Estarra and the administration have asked for preexisting content that the playerbase feels should be improved, fixed, or updated, but the response to that call has been relatively vague and limited. From my personal experiences with the Black Crypt, I have prepared a series of issues that I feel could use attention. By this I don't mean that the bonuses of the Crypt aren't good enough or that it's imbalanced compared to other constructs, just that there are a few mechanical problems that can make it impractical to actually get the full, intended benefit from the Crypt.

First, bloodrage is supposed to be a one Lusternian day experience bonus, but it wears off at midnight. This means that, if you raise it 15 minutes before midnight, you get 15 minutes of experience bonus instead of the one hour it's supposed to be. It's important to get the full bonus from it because you can only use it twice per Lusternian month, and each time you use it it costs you 5 power; using it at anytime but right after midnight is considered a waste of bloodrage and power. The solution to this one is pretty obvious; make it wear off one hour after you raise it instead of at midnight.

Next, liches are supposed to be able to move one more room before the hasty message at night. This bonus comes in the form of nighttime access to the adroitness skill that acrobats get (it's literally the same exact skill). You can raise it anytime at night, and it's stripped in the morning. To me, this seems like a poor way to do it; the bonus could simply come into effect automatically for liches at night time. It's inconvenient to have to raise a defense at every nightfall, but most of the time it's not that big of a deal. The real problem comes when you're indoors or underground and can't see the sun setting. Instead of giving you access to the acrobatics skill, adroitness, the Crypt should just automatically boost your movement during the night. Alternatively, make it so you only have to raise the defense once and it'll become active every night automatically (like moon and night totems).

Finally, The mental affliction resistance is ambiguous and impractical to code for. When you resist an affliction, you see the line "Your enhanced gift of lichdom protects you from the affliction." Where this line shows up is not consistent: for some methods of afflicting, it comes after the affliction line, and for others, it'll come before it. Also, consider a situation like this:

The maelstrom of rainbow colours whips violently around, slamming emerald green iridescence and vibrant orange hues into you.
Your enhanced gift of lichdom protects you from the affliction. Hmm, guess I'll have to cure both to make sure.

From that you know you were hit with epilepsy and stupidity, but you don't know which affliction was blocked. This is really the biggest problem I have with the crypt, and it's not even entirely a crypt problem because there is a karmic blessing (chaos) that does the same thing. The best and simplest solution I've come up with is for the affliction to be cured when it's "blocked:"

The maelstrom of rainbow colours whips violently around, slamming emerald green iridescence and vibrant orange hues into you.
Your enhanced gift of lichdom protects you from the affliction.
You aren't such a complete idiot anymore. Oh, now I know stupidity was blocked so I can just cure epilepsy and not waste any curing balance on stupidity. Thanks!

Not only is the ambiguity gone, but it's also become much, much easier to integrate into a system. Obviously, if you are already afflicted with a certain affliction, lichdom should have no chance to "block" that affliction as that would cure the preexisting affliction.

So, I realize that these are only my concerns, and the game isn't built to satisfy one person. However, I'm certain that there are others with experience with the Crypt who have similar, if not the exact same concerns. This is one reason I decided to post this on the public forum, so that others will come forth with their support or their own concerns (including any concerns with constructs other than the Crypt) and the administration will be more willing to make changes in our combined behalf. Then, we'll end up with better, more practical constructs, and we won't be able to blanketly say the administration doesn't fix old content before adding new stuff.

This is true for both lowmagic autumn and moon harvest.

Some of these problems pale in comparison that is the enormous joke that is Darkchant Truth. 10p... once a MONTH... for a rather insignificant reduction of insanity. I could be highly neurotic... chant truth and be neurotic, then literally 5 minutes later I'll be highly neurotic again. It's a waste of power, and a waste of a crypt ability.

It would be cool if the first thing could be extended to the lowmagic autumn power and maybe harvest in Moon.
The others seem reasonable too.

