I'm just waiting for the time when all the constellations and planets align, and one of the spheres hits you with all 12 constellation afflictions at once.

Thanks coders and designers!

If i was a nihilist, I would be sitting down for a week, and testing extensively with all the given variables, then write a system and a GUI that pops up, and based on current planets and nativity, tells me exactly what abilities will cost what, and also what afflictions I can give a target, and then change my f key macroes around and keep a pop up of what keys will afflict with what.

I can imagine the perfect use of this system would be most potent in combat, but it would take an incredible amount of stuffing around.

You could even code a system that keeps track of a full cycle, so you don't need to know the current state of the plants as your system will already know it

I was thinking the same thing murphy, only with macros that are based on the affiliction you wish to give rather than the type of attack your using.

That would be useful. It would also be insanely complicated, especially with retrogressions and everything. I think it'll be months before anyone puts together something like that.

If thorgal got Astrology I bet he would have it done in 2 weeks tops

if i got astrology, I'd dedicate a RL week to it, 10 hours a day and get it done.

So I don't know how good this can get if you use it to its best effect, but so far we've gathered that the skill is almost useless if you don't know what you're doing with it. As in like old hexes, but worse.

But as I say, if you use it in a more precise way you likely get more from it.

There are 12 signs and 7 bodies taking between a day and over a year to move through their revolutions. 5 of those bodies can retrograde, further complicating the cycle. No one has any idea how long it'll take for a full cycle to complete. Maybe the entire system won't repeat. You'd have to calculate the cycles of every body independently and be able to figure out where they are at a given date. I'm willing to bet the testing alone will take several game years, and any astrologer who does figure it out will be very protective of that information - you'd have to do it yourself, or buy it from someone. If you can handle it, you have any easy way to give yourself very useful buffs, weaken your enemies, and give a broad variety of afflictions. If you can handle that in a week, well... I'll certainly be impressed.

You don't have to be able to predict the cycles, necessarily, doing so would just allow you to know what specific abilities you will have at some point in the future. You need only figure out what abilities you have today to be pretty effective. And even given retrogrades, you can fairly reasonably work out what abilities you will have in the near future. Of course, the effects of Papaxi on the buffs/penalties throws a big monkey wrench in that works.

If you don't want to hang out at the observatory you need to know the cycle.

True, but you'd have to run to an astrolabe to know what abilities you have to day, and that doesn't tell you what planets are in retrograde which affects your current abilities. That's fine if you have time and notice to go to the astrolabe right before a fight but to be most effective you want to be ready to fight at any time.

No body is going to change signs over the course of a day, unless you're quite unlucky and log in at the border. The fastest body takes 3 months to travel the zodiac, so it changes signs every 6 days or so. So you visit the observatory once a day, and if the day passes and your effects based on that fast body seem to not be working, you'll know what happened.

The moon travels it in 30 days. That's a game day too.

Ah, true. That's still about 2.5 days in each sign.

EDIT: 2.5 lusternian days, obviously.

But that's at a minimum. In reality, at least one body is going to move every day. So every hour you'd have to run back to the astrolabe to know what your skills do.

Or share the same zmud triggers for tracking it - and have someone periodically hang at the observatory, type in the magic command, feed the results over GT .. bewm. Everyone gets updated.

I think it would be easier to track the cycle yourself and have chart that tells you depending on which day and year it is, this is where everything is at. (i.e. a system tracker that just tells you in a nice perty graphic.)

yup, and my idea was simply to keep that in 'sync' without having all of your guild rush every few days and poke the observatory. teamwork, bear, teamwork!

The teamwork is good but again, not always possible. Daganev and I have the same idea - a chart that tells you where things are based on the day. You'd always know exactly what all your stuff does. I was talking about how difficult it would be to create that chart.

What's the single worst thing we know astrology can do? I'm not convinced that the vast amount of time it would take to use the skillset would offset the effects.