On the armor imbues I agree with the guy that said the increased chance to resist (even if small) far outweighs a percent of damage reduction. I have personally blown up about 30 pieces of al 400+ covenant to get my current zircon suit. I have 8 pieces of +1 imbued armor. I dont wear it often cuz it just doesnt have much visible effect.

Major kudos on the allegiance commands. As a monarch I have been waiting for this for a year. Bye bye grieftards!

[sionwarwick]

Gaerlan - the "exploit" of getting items without killing G actually makes the quest doable for those of us who can't get huge groups together (namely any level ranges but the highest). Please make it possible to do the quest with 2-3 people if you make this change. This is a big frustration with many of the quests designed to be challenging for the hoards of players swamping it in the first month, but make it difficult for casual players who often do content solo or in small groups.

Salvaging - please, please make this something that current characters can pick up as well (perhaps through a quest?). Of my 6 non-mule characters, 1 is gharu, and I'm not rerolling the others. With as little time as I have to play, rerolling is not an option, it would take me years to get back the levels, and its frustrating already that I'm not "uber" enough to do most new content.

Everything else sounds good. Thanks for the efforts!

[Myk]

I still want to know why missile weapon sers and mages Have to give up a weeping weapon to get an aegis property while melee get aegis and weeping weapons.....That seems like a very bad idea.

[Gouru]

Originally posted by Hamster
Zyrca,
... This is the second time on one of these threads that I have read a dev post a condescending response to someone's concerns. ... As such, I really would expect a more professional response from you and the other devs. If that is an issue, perhaps you should just run your responses by Ibn and have him post a response reworded in a professional manner.

Can you please explain the reasoning behind sticking with this method of improving item buffs vs the combined spells method that some have posted which seem to resolve all the concerns I've read on this thread while still providing a marked improvement over the current system?

You're kidding, right? Rather than having the devs talk to us straight, you want everything laundered by Ibn so that your little feelings don't get hurt??? And you then respond by calling them 'condescending' and unprofessional? Her response gave the expected 'solution' to this for players (increase magic skill), and the rationale behind that decision. If you can't handle adult conversation, you might want to go back to your Golden Book readers.

They have also stated in the past that among the goals for these buffing enhancements is a) speed up buffing, b) reward players that train and spend xp in their magic skills and c) do so while minimizing buffbot love (thus self spells, not other). Current spells cannot be cast on self only, so unless they break current functionality, it will require new spells. Prismatic spells are usable by buffbots, unless they are limited to self only.

This solution meets ALL of their goals, while minimizing the buffbot love.

[kgober]

it's unprofessional for them to even post at all.

look at almost any other company. the 'professional' developers hide behind a wall of customer 'service' representatives that don't know jack about the product they're supporting.

take it as a given that nothing you say will please everybody all the time. if you then define 'professionalism' as 'avoiding saying anything that will upset any of the customers' you see the logical result -- never say anything at all.

is that what you'd prefer?

if it's not, then I'd say this is one of life's little tradeoffs. get used to it.

-ken

[Gouru]

Hmmm, LTTP mentioned the babies, so they are going to stick around for May? I need to do some scheduling, and there is this Baby White Bunny whose name is engraved on my War wand...

[Ibn]

Originally posted by ToiletDuk
Would it really be that difficult to make it a salvage-only pack and just let you put as many bags of whatever type you want into it?

Yes, it would be that difficult unfortunately.

What we're proposing is not intended to be the be-all end-all solution to all salvaging pack concerns. It's intended to help some people in some situations.

I guess my question is this -- if we implement something that does not specifically help your character, are you any worse off than if we don't implement it at all?

[JJC]

> I guess my question is this -- if we implement something that does not specifically help your character, are you any worse off than if we don't implement it at all?

If the change is a fundamental switch in direction, yes. If the change implies a tradeoff where there is no tradeoff, yes. When the changes give all the advantages to one type of character, yes.

The salvage pack? Harmless. Make everyone a mage? Not good.

JJC

[DHMagicMan]

For the people complaining about the Item Buff changes, why do you think the changes they are suggesting should not be implemented?

It seems to me that these changes follow very closely the same types of benifits that the Life and Critter changes already gave us. If you don't cast your own banes / item buffs you won't get the benifit but then again, you don't have the skill trained. Why should you get the benifit?

I fully support Zyrca saying "Life is full of trade offs"... It certainly is. If you don't have melee defense trained then you don't get the benifit of having high melee defense. If you don't have alchemy trained you can't make Trade Health Elixers... It seems straight forward to me.

Please describe what you see as problems with the proposed Item Buffing improvements.

[Gouru]

Originally posted by Ibn
Yes, it would be that difficult unfortunately.

What we're proposing is not intended to be the be-all end-all solution to all salvaging pack concerns. It's intended to help some people in some situations.

I guess my question is this -- if we implement something that does not specifically help your character, are you any worse off than if we don't implement it at all?

I guess my question is if this solution does not signficantly help, is it worth the dev cycles?

It sounds like a nice start to me, but has a couple holes. a) inability to store more than one bag of a material type, so multiple bags differing in quality cannot be stored, b) requires a full pack slot, my guess is very few people store more than 24 different 'types' of salvage so the gain is very small or actually a loss to a LOT of players, and it is the rare player (yes I know they exist) that salvage everything to resell to vendors, and c) storage space is mostly an issue with mages who only have 3 side packs available. They are the class helped least with this 'fix'.

I personally would rather see cycles spent elsewhere than in a 'fix' that will be of such limited use.

Stackable DI's or a comp bag that did not take a slot would help much more. Or thinking way out of the box, Foci that need to be recharged by putting components in them. The compenents could not be taken out, but if the bag had a 'scarab level' and a 'taper' level that can be increased (to some maximum). Taper level burns faster than scarab level, different scarabs put in the bag increase the level by different amounts, so a plat scarab put in might make the level sufficient to on average cast 20 lvl 7 spells, or 200 lvl 1 spells. A lead scarab put in is sufficient to cast 40 lvl 1 spells. (Would have to play with numbers here)

As it stands as a mage, I have a full bag devoted comps (and a couple wands/gems), a bag devoted to Death Items, and a bag for my other wands, non-drop quest items (Bellows for instance) and short term storage of things waiting to be muled.

My main bag is devoted to loot as I'm hunting, and salvage bags, (about 20 different types/levels).

I'd MUCH rather see time spent making more items stackable. That will free up more space than a salvage bag.

[Winchinlo]

Surely there are no drawbacks or down side to these changes, as i understand it all existing spells remain the same. The same as the salvaging you can carry on as before or see if the new methods suit your char.

[MimsterofMT]

"We are considering making changes to the way that the three Armor Imbues work. Currently you can imbue a piece of armor to

grant +1 to your Missile Defense, Melee Defense, or Magic Defense skill.

We are looking at possibly changing this bonus from +1 skill to a 1% damage reduction."


-Currently Useless, Do BOTH (change +1 to +1% AND change damage reduction to 1% or 1 point which ever is greater )!!!! Still

would be only semiusefull but much better than now.
I have a 400 base melee def. I dont even consider Armour imbuing anything right now. I would like to add % Magic def imbues to

my covenant armour (spec'd magic def), currently not worth the risk.

--------------------------------------------------------------

For May, we've added 2 additional "quick slots" like the bracelet, ring and necklace for your clothing. So, you will have a way

to target your underclothes w/o taking up quickslots or taking off your armor.

-Please fix the bug that if you have boots on you cannot remove greaves WITHOUT first removing your boots. Which is just silly

since the boots only protect your feet and not your lower leg.

----------------------------------------------------------------

"Aegis-like equipment. Our current design is an item that could be used on any loot missile weapon to add a Magic Absorbing

property to it. This property would be similar to the Aegis Shield and would scale based on the wielder’s Magic Defense. The

downside is that the missile weapon would lose any melee defense adjustment that it might possess. "

-Melee characters dont have to make this trade-off why do missile or mage characters? Why don't you add an aegis shield for

missilers and mages that goes in the shield slot.


-----------------------------------------------------------------

Regarding Item Magic changes

I agree with many people here in that your proposed changes eliminate the advantage of certain armor suits people have spent

months/years collecting and refining. I currently have finally gotten a covenant suit togather because I hate baning but now I should assemble a better protecting buffable armour as well. As a ammmter of fact with the armour imbuing changes the more pieces of armout the better.


----------------------------------

Regarding the Salvaging Pack - great idea but I will never use it. I have to little free space as it is. If you want to reduce

pack back space get rid of DI's all of my high lvl chars have 24 slots filled with rnd DI's


--------------------------------

[Neolucent]

Turbine:

Please do not change armor imbues from +1 Magic Defense to +1%, that would be a major mistake. There will be a 5% cap even? Man, that totally sucks for people like me who use a 9-piece armor imbued suit. +9 points to magic defense from my suit gives me a better chance of resisting spell traps in dungeons.

Please, do not nerf armor imbues like that. They are perfect as they are right now. Do not change +1 Point to +1% percent, it would be a serios set back. It took me a long while to build my +9 magic defense imbued suit and it has over 80+ bags of steel in it from tinks. I spent a long time of my own time trying to put it toghether and the resutls have been amazing. If armor tink imbues are nerfed in the way you plan to, I will probably leave Asherons call, and thats no joke. It would b a serious disapoinment if armor imbues are changed to +1%.

Please reconsider!

- Neo_

[cstanleytech]

Regarding the adding of a new pack just for salvage I have a question/suggestion.
Instead of adding a new pack that takes up yet another slot why not just make it so a person can access their house chest from in the field ?
Mind you I am not even sure if this is possible but it just seems to me that letting people access their chests solves the problem of storing salvage as well as other stuff fast.
As I said I am not sure its even possible but I for one would prefer better access to my house chest then a new pack that takes up one of my mages few slots.

[Yusuki]

Originally posted by Ibn
What we're proposing is not intended to be the be-all end-all solution to all salvaging pack concerns. It's intended to help some people in some situations.

I guess my question is this -- if we implement something that does not specifically help your character, are you any worse off than if we don't implement it at all? On its face, no. If the salvage pack gets introduced, it changes nothing on any of my characters. I'll still use UST profiles to salvage the way I want/need to, I won't "waste" a pack slot on the salvage thing (I don't now; I do all my salvaging in the main bag anyway because it has more room), and life will go on pretty much as before.

In response, my question is this: How much time and how many resources are being devoted to a new dynamic/feature that perhaps 5% of the population will use? If it's more than 5% of the month, it's a net loss, overall. All things considered.

Given how the communication lines have been working lately, I have to say I'm honestly surprised there wasn't an unofficial survey or poll thread asking, "How do you salvage, and why is the current system inconvenient for you? Answer in the context of having a salvage pack as described." That'd at least have given you and the team a better idea of what people needed/wanted in this regard.

For instance, if I were given a choice between this method and a method that said, "This bag will hold X amount of salvage, but it will determine what it keeps by workmanship first and type of salvage second," I would take the second method. I'd much rather have the ability to create bags of Steel that were W6, W7, W8, W9, and W10 rather than the ability to create whatever-workmanship bags of Agate, Oak, Bronze, Silver, and Yellow Topaz. Honestly, I would be surprised if the average player collected more than 12 or 15 types of salvage total.

[Yinchi]

I love the new "clothing slots" idea. This would free up hot key spots.

Salvage Packs - As I understand it, we don't receive a new pack, we simply give up another one as we did with "foci". I certainly hope this is an option rather than a change, such as the "foci" packs. Most people including myself, gather only a few types of materials. This would not be helpful and it would seriously take away from people's very limited pack space. For me, to take one more pack would cause chaos in my pack system.

My packs are used for those items I don't want to sell, we carry tons of death items at high levels, weapons, wands, comps, mana charges, kits, potions, my pack space is at a premium, to take away one more pack would certainly be an unwelcomed addition if I was forced to use it.

Item spells - Baning is everyone's bane. It is tedious and time consuming. I would welcome the ability to bane faster, there is too much downtime related to buffing. Even if a portion of your armor is not baned by this process, it is still faster than doing each piece.

The ability to bane all your armor will add diversity to the look of armor in AC. We all tend to use armor that is two piece. Celdon and the rest of the armor that comes in pieces, is sold as useless. I would welcome this change. However, this still leaves underclothing to be baned. (sigh).

An alternative would be to give us faster spells such as critter has now and use less mana for each spell.

[kgober]

remarkably, I only use 2-piece armor on my mage (the character you'd think is best-equipped to bane multiple items). and the primary reason isn't because it's 2 pieces, it's because GSA is no-drop, so I need to worry less about DI's (which are problematic to find space for, with 4 foci and well over 50 bags of partially-filled salvage of various types and qualities on-hand)

my archer and my melee characters use multi-piece armor, and yes I do bane each piece, myself (both have item trained). for my melee, I use it because of the spells I can get (particularly majors). for my archer, I use it because amuli is horrendously heavy for its AL, so I use something with a bit less AL but a *lot* less bu.

my wife, being an archer, never uses 2-piece armor because she has *always* used her Sleeves of Inexhaustability.

so, I would say that any claim that we 'all' tend to use 2-piece armor is false.

