I honestly and truly hope that they are more than half finished by now.

Nope. We haven't even finished their ritual skillsets.

Oh waiiit.



Seriously though, it's not my project - I use 'half-finished' to describe anything that's been started and isn't 100% done.

For about .2 seconds, I believed you, and was gonna RAGE

Okay, this statement is not entirely true. As someone who played with both the original and the changed version, I can say calling the trans poison ability mediocre is utter BS. If anything, I would say it's one of the better trans rewards - the difference is that it is utterly dependent on keeping the skillset, so you can't get it and forget poisons like you can with tailoring, alchemy, jewelry, etc.

Poisons is avoided due to no outlet for creativity and a majority of the desirable poisons being high up in the skill list. Unlike other harvesting trade skills, you also are usually limited by how often you can gather. A herbalist can harvest for hours on end, and an alchemist can make many kegs in a short span if they wish to (and have the herbs). If you're a poisonist and you want to fill a keg of senso, your only course is to farm stoneghasts off of Earth for hours. You will never be able to get more than those five stoneghasts in an hour, so after that you are stuck sitting on your thumbs. It's so bad that in some cases, having a fountain is more reliable and better than having an active poisonist around.

There's no real easy solution for poisons. The best you can hope for is to make the poison options for those who aren't monks and warriors more appealing, so that the market may open up there. Beyond that... new poisons? Do we really need new poisons? Or something else that could fit the theme... but what?

From what I understand, you designed Estarra's shoes.

One of the other problems about non-combat-related envoy reports, is that sometimes (usually) they get shot down as 'We don't consider this change to be neccessary'. (See: reports 315 and 350).

There's also some 'trade skills are not supposed to be discussed by envoys' bias still seeping in (see: report 56).

I wouldn't mind seeing a skill reassessment after the new guardians are out, maybe a month or so after at least.

Some things that I would really like to see:
Looking at inter-archetype skills. Dreamweaving comes to mind, there are likely more. Would some skills benefit from an illusions-like split with specs for the different archetypes that have them?
Trade-skills. Seriously artisans need some lovin'
Déjà Fu for Hallifaxians.

I'm asking for five coders to work on five problems with existing skills and guilds and then move on to the next five, and so on. This is instead of the current setup, where one or more coders are working on new content and/or other material beyond fixing existing content, leaving only one or two of the five coders to deal with 24 guilds' worth of envoy reports. Or however way it is divvied up.

I understand the world needs to grow and change. Stagnation is insidious and ruinous. But I think (for whatever it's worth) that we should be focusing more on bug fixes, balance, growing existing guilds and orgs, shoring up existing quests and whatnot before we put time into new villages/quests/orgs/guilds/etc.



There are other tradeskills with no outlet for creativity. Herbs, alchemy->lorecraft/brewmeister, enchantment->spellcraft/tinkering, and poisons all fall under this description. Guess which one of those tradeskills is the scarcest?

I like the Poisons skillset. I've had the Poisons skillset. I gave it up because, in terms of personal benefit, virtually any other tradeskill (except Artisan, the poor thing...) was superior. And I don't think that's an uncommon situation. I would rather have the Poisons skillset, as it fits my image of Eldanien better. IE, it fits his style/rp/character image. But by far, most of the enduring Poisonists I've known were warriors, particularly those who had already made their masterarmour.

Personally, I don't mind that Poisons doesn't have a trans item to carry over. I'm one of those people that tend to dislike the idea of trans trade items, not that I'm overly fussed about it. But the fact that there exist tradeskills with less than a tenth of the representation of other tradeskills should raise warning flags.

Trade skills actually aren't supposed to be discussed in envoy reports. According to HELP ENVOY, only guild skills particular to the guild in question should be discussed, and not even Enchantment specialties (which are limited to single archetypes) technically fall under that umbrella. Cosmic and Elemental Spellcraft are much better than Tinkering, of course, but I digress.

