Problems and things that might need changing/fixing in game

[belannaer]

Wizards are on the warpath and planning big and mysterious things. We are currently seeking possible problems and things that might require attention that already exist in game. This topic is solely dedicated for players to bring those problems to our attention.

So what we want is for you to do here is that you make a detailed explanation of the problem and why you think it is a problem and might need changing. Also if you have some suggestion about how to do it feel free to add those.

What we DO NOT want is discussion about those matters in this topic. If you wish to do so please open a new topic for that matter and do it there, or do it in game. Also we do not wish ideas of new features in this topic that do not yet exist. If you have those either do a topic in to these forums, use 'idea' command or contact a suitable wizard directly. All posts not directed to solely bringing forth a problem and focusing on it and explaining are going to be deleted.

[yoz]

http://www.icesus.org/Forums/viewtopic.php?t=1358


Read that.



edit:

In a nutshell

Nerf melee durability to oblivion.
Give 2handed wield a chance.
Do something to give all guilds a real edge when doing eq.

Lots of good ideas in all of teh pfloe's ideas, haul them out and read.

[yashod]

Idling offtanks. Make melee do less damage and melee skills more. Nowadays offtanks sit most of the time idle and meleeing away whilst blasters/healers/party leader is working their a** off to get that precious exp.

Guilds without a wizard to take care of them. There are few guilds that hasn't got a wizard to tweak them. Some guilds get more attention than the others and people eventually stop playing that guild since the problems aren't being looked at or people don't even get responses for their questions. Very few are playing psionicists, wilders or monks these days?

Airpriests. Purgation mastery, serenity mastery (takes ages for them to go up and is there a point of even having purgation mastery?). Few really usable spells, most of the guilds spells are pretty much useless.

[thakkrad]

Regarding melee durability, I quite agree with Yoz, if we could get a linear progression to hp, similar to sp - then there would be a much more noticeable difference between casters and real tanks.

[goderic]

Could loggers and carpenters be tweaked to make them more viable? [/canofworms]. Possibly alchemists too, to make them more than incense-makers?

[yoz]

Could loggers and carpenters be tweaked to make them more viable? [/canofworms]. Possibly alchemists too, to make them more than incense-makers?

Loggers and carpenters imho are good as they are, giving out good statbonuses and some extra shite to do. Loggers already give perhaps the best stat bonuses for a 5lvl sub.

Alchemists already do great amount of potions,incences etc if people just would get used to using them. (they do increase rate a lot)



If melee durability would not be nerfed maybe approaching the problem differently would help.

Enable combat ticks for incenses for pure casterguilds for spr/pspr.

Make meditation actually DO something noticeable for pure casterguilds. It barely increases regens at all.

Pure casterguilds could be defined just like the haste halving effect for different guilds.

[klarh]

Perhaps a recode of archery event, I think that's actually Treax-code? Why couldn't you turn the target into an NPC that has, for example, bullseye, second ring, etc slots and could then track who shot which slots to calculate points? That would give a much more realistic simulation of archery than current archery event, which doesn't look like it looks at skills too much.

Changing something to let alchemists do their thing easier would be nice, gathering mushrooms is horribly painful unless you just let your bot do the work for 6 hours or so.

However, my main topic here is earth_priests. Currently pretty much anyone can just hop into the guild, make lame exp for a month or two since they seem to be mostly useless without a massive minion, and then one day TA-DA! They have ethereal! I'd really like to see the minion system changed, and perhaps the masteries too, although masteries seem to be a common complaint from me for guilds.

Anyway, perhaps instead of the current progression of minions that earth priests have, they could choose to make a minion of a certain guild; making a magelike minion which could cast arrows and balls would be lich, etc. The power could depend on the earth priest's skills, masteries, etc. I guess these could level as well. The casters would probably have to have a low hpmax so that players couldn't just toss them to the front lines and have superblastertankabusemadness minions of doom. Perhaps if it was done right, this would give that earth aspect of elements and bone vestment some use in the frontrow as players started to tank for their casting minions! This might even make them useful in eq, I think? The leader could just drag the minion in to cast their little bit in the eq runs. Perhaps a command could be added for the earthpriest to 'remote control' minions, have them cast some spells not-so-randomly, etc.

Anyway, that's just an idea that I had off the top of my head, but imo something different for the earth priests for minions would be great.

