Dark Legacy MUD Forum

What the heck Isabelle? lmao. I thought you were the one who said only tweaking was nesceserry, and not big changes...O.o...

I mean sure, if you want to do a re-write, the whole thing could be vastly improved from what we learned about it, and our experiences with the current one. But we were just suggesting tweaks, so we could AVOID a re-write...Im confused now though.

k, yes, it will be tweaked, personally, i wouldnt mind a big change though, i feel daring today

i think i've given up, sorry, my input isnt any good, i want radical change now.

*holds up a sign for radical change


ok, thats out of my system, what were your reasons for having more damreduction again?

Because metal armor is so terrible its laughable. The penalties to your mobility score are so high that the meager damage reduction added definetly doesnt make up for the penalties.

The only metal armor that would be better than shirts (yes you heard me right - SHIRTS, SILK SHIRTS, AND CLOTH) would be MAYBE emeralite...And even then its iffy, massive mobility penalty. And for every 20 mobility that you drop, your opponents get criticals that are now one higher than they were before...If you enchant every piece of armor with mobility, it MIGHT make up for the losses, but I doubt it...You would probably have to start enchanting mobility onto your jewelry as well...And all for what?!

Think of all that space you wasted, just to make your metal armor NOT suck. If you use shirts, you can put that space towards other things, and be better ANYWAY, seeing how even with all the damage reduction you get with metal armor, its easy as hell for your opponent to hit right over it, effectivly nullifying all those efforts.


Edit: And this isn't even touching on metal weapons!

yeah, ok, so with an exchange of zero damreduction for cloth/silk i definitely agree a bonus of damreduction for metal would be fine.

or, maybe the problem just lies within the formula used to determine critical hits / severs?

right now, its like dungeons and dragons, on a super high level campaign, where every character could roll a 2 on a 20 sided dice, and still get a critical hit because of hitroll modifiers.

Perhaps it should be stretched, so that critical hits are 'special events' that only happen when you are super lucky, and not something to be relied on in a fight.
Perhaps also, critical misses should be introduced, which can hurt yourself, like dropping the blade on your foot, or falling and impaling yourself on your weapon


but yes, i agree with the possible raising of damage reduction, because hey, mobility is mobility, you wear a shirt, you can dance around, but armor is armor, you can take a smack in the chest, and still be not too bad

Emeralite is not better than silk for armor. My e200 radiant, glorified(as in spent a good bit of glory on it) emeralite cuirass gave somewhat better overall stats than an e200 non-radiant shirt, but the cuirass heavily reduced my AC cap(don't want to post specifics and let everyone know how it works), while the shirt barely affected it at all. The verdict? 20k silk shirt > priceless emeralite cuirass. It should also be noted that silk and emeralite have about the same raio of AC to DR, and emeralite has something like 50% more enchant. The extra enchant, however, is used up compensating for the AC.

DR is currently useless. In theory, it can prevent severs by absorbing 100% of the damage from an incoming attack, but in practice that never happens. Why?
1. DR is not universal, but AC penalties are, and you have almost no control over how much dr to put on a location; it is determined by your level and the location in question(you can control the material used, and that's about it)
2. DR is limited, damage rolls are not. There is a set amount of dr you can have on each location at any given level, and it is always less than the damage most players will be doing at that level. Even if you get enough DR on some areas, helms will always be a weak point. An e400 emeralite helmet, which is the best helmet you can get under the current craft code, will have about 800 dr. Any e100 player worth a damn can pierce that, and another e400 player could most likely jab it off easily on evasive style. If your DR is pierced, it does nothing to prevent a sever, making it useless.
3. The ratios of DR bonus to AC penalty on items are absurd. My e200 mitrill greaves have -21 AC and about +550 DR. If I were to wear a similar piece of equipment on each area of my body, thus gaining 550 DR everywhere, my AC would either be negative or 1,depending on whether negative AC is possible or not. The criticals which would result from this would enable players to pierce my dr several times over and sever me easily.

And, of course, reducing the damage from an attack is a completely useless feature of metal armor. Not only are the reductions low, but they happen before resistances come into play, meaning the amount of damage they prevent is actually divided by 100(unless the person being attacked has less than 99% slash resistance, in which case no amount of DR will save him/her from a quick death). Whee, my e200 emeralite cuirass prevents 11 damage!

its a difficult situation, because on one hand, i fully see the point of damreduction versus mobility, but i know it needs something in there..