-ken

[Yew Wan Sum]

First Point: I see that you are listening somewhat to the cries of 'the changes are not enough', and updated the recovery spells, although not by much, especially at the high level. Its a start though. I also see you haven't made mention of the great many posts by a great many people, who all concur that the 40% vs. 50% is insufficient. Plese revisit the numerous posts on this issue and have another look at it.

Second Point: Armor imbues MUST be as effective as weapon imbues in order to make them worth anything. Period. Magic absorbtion isn't a bad idea, but the caps are way too low to make a real difference between imbued and unimbued. Wanna know what *would* make a difference? An imbue that makes the armor self-buffing. I don't care how it would work, but that would do it. So would putting a Moderate on it. Or upgrading a minor already present to a Major.

Third Point: The salvage idea is a GOOD idea, but it leaves me with the feeling that its only half-baked. Keep working on the idea. There may be some refinement of this idea that would work extremely well. Better to refine and define now rather that putting it in and not being really satisfied with it.


Fourth Point: When are you putting in time to fix some of the truly annoying bugs, like archers charging their target with bow in hand and then just standing there, or the infamous 'I cast it, but nothing happened', or the all-time hated favorite, shooting a projectile out of your nether region every time something twitches or charges you?

Fifth Point: Consider this one carefully. I started up my latest char a couple days ago. I decided to play it without gear, but with buffs. I found gear easily enough, so Good Job on the loot. My problem is this: My character has already reached the point where I'm hunting Bone Lords and such. This is after two hours of play. Assuming NO buffs whatsoever (did this on Shadowclaim, DT, and FF) it doesnt take more than 8-10 hours to reach this point. Now, take a look a the world map. See how much of it is designated for low-levels? LOTS. See how much is designated for mod levels (40-60) LOTS and LOTS. How many players do you have who's main is under 60??? Other than rerolls, and true new players, none. Even the most casual of casual players has passed this point by now.

Even a true new player will be out of these areas long before more than 1% of them has been explored. The *majority* of your players are in the 60+ range, and most of those are 80+.

WHY is it that the areas of the world which represent the largest portion of the active players levels' is also the SMALLEST? Have you even been to VoD? Its a cluster. Reminds me of the old BSD in its camped days. AB? Puhlease. Unless you run up the coast or way down south, you are tripping over people left and right.

Bottom line: You do NOT have enough hunting area for the 80+ crowd. The entire dires should be 80+, and the west should be Caul level to VoD level.


Last Point: I have a L126 Tank Archer. This is a common, but not the most common, template. Please tell me where I can hunt, solo, that does not require me to camp a quest dungeon and does not net me reduced XP. Around AB there are too many sub 120 critters, and the XP is 1/3rd what it is in, say, an olthoi or tusker dungeon. VoD? Nope. Tanks don't solo big mobs efficiently. A mage or mage-with-bow can solo VoD at extreme levels, but not a Tank.

Bottom Line: I am *really* freaking tired of the 80+ matron hive. Unfortunately, I have nowhere else I can go and earn even close to the XP. In fact, other than a VoD fellow, I don't have anywhere to go at ALL that doesnt get me reduced XP. Lacuna, you say? Thats yet another camped quest dungeon.

I want to see the sky!! I want to hunt the open ranges! I am an ARCHER! WTH am I doing stuck in dungeon after dungeon? Is there nothing I can hunt outside that isn't either below my level, or require a pocket mage? The gap between the 80-100 content, and the 100+ content is SO large, you can drive a lugian excavation cart through it.

What happened to the ability to play AC solo? Is it for mage-wannbe's only? Caul and VoD are definately NOT solo-friendly. The only alternatives are quest dungeons which are camped 24/7.

Gimmie some outdoor space.

Bring. Back. The. Asherons. Island. Portals.

And make it harder. NOT by giving mobs 4000AL and 5000health. Make an area with Royal Swarm Mutilators by the hundreds.

If I wanted to spend 5 minutes taking down a single mob, and be forced to fellow, I'd play AC2. I don't. I want mobs. Deadly, Dangerous, level-appropriate mobs, OUTDOORS, not is a quest dungeon.

Thank you.

p.s. Remember the OLD obsidian plains? Remember when just *running through* was scary? Remember 10 million monkeys filling up half your radar, and spawns packed so densly that there was rarely a way to get through them without altering at least 50? THATS what I'm talking about. Asheron's island was almost perfect. I have no idea why you took it away. Just shift the deadliness up a notch(swarm muts + royal swarm muts) in the far part of the island and it'll be pure hell, which is to say, great fun!



OK, stepping down from my soapbox.

[Dom on TD]

umm, NM

[zathros]

Allegiance Improvements, Allegiance Bindstones, Negative Spell Timers, Healing Spells: all good changes.

*Mundane* Items: I'm looking forward to this. I can forsee picking up potions I'd actually use!

Buffing Improvements * Item Magic: Good. Perhaps more quest items and wands could be added to help out the people who rely on armor cantrips to improve their skill. In any case, they'll be better off than they were before. :)

Salvaging Improvements: Good if implemented correctly. Currently I collect 16 bags of salvage so initially it seems like I would not benefit, but if I could keep 70+ bags of salvage in one pack, I'd loot everything over 5k and toss it into my salvage pack. With that in mind, I'd like to see a "salvage everything on corpse" button added (is there one of those in AC2?). I'd also like to see the salvage pack have a fixed burden on the order of 3k.

Changes to Armor Imbues: Bad. It's a nerf to people who currently use this armor in most cases if I understand how it works correctly. Imagine a person who gets hit 50% of the time. With 5 pieces of imbued armor currently, he'll only get hit 46% of the time (or less if it's melee D and he has a good bonus) and thus will take 8% less damage ((1 - 46/50) * 100). With the new system he'd only take 5% less. The new system is better if he gets hit more than about 80% or less than about 2% of the time. This would change drastically if they were ADDITIVE with life protections, preventing 66% damage instead of 65% for example, but my understanding is it won't work that way.

[DraconisUmbra]

If you want to be able to take full advantage of Item magic, you will need to train Item magic and put experince into it. Or you can drop down to a level of spell you can cast without swapping out armor pices to take advantage of it. Life is full of trade offs, this will be one of them.

Umm it seems to me that many of the people who do not like the changes to Item Magic that are being proposed have Item Magic trained and have already put a **** load of xp into it the problem is that they choose to take advantage of cantrips so that they are able to cast the higher level item spells on their equipment without dozens of fizzles. There's already a trade off there thanks. I for one don't appreciate being left out of the loop so you can please the GD mages that seem to rule the frickin game. Why is it necessary to screw those of us who use buffing armor out of this benefit? Creating multi-bane spells would work just as well and so would decreasing the wind-up time for casting banes. But wait OMG that might also help people who use buffbots! The horror! We sure can't be having that they don't deserve any benefits. It's not like they pay $12.95 a month or something. Good to see the asinine BS is still coming though. Keep up the good work.

And still no mention of weapon buffs I see.

[Aten-LC]

Originally posted by Ibn
I guess my question is this -- if we implement something that does not specifically help your character, are you any worse off than if we don't implement it at all?

YES, because the time you waste implementing this can be well spent (or wasted) implementing some other thing i won't ever make use of, either.... grumble.

[Newbie]

First, probably a dumb question (I'm not a monarch nor would I EVER want the hassle of being one), what happens to the toons sworn below a booted toon? I'm guessing they're gone as well since it would complicated to move them up the tree, especially if the toon above the booted one already has a maximum number of vassals and nowhere to put new ones. Just wondering... All the more incentive I guess to monitor/manage your allegiance as you go - prune the fools before they get too high up in your tree.

Second a plea. @plea on. PLEASE just make the current item banes AND weapon buffs (melees and archers switch out multiple weaps when hunting varied mobs in the wild yanno - for that matter so do a lot of mages with imbued wands) cast at faster speed and be done with it. This should take near-zero time and effort to implement since you already did it for life and critter self. Don't waste time making a bunch of new spells and coding their behaviour to go to multiple objects, adding content to go get the darn spells, etc. etc. And don't make me go hunting forever to get a bunch of new scrolls to do what I already paid the price in time getting scrolls and xp into magic skills to do, only faster as it should have been all along. @plea off.

This would preserve the tradeoffs for fewer versus more armor pieces, which is a GOOD thing. Those that have aquired a nice set of self-buffing armor still benefit by never bothering to bane with spells and just popping a mana stone or 2 to charge their gear and continuing on their merry way, which has its own advantages.

If you want to go further and reduce keypresses for those that want to buff 9-piece suits, 2 pieces of undies, and a shield, then implement an item buff window where we can drag all the gear we want to buff, let us set which banes we want to apply and then hit a cast key and have our toons automatically cast all the requested spells on all the items in the window IN SEQUENCE. Still preserves tradeoff for lots of pieces versus a few. Voila - done. Would work for weapons and wands too - drag them all into the window, select your 4 weapon buffs or 3 for bows or 2 for wands, hit cast - and watch your toon cast the spells. Also works nicely for toons that want/need to equip skill-boost items for casting that they don't want to buff and hunt in.

Also, I don't really see a way to prevent buffbot love with the proposed solution OR mine. Someone will just tweak their decal plug-in to go back to the old method of handing over your armor, have the bot equip it all, cast the new spells, then hand it back. Sure they might not be able to equip everything given high skill reqs on some items, but many buffbots are pretty high level and could probably equip most things. And if they can't, they hand it back and you buff it yourself while the buffbot does the rest of your gear. No love lost.

All of this said - THANK YOU Turbine for working to improve the game and communicating with your players!

[DHMagicMan]

Originally posted by DraconisUmbra
Umm it seems to me that many of the people who do not like the changes to Item Magic that are being proposed have Item Magic trained and have already put a **** load of xp into it the problem is that they choose to take advantage of cantrips so that they are able to cast the higher level item spells on their equipment without dozens of fizzles. There's already a trade off there thanks. I for one don't appreciate being left out of the loop so you can please the GD mages that seem to rule the frickin game. Why is it necessary to screw those of us who use buffing armor out of this benefit? Creating multi-bane spells would work just as well and so would decreasing the wind-up time for casting banes. But wait OMG that might also help people who use buffbots! The horror! We sure can't be having that they don't deserve any benefits. It's not like they pay $12.95 a month or something. Good to see the asinine BS is still coming though. Keep up the good work.

And still no mention of weapon buffs I see.

WOW!!! Just a LITTLE BIT out of control maybe?

The point of these improvements is NOT to make Buff Bots more effective. That's why the Critter and Life spells are only for the "Self" versions. If you don't have the skill to cast the spells yourself then someone can help you out but it will take longer than if you did it yourself? Is this an attack against you? I don't think so.

Let's look at what they are suggesting... If you are casting your own item buffs you will be able to get a new spells and when you cast these new spells they will bane all your armor at once (except underclothes). So instead of casting Acid Bane 5 times (head, gloves, shoes, amuli top and bottom) or more, you will cast NewAcid Bane once and all pieces will be targeted. If you don't like this mechanic the current Acid Bane spell will continue to be availalbe. If you don't have item magic or don't have skill to cast 7s then a friend (or bot) can still cast the normal Acid Banes on you.

Where's the disconnect? They are giving us more options. If you don't like options then don't exercise them. If you don't meet the conditions to benifit then you can always adjust your character using the temples if it's important to you.

As far as buffing weapons, what would be the point? I currently buff my bow with 4 level 7 spells. I only have 1 weapon to buff so it's a total of 4 spells. Seems straight forward to me. The new improvements they have announced are to make it so you don't have to cast the same spells 5+ times targeting each item you are wearing. What should they do to make weapons buffs better? Make 1 "Superbuff" spell and it gets all positive magics at maximum effectivness?

[Ray XXX of FF]

I love the idea of the salvaging option. it works out better in the long run.


The improvments to the damage reductions is by far the best there is yet!

the monarch allegiance chat is going great!

One suggestion about the bindstone. great idea and all. any chance we can get something similar with mansions? i mean if you want to make mansions better why not allow another monarch be able to bind there and let his people have access to both mansions. this will create a sence of unity. monarchies comming together to help each other out. plus gives more incentive to have a mansion other then a villa.


The magic idea are great. any chance we could get the Revite, heal, stam to mana and all that also on a quick cast basis?



Gaerlen quest revised! yes! if i may suggest adding a sort of choosing process. for example.......After you complete the Gaerlen quest (have to kill the big guy also) you get a item and you can have a choice almost like bobo. maybe not status but prisons! i don't know. the chance to get XP or a item. having that choice would make this whole much better.