[iluth]

Here follows a list of whines about things which are probably working as intended, or not important enough for most people to worry about.

Icesus has a lot of mainguilds, which is one of it's neatest aspects since there is a guild for anyone who comes here to play. But some of em are really underplayed, namely Monks. And there are exactly 0 active highbie Wilders or Shadowdancers. And what happened to Shifters? It used to be that every exp party had 3 Shifters in it. I think seeing a party with a mixed guild front row would rock, we have so many different types of offtank style guilds in the game, but the majority of them are hardly used outside of soloing. Anyways I got thinking on this subject after playing Warcraft a lot, where all classes have a good function within a group.

Skinning lbd rate is ass, what happened there? it used to work great, it got tweaked a little during The Cataclysm, (Master Artisans being added) and now it almost doesn't have an lbd rate anymore. So lowbie Rangers, who cant really afford to go wasting levels in lworkers/survivalists have to skin their kills with nearly 0 skill. Adding skinning to Rangers, Army, Shifters, and maybe even Coven makes some kind of sense to me. Second part of my whine is about how random the skinning skill is. Realistically skinning an animal isn't something you can screw up after you've done it hundreds of times, but even with 100 skill, decent knife etc you're really just throwing a dice each time you skin.

The hunting recode was great. And I love Misrobo forever. But like skinning, hunting suffers a bit from randomness and thus boringness. Adding an option to hunt for a specific animal, or to being able to specify an upper and lower gamesize (like hunting for average to somewhat strong mobs) Would help it a lot. The hunting filter which was added works okay for highbies, but is a frustration for newbies who have high skill and masteries, who end up hunting mobs which are too big for 'em to kill.

Daggers, gaah. Daggers all do the same speed and damage regardless of material. And that speed and damage both suck. Dancers have the option now of going with daggers or rapiers, rapiers wins in any situation. Even though daggers hit very slightly faster, and so should benefit from poison applications to a mob, they're not fast enough so it still doesn't compete. But dual wielding rapiers doesn't even make any sense! Those weapons were designed for duelling, not close quarters kick assery that Shadowdancers do. Wielding two long pointy swords, while headbutting kicking and throwing daggers imo doesn't fit with the guild image. I think every Shadowdancer secretly wants to use daggers, but feels forced into rapiers for the dps.

Less levels in the carpentry guilds? 15 levels made sense back when Master Artisans was around.

[osma]

Realistically skinning an animal isn't something you can screw up after you've done it hundreds of times, but even with 100 skill, decent knife etc you're really just throwing a dice each time you skin.

There is always going to be a random chance of screwing something up, no matter how skilled you are in it, just like there is always a chance of accidentlly getting it right. However, at the current state, even with well above 100% in skinning you will fail around 25% of the time. This is bad enough when you are skinning a rat for Barkskin material, but when you spend 10 min killing a faerie dragon and fail to skin it properly, that is maddening. Skinning should have a range of aproximitily 10% success at 0% skill and 10% fail at 100% skill, modified by stats and knife quality. If someone has above 100%, which is more or less a gransmastery of it, the chance of failure should be further reduced, because like Iluth said, they are not going to fail very often.

Leatherworking seems to have been signifigantly downtuned with respect of how often a glow is made, and how powerful said glow is. While making a glow should not be something that happens often, it is reasonable to make one at least once out of every 10 to 15 items. To further make things difficult, a signifigant presentage of the glows created are "useless," otherwise known as items that can only be sold to shop, and often are not exceptionaly valueble even so, such as 1 sonic resistance or 2 willpower.
I would suggest that one of two fixes be implemented:
1: make glows more common while keeping good glows (+2, +3, str/con/dex/wis/int/regen) rare.
2: Make glows as rare as they are now, but make skills more effective in modifiying glow results. Even with 100+ in the various leatherworking skills i make 10x +1 pspr for every 1x +2wis.
(Post Note: I haven't actually studdied this, but I noticed something the other day; a high value skin that is leatherworked will have a higher shop value then a low value skin worked into the same item. However, it seems to me that a 2fire resist earring is very close to the same price wither it is made from a deer skin or a mammoth. This is not a good thing, because if it is true, then said mammoth-skin earring would probably be more valueable WITHOUT a glow then it would be with one).