So ok, what about the amount of damage a limb actually receives from a particular attack? Should an ear shot give 700 damage to a person on a critical hit?

we're getting into the bad area of complexity again tho.

the more i talk about it, the more i think enchantments are evil and should be removed

Like, just talking about weapons for a moment, (armor is not existing) if all weapons only did damage according to the level and material value. "PERIOD" no +50 attack roll, no +80 damroll, you would have a level 50 mitrill sword doing a weapon modifier of 7.5 or some number we have chosen, and bam, everyones damage with a weapon becomes balanced, according to their level, and the rarity of the weapon.

That certainly would balance it, but why not just remove the ability to enchant damage roll, and leave the ability to enchant attack roll? Enchanting AR wouldn't be a problem if AC weren't capped, it is enchanting damage that renders DR useless.

But, then, DR is also useless against mobs. e200 epic mobs still pierced that e200 emeralite cuirass, and since DR drops as the item is damaged, it is destroyed pretty quickly after the first hit.

A better solution might be to universally increase DR, lock the price of epicbought DR to 2(and reimburse those of us who have already bought a lot ), and make DR enchantable.

Or even simpler, you couold make DR universal ; ). While it isn't super-realistic, making hp univeral isn't either, and its pretty damn simple.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of making damage roll and hp unenchantable, making them directly dependent on level(and weapons, in the case of damage)

This would create a situation similar to Heroes of Might and Magic IV, where two characters of the same level will have the same hp and damage, but they get skills and items to raise their attack and defense and give them other special powers. Perhaps also make resistances unenchantable, and make them instead available through epicbuy(I posted about this somewhere in the forums).

i don't think you guys can have the best of both worlds, either you get diversity, and basically make yourself anyway you want (currently) or you only get strength by being high level, with rare eq (meteorite, emeralite, etc) and be balanced with people of your level.

Celeborn may prove me wrong, he usually does, but i'm just not seeing how its possible to be balanced, you have that fine line, and no matter how hard Celeborn tries to balance it, one 'side' ends up being more powerful than the other, and since some of the players base balance on how well they fare in fights against each other (generally melee versus magic - the age old battle) rather than how well they do against a monster, i don't see balance as being attainable.

While perfect balance is probably unattainable, take a look at Warcraft III.
It isn't perfectly balanced, some things are still overpowered(most undead stuff) and many things are underpowered(night elf heroes), but they are constantly tweaking it based on the overall results of matchups(ie: the universal win/loss ratio bewteen any two given races) and opinions given by top players. Doing these constat small tweaks for balance, they have created a game balanced enough for people to stake tens of thousands of dollars at a time on.

In DL, the focus seems to be on huge, sweeping, and generally unwanted changes. The player logs on one day and finds the game radically changed, with a good chance that his character is now worthless. I think DL needs to focus more on smaller, more regular tweaks to balance. Perhaps today increase troll regeneration, tomorrow increase damage reduction on armor, next week lower the ac penalty of the heavier metals, etc. By making small tweaks like this, you can observe the effects they have on gameplay, and change them as needed, instead of simply slamming players with tons of changes at once and refusing to undo any of the changes. While this won't immediately balance your game, it will gradually move it towards a stats were the imbalances are minor, and generally only felt be the higher-level players.

@vogar: I'd prefer if it was your hp and damage that were fixed(directly dependent on level, perhaps 5 hp and 2 damage per epic level?) and AC, AR, and other things could be manipulated by the player through enchanting or whatever. This way, your hp and damage would be the same as another character of your level, constitution, and race, with the difference being how well you utilize your given hp and damage through your other stats and fighting style.

Another possibility, based on Heroes of Might and Magic IV:

Your weapon's damage plus an amount dependent on your level is the base amount of damage you deal on an attack. Example: You get 2 damage bonus per level, 1 per epic level. A level 50 character wielding a 20-60 damage sword would have a base damage of 120-160. An e100 character wielding the same sword would have a base of 220-260.

When you attack, your base damage is multiplied by (your damroll bonus/your opponent's DR on that location). So, if you had twice as much damroll bonus as they have DR, your damage would be doubled. If you had +100 damage, and they had 200 dr, you would do half damage. This would work well with the idea of making hp and "base" damage dependent only on level (and weapon in the case of damage). I think this would also make future balance changes easier.