[Dom on TD]

Originally posted by DraconisUmbra
And still no mention of weapon buffs I see.

I thought that needed to be repeated, just in case Turbine didn't see it the 1st time. Yes, some of the player base use melee characters. To hunt effectively in the 100+ area of the map, melees need 2 things: a mage (preferably a fellowship) and alot of weapons with different damage types and different imbues. Buffing all of those weapons at the level 7 wind-up speed is long and painful. The recent Life/Creature speed-up has made made this even more obvious. Please, stop punishing us for wanting a shield. Isn't it bad enough that I had to imbue 21 weapons for 1 character?(I didn't bother with Crippling Blow) Why must I be forced to buff them individually with a long wind-up?

[JJC]

> Where's the disconnect? They are giving us more options.

No, they are removing options because when they design content they do it around the mages. With these self instant buffing spells there is no reason not to be fully buffed for anything anmore. That will lead to content that will expects a fully buffed character. Which mean that you will have to be fully buffed for everything, which means playing a mage, just to play the game. It's the vicious cycle them seem more than happy to feed.

Where is the benificial tradeoff for not being a mage after the changes? It's non existant. You don't have the power, protection and the lack of downtime since mages will be done in a minute. The skills are more lopsided now than ever.

Ignoring the imbalance this continues to enforce, ask yourself what they will have to do to overpower those protections. They will continue with the pratice of hollows, undefined damage and other ways to ignore that protection. The fact that Turbine is forced to cheat it's own rules to damage the characters only shows how broken the system is.

JJC

[Paraduck]

Cheapo, probably because there is no distinction between self and other item spells.

I also agree that primatic item spells (multiple effects) are a better idea than casting on all worn pieces on your character. It lowers the purpose/value of armor with many pieces. Now, we'll see more people in PKL with very high AL armor because the main disadvantage for it -- buffing time -- is completely eliminated.

[IgntionTDC]

Changes are exellent.

[KriegPfeil]

The missile changes are an insult, the only circumstance they will help someone is on a trained only or low level archer against someone with no missile defense at all but who has high coord and quickness. When should anyone ever be able to have an untrained skill be successful when put against someones trained or even spec'd skill. In order to give you some numbers to back that up we can bring my archer into the discussion. He is level 182 and has 458 buffed bow skill(370 base with major coord and mod bow). With the current system someone with 229 buffed missile defense(anyone who can have that with almost no exp put into it if they have it trained) lets you evade my archer 50% of the time on full speed. The change would make it so someone had to have 275 buffed missile defense to evade me 50% of the time on full speed. That is also attainable by any character that has missile defense.

As far pvm is concerned there isn't anything that I currently hunt on my archer that I use the accuracy bar at the midpoint(100% skill) let alone below that, so there is no impact for this as well. What NEEDS TO BE DONE is that the bow needs to be 130 mod when equiped and it needs to have the same human slayer property that the meleee weapons have. If somewhere down the line you make it easier to hit people with arrows then you can look at maybe reducing the damage of bow back to what it currently is. You shouldn't however make archers continue to be second class citizens(to say the least, archers are horrible in pvp atm) while you guys continue to look at a possible solution down the road.

As far as an aegis property for mages and archers, please don't. Balanced is not everyone is the same, or everyone has access to all the same equipment. Balanced is all characters being equal or roughly equal in the overall scheme of things. I think that as a whole the game is pretty balanced these days though balance is a fine line. You start unbalancing things when you add strengthes or take away weaknesses to certain character types. Mages for instance now can evade melees better than non mages, I say this because my archer evades better as a mage(with a wand out) than as an archer. My mage does not have melee defense, at least not atm, I don't really think he or other mages for that matter need melee defensel with close to 300 BASE magic d he resists most things which limits the damage that he takes as does his 400+ base tinkered armor. Mages should have some sort of defensive penalty, it is the sacrifice for all the offensive firepower that they have(not to mention that mages are the opposite of frail, in AC the class with the most health is mages, find another game or fantasy setting where the warriors are frail and the mages are hard to kill tanks.

I like the heal spell changes, they needed a small boost and that is what they are receiving.

As far as the buff changes are concerned I don't know why all buffs aren't changed to the way creature and life self buffs are. I don't think buff bots are such a drain on everyone in AC that I want to cast all my item spells the old way, or help my brothers buff a couple things the old way because the changes will help the buff bots also. Maybe its just me, but it seems petty and shallow to not want something because it will make others wait around less time also. Buffing is something which is essentially down time while IG, to me the worst part of any game, though found most often in games like AC, EQ, etc... is down time. Anytime you can reduce it, you are making your game better. It seems foolish to me to spend time coming up with all new spells so that they are self only item magic spells. Make all buffs convenient and fast casting, period. Spend time that would have been spent on these on a new quest or new mobs, anything that would help everyone in the game.

Being able to have a bot cast spells as fast on me as I can on myself would not cause me to change any of the three characters I play(all 126+ now). Currently and for a very long time now all 3 have at least 3 schools of magic(my mage has 4). In fact I designed my characters to be self sufficient as soon as possible, my sword character for instance was sword spec only for awhile so that he could get all his skills earlier, then spec stuff as he got the credits. I would do it the same way today too, I would never want to be reliant on a buff bot so much that I had to go back to them for every buff. If someone was in a fellow with me and was chained to a bot they would be required to break from fellow everytime they left to rebuff, they get no exp while gone so they shouldn't cost the group the exp. Those who buff on there own can stay in fellow and share exp though they kill nothing during this time. They are actually receiving exp though so their share is not simply wasted as the buff bot addict's was.

While I applaud the eagerness of the current team they need to make sure they are only making changes that they should make. Not all change is change for the better, mages not having effective melee defense was something that the game was already balanced for, I have no idea how you can balance the game with mages that can evade melee attacks consistently. Mages are now the best characters in almost any situation, the only situation that they are not is against mobs with negative armor(either naturally or because of imperil 7) and they complain about that as well. They(being people who play mages exclusively) have become like spoiled children, they think they are entitled to everything and have gotten used to getting theirway. So if they see that another character type has something, they want it, and go running to those in charge demanding it. Granting them these types of requests only fuels further such requests. The present team has to realize that somethings weren't done by previous teams for good reasons and that leaving them as is would be the right move.

That is it for now, I really hope that someone from Turbine reads what I write and responds in some way. While the lttp's are always good, lately they have made me worry a little. Changes should not be made for the sake of making changes, changes should be made when there is a reason to make them. That is all.

[Yoshitsune]

Now isn't that better.

IMHO this thread demonstrates that AC has a large fan base that is very emotioally attached to it. Regardless of whether you feel there's a trade off between Mage and Melee and Missile. Or when am I getting some loving. When are we getting more Uber content or Noobs need love too. The Dev team has an open line of communication and the people are responding.

I really have to hand it to the Dev team. They really have it tough. Like Billy Graham in a football stadium, they are trying to reach a diverse demographic and maintain a balance. Not just Offense Type (Bow/Dagger whatever) but things like XP hog or Lore Maven. Solo Hunter and Fellowship Quester. All the while making sure their 20th century game engine can handle 21st century player demands.

Keep up the good work.

[Haus der Liebe]

keep a close watch on the numbers and damage if you do implement the modifier on melee/missle imbued armor ..

would hate to see a huge damage reduction in melee v melee .. 5% cap sounds good, but still yet .. that's a huge difference in DoT .. good idea, just be mindfull of it's effects in pvp

[I gotcha]

Lag

A frequently mentioned issue for the Darktide community is the subject of lag. We receive frequent reports that lag on Darktide is worse than on any other server. We are always working to resolve any server-side lag issues that we find, in addition we are working on adding improved performance monitoring to our servers. When this is completed our ability to diagnose and resolve any server-side issues should be greatly improved.



This is a joke! You have done nothing to try and fix the problem, EVEN after it was highlighted to you! everyone check this thread out...this could be happening to you! and you can see how it is being handled!

http://forums.ac.turbinegames.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=81444#post81444

almost 8,000 views, and 300 post and still nothing has been DONE!

[ToiletDuk]

Originally posted by Ibn
Yes, it would be that difficult unfortunately.
Is it the difference between creating an array of 70 scalar entries and an array of 70 pointers to arrays of probable items?

I guess my question is this -- if we implement something that does not specifically help your character, are you any worse off than if we don't implement it at all?
If I was the only dissenter, then I would say go ahead an implement it since I'm obviously the only one who doesn't like it. But you're receiving many responses saying that this change won't help your playerbase. In this particular situation, it is my opinion that a temporary stopgap "solution" which will not be utilized by 50% of the players is not worth spending time on. Instead, that time should be spent on more pressing issues, or on planning the long-term solution to the pack space/salvaging issue.

Basically, I'd just rather see the devs spend longer on a permanent solution that people like, rather than spend a shorter amount of time on a temporary solution with mixed reviews, only to move on to the permanent solution anyway.

[Heideggar]

Allegiance Improvements:


These are nice, and many have been asking for this to be implemented for _years_. Glad to see Turbine got around to it.

The @house storage add_allegiance command is sorta helpful, yet not. I think you've gona a bit extreme on this in a lazy attempt to give something cool to the populace. I like allowing many followers into the mansion chests, but it's unwise to let everyone and their brother into ALL of them. Just to bring you guys [The Devs] up to date, a monarch who owns a mansion or villa can not purchas another housing development. That means, one of the chests is semi-designated to the monarch's use, because they have nothing else to purchase to provide for storage. So, if I let everyone have access to ALL the chests, I let them have access to _my_ chest, and to the loot of everyone who uses them in the allegiance, which could be several dozen to several hundred people. That's not smart. All ya need is one griefer to sneak in, and wipe out the chests, and you'd have virtually no way to catch them.

Few people will be doing this for this fact alone.

You should have done something like this:

@house storage add1_allegiance "add1", not "add". This will allow the allegiance to have full access to Chest One's storage. Subsequently, this could be done for each and every chest. Is this too hard for you guys to do, or was it too time consuming? I would look into changing it to what I suggested, not just because it's what I suggested, but that it will give the control of the allegiance more into the hands of the monarch and their officers, which is what you're trying to do, and will help eliminate the headaches, which I'm guessing is something you're shooting for. I really can't say what it is you're trying to do sometimes. None of the Devs are monarchs, or leaders in allegiances, so it's hard for me to tell, and it seems it's hard to put the finishing touches, the small but important details, on these allegiance related issues.

Anyways, lets move on. I'm not as negative on everything you guys do.



Allegiance Bindstones:

Because you guys have limited housing to provide for allegiance recalling/gathering, you put in bindstones. Great for allegiances, but it takes away from the use of mansions and villas, which was something you guys had stated a VERY LONG TIME AGO, you'd improve upon. How long did you think the chalkboards were going to appease people!? You stated nothing in this letter about that issue either. Oh, hookable portals, yeah, whoopie. I can recall to one spot, and I don't even want to go to. thanks.

If enough people bind to the stones, it could bring back a bit of life to the community, so long as there's reason for several allegiances to bind to a similar town. You listed 24 towns that will have bind stones. Now, some of those towns suck because of the ease to get there, the vendors offered, the buy/sell rates, and the portal system. Arwic is obviously better than sawato for this very reason. You give a reason to go to these towns because of the bindstone, but its what the town offers that draws people to them. I kinda thought you were going to try and give people a reason to go to just about any town. Guess ya can't do that if you want this to work. Hope your servers don't **** a big one if this takes off. I'm hoping this works out for you, and the AC community.


Treasure Changes Part IV: Part 4, and thank god it's only taking 4+ months to get near the end of this. That's heavy sarcasm btw. This is nice, but really... I personally don't care much about it. I think the casino could get some revamping, which is sorta like treasure. Casinos are just not exciting enough, nor are the rewards good enough to play. I was hoping something would be mentioned about casinos, as they were an awesome past time for people long ago. Think of what makes a casino today appealing, and what things in AC appeal to people, and combine them. Odd items in casinos is one thing, the variety of "games" you can play in casinos is attractive. Odds of winning compared to the amount to win. Things like this.

Mundane item improvement is nice as well. I'm curious to see how it will play out in the treasure system, and in the increase value of being in certain towns.

- The Kits descriptions will help, but I consider it "dumbing things down" for people. I always thought the "figuring it out" was part of AC's luster; similar to spell research back in the day. Not sure how many of you ever did spell research : )

- Interesting high-end Lockpicks. Lockpick + Deception = laser. All I gotta say on that : ) Naw, it's good to see you've still got some LP improvements on the list (I hope you have a list, right?).



Ranged Attacks: Might help a little with the accuracy, but I don't care how fast they fire, I can dodge any amount of arrows. You stated things will stay in the In-Development stage until you've produced desired results. It's good that you're still working on this, and it means something to you, and others, but geez, how long has this been going on? Is there something we, the more experienced AC players and PvP'ers, can help you with? It's not fun having melee-mage fights nearly all the time. Missle people are annoying at best for me.



