i really like the idea of this race.
my question is what are there good at?

thanks

They make good monks. At the moment, that is about all. They are supposed to be tanky even after the DMP changes, but most of the people I have talked to who are kephera agree that we can not handle nearly as much of a beating as we could before. High dex is somewhat useful for warriors, but the low str makes them inviable. Female kephera could probably be guardians or druids, but I haven't tried that myself so I'm not really sure how it would work.

Female kephera alright mage/guardians. Good con and int, cutting/blunt resist. But dexterity is a bit low, making them more vulnerable to warriors.

Not that you'd be totally non-viable as a non-monk, but if you're more interested in the RP of playing one, and depending on what you decide to do with your time in game, you could make it work just fine! I mean, you wouldn't be MechanicallyOptimalJimTheGrey, but so long as you're not trying to be that guy? Yay Kephera!

As others have said, with enough money, skill, and time you can make almost anything work. But, if you want to know what kephera are actually good for, it's a relatively limited list. On the bright side, as monks they are very good. Females could make pretty good guardians/druids (less-true for mages, I imagine). That's pretty much the exhaustive list. They wouldn't be any good at all for warriors, bards, or anything else in my opinion. Still worth doing if you like the RP idea, but you won't excel in combat without a lot of work.

The 14 int of a female kephera is good enough, really, especially considering how easy it is to get +2 int if you really want higher int. If Acrune was a girl I probably would have gone kephera as a cantor. I imagine their resists would go nice with with my splendor and trans resilience

thanks for input
you all have a good holiday

Yeah, if Male Kephera int wasn't so terrible, I'd probably be a Kephera as well. 14 INT is not bad. With the recent changes to how effective high stats are, 16 is about the point where it bottle necks into uselessness. So, get an INT karma blessing, and you're good to go.

I'd like to add something half-unrelated to this thread; for whatever reason I cannot create new threads, but I can reply to existing ones. *sigh*

I used to MUD waaay back (and have written my own MUD engines in fact); life went by. I played some WoW (yeah yeah I know I know for a year a couple years back. I only mention WoW since it destroyed my interest in certain game play styles.

I'm thinking of firing up into Lusternia but I have reservations due to seeing a few things in the forum here.

ie: One aspect of MUDs of the past that made them great was being created by fellow gamers.. shtey had fun, but not so much pure suck-grind. ie: WoW (and other EQ-derived games) pretty much turn into work after any amount of time - the honour grind for PVP, the rep grind for factions, and the brutal craftin gmateriasl grind just so you can build gear. Obviously some amount of grind is needed to make fun -- getting to high level in one hour is no good for any game, but making it thousands of hours needlessly, is no good either. In monthly-pay games like WoW its simply a funciton of commerce. MUDs traditionally didn't have roles (tank versus nuker) and so forth, so grinding by class for gear in dungeons wasn't so much.. it was all just in fun and luck of the draw and so forth.

I see threads in the ofrums about Lusternia and forge grinding, where you're crafting items for endless hours. As soon as I saw that, I lost all my interest in the game nearly -- I grinded WoW PVP, and I will never stoop to paying for 'work' again .. they shoudl be paying you for that level of suck

So, Lusternia players -- whats it like? Is the PVP good? Is the adventuring good? Is it soloable or has it turned into a class-rock-paper-scissor system like so many of the MMOs? Is there grind?

jeff

I had a great time as a Kephera Mage. Of course, I was female. I tanked warriors just fine.

On the subject of forge grinding, you really don't have to worry about that unless you're a warrior. A good 50% (at least) of the other archetypes use robes for armor and you don't hear about tailors slaving over a pointy sewing needle to make teh leet greatrobes.

Lusternia has a better handle on PvP control than the other 3 IRE MUDs. Whereas you could, conceivably walk up and kill some random person outside org territory in, say, Achaea or Imperian, the places where you could do that without worrying about consequences are generally limited to the planes. That's not to say killing on Prime doesn't happen, but it doesn't happen OFTEN because that might bring the Avenger down on someone's head. As for actually PvPing, I'm not the right guy to ask. But, no, there isn't much of a "rock-paper-scissors" system in Lusternia. A person in a given guild could kill someone else from any other guild, given he/she has enough skill to do it (bugs notwithstanding).