An additional problem with leatherworking is that even with high skills in leatherworking, quality of items made is quite random. Average quality skins (alligator, caiman, bear) make poor quality items a signifigant % of the time, even with high quality knife and high skills. Good quality skins like unicorn and mammoth will often produce only average quality items. Low quality items reduce the value of the item when it is sold. Which also bring up the fact that items usually sell to shop at aprox the same value as you sell the skin, which makes leatherworking almost useless (you can waste quite a bit of time hoping for an incresingly rare and random glow, or you can just sell the skins and get back to exp). High % in leatherworking skills should = a higher quality item, and items of average quality and above should be signifigant increase in value over skins themselves (poor = -5% value, ba = +2% value, a = +10% value, aa = +25% value, Good (assuming it exist) = +50% value).
Also, fine hand coordination should either be able to be raised to a higher % (currently only a max of 35%) or it should be made more effective. Leatherworking with 35 versus leatherworking with a major blessing in Fine hand coord gave no apperent diffrence, certinly not enough of a diffrence to merit a major blessing in it.

Finaly, Unconsious monsters should not notice, nor be able to attack people. They are unconsious, they dont know THEY are there, let alone that YOU are there.

[thakkrad]

There is always going to be a random chance of screwing something up, no matter how skilled you are in it, just like there is always a chance of accidentlly getting it right. However, at the current state, even with well above 100% in skinning you will fail around 25% of the time. This is bad enough when you are skinning a rat for Barkskin material, but when you spend 10 min killing a faerie dragon and fail to skin it properly, that is maddening. Skinning should have a range of aproximitily 10% success at 0% skill and 10% fail at 100% skill, modified by stats and knife quality. If someone has above 100%, which is more or less a gransmastery of it, the chance of failure should be further reduced, because like Iluth said, they are not going to fail very often.

I mostly agree with this, skinning skill should reduce the fail-rate much more. However, it increases the value of the skin, so it's not totally worthless, and while a bit slower to learn these days, it's still fairly easy to get to acceptable levels.

Leatherworking seems to have been signifigantly downtuned with respect of how often a glow is made, and how powerful said glow is. While making a glow should not be something that happens often, it is reasonable to make one at least once out of every 10 to 15 items. To further make things difficult, a signifigant presentage of the glows created are "useless," otherwise known as items that can only be sold to shop, and often are not exceptionaly valueble even so, such as 1 sonic resistance or 2 willpower.
I would suggest that one of two fixes be implemented:
1: make glows more common while keeping good glows (+2, +3, str/con/dex/wis/int/regen) rare.

Dream on. Glows are common enough as it is.

2: Make glows as rare as they are now, but make skills more effective in modifiying glow results. Even with 100+ in the various leatherworking skills i make 10x +1 pspr for every 1x +2wis.

This might not be totally impossible, at the current tune I don't remember making any really valuable items.

(Post Note: I haven't actually studdied this, but I noticed something the other day; a high value skin that is leatherworked will have a higher shop value then a low value skin worked into the same item. However, it seems to me that a 2fire resist earring is very close to the same price wither it is made from a deer skin or a mammoth. This is not a good thing, because if it is true, then said mammoth-skin earring would probably be more valueable WITHOUT a glow then it would be with one).

Perhaps a glow could add, in addition to the +%price also a small fixed amount to the price, something like +5..10k ... this should not unbalance things much, especially if the amount of glows is not changed.

Also, fine hand coordination should either be able to be raised to a higher % (currently only a max of 35%) or it should be made more effective. Leatherworking with 35 versus leatherworking with a major blessing in Fine hand coord gave no apperent diffrence, certinly not enough of a diffrence to merit a major blessing in it.

This I can agree with, as there are no longer guilds to train it more. Or it could be added to dragonscale crafters ...

[pfloe]

-ranger archers could use some love, they aren't really that hot for soloing and a waste of slot for exp parties, and now that shockwave supposedly works worse again, they lost a bit of their eq appeal too.
A new skill to train would be peachy, possibly something that'd be heavily based on your str/dex/wis so you'd have a bit better sense of progression even after the skill is maxed. The boost i'm looking for is somewhere around 10-15% for someone with ~100 in all three stats and the skill. The example skill in my open idea report was true stillness from monks, that could be added to protectors and it'd also make monks decent archers. Might need to downtune bodkins to compensate.
There's also an open idea report for a bit of flavor fluff for prowling mastery.