Negative Spell Timers and Heal Spells: I'm pleased to see you listened to the players on this, but really, I never understood why these were even discussed in the first place. If you played the content enough, you'd know the answers to these right away. Was a no brainer for a lot of people. If ya play your game more, there will be fewer posts asking for feedback on these "no brainer" type of questions.



Temple Quest: hehe, I actually thought you guys were going to _decrease_ the weapons, not improve them. I'm not going to yell nerf on anything that helps other classes and templates. More power to them. Mages get the shaft on quest rewards, and sadly, I'm pretty used to it. I've got more interest in weapons I don't even use than the ones I could possibly equip. Sad huh? yep.



Bunny Slippers with the new bathrobe: *shake head* Thanks Frostfell. What would we do without you. lol. Gotta get in my monthly poke at FF.



Town Revisions: Good. Seems like you're still tweaking the towns to make them nicer. I like it. Couldn't hurt to put in a "Undead Mage" portal gem or something, could ya?



IN DEVELOPMENT:

Improved Allegiance Officers- Eh, gives people more administrative power, but doesn't relieve people of them, nor does it require people to do them outside of a monarch. At least you're trying, so you get a "C".


Self Item spells, as oppose to the spells we have now, which are both self and others!? Seems odd, yet vague. Time will tell I suppose. Though, this doesn't seem to solve the question of wearing 5 pieces of armor, or 9. If it takes roughly the same time as both, why would you EVER wear a 5 pieces suit? 9 pieces can be of higher AL, AND, provide superior magic improvements to your character. Keep this in mind. a lot of people have 5 piece suits. When I mean a lot, I'm talking about 80% of your playerbase, or more.

If I were you guys, I'd maybe throw around the idea of a "Upper Body Acid Bane VII Self" Spell. Spell casts on the head, hands, lower arms, upper arms, and chest (top 5 areas). The amount of mana it takes to apply this spell to the upper body area depends on how many pieces are equiped in the upper body region. 30 mana per item perhaps? That's 90 mana for hands, amuli top, and helmet setup; and it'd be 150 mana for the top 5 areas in a 9 piece suit. Increase the casting time perhaps, and things will be a bit better balanced for the 5 piece vs 9 piece suit.

^^ Free feedback, see. I don't hate all of you.



PvP weapon changes: Careful here. Don't do this until you fix ranged weapons. Maybe improving some of the damage and/or animations for the melee class, but you may find yourselves unbalancing things badly if you put in both near the same time frame. The ranged attack improvements and this aegis-like ability play off each other, which can increase the potency of ranged weapons too much, if you're not careful.


Content Revisions: I like this, and I'd like to see more of it. However, wouldn't it make sense to update the older stuff first, instead of starting from the newest, and going back down the timeline?

I visited POI that had creatures from the lvl 20-40 area. Chests with rewards for lvl 1-20, yet were surrounded by lvl 100+ creatures. Aerlinthe island is one of the oldest quests. Next area was the Vissayen (sp?) Islands. Dozens of dungeons don't reflect the content they're in, nor do the chests you find inside. All of these are years older than the Gaerlan Quest or Maraw Lassel. Are you guys even considering this? Is it too hard for you? If this is the In-Development section, these things aren't being considered for development?

Going to a point of interest that is not interesting only makes the point that it needs fixing.

I could easily make a list of a lot of places, but it's not my job. Pay me in mansion rent and my 2 accounts, and I'll consider it : )


Character Starting Skills: As long as the racial skills aren't used in combat, it'd help balance them out. Many don't use item tinkering beyond Usting stuff anyways. Now, if you end up improving dagger, or deception, or have someone who's UA spec'd for combat, you're back to square one. I haven't seen a staffer in around 2 years. I see dagger people once a week, maybe 2 weeks, and UA people pretty often. There's probably a reason staff isn't as useful as dagger and UA. I'd spend some time on this. Maybe improve the deception and assess person skills first, and see where you fall after that when tweaking this difference of skills.

[Heideggar]

Salvaging Improvements: In theory, good, but in reality, it's going to fail. If this pack takes up one of my existing packs, of which I only have 3 of, I have to have 24 different types of salvage to fully utilize this salvage pack. Not 24 bags of salvage, but 24 DIFFERENT types of salvage.

Salvage types I keep: Steel, Iron, Mahogany, Brass, Opal, Granite, red garnet, black garnet, white sapphire, imperial topaz, sunstone, black opal, fire opal, pine, and leather. Sometimes I pick up req. changing salvage, which is an additional 1-2 types. black opal, fire opal, pine, and leather I only pick up when I'm below 3 bags on my mule, so that's once a month : )

So, I carry roughly 15-20 varieties of salvage at most. ~12 at the least. That's a lot of wasted pack space because of this salvage bag you guys are recommending. Now, I've got 3-4 bags for different qualities of steel, iron, mahogany, brass, opal, granite, and pine. So there's an extra 18-21 pack spaces used because of quality, wait wait, each one of the these 6-7 goes into the salvage bag, so it's only 12-14 extra bags I've got in my main pack. I lost about 12 slots because of the salvage bag not being used to its full potential. So, the items I had in that pack, are in my main pack. That's 24-26 slots being used in my main pack, plus 24 slots from the salvage pack. I _was_ using 18-21 (different grade bags) + 9-10 (imbue + req. change bags) = about 31 pack slots for salvage. Your uses 24 for the salvage pack, and another 12-14 bags for the different quality bags; for a total of 36-38 slots. That's more than what I use now. I would never use it, it's too restrictive. If I had a _ton_ of different types of salvage, I _might_, but I don't. You'd have to give me a reason to pick up other salvage, and you're not.


Salvaging different materials into the same Ust... interesting, but I'm not sure if this would work real well. If I were you I'd get fancy with this. Because really, that's what you're gonna have to do to beat out a simple decal program like U.S.T. which makes Usting extremely easy and convenient.

Here's what I'd do:

1) Allow for someone to drag whole packs into the ust. I'm sure you allow that now.
2) Allow for multiple salvage to be Usted
3) Add in checkboxes like:
- Ust and combine all that is quality 7 or lower
- Ust and combine all 7.01-8.00 quality
- Ust and combine all 8.01-9.00 quality
- Ust and combine all 9.01-10.00 quality
- Ust and combine imbue salvage of all quality


Things like this, the options, would be awesome. If I could click a few checkboxes, drag a few packs to an Ust, and click salvage and then be done, it'd really help with this task/job. You'd be putting in a lot of functionality like the U.S.T. program, but really... that's what you're gonna have to do to make this smooth and worth while.



Changes to Armor Imbues: 5% max for a 33% chance of success. It not worth the time and effort to do. With the current system, it provides for an evade, which means _zero_ damage, which is better than 5%. Wtf is 5% when you get hit for 50, that's 2.5 damage points, whoopdie do. You're more worried about the other 47.5 damage, than that 2.5. It's the 47.5 damage that's gonna get ya, not the 2.5. Lets say you get hit for 100, that's 5 damage less. I can't see people saying, "Yeah, I get hit for 100 a shot!, but this 5 point reduction keeps me in the fight much longer. It's really worth the **** loads of armor I blew up" Considering how much low value, low ws, good AL stuff is out there (few if you didn't know), people won't be doing this for the benefits. I'd rather see you increase the number to melee D than this stupid damage reduction. 5% is nothing. When you get into the 15%-20%+, yeah, that tends to help and be worth it. Read the replies to your "Heal Spells" feedback for similar feeback on this issue.

If you wanna help this area, and make it worth while, you're gonna have to up the number to melee or missle D given. Melee D has a modifier so I'd say a +3-5 would be more worth while. On a 9 piece suit, that's +27-45 to their melee D, that's a nice chunk. Modified by a +30%, that's an additional 8.1 to 13.5 to effective melee D. Now, is that worth the time spent getting the salvage (easy), to tink it at 33% (ouch), for 9 pieces (oof), that have magic and/or majors (ugh, sonofa, blew up my major coord BP : ( ). yeah, I think you'd start to get into the ballpark of a good imbue number for this.

Now missle D has no modifier, but I suppose it could be used the same way.

Magic D... eh... I'd need to see the formula on magic D to give a good number. However, like the others currently, it sure isn't worth the time and effort to imbue armor for the 9 point-max increase to magic D.

[Zero_Washu]

Originally posted by Ibn

I guess my question is this -- if we implement something that does not specifically help your character, are you any worse off than if we don't implement it at all?


Yes. Because to the person who it does not help it is a waste of developer time that could have been used to fix something or make something that did help them.


Obvious eh?



Sheesh.

[Zero_Washu]

ALLEGIANCE

Nice. Will make kicking griefers and thieves many times easier.

Will there be a limit to the number of people/accounts that can be kicked?


BINDSTONES

Please go further and allow house mansion_recall to recall to whatever housing type your monarch has.


TREASURE CHANGES

I still believe caster items benefit from better enchanment selection than weapons. I have NEVER seen a bad or non-applicable buff on a caster. I still see non-applicable buffs on weapons (swiftkiller on bows?)


ITEM M AGIC

Push this hard. There is no reason to make item only users WAIT for it.

SALVAGING IMPROVEMENTS

First, a single pack allowing one of each type of salvage is useless. Many of us collect salvages which we subset into various salvage ranges.

Suggestions.

1. Remove penalty for salvaging multiple items. Right now it penalizes you if you salvage more than 1 item at a time. If my character can salvage 1 work9 item 100% why can't I do 2 at once?

2. Reduce weight of salvage bags to 50bu or less.

3. Raise the minimum return on a salvage attempt to 50%. Too many allegiance members don't salvage as the experience required to get decent returns is too high for sub 80th leve investment. Its far worse for pure melees who usually have a low focus, one of the primary requirements.

4. Look at the plug-in called UST.

[Brokin]

I love the salvage skill idea to balance out the races.

As far as what stats to base it on, using the same formula as
item tink is fine. (Coord + Focus)/2 works well enough for most characters. Mages have max Focus, archers, have max Coord, as do the majority of meleers. So most characters will be able to get very good results with a bit of effort pumping the skill.

-----

The item buffs issue would be fine if there was an easy way for players to flag the "outfit" they want to be buffed. This could be really cool, since a simple button is all that would be required. It could also be done with a level 1 item spell (assuming that buffing a shield would be seperate spells by design). Or a store-bought gem or chat line command would work too i guess.

Whichever way the flagging occurs, the server could then remember that list of item IDs for that character. For convenience, item descriptions could list if the item is flagged for buffing. Then the new item spells would just target this list. Bingo, problem solved. This way meleers who swap out armor for buffing are good to go. This solution would require a bit more work, but would so kick butt.

-----

a couple other ideas....

Is there any way that melee weapons with elemental attack types have a background in the icon that is more like (x)bow/tw ammo? The thin "elemental" outline is overridden by the blue "item-is-magical" outline and makes switching dammage types less clear. For example, a fire axe would have a flaming background, reguardless if it was magical or not. This would also rock for resistance rending bows and wands actually (if not too hard to code).

Any chance that loot axes get a make-over? I am talking specifically about silifis. They look so blocky, that if I can find a battle-axe with similar stats, I take the 1 less dmg for the far better looks. If they could get similar handles as some of the redone melee loot staffs, that would rock too.

Love what is coming down the pike guys! Keep up the great work!

[wids_1]

My wish list

I would like to see added to the game


1. extra hooks to our exsisting cottages and or appts.

2. extra storage units ..


While the Villas have abundance and ample places to store things either in thier two chests and or hooks. cottages and apartments have very little .. and are limitted . as i am . I love my cottage but would love to have these two little items added ..

I know they can probabbly because the villas have portals in thier homes and that would cause lag but not cottages and or apartments .

thanks

Wids aka Niteowl

[Silifi Of Death]

Cottages should have two chests. There's no real reason to get a cottage right now, other than to show off. Not really worth the time/money to get one.

[cindel]

Originally posted by Zyrca
Players will find out that they are banned from an allegiance when they attempt to swear into the allegiance.

If a player swears to someone and then thier patron (or someone else above them) swears into an allegiance that the player is banned from, the next time the banned player logs on, they will be kicked from the allegiance.

Thats a bad idea! Very Very bad!

Say one of my account was banned from a monarchy.
This account has a higer lever char swoar to a lower level char on another acount of mine. If someone way up the chain from me swears into a monarchy that my higlevel accoun is banned from, I loose my swear to my own charaters, and then I can get it back!

That is very bad. I hope if this goes in game that Envoys will be made avalible to fix this problem.

And while im on this subject, currently the same thing can happen with the boot command. I personaly think that no other player should beable to break my link with my patron. Unless like I said before, envoy will have the power and athority to fix broken links on request.

