-Don't scale damage based on your max health; for me at least as a lobo bard, it would mean that my one advantage (massive health compared to usual bard specs) wouldn't matter nearly as much. I don't see how it would make sense for a faeling to take significantly less damage than a loboshigaru or tae'dae from the same room-wide attacks, for instance.

-Standardized affliction lines are a good idea if you want more people writing systems and getting involved. (The same secondary line for paralysis from poison, severspine, NPCs, etc.)

-Matching DIAG lines to HELP CURELIST would also help (the Serenguard have a clan-scroll somewhere connecting the two, if it helps). I know that when I was a newbie, fighting was super-annoying when I could DIAG, search my RTF version of HELP CURELIST for the main points of the diag line, and even then not know what the cure was.


EDIT: slickness is a prime example of this- 'extremely oily' on diag to 'slickness', on HELP CURELIST.

If someone wants to draft a new HELP CURELIST file (or an alternate help file), I'll be more than happy to load it.

So no simplication for ally/enemy lists?

1. I know you mentioned warriors, which is great. I was just pointing out that damage outliers aren't warrior exclusive.

2. Understandable!

3. Right, the ingredient cost. I can't really suggest removing curatives as I'm not sure how much mayhem that would wreck on current systems and players, but the required herbs could certainly be reduced. I'd suggest halving the required herbs across the board for all keg based curatives. Would go a really long way. I know alchemists and herbalists will groan, but getting and maintaining multiple sets of all the vial curatives is expensive.

Also, could reduce the cost of vials. 2-3 gems per vial would be better than 5, considering the huge number you have to acquire, and if they decay in groups as they generally do, vials+refills can put a real dent in most players pockets.

This is interesting, because I was often shocked by how expensive health vials were in the other games.

However, I do think there is an issue with the variety of things you would need/want. Or maybe thats a good thing.

I've often felt that the health/sparkle/healing scroll requirement was a bit much.

I don't really get that. Is it the credit costs that are set by IRE, or the skills? I know the amount of lessons it takes to get to trans are the same across the game, as well as the credit costs. But in terms of raw amount of lessons it would take just to omni-trans, Lusternia is way higher. Even the basic cost of entrance just to be a mid-tier combatant is significantly higher. Cause while Lusternia is on pretty equal terms with the other IRE games in terms of amount of skills, every other one has the 'common skills', and then it has mini-skills, which cost half as much to trans.

I could see resilience and magic as two easily defined mini-skills. Possibly dramatics and influence too. Then the skills that could possibly be combined, like mentioned above. Environment and discipline are both basically Survival from Achaea, but split up for some odd reason.

Of course, putting resilience/magic's effects on one of the other skills is also a good idea.

Edit: Also to touch on this.



From a little talk I had with people IG, it doesn't seem the problem is really a damage thing, it's the large difference in terms of attack level. I can understand that, and know there can be a large gap between them. Scaling denizen damage is a bad idea, but possibly buffing druid/guardian bashing attacks a little bit would help a lot. It won't technically effect how much damage they're taking, but they will be able to kill things faster, which means they won't have to tank as much.

Well, compare it to Achaea. I'm not sure what the cost of health vials is there, but the types of vials you need is drastically smaller. Here we need 16 types of cures in vial form.

I mean, I die inside every time I have to refill quicksilver because I know how quickly I go through it, and it's just so freaking expensive.

Costs like 175-ish per 50 sips in Achaea. Less if you know the right person.

re the skills. I think someone should do a deep analysis of the skills, because my impression is that at the omni-trans level they are about the same.

What is diferent however, is how many of the "extra skills" cause such an increase in strength compared to others. Meaning, if you don't trans Tattoos in Achaea you won't be that much worse off than someone who does. But if you don't trans planar here, you are a bit screwed.

You really can't compare gold costs between IRE games. The economies are completely different. It's beyond apples and oranges--it's apples and tractors.

Depending on the supplier, I really don't think there's a problem in itself in the amount of herbs needed to create certain things, but those elixirs which depend on a randomly generated commodity to make (let alone stock reliably like mercury for quicksilver or spices for oils). I know I've tried my best to upkeep a reasonable price range for the herbs I stock as well as the potions I keep in kegs, but some things are just bumped up naturally because of the rarity of the ingredients required. If there were a way to get mercury/spices/sugar/etc. reliably, I'm fairly sure that the cost would go down a bit.