Lets not start bringing weapons into this debate about metal armour just yet. Should ANY sword made from gold, no matter how high level or how well made EVER be able to sever through Emeralite armour? (This is assuming the armour is hit, and a gap is not found)

In my general oppion, a weapon made of softer metal would only become damaged by armour of a harder metal. Maybe some blunt trama would transfer through. Think about it.... how much damage does a wooden axe do to a person in full metal plate armour? I know there are a few of you SCA types out there. Now lets give a person an axe made of better steel then the armour.

In short, I don't think it should be a matter of DamRed, Mobility, Armour Count, and Attack. I feel it should be material vs material. The "stiffness" of your armour should affect your ability to strike and dodge, but not much more. Also, isn't better designed and made armour less of a hinderance on mobility?

Like I said once before, there is some much that could be changed in the craft system, and the item systems. Starting a debate about "smaller changes" is only just teasing ourselves. There is just so much that is either outright wrong, or could be much better.

However, I do agree strongly with Nuitari. Changes should not be in huge leeps and bounds. It leaves a dozen things that might be buggy, abusive, unbalanced, or just hard to learn and understand. Small steps, with LOTS of attention paid to how each change affect Alora is a better way to go. Whenever I have coded, it was always one small change at a time, and i spent weeks making sure I would not regret the change latter. Only then would I think about something new. (not that I am anything even near a great coder)

Advantages are that the players have time to adjust, and report flaws. Since only one thing is changed at a time, flaws are more easily found and corrected. Reports are less chaotic, and more easy to sort through.

Oh, on a side note. If diversity died in this game, that would be it for me. As much as I like DL, it would become unbareable for me to play as a cookie-cutter character.

Now, if there WAS significant ammounts of roleplay here that might be different. We all know roleplayers are the minority, and generally have tight cliques. That being the case, I would quickly lose interest in a game where I was forced to be "normal" in so many ways.

I am sure someone out there is saying "GREAT! Lets make the changes so Vogar will go away!" right about now.

When I recommended the gradual changes, I wasn't talking about the crafting code. It needs immediate and drastic overhaul.

I know this has been discussed before, but i'll repeat it again.

My e200 emeralite cuirass is barely better than my silk shirt. the -mobility is so high that most of the extra space is used for enchanting mobility to cancel out the penalty. Also, my emeralite cuirass gets ruin just as fast as my silk shirt. This makes no sense.

My e200 emeralite helmet also sucks. It has a bit above 300 DR, but when this is compared to an e200 bronze helmet, you'll see that there isnt a significant difference in DR. The only difference is the little extra enchantment space over mitrill.

Based on these two items, it is wiser to save the emeralite for picks or weapons.

changes that i like to see in future patches:
* raise DR for all metal armors.
* There should be a significant DR between emeralite and other metals
* Different armor material have different rate of destruction.
* skin/cloth/silk equ are resistance destruction by blunt attacks(bad vs pierce attacks)
* metal armors are resistant to destruction by pierce attacks (bad vs fire/lightning)
* blood/light armors are resistant to destruction by all physical attacks (these are rare mob equ)
* Bone equ have no resistance to anything however, allow the equ to fix themself over time. Sort of like DR regeneration. (bad vs. blunt attacks)


what do you guys think?

i was thinking of bones as the bones of the undead. perhaps we can make the bones regenerate only if the bones came from the bones of undead creatures...

Then that would be a different material would it not? I personally agree some different bones would be nice.

woods:
All different kinds, ebony, hawthorn, ironwood, ect...

fabrics:
Silk, skin, cloth (cotton)

Rock:
Clay, Sandstone, Shalestone, Limestone, Granite

Leathers:
Hide, Fur, Scale

Metals:
Gold, silver, iron, steel (arguably not a resource), mitrill, adamantite, meteorite, emeralite, ?hampsterite?

Bones:
Bone

As you can see we are lacking a bit of diversity in the area of bone crafts. I would agree that something better then "bone" would be nice. Ivory, antler, and maybe "Lich-bone" all would be nice choices. Would also allow a little diversity in bone processing crafts.

While we are on this topic.... When will different woods ever be made useful again? Right now its only Hawthorne and Ironwood that are used.