Other things.
The salvage skill is a good idea. But it still leaves the fact that aluvians are still stuck with a useless skill. And still have to buy item tink to do item tinkering. I dont have a clue what you have planed for assess person, but I can think of very little use the skill could ever be put to for non pk/l. A better approach would be to allow sell back and untraining of racial skills. I really dont think the 6 extra skill credits that player could get from their racial skills would be unbalancing. And it would truly make each race ballanced, and provide for a varied array of new template combinations.

[DHMagicMan]

Originally posted by cindel
Thats a bad idea! Very Very bad!

Say one of my account was banned from a monarchy.
This account has a higer lever char swoar to a lower level char on another acount of mine. If someone way up the chain from me swears into a monarchy that my higlevel accoun is banned from, I loose my swear to my own charaters, and then I can get it back!

That is very bad. I hope if this goes in game that Envoys will be made avalible to fix this problem.

And while im on this subject, currently the same thing can happen with the boot command. I personaly think that no other player should beable to break my link with my patron. Unless like I said before, envoy will have the power and athority to fix broken links on request.


Um Cindel? There's an EASY solution for this and the Devs don't need to get involved. Don't get banned. I've been playing for 4+ years and I've never had problems with any group.

The benifits far outweigh the minuses for this change. Do you think that somoene who acts like a jerk and is banned by a monarchy should be able to get back into that monarchy through swearing to someone who then swears to the monarchy? I'm glad they would be booted immediatly on login. What sense would it make to behave any other way? As far as swearing your char and what if your patron was below your level when you got booted?

Find a new patron.

Then again, don't get banned in the first place and it will never be an issue.

[Frieze]

"Salvage" Skill:

Great! Finally! My only concern is that current characters get this skill too. If it is only for new characters, that is still better than nothing, but it only makes us current Sho/Aluvians feel worse about our initial choice.

The reasons for why this is being considered were worded perfectly in the LttP. Those complaining about Gharu not "being rewarded" while Sho/Aluv are...: Please keep in mind that, just as it is worded in the LttP, Assess Person is useless and Sho don't get a secondary skill. Unless you are planning to be Dagger/UA... there's no point in being Sho/Aluv. Aka, there is no point in saying that this shouldn't go through. They are trying to fix the *problem* of too much incentive to be Gharu.

Salvage Bag:

Also great! Assuming this will appear in its own *new* pack slot, there is no reason for anyone to veto it. It's more space! Even if I separate steel/mahog/granite/iron into various QL bags, the Salvage Bag would still save me a ton of space. As long as it doesn't auto-salvage without extensive options (and, auto-salvaging ingame would be a godsend), it sounds great.

Underclothes Paperdoll:

Yay. :D

Everything else looks great too :)

No complaints!

[cindel]

Um Cindel? There's an EASY solution for this and the Devs don't need to get involved. Don't get banned. I've been playing for 4+ years and I've never had problems with any group.

The benifits far outweigh the minuses for this change. Do you think that somoene who acts like a jerk and is banned by a monarchy should be able to get back into that monarchy through swearing to someone who then swears to the monarchy? I'm glad they would be booted immediatly on login. What sense would it make to behave any other way? As far as swearing your char and what if your patron was below your level when you got booted?

Find a new patron.

Then again, don't get banned in the first place and it will never be an issue.

Yeah half expected this kind of response.
You know not all people are jerks in game. I would hate to think that anyone that knows me in game would ever place me anywhere close to that catagory. But, as the saying goes $_-_ happens. Whether is be someone in a chain above me banning me becuase I told them to stowe the language on the /a chat. And I have had people above me in the monarchy break and haul me off to places I dont want to be enough to have actualy sat and thought all the ins and outs of what can happen.

I know people that play on Leafcull that really dont like me much IRL. For reason that I wont go into nor should I have to go onto. But rest asured their is plent of room for mutial dislike. I dont take in game, but others have been known to.

And as far as your sugestion, or point, whatever it is. I still doesnt solve the problem of someone besides ME can break my alegaince with MY OWN CHARACTERS!!!

I dont care if its a joke, a get back, or directly related to somethign I did, my chain get broken and well I wont be very happy at all.

[sylphia]

Ibn,
Our point is that--while we appreciate the fact thathe devs are trying to give us something to help--the fact is that it isnt really going to be that beneficial to most players. A better-implemented "solution" would be more worthy of the devs' time. Are we going to be any worse off if the pack is useless to most player? No, not really. But we wont be any BETTER off, either, and isnt that supposed to be the point of adding the pack? It might be more difficult to add the salvage pack the way we have suggested, but if it actually gets USED then it makes it worth the dev-time spent on it, as opposed to a relatively easy-to-add pack that is unused by most players, dont you think?

I, for one, DO appreciate the fact that the devs ARE trying to make an improvement here. But it's something that will get filed under "other content": the stuff that I ignore and eventually forget even exists in the game, because its completely useles to me on all 10 (12 now! :-) ) of my toons. Now obviously, everything that gets added to the game does not have to benefit me dircetly, but I should think that somehting like this, which is in theory supposed to be a benny for everyone, SHOULD actually be that before it's implemented.

We arent saying dont do it. We are saying dont do it LIKE THIS.

[_AbBaNdOn]

Item Buff changes

You are currently focusing on the paperdoll which gives rise to all kinds of problems for people who use buffing equipment and buff their undies...

Is it possable to have item spells target your person like a protection spell does. It may require adding a new step in combat damage resolution but it will solve all problems and add several benefits.

If a person could cast blood drinker, acid bane, impenetrability on their "person" instead of their paperdoll then...

-No matter what weapon the player pulled out it would get buffed by blood drinker. This would be awesome for people who hunt outside.

-All pieces of armor and clothing would have acid bane and impen on them even if they changed outfits while hunting. For example if they used equipmenet to buff and then changed into their battle armor the buffs would still be there.

It would also allow for some nasty PK fights as people would then be able to dispel or counter other peoples spells like banes. Or the dispel side of things could be left alone.


The paperdoll is a great step and i will definately be back when it happens in june but You can already see how many holes that path is gonna have.

[Bruiserk]

I originally posted this earlier in this thread about the salvage pack, and the issue of pack space in general:

Salvage pack wouldn't do me any good as well.

I was thinking that if you want to look at addressing the pack space issue, why not look at foci? I think you should look into creating a prismatic type of foci that can cover all schools, but you have to buy a charge that imbues it with the properties of a particular school. When charged with a school, the prismatic foci increases in burden at the rate that the current foci weigh in at. This way we still have the burden penalties that we currently have, but it opens up the pack slots. This takes care of the salvage problem, and the need for more pack space in general.

Existing players can turn in their current foci to a town crier who then rewards the player with that particular school's foci charge. The existing players can then buy a prismatic foci from a scrivener, charge it up, and continue about their business.

New players should, if they have trained a magic skill, start with the prismatic foci, and a charge equal to each class that they have trained, or their foci is already charged for that school.

I'm sure something like this would take quite a bit of work, but I think it is probably a workable solution, and more to what the players need, than the salvage pack solution.

Then I saw that there was a foci thread, and in it Ibn stated this:

The chances of this occuring anytime in the near future are very, very slim, close if not equal to zero.

Foci are currently working exactly as intended.

Which tells me that since they can actually give us more pack space, they really don't want to. The salvage plan is just an attempt to throw us a bone that they know we won't use. Then they can claim that they are trying to address the pack space issue without actually really fixing it.

They have the ability to open up at least 3 more pack slots on mages and one or two on other toons, but refuse to do it...

I can only wonder why?

[Sek_the_Wise]

I can see cindel's point,

How about adding a check and a message when you try to swear to someone and you have a vassal who has been ban from an alleg just a you have X number of vassals ban from this alleg do you wish to continue.

Thus no problems will come up as to where maybe you let a family member play your new 6th slot and they just urk alot of people get an account ban and when you swear in, your high level vassal suddenly goes poof from your other account.


Since the alleg database itself checks the person I dont see why it cant be done in reverse and just give a yes no option just in case.


-Sek

[Hamster]

Originally posted by Gouru
You're kidding, right? Rather than having the devs talk to us straight, you want everything laundered by Ibn so that your little feelings don't get hurt??? And you then respond by calling them 'condescending' and unprofessional? Her response gave the expected 'solution' to this for players (increase magic skill), and the rationale behind that decision. If you can't handle adult conversation, you might want to go back to your Golden Book readers.

They have also stated in the past that among the goals for these buffing enhancements is a) speed up buffing, b) reward players that train and spend xp in their magic skills and c) do so while minimizing buffbot love (thus self spells, not other). Current spells cannot be cast on self only, so unless they break current functionality, it will require new spells. Prismatic spells are usable by buffbots, unless they are limited to self only.

This solution meets ALL of their goals, while minimizing the buffbot love.

Well, my "little" feelings haven't been nor will they ever be hurt by something someone posts on an internet board. Having said that, yes, I consider this statement:
If you want to be able to take full advantage of Item magic, you will need to train Item magic and put experince into it.
To be condescending and unprofessional. If you don't, then that's fine we'll agree to disagree on that. I appreciate the fact they take the time to read our feedback and to respond to some of it, but I don't think it is necessary to talk down to the people giving said feedback or asking questions. So while I do value their responses, and I want them to freely tell us what they are thinking with regards to the game, I do not feel that expressing it in that nature is necessary or warranted. It also does not help promote feedback from players, which is the intent of these threads.

I see no place where she gives rationale for that decision. She says that in life there are trade offs. That is hardly rationale.

It appears that you feel that personal jibes and insults are a part of adult conversation. I tend to think it doesn't belong on a board for discussing things. I guess we'll agree to disagree on that one as well.

I have not seen all of those reasons outlined by the devs, but I may have missed posts regarding these changes. If that is indeed the rationale driving the choice to go in this direction with the improvements, then it would have been nice to see that in her response. I think that giving reasoning behind certain decisions goes a long way to quelling some of the complaints or at least provides an understanding as to the direction being taken.

I also think players that have spent a large amount of time/trade items collecting majors for buffing should be able to benefit from these changes without sacrificing the use of those items. I feel that's a valid concern.

The number of armor pieces, which I haven't seen a response to yet, is a lesser concern, but I think any solution should take that into consideration as well.

Mind you, this is coming from someone who plays a mage the majority of the time. I will be able to take full advantage of pretty much any change that they implement, but I would like to see a solution that does not sacrifice concerns like buffing armor (majors) or the number of armor pieces just to make sure that buff bots cannot utilize them.

I don't know if the previously mentioned prismatic spells could be dispelled if armor leaves the person that casts the spells. That would address every concern that I have seen voiced including the goals the devs have apparently mentioned in other threads.

If you care to respond to this, then in the spirit of keeping it adult, please leave the "Golden Book" comments out of your response.

[Nihilist]

Salvage skill

If everyone gets a salvage skill and some character has a high item tinkering skill aswell this would make the salvage skill derelict. There would be no point in raising salvage given that the tinkering skill would be used to determine how much salvage is produced. -- unless this is changed ofcourse.

[Truth Seeker]

Salvage skill would be worthless for tinkers, but for combat characters that just have Item tink trained so that they can salvage their loot better in the field it would give them back a couple of valuable credits.

The xp they pumped into item tink (or whichever skill) could then be pumped into salvage so they are in a winning situation....same salvage level and more free skill credits.

If turbine give the salvage skill a bonus to salvage % compared to tink skills then they would be even better off :)

[oxbow_td]

Lots of discussion on the salvage bag, especially regarding it's utility for mages.

One simple solution would be to make the salvage bag double as an item magic foci. Then everyone gets benefit from it, even if it isn't an ideal solution.

[Bruiserk]

Actually the best solution is to create a prismatic foci that only occupies one pack slot instead of having a foci for each school occupying a pack slot.

This frees up general purpose storage that can be used for anything, salvage or whatever. The problem is that Ibn says that they won't do something like this, but instead they propose an essentially useless salvage pack, that will take up another pack slot. So if you are a mage, you will have 2 general purpose packs, 1 salvage pack, and 4 foci packs. 1 general purpose pack is going to be filled with DI's, the other with scarabs tapers wands and such. Everything else will have to be stored in your main pack.

[Truth Seeker]

Or maybe you just don't buy a salvage pack?

They aren't forcing you to use one....from whats said it would be an item that takes up a pack slot but is not a pack exactly.

Therefore technically speaking you could carry 7 salvage packs if you managed to get 7 bags of every type of salvage.

[Ibn]

I'm holding off on responding to the In Concept topics until we've had a chance to sit down and discuss them as a team. I'm tracking the feedback on the In Concept topics and will be presenting the comments. Right now our focus is primarily on the Coming Soon and In Development topics.

Which brings me to a comment on the Item Magic buffing improvements, which are in development.

