Fist de Yuma - June 11, 2002

If you have not heard by now you'll know about it soon. The magic changes are going in this patch. This is expected later this week. The long awaited spell timer extension is going in. Spells will last much longer. VII's will last and hour, VI's Forty-Five minutes and everything else will last half an hour. We will have the OPTION of using special packs with a few other items for spells. Cost wise is said to be the same. We believe there will be a pack space saving but it will not be that great for a full mage. Of course the cost will be the same only if Turbine has done its homework. Given Turbine's past history I'm not confident. Those are the good things. Added to that is a major bad. The spell economic is going away. While this will stabilize a few things it sets many of us back several levels. At this time I get three points added to focus and self and three points on my skills. At one time we were up to six points. Some less used skill get a great bonus. In the last developers talk they said the spell economic was going to be based on skill. I was ecstatic, as this would really help my Og. Well they changed their mind for some reason. We end up losing at least five points off every skill. This may not seem much but I was right where I needed to be. With five less points North ML, which was a fairly safe place to hunt, will now be a danger. Virindi will be resisting far more often. Ziffers will be a bigger danger. I'll have many more deaths from this. I ran some numbers to see what I'll need in xp to get back to where I am. It comes to over 512 million points. This is only magic. My other stats that lose points will add to this cost. It will cost me six levels before I'm at the point I'm at now. Until I reach 114lv I'm behind where I am at 108. My total goal of being able to weather de-buffs may never be reached. Only my luck changing or Turbine changing the loot will help. I might pick up the three major items I need. If so I'll make my total goal with mage. This is not likely. This change will also hurt melees. Many melees will have to drop back to using VI spells for a while and will scrabble to make up the lost points. This will hurt but given more time on VI spells it will be a wash. The time extension will help melees far more than mages. How can I say that? I have been on many a quest with melees that take ten minutes to buff. Most mages are done in three to five minutes. At high levels most melee have Creature and many have Life. This means they are tossing as many spells as a mage without their stats to back it up. At mid levels and even high levels tossing a VII spell is hard. Most melee use VI's until mid to upper 80's. Melees are stuck with using VI and lower spells for much longer than mages. A melee may have a shorter buff at low levels but they do it more often. The time length on VI spells going from 15 to 45 minutes will really help them. I expect Fist to still use VII's but it will be painful. He was up to 330 Creature and will be pushed back to 325. Gaining back those 5 points will be costly but needed. The hour of fighting will more than make up for it but buffing will be very painful. The time length change more than makes up for all this trouble. I would rather not have these set backs but at least I'm insured of results now. With a vuln and war I was going from 600+ hits to 350 hits. I'm not sure what I will get now but at last I'll know the exact amount of my hits soon. This will let me plan exactly what spell when to finish off a monster. Strange complains The one part of AC I generally ignore is PK. It is hard to with all the screaming right now. It seems someone figured out what a war spell will do without the ECO to make it stronger. With the protect items a PK uses a Vuln and blast will to 180 points of damage. Now that is respectable to me but I'm not a PK. It seems that War mages were depending on the bigger hits to finish off people. The strongest most dominating group of PK will get a little weaker. Many say they will quit over this. Fist de Yuma Jr Jr. finished his template today. I was 5 million short of 75 when I logged on. I decided to go hunt EVL until I got it. I also had hopes of picking up a minors or majors to make up for the coming losses. It started out packed with people. It quickly tapered off and we ended up with a nice group of five hunters. That lasted for an hour or so. After that I became the key person in the fellow. We never had big numbers but we fought well and made good xp. I was teaming with a dagger fighter named Oliver Twist. He asked me how a person joins Elder. I checked his stats and saw he was in a chain alliance. He told me his reason for leaving, reasons that showed a style I approved of. I liked his attitude and said I would accept him for a vassal. We hunted together for a while until he had to log. Toro was on and they had a good talk. The two of them met at the mansion and hit it off. I'm lucky to have such great people for vassals. After 4+ hours of fighting I made 75. I trained Creature and poured my saved points into it, 28 million worth. This got me to 227. It is not enough for VII's but with the coming changes VI's are ok. After selling off my junk I logged some mules and dumped all his old Creature armor on them. I then logged Fist and give him his armor. I have enough stuff for a new set of GSA or GSC, depending on what I decide on. I figure Fist will go make the new armor. GSC would be great for Fist as he does not bane his armor. Jr