Making old skills useful

[Simon Francis]

I occaisionally feel the need to post about making old skills have a use again every so often over the years. So here it is.

For Treasure Hunters:

Cartography - Make sure level 5 maps have at least one 600% intensity object in every chest. At least if the item has MODs that don't go together, the item can be imbued down to obtain a relic fragment or two.

Remove Trap - All level 5 treasure boxes should have 3 Insta kill traps on them, unless the cartographer has sufficient remove trap skill. None of this telekenises stuff. Make treasure hunting more exciting, and if there is a guarenteed minimum 600 intensity modded item, people will sure as heck get remove trap as a skill if they are guarenteed 3 deaths without it.

Other Skills:

Herding: Have it give bonuses similar to alchemy. For every 10% real skill in herding, have it give a 1% improved chance to control and tame animals. For Example, a Legendary tamer with 100% herding would have a 10% better chance of taming a greater dragon than a regular legendary tamer.

Taste Identification: Only players with taste identifcation should be able to experience the effects of enhance potions jewelry. For every 1% in real taste indentification, your enhance potions cap would increase 1%. So if a player has 100% Taste ID, they could have a cap of 100% enhance potions from jewels. GM alchemy would still provide its bonus as well to potions along with taste ID.

**Potions would work exactly like they did Pre AOS before enhance potions. Any player can chug a greater heal or cure, they just wouldn't have their enhance potions items affect it unless they had taste ID or alchemy bonus**

Thieves: Players with GM Stealing, Snooping, Hiding, and Stealth can never be revealed unless a character with sufficent detecting hidden is around. They could still be damaged and poisoned and parad via fields or AoE spells. (4 Skills would be required to limit usefulness of templete who would only have skills to get pvp advantage).

Detecting Hidden: Only characters that could reveal characters with GM Stealing, Snooping, Hiding and Stealth.

Item Identification: Depending on your skill, GM item ID now has a chance to unlock hidden MOD bonuses from monster looted items. The unlocked intensity would be up to 10% intensity bonus from a mod that is already on the weapon. Ex) a 40% lightning kryss looted from a dragon Item IDed by a grandmaster could have 1 chance of bumping the property by up to 10%. So the Kryss could gain anywhere from 0-10% boost to 40-50 lightning. Not all items could get a boost, and you could only try once per item.
At GM Item ID, boost chances:
50% Chance of no intensity boost
25% Chance of 1-4% intensity boost
15% Chance of 5-6% intensity boost
5% Chance of 7-8% intensity boost
4% Chance of 9% intensity boost
1% Chance of 10% intensity boost

Forensic Eval- Depending on skill, chance to loot a "missed" item from a corpse. Could be anything from gold, to gemstones, to , potions, to consumable items like stealables.

 

[Lady Laurel]

I like the sounds of most of this. Though it would mean a great deal of work to change my character templates. lol

 

[jbfortune]

So you want to make it so treasure hunters need another skill on the already crowded template?

A couple of relic frags aren't gonna make people desperate to go treasure hunting, in fact, the thought of training remove trap would probably put most people off.

 

[MalagAste]

So you want to make it so treasure hunters need another skill on the already crowded template?

A couple of relic frags aren't gonna make people desperate to go treasure hunting, in fact, the thought of training remove trap would probably put most people off.

Agreed. I've no desire to work up this skill.

 

[phantus]

So you want to make it so treasure hunters need another skill on the already crowded template?

A couple of relic frags aren't gonna make people desperate to go treasure hunting, in fact, the thought of training remove trap would probably put most people off.

Telekenesis should have never been allowed to open chests. Tmap locations should not be static spots making mining needed for treasure hunters. Dog forbid you have to go with someone else rather than solo everything. The fun of Thunts used to be doing them with friends.

As for the 600% increase. That is a lazy way to accomplish something but the cartography/thunting experience is so unique I'm amazed at each expansion that does nothing to accomodate it. Either the code to do it is too difficult for our teams or they don't believe it to be something important. It's needed work for over half a decade and I'm sure isn't even on the radar. Not that on the radar actually means anything anymore.

 

[Fink]

A definite boon to Herding would be to allow us to also herd our own followers no matter the type. Reanimates, summons, etc.. I'd love to be able to herd my energy vortices, nature's furies, and undead.. maybe even hirelings. In terms of followers, you can only herd the tamed variety.

 

[Alezi]

Yeah, lets up the possible EP you can have to 133% (with Alchemy). Those 100 damage mel's fermented wine shots won't be gamebreaking or anything.