First off it's important to stress that the the proposed new spells are NOT intended to be the be-all end-all solution to Item Magic buffing for all players. Other things -- like prismatic banes -- are still on the table for later development. We understand that this solution may not instantly benefit all players, but we believe that it will benefit a very large number of players.

[Wyth]

Regarding the issue of salvaging....

First off, great idea to improve the use of the Ust by allowing a character to salvage multiple items at once. As for myself, i'll only salvage items with a wk (6) or greater, thus producing higher quality salvage. I'm sure I speak for most other people as well, since that's pretty much the low end wk on salvage I see in the Marketplace, or from friends who have given me salvage in the past.

The point i'm trying to make here is this. Instead of having to view each item separately to see it's workmanship, what if there was a small number on the lower left or right corner of an item showing it's workmanship? This would greatly speed up the salvaging process as well. In addition, a small letter could be placed on the opposite corner denoting the material of the item, such as:

I - Ivory
S - steel
C - copper

My intent isn't to deface the icon of every item in the game, just something subtle to further identify an item without having to waste time ID'ing every little piece of potential salvage. Just some thoughts. Any feedback on this issue is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Truth Seeker]

Ibn,

Any chance of a comment on making Allegiance Officer Accounts?

[Alicex]

As we stated in the April Letter to the Players, in May we will be revising the Palenqual’s Living Weapons quest. One note in advance – any already-created Living Weapons will receive an upgrade, but this upgrade will include a wield requirement of 250 base skill.
We recommend that any character with an existing Living Weapon not be wielding the weapon during the event if the character does not meet the new wield requirement. If you do log in wielding a weapon and you do not meet the requirements, the weapon will be unwielded. It will be moved to your backpack if you have an open slot, otherwise it will drop on the ground.

I spent several days and lots of sacrifice to get this wand, it has since been part of my personality. I would like to request that the current living weapons be grandfathered rather than be changed so people like myself dont lose something they have had for well over a year. Besides how would I be able to sprinkle powdered sugar?

[sublimaze]

Just want to first say, NICE JOB on all the new stuff. Can't wait to see it all. I say that to preface my comments that follow so you don't think I'm just complaining. I love the direction the game is going!

Salvage backpack: sounds good, but I too am one who salvages multiple craft levels of the same salvage. A salvage backpack won't help with that. I would echo those who have already said it: look at the program UST. Allows you to salvage different crafts, and exclude items with tinkers or inscriptions or cantrips or even level 6 spells on them. PLEASE put in a built-in UST plug-in instead :)

Item spells: I too feel that armor choice is a fun dynamic. I.e. choosing a 5 piece set over a 9 piece set should have more issues than just looks. I would rather have two item buffs, physicals and elementals. That way a 5 piece set would take 10 spells (sped up to level 1 speed :) ) If I wanted the higher al of a 9 piece set, it would take 18 spells, and at level 1 speed wouldn't be burdensome, but would still add that choice dynamic. Or heck, just make one spell do all banes, might be even better. Then it would be 5 spells versus 9.

[Blood Mage]

What's all this about amuli being gimp now? A LOT of mages are burdoned at all times and wearing just more pieces like celdon... UGH.

Oh and about all you complaining about the salvage pack.. If its a new pack that is AWESOME, all u complaining obviously ARNT mages... us mages with all schools, thats at least 24 less slots... so yeah

[Bruiserk]

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
Or maybe you just don't buy a salvage pack?

They aren't forcing you to use one....from whats said it would be an item that takes up a pack slot but is not a pack exactly.

Therefore technically speaking you could carry 7 salvage packs if you managed to get 7 bags of every type of salvage.

I wouldn't buy one. It wouldn't help me in the least. I don't collect 24 different types of salvage, so I'd be losing space overall with one. The point is, why don't they combine foci, and free up those pack slots for us to use which is beneficial to a larger percentage of the player base than the proposed salvage pack? The problem is that Ibn has stated that combining foci is basically out of the question. So, they have shelved what is possibly the best solution.

[Winter]

Concerning the salvage bag,

To make it more useful in the field, I think this bag shouldnt take up a pack slot, but rather have a function similar to the Kithless Feather Bag, I.E. It takes up a slot in your inventory, but not a pack slot, and you use the bag on the salvage.

I also was thinking about the bag in what we currently know about it: have any of you considered that while this might not be a good thing to have taking up space on your main, it will most likely be excellent for your trademule or in your housing storage.

[DraconisUmbra]

First off it's important to stress that the the proposed new spells are NOT intended to be the be-all end-all solution to Item Magic buffing for all players. Other things -- like prismatic banes -- are still on the table for later development. We understand that this solution may not instantly benefit all players, but we believe that it will benefit a very large number of players.

Well thanks for that :) Could have saved us all some grief if this had been made clear earlier though.

[ttusher]

Originally posted by Winter
Concerning the salvage bag,

To make it more useful in the field, I think this bag shouldnt take up a pack slot, but rather have a function similar to the Kithless Feather Bag, I.E. It takes up a slot in your inventory, but not a pack slot, and you use the bag on the salvage.

I also was thinking about the bag in what we currently know about it: have any of you considered that while this might not be a good thing to have taking up space on your main, it will most likely be excellent for your trademule or in your housing storage.


Zyrca said earlier that only partial bags would fit in the salvage bags... so unless you really want a ton of partial salvage at home or on mules, its not a great option

[ttusher]

My feelings are that we should not concentrate on the salvage but on comps, and a comp bag. that way people could toss the foci and go back to comps and tapers (oh the joy!)

Get rid of the racial skills and give people a couple of extra credits.

Finally, how about getting rid of the 126 cap? Im not suggesting getting any more skill credits after 125, but just display what level people really are! You did it with critters a while back, why not our toons too!

[ZeroCool]

I think you guys are doing a great job with the changes, I also wish to give kudo's to the developers of the some of the dung's being introduced...The dung for caul recaul was a great design and I enjoy revisiting it several times over.....as well as the last 2 dung's for the ancient armor....the over all design and the graphics really deserve kudo's.....

as far as the may patch....I can't find 1 thing I dislike about it...Kudo's....

I did want to bring up 2 points......
The sever down times is getting a lil excessive....but I understand your changing stuff....but it's still poking the players in the ribs...

next would be the turbine board....you guys said you wanted to better the communication, All I really been seeing is a few 1 liner answers or page locked for:......

when players present ideas or concerns to you guys, it does deserve a minimum responce....I do notice you all respond to what is favorite monster or whatever for fun and interaction.....but when someone asked a simple question like:
why are items restricted to being stacked...like 25 dispell gems rather than be based on burden of the player......a simple responce would be nice like a reason....

I notice that there are specific admins that respond more than others....for those I appreciate it....Srand, Scenario, and Zycara seem to be the only ones posting replys.....and IBN but most of his are sorry thread locked or 1 line answers that don't give information 1 way or the other....but he has posted a few responces worth reading.....

think we could get some improved feedback?

/r ranting off

Sorry....these 2 areas I mentioned are kind of important, and I'm trying to give feedback in hopes they can improve....

[Sorrowfull]

Originally posted by Alicex
I spent several days and lots of sacrifice to get this wand, it has since been part of my personality. I would like to request that the current living weapons be grandfathered rather than be changed so people like myself dont lose something they have had for well over a year. Besides how would I be able to sprinkle powdered sugar?

you are thinking of the wrong weapons....the living weapons are the low/mid range melee weapons you can get and fashion together with the totems dropped by hea


besides the stave you are refering to has already been updated once...

[Alicex]

Oh Thanks Sorrowfull. That makes me feel better

[nofeir]

Regarding the proposed June changes to item casting, why can't the EXISTING item spells redirect to our worn armor items?

If you're going to add a whole new system of spells they will take up even more room on already crowded spell bars. In two accounts with now 12 characters I have 9 that can cast level 7 spells and have been for about a year. Several characters are STILL looking for various spells in item, creature and life.

Now you want to add MORE spells! It'll end up taking forever to get all the level seven spells out of those stingy steel chests! (Yeah, I know, there are level 7's on some critters now, but the selection isn't any better than what's in the chests.) I save up SIK's until I have 20 or 30 and go find a chest. You either get the same spells over and over again, or you get trash spells. What good is it to get multiple copies of a level seven scroll to debuff a critter's cooking skill? Yeah, that'll really hurt 'em!

Please, don't make us go back to the chests for another round of spells, or change this dumb way of getting level 7 scrolls. What in the name of Asheron is wrong with making them available like all the other scrolls!?!? MAKE LEVEL 7 SCROLL VENDORS!

:confused:

[Zero_Washu]

Originally posted by DHMagicMan

The benifits far outweigh the minuses for this change.

Find a new patron.

Then again, don't get banned in the first place and it will never be an issue.

I disagree. It is also highly abusable. There have been cases of people gone wild or hacked which was used to break trees. This could be worse.

We have had people banned from the guild who were let back in after the misunderstanding was cleared up. However in the hands of a vindictive monarch or just one with a bug up his arse he could not only ban you but ruin any connections between your characters by selectively banning

[Porran]

Alright, fifteen pages later, I think I'll delurk and actually weigh in on this. It seems like a lot of folks are getting caught up in the heat of debate and making assumptions that - just maybe - we don't have enough information to be making quite yet. I'll just hit on a couple of the topics that seem to have been contentious.

1) Allegiance improvements - seems like the big deal here is the ban capability, which I have to admit seems like an excessively potent power in the hands of anyone but the actual monarch, or maybe the Right Hand when that position comes into play. A lot of the other complaints, though, I just don't see.

I think it's a valid point that the best way to avoid having problems with the system is to avoid being banned. I suspect that those who complain that it's too easy to be banned for insufficient reason either a) don't realize what they're doing to merit it or b) should reconsider their choice of monarchy. Most people I know wouldn't *want* to be in a monarchy where the people in power would ban someone at the drop of a hat / for personal reasons / etc. Yes, there are petty people out there who will do these things - and you know what? They deserve to have their monarchies collapse as people get fed up and leave. Same goes for any monarch who is prone to fits of "bug up his arse".

These aren't reasons why the power to ban is a bad idea; these are reasons why it's important to know your prospective monarch and patrons - and to be open with them about any bans *you* may be under so that *they* don't go and swear to someone and upset your own carefully-orchestrated allegiance tree - *before* you swear to them. Allegiances aren't (or at least, IMNSHO, shouldn't be) about getting fed the maximal amount of experience or getting access to buffbots or equipment stores. In fact, with the demolition of XP chains and the prevalence of public donation-only buffbots, I don't see much incentive to remain attached to a monarchy for any reasons *other* than camaraderie and the assistance of your patrons - which was the spirit and the intent of the allegiance system in the first place, was it not?

2) Buffing improvements - item magic - It does seem strange that these proposed "buff all your armor" spells would -not- redirect also to clothing - is there some sort of rationale for this? Regardless, if this decision is immutable, at least the quick slots for clothing will making baning the undies less painful.

For those of you who are complaining about these new spells not being of use to you because you wear different equipment to buff: that would be the cost of needing to use the cantrips to achieve the casting skill levels you desire to be able to cast the level of spells that you want to cast. Yes, prismatic banes might be more useful to you, as would a simple, general decrease in item spell casting times (even if that meant, to go along with the buffbot anti-love, splitting out item spells into Self and Other versions - which they might do anyway, considering that it seems like the ability to buff other people's armor was unintended). I imagine Turbine has already discussed these ideas, or, if they haven't, will do so now that they have been put forward. Demanding an instantaneous explanation as to why those alternatives were not their first choice is more than a little unfair; keep in mind that most companies don't bother to communicate with their customers even this much, and that these are only their current plans, which (as we have seen before) are subject to change based on feedback.

[A side note here: I was almost amused by the umbrage that was taken at a dev saying that there will always be tradeoffs. Making sure that there are tradeoffs is what's called "balancing the game", and that's an important - some would say the *most* important - part of a dev's job.]

3) Salvaging improvements - I'm not going to address the issue of usting different kinds of materials at once / automating the usting process in the client, as I think it's kind of a moot point and a bit of a dev-time waster. UST (the plugin) is here and it's more customizable than anything Turbine could likely justify putting in the game - why not just use it?

What a lot of people are complaining about, though, is the fact that the salvage pack, as proposed, will do nearly nothing for nearly everyone, and that much is true. Thankfully, this idea is still in "very rough draft form" - but the proposals for how to improve it seem to be lacking an understanding of what Turbine is trying to do - i.e. to provide more storage space for characters without a large increase in the amount of data that has to be stored for each character.

(Note: the following is very theoretical but it follows my best educated guess about how AC does things. It also gets a little technical, so forgive me for geeking out.)