-all the new shiny weapons, the fix on str component in melee damage etc little things seems to have scaled melee damage way better than anything else. then there's the issue with sustainability, using skills isn't mandatory to do decent damage so eps last a long way, and are quickly gained back with the help of incenses. This makes mixed parties with both casters and offtanks inconvenient and inferior.
Higher epcosts, less ep from smokes, meleedamage downtune or a shift of damage from melee hits into the relevant actively used offensive skills might be some of the tools to fix the situation.

-exp is dull, some randomness would rock. atm the monsters hardly ever crit, only select few cast anything bigger than dart (and even fewer anything life threatening). Even eq mobs seem to most often either not crit at all or instakill you with a *barba*. More low end crits would be more interesting both for exp and eq, and occasional surprise spells, skills for bigger exp mobs would liven up exping a bit. And I don't mean instakill crit needles for everybody, just an occasional missile or bolt to wake up people.

-dunno if I'm the only one but I find the ever-increasing eq party size somewhat disturbing. At some point 9 was very viable and the default to use, nowadays it seems to have grown upto 11-12. the loot is split in more ways sure, but if mob tune gets evaluated only against 12man parties (or 15man in few years time?-P), it'll make it even harder for new eq communities to get into the "end game". So maybe consider imposing higher penalties for out-of-place members or in some other way limiting the usefulness beyond 9man. Doesn't mean I want mobs to take longer than now, just that the they should be doable with 9man and that should be the measure against which they get evaluated.

-we've now seen a 7G player can somewhat offtank eq mobs, atleast with evasive combat. I made a post earlier how I'd like to see many of the off guilds have something similar to evasive combat, possibly even more effective. This could also be tied to various tactics etc leadership skills army gets. The idea is to shift more towards one 'main tank' idea, which would give 2 more spots in the 9man formation open for a bit different styles, instead just that VERY HUGE (and VERY IDLE) plated army in all 3 frontrow spots (+ the assorted randoms in non-formation spots). I believe yoz linked the post about this though, so there's more material there. Dunno if I mentioned there that some more medium armours would also work towards this goal, f.ex. I know I'd love nera off bracers if they were decent medium armour instead of heavy.

[solar]

Let's see here, my current thoughts on Icesus... The game is great, but even great can be made better!

Content:

There aren't that many good expmobs around to support multiple parties, and those parties seem to usually consist of 3-4 members.
My guess is that exping parties of 5 or more players offer crappy shit for all of them as they need to change areas rapidly to guarantee passable exp for everyone, and also their varying performance makes some burn out too fast, the backrow dudes compared to the front rowers, that is. But this is just my opinion and observation, and does not necessarily need further attention. Maybe adding a teeny weeny group bonus to exprate for larger parties could make them less of a burden.

Majority of mobs seem to be dealing only physical damage. Introducing non-eqmob content that would make resistances more usable might be nice.

I'd like to see more guild-specific content: Both quests and events. Arguably, extra event and quest content ought to be aimed at the whole playerbase, but some guilds are just plain boring and could use the extra spice.

Halo-like once-a-reinc quest for other three elements, for various benefits, which could include better campfire ticks for being rewarded by the elemental fire, larger carrying capacity for earth, more effective first aid from air etc?

As for tuning:
Someone touched the idea of having a front row from mixed guild backgrounds: The guilds might want some more synergy besides everyone hitting the mobs as fast as they can. This might also warrant a closer look.

Throwing is not on par with archery (yeah well, it isn't really supposed to be, but still), absolutely no use to have a pure thrower in the back row and the thrower sub boasts, was it, 8 levels? While the royal archers rock with their five levels and specialized secondary guild archers get clandestines to add to their power. Throwing seems to be useful for random instahurls for dancers who get to poison their throwing daggers, and mounted templars who can't use BoJ on horseback. And possibly for those who have an impaler, but only as a means of harassing a mob in general.

I remember shadowdancers losing their precious controlled retreat when their guild structure got tuned. Maybe someone could make it so that they would have a way to flee better as long as they are solo? Something related to either a shadow strike attack mode, or uncanny adroitness instahurling powders. They really don't have that much in the way of hpmax, and any larger mobs hit them pretty hard if their flee drags on.

Playability, userfriendliness:
Some spells/skills/x/y/z could use some of that beloved 'fine code coordination'. Boost spells, for example, could be made so that they could be recast again, replenishing the duration back to its max without first having to wait for them to drop / manually dispelling them before a recast.