Wrt to the fact that the call has been mixed: I think a fix to the idea system like the fix to the bug system I suggested a few months ago would be really hot.

For what its worth I think all of Ceren's proposed mechanical fixes make sense and should be implemented. I can see why the way they are currently implemented was easier to code, but I agree that the current behavior causes those abilities to be subpar. I would also like to comment that this type of detailed post that gives multiple examples and does not rely on LOLEMOTION (see below) is a refreshing read.



This has already been described so I do not know what the confusion is. Your insanity level will be cut in half. What you are describing is a situation where you were close to being sociopathic. You just can not see the actual value of your insanity, using the thresholds is not enough. For example, using random numbers, say neurotic is at 800 insanity points, and sociopathic is at 1600 points, you are at 1500 when you chant which drops you to 750, and then shortly after you are back to neurotic.

If you want to argue your case then you need to collect the following data:

1. Normal person, spend 2 hours on Astral, then time how long until you are back down to fully sane
2. Person with circlet, spend 2 hours on Astral, then time how long until you are back down to fully sane
3. Normal person, spend 2 hours on Astral, Darkchant Truth, then time how long until you are back down to fully sane.

I have no clue what the real numbers will be but as long as the value for 2 is close to the value for 3 I do not think you have any room to complain. I will wait for this data with baited breath.

I completely disagree with your method for us to argue our case, a better way to do it is this:

Darkchant Truth (Astral insanity) is to Magnagora as whatever Celestian's willpower/endurance recoverying thing.

Take one person, have him have 0 willpower and 0 endurance and take the time to recover to full.
Take a sociopath and see how long it takes for him to recover.


The difference? Probably around the same amount of time, I run out of willpower all the time and spend at least an hour and a half recovering (no bed or willpower regen manse or benediction? Whatever Sarcrement users have). My neurosis (I've been sociopath before I believe) has taken at max two hours to recover.

In terms of this, I deliberately thought that a way to heal astral insanity would be much, much better received than a willpower cure. If you're low on willpower, you can just conglut to instantly raise your willpower back to full strength, at the cost of your current defenses. No mortal, even a Titan, should have too much trouble recovering XP from a single conglut death. I'm at Titan, and I can do it with roughly 20-30 minutes of bashing- much, much less than downtimes for sociopathic insanity or full willpower regeneration from zero. By contrast, nothing cures astral insanity, not even death, except for one ability in the Healing skill. This ability is not only rare to find, but also relatively ineffective. Truth gives a massive drop in insanity that can be used once a month- not great for sustained astral bashing for more than once a month, true, but it provides a much surer way to reduce insanity compared to the zero ways Magnagora had before. There are multiple events and places where this can come in handy.

As for Ceren's post, it is absolutely spot on. I didn't handle the mechanical side of the implementation, but you clearly proved you are much better than I am at making it a reality. Major kudos. As an additional question, I would ask if the chaos blessing and lich resistance could stack into the same message, so that we could be sure it's a 30% resistance to mental afflicts across the board instead of two separate 15% chances.

Interested parties should note that a Chaos Blessing is a little more than 15% effective, and it -does- stack with the Black Crypt, so a little coder told me. I consider that a significant advantage. Besides, for those of us less able to keep ourselves drowning in karma, it's a bonus that we would otherwise probably not be able to afford.

I think that Darkchant Truth is also a pretty good deal, for what that is worth. Enthralled is right in how it works, so you can't exactly rely on how insane you are in your STAT as a good indicator of how effective it is. Do some controlled tests and see what you think then!

Gonna have to disagree with you, Maylea. Alot of Magnagoran players feel jipped by Truth, and it's been tested/used quite a bunch. It's not helpful at all, considering it's only 50% once a month. That's once every 25 hours or so if you use it at the beginning of the month. A better deal would be 100% a month at the current costs, or have it do 50% once a day. I can tell you that you don't really know a skill unless you use it. Looking at code is all well and good, but using it in application is a different story.

