Sorry if we're not supposed to make threads on this or something, I am not too into Lusternia these days, but I heard that you guys like to streamline combat, so I wanted to post my all-time favorite idea in that area. I originally made this suggestion over in aetolia but it didn't catch on.

The idea was to make a special herb, which we could call "gruntswort", that would have unique properties to help people build a system. It would have one big upside to being used, and one big downside.

The downside would be how it works with herb balance. It would have a longer herb balance than normal, and the more of it that you eat within a given time frame, the herb balance time increases or "stacks" with each usage.

The upside would be that when you eat it (and there might be an equivalent for each cure type, or might not, and the stacking balance time might travel across different cure types) the herb would cure any herb-based affliction.

The expected application would be this: When in combat, you could easily make a system to eat lots of gruntswort, and thanks to using it you would be able to continue a fight for a variable amount of time even if you didn't have a "real" system. But because of the stacking herb balance, you would fairly quickly become overwhelmed by afflictions while relying too much on gruntswort.

But imagine that you have something like 10 afflictions in your system. You would change these away from using gruntswort to using the correct cure, because that way the gruntswort balance won't stack as much, or not as quickly. And the more real cures you have in your system, the better your healing would be.

What this would do would encourage people to PvP more because they won't be shut down the instant they are hit by an affliction they don't have the cure in their system for, thereby letting them fight and get more affliction and cure messages while doing so, while not become a substitute for a normal system. Yet by being able to keep on fighting, it would encourage the gradual creation of a "real" healing system. It would also greatly increase the number of players who PvP and widen the range of skill levels in PvP.

The problem with building a system isn't so much the number of cures as it is the sheer number of afflictions, messages, and special cases. This suggestion would not mitigate any of that. The downside seems like a big one, too, so as to make it unusable for fighting unless you're amazingly lucky otherwise.

Not sure if I would agree with you there, because you're thinking about making a system in the traditional terms. A gruntswort system would just be something such as "push button, start eating gruntswort, stop eating it once I eat it and it doesn't cure anything."

Either it's simple and works well enough to keep a person in the fight (not gonna happen), or it's got such a bad downside that no one really wants to use it.

Why don't you think it could happen? There are a lot of areas where it could be balanced. For instance, the balance timer could increase slightly when a random/hidden affliction is given, even if the cure hasn't been used yet, to increase the disadvantage where someone wouldn't have been able to eat the right cure immediately anyway. And a discipline or survival skill could go in which says "You have been afflicted!" when you get an affliction and didn't have any, to give a clear sign for when to start eating it. This would make it easy to know when to start using it for example. If enough work went into balancing the way the timer increments, I think it could work out, since it doesn't need to make someone without a system unkillable, just let new players stay in fights for longer.

It's a good idea in that it would let less experienced fighters last a good deal longer in group combat, but that could have the unintended consequence of tilting combat to more strongly favor zerg tactics. Though I guess zerg-heavy tactics aren't any inherently worse than one super-arti-demi laying waste to half an org singlehandedly.

I suppose it could work in some form, but your initial wording of the idea wasn't quite clear to me.

Are you suggesting that this magic cure would work for deep wounds, regeneration afflictions, soft lock situations, and all that? Or is this just supposed to cure the "simple" afflictions more easily?

Well, it's a complicated idea and kind of hard to explain. I found that when I first floated it in Aetolia a lot of the criticisms were based on things I wasn't even suggesting... the suggestion has actually gone quite a bit smoother this time.

Part of it is that I'm not actually trying to suggest the entire system as it could be implemented, just put forth an outline of the idea and why I think it could work.

For soft locks, that is one of the first things people should learn to heal. I think the special herb should just heal afflictions of the appropriate type (herb would heal herb afflictions) completely randomly. Therefore it would be very bad at healing locks. Learning how to heal the locks with the actual cures, though it would be very bad at that since it is random, wouldn't really be a problem because healing that correctly is one of the first things someone should learn anyway.