The reason the proposed salvage pack accomplishes this goal is that it only needs to store somewhere around 280 scalar values - for each of 70some different materials, the pack would only need track the quantity (0-100), workmanship, number of salvaged items (for use in the "averaging" to determine the overall workmanship of salvage from different-WS items), and total value in pyreals. This stands to be much, much smaller (by my rough estimate, the entire size of the salvage pack contents in memory need be no larger than 4 kilobytes, assuming inscriptions are not allowed - who inscribes their salvage?) than a pack of 24 loot items, each of which could be data structures of arbitrary size. (Think of tomes, which can contain many, many pages of arbitrary text - or even a pack containing 24 items, each with an inscription. There's room for about 120 characters - which tallies nearly 3 kilobytes just for the inscriptions, before we even consider how much data is used to describe the objects themselves.)

Now, what might work for the salvage pack, to make it more useful to people, would be to add an additional field to each of those 70 (or however many) slots to store what kind of salvage each slot in the pack contains. This would still be much smaller (1 byte per slot, or possibly only 7 bits if one is willing to squeeze this as much as possible) than any possible loot item descriptor, and would liberate the pack from the "one bag of each type only" limitation while taking up minimal extra space . That space cost could be recouped by reducing the number of slots; as long as there would be more than 24, it would be a net gain for anyone who carries more than 24 bags of salvage (and might encourage some people to start collecting more varieties, which wouldn't be a bad thing).

I'm sure there are other ways of somehow providing more space, perhaps even down to reengineering the way the server stores objects; but I'm *not* surprised that compressing all of a character's foci packs into one is not one of those that is under consideration. As I understand it, the foci packs are another balance issue: look at all the people complaining that everyone has to be, at least to some extent, a mage in order to have any success in playing the game. And the more of a mage you are (i.e. the more schools you cast), the more foci packs you have to carry (unless you like old-school components). This sounds like a limiting factor to me, and an intentional way to keep the mages from *truly* getting out of control by being allowed to go from packs and packs full of tapers etc. to having to carry nothing but scarabs and prismatics. You think mages are overpowered as it is? You want a compelling disincentive to play them? I don't think there's been a more compelling one since the introduction of hollow weaponry. Granted, such disincentives work better when they're more direct (and the incentives don't make things more or less mandatory, cf. item enchantment), but it's pretty clear solving both problems at once is going to take a lot of work.

That is, of course, if you consider them both problems. ;)

4) Character starting skills - Erk. Changing these is always going to be a big pain, and I don't see -any- way Turbine is going to make even a majority of people happy no matter how they resolve this admitted imbalance. I've typed enough on other subjects today, so I'll let other people do some more thinking on this, and then maybe I'll revisit it when I've had a chance to consider it more.

Sorry for the incredibly long-winded post. No offense is intended to any parties - if you were singled out, it's probably just because you shouted the loudest. :)

[_Rotting-Flesh_]

Originally posted by Bruiserk
Salvage pack wouldn't do me any good as well.

I was thinking that if you want to look at addressing the pack space issue, why not look at foci? I think you should look into creating a prismatic type of foci that can cover all schools, but you have to buy a charge that imbues it with the properties of a particular school. When charged with a school, the prismatic foci increases in burden at the rate that the current foci weigh in at. This way we still have the burden penalties that we currently have, but it opens up the pack slots. This takes care of the salvage problem, and the need for more pack space in general.

Existing players can turn in their current foci to a town crier who then rewards the player with that particular school's foci charge. The existing players can then buy a prismatic foci from a scrivener, charge it up, and continue about their business.

New players should, if they have trained a magic skill, start with the prismatic foci, and a charge equal to each class that they have trained.

I'm sure something like this would take quite a bit of work, but I think it is probably a workable solution, and more to what the players need, than the salvage pack solution.


I think that this is an excellent idea. As most have said (from what I read) the salvaging pack would do me no good as I have different ws of salvage.

Another question that I have is with giving the other races item tinkering. I am gharu but was gharu before it was item tinkering. If by giving the other races item tinkering are you going to give Gharu people 2 skill credits? I think that balancing out the races is a good thing but I somehow feel like as being Gharu I am gonna get the short end of the deal. Maybe I am wrong but thats just how I see it.

Other than not liking the salvage pack idea and not sure about the tinkering skill I think that everything else is great and thank you for the time and effort that you guys are putting into the game =)

[Jet-eye-nite]

I guess I also don't understand your thinking on self buffs only ?
Alot of folks use bots and alot use dual log to buff their own chars, so to exclude the other portion to me ,make little to no sense. Stop your Navy way of thinking ( corporal punishment, some exploit so lets punish everyone) . :confused:

[Atticus Finch]

I really hope that you guys aren't going to keep those corny names for guild officers.

I would suggest something such as Squire, Lt., Governor....I don't really know any military terms or anything, but something like that......Right Hand and Executor? No...please.

[scorcher]

please do something about spell disrupt messages occuring from

server/internet lag.(brought about due to godmoding spells)


OPTIONS:


1 fix godmoding of spells/potions and remove the radius

altogether(told this could not be done due to the physics of the

game, altho in this recent letter it was mentioned that the

potions would be an attempted fix, so why not the casting, this

would be the ultimate fix as it would mean freedom of movement

for a mage again! )


2 create a system that uses a formula of distance/time/spells cast

to determine if someone deserves a disrupt from attempting to

godmode



3 fix the lag!! this applies wheter or not 1 or 2 is implemented...

this is the main factor in many of my deaths, very very

very frustrating to know i could have casted a spell and heal or

kill someone, only to find out i got a disrupt message, when i

barely even moved, or didnt move at all or did not begin a cast

until several seconds had passed after pressing a button, or i

windup then lag right before the actual result of the spell kicks in,

yet a melee/archer can still bash me. Not to mention the many

times i have ran , stopped to heal, get the message then try

again and get the message by that time i am dead. Everyone

else including melee/archers experience issues with lag as well

so it would obviously be beneficial to everyone



******healing/revitalize improvements

glad to see you agreed to bump these up a little more, I would still suggest that you bump up the low end on the level VII spells; about 10more points on health and 20 more points on stamina.



this is just lagniappe:
********darktide armor

lets see a better drop on low wms, high al armor that is actually under 6k ! its darktide we get looted there!

[_AbBaNdOn]

I just made a thread over on the general boards about my salvaging idea's but i just realised something..

If an ust starts seperating by qaulity will it still be possable to squish different qaulities together?? It sounds like it would be impossable to combine different qailities now...

[Artillius]

"One idea that we are investigating is a “Salvage Backpack”. This would take up a pack slot in inventory and could hold a single bag of each type of salvage."

Ugh!!!

Dont take away anther pack slot. Its bad enough as it is. I like to leave my main pack open for loot. So I can stuff as much loot on me before going and selling off.

I know it wont happen but allow us to put the Foci inside another pack. Then you wont have to mess around with this foolish idea.

[scorcher]

salvage backpack? how about instead of wasting another

packspace have a place you can click on or doubleclick and it

opens a menu, anytime you pick up salvage it gets stored in this

menu, it is placed alphabetically in order from salvage class , then

in order of wms, have options to combine on salvaging certain

wms wether it be 1-6 7,8,9,10 or 1-10 or 1-8,9,10 , have a place

that shows the combined burden of all the salvage in the menu

as well, even have an options panel with parameters to

configure each type of salvage, wether you want to salvage it as

you pick it up if it is not a major, over 10k, under a certain wms

ect. even with this you could still waste another backpack if you

feel it is a must.


i agree up above do something about the foci, when i was a mage carrying old school comps, i use to use three backpacks now im forced to use four+ space for tapers and scarabs.

[Bernard The Fox]

Can you tell us the target level range for the updated Living Weapons? Will it remain the same or will you create them to be more useful to higher level than they were before?

[Alaren]

Salvaging backpack.. nice idea, but it doesn't help people who may split salvage into grades.. like collecting bags of level 7, 8 and 9 seperately.

Salvaging multiple items.. I seem to remember that if you try to salvage multiple items at a time, you lose some of the quantity.. is this still the case, and would it be the case if you could salvage multiple materials. I dislike the fact that heavy items salvage to the same quantity as light items.

Item spells that cast on worn items.. what about people that wear casting armor such as minor item gaunts etc.. they wouldn't be able to buff their fighting gaunts using the new spells, they would have to use the old item bane.

As far as char starting skills.. make it so that after level 25, ANY racial skill could be dropped.. initially, make UA 4 to train and 8 tp spec and give them item tink, and on aluv replace assess person with item tink.

[Frieze]

Originally posted by Alaren
Salvaging backpack.. nice idea, but it doesn't help people who may split salvage into grades.. like collecting bags of level 7, 8 and 9 seperately. Yes it does help you.... first of all, imbue salvage doesn't need to be separated. Neither does stuff like race salvages or melee <-> missle, linen, most salvages that you aren't using often, etc. The only stuff that really needs to be separated if you take a look at the calculators and is ws8/9/10 steel/hog/iron/granite (and maybe opal).

Combining the 1-7 is what most people do, and the people who don't, usually just don't know the fact that ws7 over ws6 is almost never, going to make a difference with any material.

Even if you do all this it will still save you space. Obviously if you're collecting ws7, 8, 9, you're collecting the 6 as well, and the 6 can fill your salvage bag. It's not like they are preventing you from keeping salvage in other packs.

[hanyuning]

I agree with allowing us to untrain our racial skills. This would give everyone enough credits to go train whatever tinkering skill they wanted. You could even leave them in at the beginning of character creation and we have to spend a month geting rid of them. I'd be okay with that.

[BadhMac]

I just wanted to say thanks, for all of the great ideas coming out with each new patch. Turbine, you all have really made our customer loyalty worthwhile. Keep on Keepin' On !!!

[Garnet]

Untraining racial skills? Brilliant idea! :cool:

We could introduce this as free skill for all new characters regardless of race (similar to Run and Jump). Alternately, we could give it only to Sho and Aluvian characters as having it on a Gharu’ndim character would be redundant. - from May LTTP

"All new characters" indicates no changes would be made to existing characters. It's taken me a lot of time and effort (no macroing, no XP chain, mostly solo hunting) to get my main character to level 103. She's Aluvian, and aside from having inadequate returns on salvaging, I'm happy with her development. I wouldn't want to reroll merely for the sake of acquiring a new skill.

I sincerely hope I've misinterpreted that phrase. :(

[Torz]

One hour buffs a bit short, can you make it 2 or 3 hours or possible to stack same buffs 2 or 3 times for longer durations ? maybe a quest to unlock longer duration buffs ?

Cheers
Torz

[DHMagicMan]

If they make Salvaging a "Free Skill" for all new toons, do you think it would be possible to have a Salvaging gem in the temple of knowledge so we can train it? Since it would cost zero skill credits it seems like that would be an easy way to get it onto your character. Even if we have to deal with the timer in terms of other changes to our skills, at least the gem is there when we have time for it.

Thanks for your consideration.

[Thundercutter]

I've read through the posts entered on this thread and would like to respond to a couple of them:

First, there is at least one account that has a main character that is under 60th level: mine. I've been playing AC since beta and my main is actually the second character that I created since retail (I deleted my original main because he was unplayable). I actively play 4 of the 5 characters on my account. However, I work and have other real life obligations that severely limit the amount of time that I can play AC.

My characters are:

Thrud the Barbarian (Level 50 Meleer - Aluvian): Spec: Sword, Melee Defense. Trained: Arcane Lore, Armor Tinkering, Assess Person, Cooking, Crossbow, Dagger, Healing, Missile Defense and Weapon Tinkering. He loves having monsters drain 5 of his 10 mana with level 5 spells.

Warren Peace (Level 47 Battle Mage - Aluvian): Spec: Life Magic, War Magic, Mana conversion. Trained: Arcane Lore, Assess Person and Dagger. He casts level 7 spells and doesn't even carry a dagger.

Balderscab (Level 38 - Artificer - Gharu'ndim): Spec: Alchemy, Staff. Trained: Arcane Lore, Healing, Item Enchantment, Item Tinkering, Lockpick, Mana Conversion, Melee Defense, Missile Defense and Thrown Weapons.

Qwami (Level 20 - Desert Ranger - Gharu'ndim): Spec: Assess Creature. Trained: Arcane Lore, Bow, Creature Enchantment, Fletching, Healing, Item Tinkering, Melee Defense, Missile Defense, Staff and Sword.

Qwami's Mommy (Level 6 - Mule - Gharu'ndim): Trained: Arcane Lore, Creature Enchantment, Item Enchantment, Item Tinkering, Life Magic, Mana Conversion, Staff and War Magic.

My clan lives in an apartment in Qalaba'r. With the exception of a mumiyah guise and a skeletal guise, my storage is filled to capacity with salvage (one type per slot). The rest of my salvage is carried by Balderscab in one of his backpacks.

Now, that having been said:

If the salvage backpacks can be used to replace the second backpack in storage, it would be perfect for my account. It would clear up a lot of storage space AND free up an entire backpack on Balderscab. As was stated previously, no single solution will make everyone happy. An equivalent backpack that only holds death items is great for high level characters but that's pretty much it; Thrud carries four master robes and a couple of other death items and he does fine. Likewise, the prismatic foci are great for those characters that have two or more schools of magic but even single school mages just balance out.

