Quote from HELP KEPHERA:
Additionally:
*Leaving the realms dissolves your hive.
*In order to bond someone into your hive, you must be mutual allies.
*The queen is not bonded into the hive and does not count towards the total of bonded kephera (i.e. if you bond a single other kephera into your hive, you will get a bonus of 50, not 100.)

At the moment, the restrictions on this racial ability make it almost completely useless. In order for it to work, you need to actually find some kephera who you are not at war with, and you need to convince them to do something with you. Its so much effort for such a minor bonus that even for an rper/basher like me, it's not worth it.

Changes that I think would turn Hive Mind into an ability that is actually useful:
1. Expand the local area restriction to continent.
2. Add a hivetell channel.

This would allow the members of the hive to actually go do different things whilst getting a small bonus from belonging to a hive, provided they all stay in the Basin of Life, the Undervault or on one of the higher planes. I also find the lack of a hivetell channel rather odd - you get shiptells, coventells and even squadtells, but the race that is naturally psychic doesn't get to talk to all members of its hive at once.

Now, yes, this would let a queen bond to ten kephera and then they could all go off and do stuff in different parts of the Basin of Life with 500 point boosts to everything, while the queen sits safely at the nexus where no one can kill her. But this requires you to a: find eleven kephera on at once (which is impossible) and b: find a female kephera (as far as I know the only active female kepheras are myself, Jhen and Mistie, though there may be others on while I'm asleep). So I do not think it would be a problem unless the population of Lusternia suddenly has an explosion.

Hmm, I don't know that the boost should necessarily apply everywhere, but the hive defiantly should not kick out people who leave the area of the queen.

Do you need to remain mutual allies to keep the hive together? It makes more sense to me to have joining someone to the hive work like squad drafting.

I has made mistake. The person you are bonding needs to ally you, but you don't need to ally them. If you're in a hive and you unally, you don't leave.

I am personally all for more Kephera perks. There is a reason why there are so few of us other than the fact that Male Kephera are restricted to being monks.

I'm gonna go reincarnate Lehki into a kephera.

Having hives break upon area leaving is indeed pretty lame. Just have the bonus go dormant for that person (and his count toward the hive go dormant as well) when he leaves the area with the Queen. Only Keph in the same area as the Queen gets the bonus. This also prevents the "queen sitting safe in nexus" abuse. Death and logout breaking the hive is pointless IF it doesn't have a channel of its own.

Unlike squads, hives have no channel of their own. This makes hiving together just a pain in the ass if it breaks every time someone logs out. However, if they have a channel, they MUST break on logout, otherwise, kephera basically get a free clan of their own.

Leaving the lack of a channel, but making hives not break upon logout is a good idea. This way, you get continuity in your Hive RP, but at the same time, still require a clan if you're going to want a personal channel for it.

I kind of like the proximity to the queen thing, but the absolute remove is too much too. Maybe bonus effects should just go dormant if you leave the area the queen is in, then come back when you rejoin? Then maybe add a hive channel and HWHO, which can indicate which local areas a queen's underlings are to her (I think that'd be a nice touch).

Also, I think there's a bit more kephera around on that. Remember that RWHO doesn't show people on different planes or those who have gems.

Fair enough. If people think that it would be too powerful, I'll defer to their judgement, which is probably superior to my own.

So, taking these suggestions into account, here is a revised list of suggested changes to Hive Mind:
1. Leaving the area that the queen is in does not cause you to break away from the hive, but you you lose the health/mana/ego bonuses that you would get until you return.
2. Only members in the same area as the queen count when calculating the health/mana/ego bonuses.
3. Add a hivetell channel.
4. Modify the HIVE MEMBERS command to show the local area of each member.
(Possibly -> 5. The hive queen herself still gains bonus health/mana/ego for members outside of her local area. This would give a reason for female kephera to have disagreements with each other about who should be queen, but again, it could be too powerful.)

I don't think this is wise. You're basically giving female kephera (the queen) a possible mechanical advantage that male kephera will never have access to. Besides, the whole point of making h/m/e bonuses go dormant is to prevent abuse (of the queen sitting safe in nexus, while her hive members get a boost from a huge hive) and making the queen always get the bonus of all her members no matter where they are will defeat that purpose.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. If the queen sits at the nexus while all her hive members are elsewhere, then her hive members are not getting a boost from a huge hive, because they are not with the queen. If the queen is not hiding, then she can be killed to break the hive.

The most problematic abuse I foresee happening is a kephera queen using her ego boost to influence guards at a lower level than she should be able to. I don't know how feasible/possible this actually is? Does anyone know?

If you implement any solution where kephera are noticably and easily buffed by this you have to rebalance the race around the assumption they will always have those bonuses.

Except aren't kephera already considered to be a pretty sucky race? I seem to recall that being said in the last racial rebalancing thread and I don't think anything changed for them.

I don't recall that from the last racial rebalancing thread... rather the opposite in fact.

I admittedly did not read most of it, but I thought I saw the argument of "No one is kephera, therefore they must suck" in there somewhere. A weak argument, but eh

No one wants to be Kephera because they're humanoid bugs. They're pretty good. An enabler for the idea of a tanky caster that doesn't involve TK.

Well, uh... in that case, we should buff kephera to make being a humanoid bug more appealing.

Honestly, i think the problem is the male kephera. Females are amazing but since a good portion of the player base is male(speculation), most will want to roll a male kephera which are pretty much limited to monks due to the not being able to wear armour and with very high dexterity. If there was some way to let warrior bugs wear at least a little bit of armour to be on par with plate it might solve the problem a bit...

P.S. I'm really shocked there aren't more tattooist monk bugs running around due to the trans tattoos ability...

I was a kephera paladin with splendour. As far as tankiness goes, it worked well enough. It is disappointing how much more I would like the female's stats, considering I'm very happy being a dude, but thats life I guess.

I've never played a male kephera. I'm female, so I have no idea how good or bad they are. Perhaps tattoos were a ninja buff to male kephera. So ninja that it is not occurring to people.

Right, so dropping the part about queens always getting the buff. People don't seem to think its a good idea. Which means that what is left are mostly cosmetic changes. Things that make life easier for the queen, instead of actually buffing kephera in any way. Stuff that will make me actually want to hive bond people, because it's not such an annoying hassle trying to keep tabs on who is nearby (we use Mindsense for this) and rebonding whenever someone comes back in.

1. Only members in the same area as the queen count towards and benefit from the health/mana/ego bonuses.
2. Leaving the area that the queen is in does not cause you to break away from the hive.
3. Add a hivetell channel.
4. Modify the HIVE MEMBERS command to show the local area of each member.
5. The queen can HIVE WATCH - receiving a message whenever a member of her hive leaves or enters her local area.

I don't really think a re-design of hives would be a high priority for admin, so I doubt any changes to it would be seen for a long time. But if they did go with something, why not just have it function like a squad/coven/mindlink? Would still need some extra checks to limit buff to same area.

While it would be neat for RP purposes for hives to get their own channel, if you wanted to do some kind of keph hive RP I'd say just buy a clan for it and say that's the hive channel, and say the actual hive ability is just some empowerment thing the queen can do when her subjects gather.

Another thought, maybe style it as some buff to female kephs leading squads, like Stag Pacing does. Effect should still be limited to kephera though, yeah.