For regeneration things, I would personally make a general salve that would heal most salve afflictions (with an incrementing timer) but regeneration takes longer if I remember correctly, so this would take longer to heal those. And potentially, with the timer incrementing, much much longer. This would require people to learn how to heal regeneration wounds properly sooner, but again, that is an easy and core thing, so that wouldn't be too much of a problem.

So, in application it could end up being pretty complicated, but people who use the special or general cures exclusively should be disadvantaged anyway, and it would ideally function to encourage people to learn how to do certain things before they learn how to do other things. And once you've got a reason to learn how to cure locks or regeneration cures correctly first, why not keep going? Most people would, but they would do so at their own rate and be able to do some PvP as their system progresses, instead of needing the system done before PvP can really begin.

Zergs? Yes there would be, but they'd be easier to kill than zergs usually are, so it couldn't be all that bad, and there would be more people doing smaller scale pvp too probably.

Considering there are abilities out there such as Sweetfount and Drink, I don't really seeing there being a need for this in Lusternia. It's already hard enough for most affliction classes to stick afflictions outside of some uncurable/unavoidable mechanic. Plus, we already have Allheale. Allheale would have to go if we included this herb. Plus we have First Aid coming, so I don't really think we need another herb to make it even easier. You'd be nerfing affliction classes at the same time.

The point of the stacking balance (perhaps with additional stacking added when hit with certain afflictions) would be that it wouldn't be worth using over normal cures, so it wouldn't be meant to have any impact on affliction classes as compared to other classes.

I'm not sure how helpful the first aid ability is going to be since it 1. can't reliably be used in combat and 2. doesn't sound like it will provide you with the affliction lines to go with what it cures, so all it would really do is let people who get afflicted by someone or something which then goes and leaves without killing them get healed up. If the first aid skill echoed the affliction line back to you then it would be great though.

I would just trigger it to slaughs, crones, dark moon, othala runes, and the rare could-be-anything angel/demon hits. I don't see it helping the newbies, and I don't think you've really thought through how everyone else would use it.

Things like that would increase the balance timer on hit though, and that increase could be an amount designed to discourage its use as a normal part of curing. I'm not sure what about that is hard to understand since I've already mentioned it twice before in this short thread.

You also mention several times that it's temporary and stacks depending on how many times you use it. People who know what they're doing can save several seconds by using it, but people who need it are just going to end up crippled in comparison to something like first aid or just using Treant.

Maybe you're right, you could start off with it and then stop using it before the stacking got problematic. But I think changing the beginning of fights by a bit would be a small price to pay for such a great thing! And I don't think it's comparable to first aid or treant, since one doesn't get used during a fight and the other is using someone else's system based on one of the less popular clients.

You might be surprised how quickly MUSHclient has grown in popularity over the last couple of years.

I was pretty sure you were going to come up with something like this... and I'm also pretty sure that if not for Treant, there would be far fewer Mushclient users. Or if you were still doing Palisade for zMud.

A lot of people have moved for the system, not for the client. As far as non-Treant users go, there's still a very heavy prevalence of the *Muds here.

Oh, I definitely prefer zMUD, but it's so nice not having to maintain your own system.

No need to be snarky. Whether it's a free or paid system for a free or paid client, the availability of the system is primarily to help others get into combat. This streamlining stuff is all great, but the bar can only be lowered so much and combat systems will still take a hefty amount of time and knowledge to build.

That was merely in response to the, "You might be surprised at how much it has grown. " comment... because, well, the only reason it's really growing here in such a way is Treant, heh. There are very, very few doing anything with Mushclient and their own systems. It's only really being used here to this scale because of Treant.

If you think that's being snarky... eh. To me, it's an observation that it really hasn't grown as much as you seem to think.

See; Xavius' comment.

The snarky part was the "I expected this from you" bit.

What about AG? Ethelon made a system for MUSHclient long before I ever did. I only made the switch because zMUD was getting behind the times and CMUD was unstable and slow. (Which, again, is appropriate to this thread because there are just so many triggers, afflictions, and special cases that my client/system couldn't keep up any more.)