Problem is, there's no official vector for fixing trade skills except the Ideas forum here. Even if, through some miracle, a suitable set of solutions to the problems with Tinkering (one example) are not only arrived at, but approved by the administrators, apparently everyone is too busy working on envoy reports and implementing new content to fix existing content that needs fixing (not that this is in any way unusual for the genre, mind you).

Personally, I find it highly annoying. I have yet to see an aspect of Lusternia not dominated utterly by combat, except for Newton Caverns and the submission of crafting designs. Even something seemingly unrelated, like trade skills that need fixing, suffers indirectly because the bulk of development time is apparently spent on balancing combat through envoy reports, a task that will never be finished. When the servers finally grind to a halt years from now, the same number of combatants will be just as concerned about the arms race as there are right this moment.

My suggestion? Allocate one envoy slot to each of the 13 trade skills, assign them to player envoys, and reduce guild skill envoy slots from 10 to 9 universally (or whatever it is, I'm really not even sure). Done.

Guilds get one slot every month. Some guilds, like the Aquas for example, need this slot badly. Others occasionally offer their slot to secondary or tertiary skills, or even to skills they can't even use, if the situation is such that their envoy feels they don't need the use of it for their guild specifically, as was recently done in a couple of the Glom and Mag guilds, or if they feel that someone else needs it more (this second one is not always a cry for a nerf, I've heard of envoys going "Hey, you guys are hurting right now, so have your envoy throw a report at us, we'll let you use our slot.")

Each guild receives 1 slot, which they can use to envoy whatever skill-related topic they choose.

Ah.

But you do see how the situation is set up so that skills that don't concern combatants pretty much never get addressed, right?

One slot for all trades, maybe...? Better than nothing.

It's been asked for before, never happens, always the same response from memory.

Best to do as suggested, list what we think needs to be fixed. We might be able to get special reports through, though last time that happened things did not work out well generally.

If the admins are happy with a few trade skills being the ones everyone uses (and abuses), and with others being pitifully disused, there's probably not a whole lot anyone can do about it.

I knew Tinkering sucked when I took it, but I took it anyway, in keeping with the theme I wanted for my character. Think about that, though: I'm brand-spanking new, yet I knew Tinkering sucked. Not only do I know it sucks now, I knew it well over a week ago, and no one actually had to tell me, either. I merely confirmed my near-absolute suspicion of its sorry state by asking around, just to cover due diligence.

It doesn't take a great thinker, then, to deduce that at least a few of the admins (especially former players) know perfectly well that some of these skills basically suck. So really, it's a matter of hoping they decide to fix it one day.

That's good enough for me, I suppose. As I say, I knew I was taking a sucky skill when I chose it, and I'm actually not complaining about that here specifically (I'm complaining about the fact that only the futile quest for combat balance is ever addressed, Tinkering notwithstanding). It's just too bad I have to know something like that.

I think while guild skills and even common skills get looked at once in a while, a lot of the trade skills get ignored - only because they don't really affect PvP dynamics. Being mostly a non-combatant, I enjoy Lusty for its socialising than anything else. Trade is fun for me whilst raiding/defending isn't.

One idea that has been shot around but always rejected is having perhaps a trade envoy. I mean, in the same vein, why not have an Ascendant envoy to look at Ascendancy.

Ok so we're forming a list.

Dreamweaving
Tinkering
Artisan
Bookbinding
Brewmeister ()

What needs to be done to them to bring them up to par?

I'm still thinking that tertiary skills shared across archetypes should be split into specs if they aren't working or at the least have skills available dependent on your guild skill. It may give some room for mages to have dreamweaving improved for them without changing druids.

Brewmeister didn't seem terribly useful when I had it and I don't see it used terribly often now that I'm over to Lorecraft. Lorecraft has the rest of the curatives that Brewmeister is missing, even if you don't use the influence scents or the oils. And Philosopher's Stone blows TeaCeremony out of the water.