 

[Miriandel]

Lots of nerfs in your 'enhance skills' proposal...

 

[Evlar]

So you want to make it so treasure hunters need another skill on the already crowded template?

A couple of relic frags aren't gonna make people desperate to go treasure hunting, in fact, the thought of training remove trap would probably put most people off.

Telekenesis should have never been allowed to open chests...

But what if I'm role-playing as Uri Geller and taking time off bending spoons and screaming "WORK!!" at watches, to have some treasure hunting fun??

 

[Stupid Miner]

Give people with Item Id a luck bonus too, only seems natural.
or a luck multiplier.
or both.

As for the 600% increase. That is a lazy way to accomplish something but the cartography/thunting experience is so unique I'm amazed at each expansion that does nothing to accomodate it. Either the code to do it is too difficult for our teams or they don't believe it to be something important. It's needed work for over half a decade and I'm sure isn't even on the radar. Not that on the radar actually means anything anymore.

Currently:
Imbuing can make 5x100% properties or less.
--Trying to enhance them often results in breakage.
--Will eventually wear out.

Crafting with a valorite hammer can get 40 DI + 5x100% properties+something else if you're using an ML recipe
--Max potential is realistically ~680% and 7 properties (Knight's War cleaver would be +50%, but that's not a real weapon)
--Will take Millions upon tens of Millions of gold to get an item with all the right properties/intensities

Treasure Hunting should have its own niche in here:
--Perhaps item properties that go slightly above 100%? Maybe up to 130% with each 10% above 100% being twice as rare,
--or a % chance that the item will have its property intensities multiplied by 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3, meaning one would have to successfully get a 1.3 intensity multiplier *and* roll a 100% for the property itself to get up to 130%. Has the secondary advantage of boosting the average quality of loot.
... and in some sort of bonus for luck, toss in some rare *really* tough monsters into the spawn. Maybe a % chance to make the monster Paragon or Blackrock Infected.

There's a thousand things that you could do with this skill to make it amazing. (and whatever you do, do for SoS too!)

 

[girana]

Give people with Item Id a luck bonus too, only seems natural.
or a luck multiplier.
or both.

i like this

 

[Jhym]

I've always felt for level 3 and above chests and traps, TK should have no effect. MAKE people use remove trap. I've worked hard at it, and it's useful if you don't want to have mage skills.

Oh, that's right, nobody uses lockpicking/remove trap for anything but treasure maps and factions anymore.

I think if they won't remove the TK garbage, then any trap you open with TK has a 50% chance of destroying the contents of the chest.

As for cartography/treasure hunters -- keep stuff as it is, but for level 4,5,6 add in chances for SA/ML ingredients and deco as additions to the chest, as well as on the spawn. Later add new quests/maps for deco hunters, perhaps to spawn random "rubble" pieces and replicas of rare deco on the shard (that is marked "replica of xxxx".

Detect hidden/forensics should give a bump of 100 luck each at GM, and if you have both, the bump is 220 luck. This is added to your overall luck rolls and would also affect the luck of those in your party if you are the party leader.

Herding shouldn't affect taming, but I wouldn't mind it affecting Vet. Perhaps gives the vet up to 200% healing at GM.


The taste id thing is interesting but a serious potion nerf that would pretty much wreck alchemy sales. I'd say let tasteid increase the EP cap up to 200%. Also, tasteid could have a % chance of bumping up the level of the potions you create -- so if you are making lesser poison, GM tasteid could have a 10% chance of you making greater poison instead. Or perhaps tasteid could act like LRC for alchemists, with a 50% chance at GM to use no reagents while potioning.


Detect hidden/reveal spells should be required to reveal a stealther/hider. There should be no passive reveal. However, I don't mind giving those that have passive reveal now a default detect hidden amount. So, for instance, perhaps Elves have a natural base of 35% detect hidden without training, humans 20%. And for each point of int above 90, an extra 1% on your base. This would seem more fair to those of us that like to wander around doing our business in the shadows.

Item ID, Arms Lore should both give a percentage chance to bump intensity levels of crafted items, aside from their current other abilities. So GM Item ID + GM Arms Lore should give you a 50% chance of an intensity increase on one or more properties up to 50%. I don't mind the skills working on treasure loot, but it would have to be within a certain time window and only for those involved in the loot gathering. Otherwise everyone will just gather everything off the monsters and chests, rush home, switch characters, and "bump" everything in the safety of their houses.

In any case, be very careful what you wish for... some of us mentioned insurance years ago laughingly, only to get a full bore insurance system.