needs to bane as he will pull out his wand to imperil. Without that ability Fist is stuck with pounding away. The advantage is in buffing and the amount of comps to carry. While I was at it I decided to check out if I'll save any pack space or not with the changes. I have 56 different comps, not counting scarabs. With the loss of three packs that is 72 and with the new taper I end up losing 17 slots. Not good news as Jr has big problems with pack space. The savior is with Creature I don't need as many mana stones. Other than fast stocking there is no reason to get the new packs with Jr. I might pass with Fist as well. Stocking is a pain but I cannot afford to lose the slots. Still have not totally decided but I have a few days. Mage I'm sure will gain space as he uses peas. I have been slowly cutting down on them as I carry a lot of comps and was not running out of some types. About all I really needed in peas is Onyx powder and Red tapers. Even with carrying two hundred of each I was running out of those. Deadeye only has Item for now so he'll gain space. I plan to get both Creature and Life in time with him so he will end up losing later. Developers chat What a mess. For one most of us could not get into it. It crashed our browser and there was no way to make it work. Many of us thought there was some sort of intelligent test involved. The reason we say that is, by the questions, only people with and IQ below 50 got in. There were no less that three question on house hooks, like that is really important. Who would win a sword dual between two developers, who cares. Many of the questions had already been answered many times or were in the letter to the players. Most of the questions were along those lines and not worth watching. Despite the lack of brainpower some information did make it out. Monarchs will be able to make ten announcements a day instead if three. There will be a different pull down for buffs and de-buffs on the screen. This will let me remove mage minder. There is also something about Grivvers and the next set of quests. I wish there was more but and hour of questions came down to that. Why bother to ask us then. In our town there was this big debate over what ended up being called, "The Wall". There was an exit street to an undeveloped section of town. A few of the owners decided to block the street with a homemade wall. They did this to keep traffic from passing their house. It was illegal and unauthorized. The reason they got away with it was they were rich. With that street blocked all the traffic was directed to another street. Those people did not have the money to force city hall to do the right thing. All they could do was make a lot of noise. Now the entire town wanted the wall removed. Everyone know it was illegal and that the only reason it was not torn down was corruption. One person I know used his truck to knock down the wall and the city put another one up. After a few people were tossed out of office and it looked like the Mayor was next they decided to do something. They paid $14,000 for a study on the streets. The study took them past the election. They had high hopes that the study would say the street should be blocked. Well the study came back saying the street should be open. It was a major exit for that part of town and it was designed to be there. It made no sense to keep it close and it should never have been closed to begin with. Guess what happened? Nothing. The wall stayed. The entire 14k of our money was a sham cover. They never intended to do anything but what their rich friends wanted them to do. This came to mind when I saw the results of the Macro/chain study. The results were lopsided in favor of getting rid of macros. It was half and half on chains. Given that the chains and macros voted with all their accounts and most everyone else only voted with one the results should have gone the other way. So the overwhelming majority of players want macros to go away and at least half want chains to go away. What are the results, nothing, it all stays the same. So why the hell waste our time with a survey if you have no intention of doing anything about it? Where they hoping for different results to support the firmly set position? Turbine keeps thinking they can outsmart the macros. Given the developers are very smart and have more knowledge of the insides of the game I can understand why they feel that way. What they don't understand is the macro makers have a lot more time then Turbine does and their job is simpler. They can figure out how to cheat no matter what Turbine does or what changes Turbine makes. Only by changing the CoC to ban macros will they ever get a handle on this. Of course if they are just marking time until AC2 we will never see a change. What is disturbing is their thinking they can make AC2 macro unfriendly when it has been proven over and over again that the macros will beat them every time. Why should AC suffer the rubbish of the other games castoffs? With their lax CoC and little enforcement of what there is we are attracting every grief player kicked from the other games. Many of us fear that AC2 will be more of the same. I was strongly tempted to move to AC2. Now that macros are allowed I don't think I'll bother. Turbine answers Jason Booth made the below post in the Warcry board. It explains a lot. Myself, and most people at Turbine are adamantly against combat macros being allowed in the game, but unfortunately, we dont control that aspect of the game. Those decisions are made by our publisher. He did not name the publisher but we can assume they mean MS. As it is far to big to respond to our complains we are stuck with the !