As for the Chaos blessing, I think what they're saying is for chaos to just increase the lich bonus so it's a flat 30% defense and fires on the lichdom message, not two different 15% resistances as it is now.

Any help is better than no help at all, Ceren's suggestions are sensible.

I think a direct comparison in effectiveness to the 700 credit artifact that many people buy specifically to deal with astral insanity is a perfect way to argue your case. I feel it would be far more affective to point out if Truth was no where near the affect of a Circlet. If you try to argue that your power does not compare to a totally different power I have a feeling fewer people will listen to you. This is not to say that you can not make that comparison, I just think it is misguided (and a continuation of the we don't have trueheal/litch so it is so powerful for them in this specific situation I list while we do have trueheal/litch which is useless in this other contrived situation, the admins clearly love them more than us)




As would I. If it means anything I think the RP of being the Org all associated with the Taint having the only way to deal with Insanity is very cool. I understand why people might be debating its effectiveness but I think from a pure style point of view it is great.




I personally would want to see the data on how it compares with a circlet before I thought it needed a boost. Having said that a 100% cure once a month would be the absolute most I could see. I do not see how you can feel 50% a day is even remotely reasonable, statements like this just cause me to question everything you say.

Insanity areas are for high level hunting and some events. The current Truth is great for event situations and will give you a large edge over all other orgs in dealing with the affects of ~2 hours of insanity.

For the player who spends 2-4 hours a night hunting (I would say this is the higher end of the scale, not even your average player) this will increase the time you can spend in the high exp/hour areas by a significant margin. For the player who spends 10+ hours hunting I agree, it has a marginal affect.

I again ask for real data. If tests have been run then logs should be available. It should be easy to show the real time it saves. Posting this data is the best way to argue your case that it has too little affect for the cost.

You vastly over-estimate Truth, Enthralled, but that's fine... you don't have it or use it. There's little "real data" that can be achieved other that going: STAT "hey I'm highly neurotic!" TRUTH "Hmm, I'm neurotic now!" *wait a bit* STAT "Heey... I'm highly neurotic again..."

Actually he kind of outlined a pretty reasonable way to test...

Hmm...this sparked an interesting idea. What if Darkchant Truth not only reduced your insanity...but also gave the part you lost to a target, increasing their insanity?

This would be a buff.

Now a good idea is a good idea. Just make it a targetable attack.

Um, I believe what Maylea said was Chaos and Lich stack - but I'm not going to get into the numbers more specifically than that, because I'd need to prod a coder to triple-check for me, just to be sure. It's a fair bit higher than you give it credit.

I double checked with a coder, no they do not stack. However, the percentage is still as high as I thought it was - your percentages, Revan, are far from correct. If they compiled into a flat 30% bonus, you'd be worse off than just a regular Chaos blessing, as I understand it.

Really upset to learn this. So not only is it a much weaker version of the Chaos blessing, but it doesn't even stack? That didn't come up once during the discussions, and you can bet I would have made a different suggestion if I knew it was going to be that different from the idea I had proposed. As I remember, shortly after the Crypt came out you told us that it stacked with Chaos. Now it doesn't?

To be fair, that much resistance to mental affs on top of actual curing would make you immune to bards forever, amongst other things.

Yeah, and I get that. If this is the case, tell me before hand so that I can produce a different suggestion that would actually be useful. I had taken various statements from players and administrators, especially ones on the committee board, into mind when discussing the functions of the Crypt. There's a lot of difference between "15% additional resistance on top of the 15% you get from karmic blessing of chaos" versus "15% compared to chaos' 30%, and doesn't stack, but you don't have to spend karma on this blessing."

I made a proposal based on being told it would work a certain way, and wasn't perfectly happy with some of the suggestions, but let them slide. Now, some time after the construct is established, we're told it doesn't work the way we thought it did.

Magnagora was the only org without insanity healing. The other orgs have guilds with the healing skill and its insanity ability.