Also, you lot should know better than just to settle for one price at the closest store to stock things. Clearly you lot need to shop better or get a thing which tells you who stocks something at the lowest/average/highest price in the organization. A board which shows prices from all the shops in one spot, perhaps . -/derail-


Edit: Also, strip-harvesting is a problem, yes, but what can you do really when someone aims to shut something down completely. Not much, I think. Oh wells.

Even the "perk" skills here are upping the ante, so to speak. Beastmastery is now a staple in combat, and things like hypnoticgaze and healing and spit are just more that the high might folks have that the lower might folks won't because they are transing reslience just to not get devoured by joe warrior.

edit: People with trans riding really didn't have a huge advantage over those that don't. Beastmastery is another story.

It would take more balance than the normal diagnose command would, because it's both diagnose and "send cure commands to player and auto process".

Sounds good, brother.

Represent.

Just looking at quicksilver, the cost is: "Ingredients: kafe 4 pennyroyal 4 sage 4 mercury 1". The average cost to create would be:

Kafe (4*9) = 36
Pennyroyal (4*10) = 40
Sage (4*9) = 36
Mercury (1*100) = 100
TOTAL = 212 gold

While I'm not arguing that the ingredients may need to be reduced (and putting aside the actual cost it really takes to get those ingredients--I assume alchemists can generally get bulk deals or barter), if someone is charging 1000 gold for quicksilver, it seems (to me) that charging 500% over cost is a bit steep. No matter how much the commodity cost is reduced, it won't stop others from gouging their customers--I can imagine that prices would remain fixed and alchemists would just enjoy an increased profit margin! Anyway, maybe the problem is simply that you need to find a better dealer?

To those talking about standardizing lines, here's the issue:

We're not changing skill lines to one line for each affliction, so for:


...both give stupidity. We're not changing this to a generic "Person gives you stupidity.". All lines should reflect the actual skill doing them, which is why these messages exist in the first place.

Another idea - what if the line became an optional message when the affliction is explicit (like in these cases) and not hidden?



I don't like this for one main reason - it would entirely screw up illusions and illusionists. Whereas normally you would have one line to illusion for the glamours case, you now have either one or two. Illusioning the line itself would become a tipoff for the anti-illusion in the system. I'd say systems would choose to lean the way of including the third line, so messages could be ignored if that line isn't seen.

The only remedy for this that I see is having an "optional illusion" line attachment..... and I don't really like that.

Except that mercury isn't as common as the rest of these (herbs), especially since forging stopped taking weeks of firing a forge (and thus getting lots of mercury). Finding somebody to sell you 300 mercury is a feat in and of itself, at least in Seren right now.

So, while it only sells for 100 per or so, it's not available on the same scale that the herbs are.


EDIT: @Charune: the 'standardized' lines are meant to be after, like your second example. Also, with regards to illusions, I would guess that systems would have a hunting option to cure just off of the 'standard' lines, eliminating the need for lengthy hunting triggers. The idea behind the standard lines would be that anybody could code a simple system that would be okay at curing, while prioritizing/queueing would be a premium system, thus making the system easier to enter.

The problem is not the herbs driving up the cost, it is the mercury driving up the cost. Mercury doesn't grow on trees and is sometimes incredibly hard to acquire, especially if you want to fill a keg, and more so if multiple alchemists want to fill kegs, or you want multiple kegs filled cause you have multiple shops.

So when you are getting 2 - 3 mercury here and there and taking days - weeks to get a supply of it to fill 1 keg... well the cost rises drastically to represent this.

We could of course just increase the chance of mercury--not sure forgers and cooks would like us for it though! Are there other commodities that are too rare?

That's possible, and as I'm enemied to everywhere but Glom my options are limited, but I'm also a demigod who can acquire gold quickly whenever I need it, so I tend not to shop around. But...

keg118116: quicksilver (keg refills) 27 1400gp


keg106901: quicksilver (keg refills) 60 1400gp


keg112472: quicksilver (keg refills) 65 500gp


keg144031: quicksilver (keg refills) 14 800gp


vial61115: quicksilver (turquoise vial) 1 921gp


keg8755: quicksilver (keg refills) 45 1140gp

The cheapest was Viynain with 500 per refill, which is rare (and I'm stocking up).

I don't know how to solve it if the alchemists simply won't lower prices.