@#~!@#$@# rejects from other games destroying ours. Personally I think Jordan Manx idea is one they need to explore. To read his exultant column go to; http://www.ac-2.net/features/columns/jordan/jordan_06-03-02.php. His idea it to have a Combat macro's allowed server and ban it elsewhere. This will let the people to lazy to play the game still lord over others with their god like players and let the rest of us play in peace. A simple but elegant idea. This is so simple I'm shocked Turbine has not done it. There is a big problem with melee balance. The problem, other than melee being so far behind mages, is the cheapest skill is the strongest. Nv_Likinsly suggested a great answer to this problem, increase the strength bonus! Such a simple elegant solution. Dagger is the only melee skill that does not use the strength bonus. It does not disturb the balance between the other skills because they all get the same increase. Of course us old school melee with less that 100 strength start will not gain as much but any gain is welcome. (Fist started with 80 and Elder 75.) I'm sure that there is something about this that Turbine knows and we don't. There has to be something that makes it not as simple as it looks. Otherwise why haven't they done it already? When my 120lv UA is doing 8 points of damage and is getting out killed by a 60lv dagger something needs to be done. The dagger skill is strong in three ways. With the lower cost you can spec Life, Melee and Lore with the ability to get the other three skills (Item, Creature and Mana Conversion) by level 75. With no need to put max points into strength a dagger can have the max melee defense. I ran the numbers and it averages around 17 points of melee defense over the "Fist" UA template. This will be a big benefit when drawing the Wand for Imperil. So not only is it the best attack skill (other than a 16 point sword) it is the best melee defense and melee magic skills. At this point I would not recommend another melee skill than Dagger. It cannot get any worse than that. Increasing the damage of all the other melee skills would not fix all of it but it would be nice to have an equal chance at damage with the least costly skill in the game. Jr II I took Jr to EVL today. It is only a test of sorts as his buffing is very long for what he wants to do. (Five to six minutes.) It will be better when VI spells have triple the time. Of course I'll lose 5 or more points off my skills so the test will be invalid but it give me an idea what to expect. Even 400+ melee defense gets hit a lot of they pull a wand out. My intent was to see if; 1. I could land an imperil often enough and 2. Could I pull a wand and live. It was a good test that told me a few things. I can imperil with very few resists. I'll be adding to Life a lot as it is still very cheap compared to the other skills. Of course I'll be working hard to make up for the five-point plus loss on all my skill. I'll have far more to make up than a mage does. Strange how this mage nerf is going to hurt melees so much. In any case a VI imperil worked wonders. I would kill an EV in seconds. Hitting for 250 crits instead of 60 and with low hits over around 70 I could kill three Olthoi before I could kill one un-imperiled one. The problem of course was the damage I would take when pulling a wand out. I found that if I was not unlucky with fizzle fests (Great random number gen you have there Turbine.) I could land on two EVs, pull my weapon and take about 100 points of damage. Then a few swings each would put the Olthoi down. I could not pull my wand when facing three Olthoi. As I put more and more into melee defense I hope to cut down on the hits. The goal is to be able to mostly evade even with a wand in hand. That may be a long way off but it should be possible. I did not try draining as of yet. As I'm landing the Imperil with few resists I should be able to but I was not confident enough in the skill to try it yet. The goal right now is to imperil and get that weapon and shield out as fast as possible. With the effectiveness of imperil I can stop raising my attack skills for a while. Where Fist never has enough attack skill Jr can depend on Imperil to carry him over the hardest monsters. This means the next 20+ levels will go into Endurance, Melee defense and magic skills. Lady Quest Our alliance has planed the Island Lady quest for weeks. We had twelve people lined up to get the reward, including Fist de Yuma Jr. We had good leadership, strong fighters everything to make it a successful quest. It was a mess. Several things worked to mess it up. A load of Elders decided to join in hopes of getting a key off the floor. After we started there were a lot of non-Elders who joined hoping for a key off the floor. Stay Puff, MT all around grief player, decided he has something against Sword Blade. Sword Blade is twice the man that Stay Puff is. The little people with small narrows minds hate those better than them so this can be expected. The crowd was so bad that there was no way we could do the quest. We decided that dropping off a bunch of us near Relic Town would help. This meant that many people who wanted to do the quest for the adventure were left out. Those that did do the first two parts had to contend with the little kid and his ban of kiddy. We were very disappointed when the little