Also guildrooms could have an extra option to view a certain level and what it offers, without having to join/advance to reach that info. This feature would be nice especially now that there are these 20 level secondary guilds around.

AND-forking with some multitarget spells could use fine tuning as well, since typoing one of the target can make the whole spell get wasted as the spell only returns a Que? after it gets completed if it can't find all the targets in the room.

(I won't even venture on the topic of hellish syntaxes in some quests. This is a well-known feature and isn't going to change anytime soon. :))

"Powerhour" ripoff feature for those random gamers vs the lifeless geeks. Those who get to play only a few hours in a week could get some flowerpower to their expgain so that they could possibly advance to playable levels during their lifetimes.

Event plaque: Even though we have events that are run on wizardly whims, we could have a general plaque that shows starting times of upcoming events.

Move silently and darts/spells: I'm not sure how spells the mobs cast behave, but combat maneuvers get cancelled when the mob is no longer in combat. Spells, however, have an annoying tendency to hit the sneaking bastard who returns to the crime scene too quickly, regardless of whether or not the sneaker has already hidden. Maybe those spells could be tuned so that if the mob is not with a battleobject when the spell fires, the spell is actually not cast as there are no visible opponents or something?

So uh, I guess I'll stop here and hide.

[apog]

Less levels in the carpentry guilds? 15 levels made sense back when Master Artisans was around.

I took a look back to 2005 when Carpenters were still active and found that all of the following applied then too. The first 3 main guild levels give skills from the east and south guilds. This means you only need the 3 main guild levels and 1 level from the west side guild to make any non-tool (and some tool items), with most items able to be made with just the 3 main guild levels. After that, one level in the upper guild will allow you to make tools. So basically, it is currently 5 levels to make anything, but 15 levels to have "everything at max". Only 12 levels to have everything at max if you already have a tool set. I don't think 4 (to make almost anything), 5 (to make everything), 12(to make almost everything to 100%) and 15 (to make everything to 100%) levels are out of balance. So the guild may have 15 levels, but you are in no way required to have all 15 levels to make stuff (or even make stuff at a decent level).

Though I do agree the stat bonuses are way out of whack. The first sub guild levels all give a trifle bonus (2 give dex, 1 gives str, the last gives wis). That means for a combat oriented person, a 6 level sub guild would give the following total bonus (taking the 2 dex, 1 str guilds).

Total gained from 6 levels is:
6 dex, 2str, 1 con, 2 epr

either way, I think that's pretty amazing for only spending 6 levels on a subguild. That part made sense when artisans were around and they absolutely needed stat bonuses because they couldn't get them anywhere else. Though as someone pointed out to me, with the prevalence of secondary guilds, most people are choosing those instead of taking guilds just for stats because you get additional skills/spells as well. So this might be a moot point.

Edited: After reviewing my logs for 2005, I realized the guild was always this way and hadn't been "changed" by anyone recently.

[goderic]

[quote="apogThough I do agree the stat bonuses are way out of whack. The first sub guild levels all give a trifle bonus (2 give dex, 1 gives str, the last gives wis). That means for a combat oriented person, a 6 level sub guild would give the following total bonus (taking the 2 dex, 1 str guilds).

Total gained from 6 levels is:
6 dex, 2str, 1 con, 2 epr

[/quote]

Yep - but without combat skills to match. Dropping carpenters to 5-8 levels total and allowing all skills at the top level would make a highly playable guild. Perhaps a requirement of minimum dex and 1 level as a logger would help balance it more?
I just believe there's a good guild there, waiting to be let out!

[klarh]

How about doing something about survivalists/hunters/fishers? Survivalists is pretty much a totally useless guild, considering that almost all of the skills are learnable by doing from 0% or otherwise mostly useless. The hunting sub teaches some stuff that could possibly be useful if you have levels to throw away, but you have to get through survivalists first, which probably makes them useless as well. Fishing also gives nothing that you can't get by doing, as far as I know. All these guilds do right now is seduce very new players, giving them useless skills for their levels. Now that there are secondary guilds, not even highbies need this guild to waste their levels in. If survivalists is kept, perhaps it could get a level 30 or so requirement, so players should know better than to get levels in it by then. Hunters might be useful if the survivalist req was removed, I don't know... And as for fishing guild, you might as well give players a couple of amber scrolls for the exp instead of levels.