As for the statement about aegis or weeping weapons: I guess this goes back to the trade off between being a warrior, an archer or a mage. Archers and mages have one critical advantage over a meleer: range. Meleers have one critical advantage over archers and mages: a shield. If you want range (somewhat) and a shield, you could take thrown weapons; it's a choice (just not a good one). I guess if someone wanted to have a decent ranged attack and be able to go toe-to-toe with a warrior, he or she could be a bow/sword specialist (4 credits more expensive than a specialized battle mage).

Instead of running to Kara (which I hate by the way), Thrud is tied to the lifestone there. While most of the creatures there are at the high end of what he can battle one on one (75+ level), it is a pretty good hunting spot without a lot of other people around. This also made it easy for him to pick up scrolls for Warren and eventually for Balderscab and Qwami (they can cast level 5's and 4's, respectively). I know that this is probably not an option for most characters; I was just throwing it out as an alternative to running there.

With regards to the ongoing debate regarding the salvage skill and item tinkering for Gharu'dims. When AC started, the racial skills were considered bonuses for being a race; basically, your character knew these skills because everyone in your culture did them. Sho were trained to defend themselves without weapons; Aluvians lived in dangerous towns with shady people; and Gharu'dims were desert people that were famous for their trading and bartering abilities. In that light, might it be possible to remove racial skills and give the characters an inherent ability with certain skills. To keep existing characters from being nerfed, give all charcters 56 skills credits instead of 50; however, aluvians will always be better with daggers and assess person than any other race with the same skill level; Sho will always be better at unarmed combat and Gharu'ndims will always be better with staff and item tinkering. Thus, the actual points will be balanced but the intent of the racial skills will be retained. I have no idea of what would be a fair bonus.

With regards to the debate about the multi-piece item spells, what if it were treated the way that fellowship spells are/will be. A multi-spell is more difficult to cast (+25 difficulty) and it costs 10 mana more per item (beyond the first) that is buffed. Balderscab, being a hybrid (warrior/mage), doesn't have a lot of mana; so, his buffing cycle is: (a) cast as many buffs as possible; (b) pull out his orb with life mastery on it; (c) cast health to mana I; (d) heal; (e) cast health to mana I; (f) heal; (g) cast health to mana I; (g) heal; (h) switch to his item enchantment mastery wand; repeat cycle. Note: I'm not complaining; I didn't pay for life magic with Balderscab and, therefore, he should have to pay for the convenience of being able to cast life spells; likewise, he did not start off with a mage's focus or willpower; so, he shouldn't be able to cast as long as they can.

As for the assess person skill; I have to go with the majority on this one: it sucks. Granted, it's only a 2 point skill but I would like to throw my suggestions in the box for how it can be improved and still remain a two point skill. (1) Most characters can be broken down into a combination of certain professions: archer, meleer, evader, og mage, battle mage, rouge, craftsman, etc. If a character has assess person trained, then, they'll get a second tab on their assessment window. This tab ranks the person being assessed based on what Turbine considers the norm for the person's level. Rank levels could be: None, Negligible, Low, Average, Above Average, High, Incredible and Uber. This ability would not only work on players but human "monsters" as well. It's not great but what do you expect for 2 points. (2) Another option would be for a successful assessment to state the attack type and attack height that would be best against the person that was assessed. The assessment will always return something; if the assessment failed (based on the target's deception skill), the assessment returns a random attack type and height. The same can be done for monster assessment.

Now, as for the various discussion about meleers and item magic. I must agree with Zyrca, if you want to be able to cast spells as well as a mage, you should be a mage. Basically, the mage character took the mage skills at creation; they also chose attributes that would make them a better mage. IMHO, a meleer, even a hybrid, should never be as good as a pure mage. The same applies for non-archers/hybrids wanting to be as good as pure archers or non-meleers wanting to be as good as pure meleers. My characters, Balderscab and Qwami will never be able to go toe-to-toe with monsters like Thrud nor will they be able to penetrate the magic resistance of monsters as well as Warren. But their versatility gives them options that neither of my pure characters have; in other words, they traded raw power for flexibility.

As for armor imbues, what if the character option screen determined the result of tinkering an item. For example, if a character set his or her salvaging option to bonus; then, until the option is changed, any success would give the +1 bonus; likewise, the damage reduction option would grant a 1% damage reduction per success.

Buffbots: I personally don't have a problem with characters that use buffbots; however, it should be realized that buffbots do artificially increase the capability of those characters that do use them (duh). Buffs beyond what would be expected from the character or from an equivalent level fellow means that the character can now hunt in areas above his or her level. These characters quickly gain levels and find themselves needing to adventure in higher and higher level areas to maintain their level of enjoyment. Unfortunately, there is a limit to Dereth; most of the content and critters that were developed were created before buffbots became as prevalent as they are. The devs have done their best to upgrade the monsters accordingly but they can only upgrade them to a point; after that, the world is too dangerous for new characters (hence the upgrade to the society/explorer letter quests). As is obvious by the level of my characters, I don't use buff bots; that's my choice and I have no problem with it. My hope is that AC is around for at least another 4 years; at that time, I would like to see the fireworks that go off when my characters hit level 126.

I do have a question, though. Alchemists, and to some degree cooks, can create items, potions and food that emulates most of the life buffs. Are there any plans to do the same for creature and item spells? Life magic costs 12 points to train; creature and item enchantment only cost 8 points each. I would have thought that if alchemy were used to duplicate any of these skills, it would have been the cheaper ones.

By the way, (a) I personally like the changes and (b) it's nice to be able to play AC the weekend after an update without the servers being down for a hot fix/rollback.

[_AbBaNdOn]

Now, as for the various discussion about meleers and item magic. I must agree with Zyrca, if you want to be able to cast spells as well as a mage, you should be a mage

Melee people dont want to cast ANY spells, period but we are forced to. Being a melee guy isnt possable without some form of magic, wether thats arcane lore thats based off mage attributes or 3 school + manaC based off mage attributes.

[Thundercutter]

I agree with you on that point. Thrud was 20th level before he finally took arcane lore (I just had a problem with a Barbarian taking a skill called arcane lore). Fortunately, meleers did get a bone thrown to them earlier along this line in the form of innate resistances that are based on non-buffed warrior stats. Granted, the resistances are only up to level 5 life magic buffs (again another duplication of a life magic power) but it was a plus. Likewise, sticky is really only useful for meleers and hollow weapons are a mere annoyance to them. Thrud's best items cast level 5 spells on him (he has nothing that casts cantrips). This is probably why he can't fight things that are more than 30 levels (except wasps, which quick attacks until they runs out of stamina) above him but that's why so much of Dereth is geared towards mid-level characters and below. If Turbine's goal is to make using buff bots less popular, my characters will probably find other characters out in his, typically deserted, hunting grounds.

[Bob Down]

How about setting up an RSS feed from the announcements forum? It would make life infinitely simpler for many and would make sure information was distributed in a timely and accurate fashion.

[Ashikaga]

I really like the sound of the new item spells.

My guess is that they will be implemented somewhat like the fellowship spells e.g. another +25 difficulty of the older level 7 item spell + more mana required for each item you are wearing.

A lot of my chars will have no problems casting the new 7's if thats the case. But, for those that struggle with 7's, I will use 6's instead.

For most people there is very little difference between level 6 and level 7 item banes. Often level 6 banes reach the 2.0 unparalleled cap. If you are a melee, with a shield, you aren't going to notice the difference anyway.

Its has to be a far better option casting a few level 6 item spells every 40 mins than 5-7 times as many level 7's every 60 minutes.

.................................................. .................................................. .

I am not so happy about the Archer changes.

I agree with a lot of the other commments.... too little too slowly.

It really is about time archers got some decent PvP love. They are by far the most neglected class.

The only real PvP love archers have ever had was the Weeping bow/xbow/atlatl and when that was nerfed it made archers the weakest PvP class again.

I am not sure that the proposal involving minor tinkering with the accuracy bar will ever solve archer's problems. The spread of DOT from making the whole accuracy bar usuable is very hard to balance. At one extreme you destroy enemies without missile D and at the other you can be totally ineffective against those with missile D.

For most archers, its fighting mages that causes the biggest problems. Perhaps its time to review weapons like the Hollow bow. The damage could be increased considerably without destroying melees or affecting PvM. Special properties could also be added like biting strike etc..

I think the Aegis for archers is a useful idea. Its an alternative to improving the Healing skill.

Healing skill does not scale well for the size of hits you get from a Weeping Wand. Compared to Life Magic, Healing is unpredictable and unreliable in PvP.

The idea of having the Aegis as a loot wepaon imbue is totally unworkable though. Anything short of a full AR bow is totally useless in PvP and AR bows can easily be debuffed anyway.

I think some sort of jewlery Aegis item would be the most resonable solution. Please don't make it a necklace though - most archers (and mages, melees too) will want to wear a health enhancing item there (e.g. Encrusted Bloodstone jewel.) :)

[Ganzor]

Originally posted by Zyrca
If you want to be able to take full advantage of Item magic, you will need to train Item magic and put experince into it. Or you can drop down to a level of spell you can cast without swapping out armor pices to take advantage of it. Life is full of trade offs, this will be one of them.




Translation: Turbine hates melees.

[Frieze]

triple post :rolleyes:

[Frieze]

double post :p

[Frieze]

Originally posted by Ganzor
Translation: Turbine hates melees. lol, it's item magic we're talking about here. There's a reason that low magic melees call themselves "item-only" - do you think it's because *gasp* they train item magic? :p

In all honesty, once a melee can cast VIIs they stop raising item. Now there's another reason to raise item :) Having a 10/10 melee myself, I know that threshold is level ~90. If you're 126... that's 36 levels and potentially even more experience that you've gone without needing to touch your item magic.

Therefore, it's your choice, and the choice of every low-magic melee. Raise item, or don't... heh.

[_AbBaNdOn]

Fine i will agree to just spending more xp into my MAGICS even though i wanted to be melee...

Now turbine has to add meleeD reqs to ALL armor so mages and mage archers have to waste xp on something that they dont REALLY need.

[Thundercutter]

Actually, I can think of one potential case where melee defense is always desired: zero stamina when successfully evading. Isn't there a chance that a character will not burn any stamina when they successfully dodge an attack based on their melee or missile defense? This means that melees can stand in the middle of mobs and wipe them out. The high defense reduces both the health and stamina loses due to attacks by the monsters. Of course the character still loses stamina for his or her attacks but that's minor (it's why warriors can swing with their bars all the way to the right for the massive damage).

[Li of LC]

If the goal is to ban buffbots, Turbine should simply ban buffbots.

However if the goal is to reward players who have trained item magic, then that reward should benefit ALL players who have item trained - including those who use shields and weapons.

[Thundercutter]

There was a major discussion a while ago regarding buffbots and there's one problem with banning them: What is the difference between a bot that casts high level buffs on characters and a player that does the same thing? Turbine wants players to choose to not use a buff bot not legislate that they are illegal; it's a more difficult road to travel but one that will cause the least amount of player dissatisfaction.

As for item magic benefitting all characters, it will. The perks that are gained from any skill are only limited by the ranking that the character has in the skill. Just as a melee wouldn't expect a mage (or possibly an archer) to be able to gain all the benefits of melee defense that they (the melees) have; one wouldn't expect a melee to be able to gain all the benefits of a pure mage.

By the way, this isn't limited to different archetypes. An item magic specialist mage will probably have more skill points in item enchantment than a pure mage of the same level that only has item enchantment trained. A broader example of this are fellowship spells; they have a difficulty of 25 above the normal difficulty of casting the spell. This isn't taking anything away from any character that has item enchantment (trained or specialized), it is simply a bonus for characters that have enough points in the magic school to cover the additional difficulty. If a character continues to raise his or her item enchantment, he or she will be able to cast the fellowship spells with decent regularity simply by reading the scrolls and learning the spells.

I guess this again goes back to choices. Obviously, if there is no logical reason for a character to continue to train a skill, they will stop at a certain level. This is an incentive to keep training skills even after there is no longer a game incentive to support the decision. The only characters that immediately benefit from a new skill-rank based incentive are the ones that have the prerequisite skill level already but any character can put experience into a skill that they had previously stopped training to also gain those benefits. Just remember simply because a skill doesn't seem that promising at first (appraise skills, magic defense, thrown weapons, war magic) that doesn't mean that the devs won't make a change that will make them more important. Characters that are holding on to (and enhancing) those skills (despite their uselessness) will be the first to benefit from the change.

By the way, I'm not a dev. I've just seen all of the major and minor changes that have taken place in AC since beta 2. The one thing that I've noticed is that eventually everything changes but overall, the game has gotten better and it rocked even then.