kindergarten group ran past us to Relic town. By the time I was buffed the little kid had killed the watchman. We were lucky that most of us made the portal. The other day mental midget killed the watchman and the entire group missed the portal. All their work was gone so he could get his name in lights. Inside Stay Puff said if we gave him a bunch of stuff he would stop messing with our group. It has come down to this. You have to bribe the grief players to leave you alone. Of course it was understood that giving him the items he demanded would have changed nothing, no one trusts his word. Before we were done buffing the pathetic moron had killed our leader. As I was buffing I got low comp warnings. I was new to doing this much buffing with Jr but thought I had enough comps. Somehow I had burnt almost 100 of one comp and almost 75 of another. I was lucky that Mike Hex was there to help me out. He gave me some peas and a splitter. Another Elder also gave me some peas and a splitter. I'll have to get those back to them as splitters cost too much. I increased the amount I buy of all my comps right after the quest was over. It was very embarrassing to look like a newbe who forgot to stock up. With no leader and so many people it started bad and got worse. Stay Puff never fought, just watched for ways to hurt people. When one person hit the switch to open a door he would hit it again to close it. This would trap people behind the door. When we finally got close to the end and he could do no more damage to people he ran ahead and killed the lady. Several people logged in disgust. Fair Ellen, one of the nicest persons in the game, was killed by one of Stay Puff tricks. She was one of the 12 who was to get the reward. Lrd Deathbringer, Balashs ppl, got her stuff and ported out in anger. So he missed getting the scroll as well. There were a lot of keys on the ground so those that joined to benefit from our quest lucked out. This made for a very long line at the chest. I asked if it was possible to log out as we had a lot of family over and they were setting down to eat. I don't know if this is true but they said I would be booted after 90 minutes if I did. Everyone said I could go to the head of the line. I asked a few times if anyone minded if I did and no one objected. That was a relief and Rosa was only a little mad at me being late. All the time Stay Puff was doing this I gave him chance after chance to change. When he showed up I asked him politely not to jump our quest. When others started cursing them out I told them not to. When Lrd Deathbringer was trapped behind a locked door I asked him if he would help him. I did not know at this time that Lrd Deathbringer was trapped do to Stay Puffs actions. He proved to me that he is just a bully who thinks he can get away with anything. I don't think the three-day ban he got for his actions on our quest will change much. Right now I have a letter campaign going to MS. Each person is to explain in detail what Stay Puff did to harass him or her and why he or she thinks it violated the CoC. With enough letters I hope to see the account get a lifetime ban. On MT you will see him or his other player kill the lady several times a day. Even those he does not jump constantly have to worry about it. Many just quit doing the quest when he logs on. Giving him a lifetime ban will also wake up the other Stay Puff want to be children. The Naked Dires run is announced!!! I received a nice letter asking I post the below. Not sure if I would do it though I'm sure I would live. High natural resistance and spec'd run would give me a great advantage over the newer templates. Give me your tired, your insane, your macrod asses yearning to breathe free, its time to tempt fate as we join hands and run naked across the dires. Just as Asheron intended, we shall don our birthday suits and (attempt to) cross the dires on our way through the wild and onto glory. Slow and young, fast and old, we will run as mortals and perhaps die as equals. No, this is not a race, its not a competition, and its definitely not a blood drive, its just our little insane way of having a little fun and wed like you to join us. On Wednesday, June 12th at 8PM (PST) we will be gathering in the main courtyard of Fort Tethana preparing for the run. We will be departing towards 88.3S, 64.5W (South Dires Lifestone) at 8:30 and not a second later. There will be an after event gathering in Hebian, so feel free to come whether or not you participated. The only buffing we want to see in Teth is Creature buffing, however, I personally dont care if you cheat and buff yourself with life prots. Hell, youre the one missing out on the fun, not me. ;) The rules are fairly simple. No clothing, no armor (no shields, no suits), no robes, no way no how. Leave it at home, naked or nothing. I also recommend and request that you please leave any valuables on your mules as there is a fairly decent chance that quite a few of you will not make it more than 10 clicks. With that said, the standard disclaimer applies. There will be body recovery assistance provided if absolutely needed. Word of mouth is our friend so please, tell one, tell all, set your MOTDs and pack your vassals. This is going to be one wild party and I dont want anyone to miss out. As for transportation to Teth. We will be summoning Teth from the Subway starting at 7:30 til 8:15. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail at diresrun@addictsinc.com or in game as Invariance. Hope to see you all there. :)