Lusternia, and most MUDs, aren't very linear (there's no set storyline you have to follow and when you have, you've "finished" the game...), so the term "soloing" as it's used in MMOs doesn't quite apply to MUDs. Generally, you'll find yourself bashing to level on your own, so I suppose you're going solo a lot of the time unless you partner up and go with someone else but it's not necessary if you're well-prepared. Some of the PvP is group combat, unless you're Thoros/Malarious/Forren/Narsrim/etc... the list goes on a while of the high-tier combatants. But usually, you're with your city/communemates if you're defending/raiding.

There's always some grind in a game like this, whether you're questing, influencing, or bashing for your experience to level... but that's not all that MUDs are about. You can bash to a decent mid-level and stop to enjoy the roleplay or get involved in city/commune stuff that doesn't involve the same sort of grind. Then you could pick it up again... or not. Up to you.

Hope that helps.

It does comfort a bit, but byu 'grind' I should perhaps specify --

Are there 'artificial' time sinks in place? (ie: Its all artificial I know, but a WoW example might explain):

Example: One type of common grind in MMO's is a rep grind; ie: You cannot enter dungeon-X without 20 people, and furthremo, Y number of those peopel require Keys, but toi ge the key requires you to beet several other dungeons, and to just kill-repeatedly various mobs to get reputation; furthermore, you probably cannot handle dungeon Z without first beating dungeons A, B, C to acquire gear buff enough to survive.

So all told, many MMOs today require you to spend enormous amounts of time just 'grinding' (wasting your time) for reputation, faction and gear, just to get into content.

Whereas in the old days of MUDding before MMORPGs liek EQ came around, you just went into a dungeon solo or with a group, and hacked awayp; ususually success was really mostly level and sometimes skill related, but didn't require you to team up and spend hundreds of real hours jsut to get somewhere.

So grinding (bashing is your term?) to level up is fine if its reasonable, but requring you to do 20 quests in a row over 50 hours, just so you can do something else.. ludicrous.

That is my worry .. if I join up, will I be wasting a lot of tyime, or is it all fun in the fifferent ways?

jeff

(Its funny how with games these days I actually fear starting one up, since you might get 20 hours in and then find out its all a waste of time down the road, so you quit. But now I have a baby, so time is very tight, so when I play, I want it good, and not wasted

I think all of the playerbase would eventually riot if that were true in Lusternia.

No, there's not much stopping you from going and bashing most locations. For some of them, you have to be a member of a certain organization to go there and not be questioned (and possibly enemied) for being there, but those are relatively rare. For most of the others, the only other two restrictions would be the strength of the mobs there (sure, you can fight something 30+ levels higher than you, but you'll last all of 5 seconds unless you really really know what you're doing) and the environment (for example, you won't survive bashing underwater unless you've got waterbreathing or waterwalking... but again, that's also sort of rare).



Achaea is a nearly-decade old IRE MUD (if I remember correctly), and the combat system from Achaea has carried over into the other IRE MUDs. Yes, you just go right into an area and start killing things. There are some restrictions on certain areas, like I said, but you can normally blow those off if you don't mind being enemied (and the chance of being attacked by that org's players for being where you're not supposed to be).

Yeah, it's not like that here. There are areas where if you try to hunt there and you're not strong enough or have good equipment, you could get killed because the creatures are really strong or aggressive, or if you go there and you're a member of one org the other org might take exception, but there's no place where you can't go because you haven't done enough quests or anything.

What you described sounds really sucky!

Noola, that is THE weirdest and most oddly hypnotic avatar I have ever seen you use.

Example of difficult place you have to quest to get to: Catacombs, lowest level.
Example of said difficulty being voided: Permanent rift on Spectre Island directly there.

Other than that, there's a planned "Ascended" area that only Demigods and Ascended things can visit, and there are the Havens which only Gods/Demigods can go to, but there's not really any hunting there. All the main hunting/"raiding" places are accessible by anyone with a certain amount of skill and/or lessons and/or artifacts.

You also don't have to grind to get equipment in Lusternia - the only pieces of equipment that actually do anything are armor/greatrobes (damage protection) and weapons (only matter for warriors). All equipment is player-created; weapons and armor come from Forging, and greatrobes are made by a Tailor and enchanted by an Enchanter to give protection. You don't have to hunt anything to get weapons and armor; actually, all you get from killing monsters is gold, experience, and karma.