Hey, the numbers were showing you were wrong!

They were just flawed numbers. *cough*

Out of curiousity (since I've never played one of these races), does anyone know how well a Tae'dae, Dwarf, Igasho or Orclach does at influencing? Tae'dae most specifically, given they are extremely charismatic.

Edit: Oops, Orclach, not Taurian.

Tae'Dae look alright, but in practice, the speed penalty is a problem.

Yes, hence the idea.

I was really asking if anyone had actually tried it in practice.

Speed penalties haven't affected influencing for like 3.5 years AFAIK - it's charisma based.

Correct. I tested this with both a 17 cha tae'dae with a 17 cha faeling as well as with a 11 cha mugwump and a 11 cha loboshigaru. I think I did 20 influences with each, and they were more or less the same. In fact, I think on average, tae'dae was better than faeling by like .1s. That was probably due to lag.

Well, that's encouraging at least. Is it less than 12 charisma that the person starts to backchat before eq regain?

From what I've seen, the denizen appears to "backchat" based on your charisma. So regardless of your charisma, you can't avoid it if you lag a bit.

Dwarf is not good at influencing. At all. IMO.

So the question becomes: how long does it take to influence vs kill? You get 1.5x the exp for influencing, but as I understand it, it takes a lot longer to do the influencing... maybe a disproportionate amount of time?

It depends on your crit rate. You'd probably need to average the comparison out over the long run. N=1000 is probably a good start.

Influencing is no more easy then hunting. You need to remember influencing only affects denizens/beasts that are fairly easy to kill. (illithoid are easy to kill, the worm is the harder part. Monks are easy to kill, Guards are easy to kill if they are alone, Elfen healers are easy to kill). Creatures that are harder to kill can not be influenced by most people (like that illithiod highpriest guy) and actually give less xp then killing it (which only has to do with the fact they have been made weaker for amnesty purposes). More worthwhile creatures like linked astral, illithoid worms, kraken, etc are not influenceable.

I sip less killing an illithoid then influencing them.


It needs work in that sense that higher level mobs should become available. Implementing an insane bromide cost to a broken skill is not going to fix it, it just breaks it further.

The only nerfing fix I see needed right now is on esteem it should not be able to be stockpiled.

Agreed. I spend a lot of gold on bromide potions, and I am a faeling.

I disagree with the esteem stockpiling. Perhaps the types of items it can be imbued into should be changed so that you don't hold onto them for forever, but I see no reason why I can't have many items containing my esteem, since I don't have corpses I can turn in for gold.

Marauder influenced - 1291 essence

New: Marauder/worm bashed - 1573 essence

Might want to do some better research.


Some things are better to influence, some things are better to bash. Illithoids are far better to bash than influence.

what I mean with stockpile is for longer then 1 OOC day. I find imbued items rather unbalance shrine battles, and their use in this way makes them worth to much gold. It would be better if imbueing made an item that only lasts for a short time (like corpses), then create an npc that will accept imbued items for 20 gold per percentage so that people still have the choice to offer or sell just like with corpses.

Anisu has a point. Being able to unload esteem directly into shrines would be better than the whole item thing.

That's a good idea, as is having the esteem items decay quickly even in stockrooms.

If most people influence with weakness then selling imbued items is their gold source. Mobs don't hand over gold unless influenced with charity. Unlike bashing where gold is always dropped (not every mob, but when you bash you get gold for it).

So no, I am not for any concept of esteem items being only 1 day in length.

Nor am I for any concept of selling 100% esteem for 2000 gold. I get more than 2000 gold in 25 minutes of bashing.

Esteem items also don't imbalance shrine warfare as it was already nerfed to not consume the entire bottle all at once, it takes a % of the bottle with each sanctify/defile. Just like using corpses.

Anisu's fix is a bit extreme. I would like to see a smaller change if any. You can definitely bash 8-10k gold/hour. This 2k esteem bottle seems arbitrarily low.

AFAIK, since both sides can hoard esteem items, it doesn't disadvantage either side more than the other. You can hoard sanctifying bottles as much as defiling ones.

I think what Anisu means with the shrines is that it's pretty hard to take down shrines with one instance of bashing. It takes a while (Astral bashing also interferes here though). Conversely with bottles since you can store up massive amounts of essence with them you can take them down very very quickly.