Well, honestly, envoys were setup, designed and picked with the purpose of addressing game balance. Over time it's evolved into 'well, if you've a complaint about a skill(set) bounce it to your envoy(s)' - but that does not change their 'primary directive' so to speak, is to address combat balance.

Elsewise, we wouldn't look for combatants when we're picking envoys (god knows that's not the only quality, of course).

Every time this thread comes up (and it does, regularly) we say, 'Well, what do you think needs changing?' 'Tinkering sucks.' 'Okay! Make suggestions.' 'Make it better.' 'Fantastic suggestion. Let me phone the president - I'll get the FBI on that right away.'

If there was a thread with an interesting, intelligent, well put together list of suggestions and ideas for changes to this tradeskill or that tradeskill (let's quit saying 'and general skills' - the only thing anyone's brought up outside of tradeskills is dramatics stories, IIRC - and dreamweaving, which is being worked on, but that's just another beast entirely and I know about 0 on that), I can guarantee you it'll get looked at - beyond me carousing the forums with my big mod stick, anyways. There's been many occasions (many, many occasions) that things on the forums get discussed - and there's still some things floating about, waiting until its day.

What you would really need is a strong list of suggestions and ideas (including comments as to why what exists currently doesn't do well, much like how envoy reports work) that won't affect game balance drastically, won't make combat more convoluted/difficult to get into than it already is/increase what is considered by some to be a 'high cost of entry' in terms of items required etc, and will make the tradeskills profitable.

Honestly, I don't think I could do it myself, nor a few of us (admin, that is) if we sat down for a few hours. Coming up with ideas for some of this stuff is, well, painful - not in the 'I'm rubbing my face against sharp, salt-covered rocks AHAHA' masochist-type painful but headache-inducing levels of far-too-much-thought painful.

And then you'd need a free coder to take it up. Basically what it sounds like, though, is a complete review of most (if not all) of the tradeskills - whether by removing some of the curatives from lorecraft or by making robes 'easier' to enchant/tailor etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your complaints though? I think you'll all find coming up with such a list far more difficult than you realize - if I may give a bit of advice, though, I strongly suggest using bullet points and short, concise sentences. Easier to read!

The main issue though is that most of the time whenever we come up with ideas nothing comes of it. There is an entire thread of skill ideas some with suggested ability lists that nothing ever came from along with multiple threads on singular skill suggestions. It becomes depressing when all that we see is "you need to give us your ideas" then "we don't like that" or "we like that but not right now"

I would personally be interested in seeing the result of a count on all the skill choices currently selected by characters. Convert the results and you would be able to see the distribution of skills, though with skill flex in this would become a bit more difficult considering people might be "trying out" the lame choices.

That being said, I'm still thinking about some form of dreamweaving specs.

I can point to several times that this has happened, that a list of specific, implementable, changes was collected and posted. Some of them, it got looked at. Never, to my memory, did any of the changes happen, or anything more come from it, with one single exception, the forging revamp.

For instance, here is one thread where I did precisely what you said, that Estarra actually glanced at; but while she shot down every idea in it, I am entirely convinced she didn't actually understand most of them, and never came back to the thread to consider the misunderstandings. (Most egregiously, in forgetting that a room doesn't become furnishable until some admin makes it so, she concluded that making chandeliers equally available at nexuses by allowing us an outdoor equivalent would lead to five thousand chandeliers filling every room of every city and forest, which it couldn't, not even remotely. Similar brush-offs exist on several other topics.)

This is Felicia's point. While "make it better!" is way too vague, you're pushing the pendulum too far the other way to say "Spend many hours preparing detailed recommendations knowing that there's a barely-better-than-nil chance it will lead to anything". Something in between might be a better compromise, like where we make vague recommendations and then get enough feedback to know if there's any hope of anything coming from them so we know if it's worth it to dig in deeper.