Fist de Yuma - October 15, 2002

New setup I really lucked out the other day. I was standing at the mansion and someone needed to dump their mule. I'm guessing this shirt had to high of lore for them but after patch Fist buffs to over 300. Anyway it is Piercing VI Armor V shirt. Given that not much hits me Armor is something I can skimp on. Where I mostly get into trouble is war spells, especially after a vuln. The shirt lets me change my set up so I can have Bludgeoning VI on. I also won a bid for some Major Magic Defense boots. This will let me dump the neck item. Not sure what I'll put in its place but it gives me options. This is one of the major problems with the Life less melee. It is really hard to get all the Life protection covered. Hollow Olthois I could not sleep. It was likely my eating pizza like I was 20 again. I like to eat but when you start to age it is not a good idea to overeat. In any case I decided to go hunt until I was sleepy. So the question was where to hunt. Given the hour there was a good chance that the Hollow Olthoi's were not camped. I decided to go check it out. I logged to activate decal, buffed up and recalled there. I had tinkered my Cestus twice since the last time I had been there. I also had added a few items such as Minor Coodi and Major Quick. I've also added points into UA and Melee defense. I felt I would do a touch better than the last time. The last time was great but I had to loot in battle. I could not keep the room clear because my kill rate was below the spawn rate. This time things were different. I cleared the room in under a minute and had a lot of stamina left. I settled between two pillars and killed each group as they spawned. I could not always kill one group before the next spawned but did so enough that I could loot in peace. Speaking of loot I really lucked out. The average for an hour there is three to four Sings and a few items of use. I started out finding a minor Focus and a Minor Mana Conversion helms on the first few I killed. I was picking up Steel like it was going out of style. I think I got 50 units over all. I was disappointed at first with Sings. I was there for some time without seeing a single one. I was worried that I had messed up Sixth Sense and did not have Sings being detected. I got a hit on a Sing so the Sixth Sense worry was alleviated. Shortly after I got another hit, then another. I was going though cycles of nothing and then a bunch. After I left I was surprised to see I had nine Sings. My old record was five. Given that I had empted my pack of Sings with a 35 sing bid on the boots this was more than welcome. I really should have gone back and did another hour but I was tired and it seemed a bit greedy to be camping it. After talking with Zikar for a bit I logged and went to bed. Skill sell back The below is in several parts. As information came out on skill sell back my early writing became obsolete. I'm keeping each essay in to show you how my thinking evolved. Be patent as you read each one if you know how it all turns out. I'll get around to showing each step as the information becomes available. First word comes out Skill changing is something that I would look forward to but worry about at the same time. It would be so easy to abuse. Given the track record of players in AC abuse will be the norm rather than the exception. The idea of a skill sell back would be to get rid of skills that have proven to be less than useful. Throw weapon, Missile, Leadership and a few other skills come to mind. By getting rid of Leadership, Missile and moving Run back to trained Fist de Yuma would be able to acquire Life. Where I see the abuse are those that will take easy skills and then transfer to more powerful skills later in life. I'm sure that we will be seeing a bunch of spec'd Life, War, Magic defense players in the future. The early pain of BM"s will be gone. Make a four school and then move War/Life/Magic defense to spec'd at a later date. Here is what I think the template of the month for mages will be. I'm assuming that it will be impossible to un-train a racial skill. Spec'd Life and Mana Conversion with War and access person trained. If it is possible to un-train a racial skill you would gain even more points. At level 7 un-train access person (+2) and pick up Creature (-8). Then get Item at level 20 (-8). Now you are a Spec'd Life mage and fully powerful. At level 40 move Mana Conversion (+6) to trained and spec'd War (-12). Now you have a fully functional BM at level 40 and never have to suffer a lack of skill for long. You can move Magic Defense up to specialized at 75 with the skill credit. There is even points to re-spec' mana conversion if you feel that would be useful. Given that any mage past 75lv can re-do their player in this manner it will change the game a lot. I like the idea of dumping unless skills and getting Fist Life. I like the idea that Mage could spec War. It will be kind of hard to do but possible. How I do it will depend on if I can sell a racial skill back or not. I would gladly sacrifice the ability to go Staff on a Crystal golem for spec'd War. If cannot un-train Staff I'll do something different. What would be the results of moving War to Spec'd? Simple, my base War will move from 319 to 350 base. With the new spec'd changes that will go to 360. That will mean a buffed War of 432. Mind boggling! Fist will change from a gimp to very strong. For one I would move Run to trained and pick up 4 points. I would drop Leadership for 4 more. I would also drop missile and have a total of 14 points to play with. Instance Life! Given that his missing Life skill is all that keeps him from being in the very strong category this would be more than great. The surprise will be Fist de Yuma Jr and Deadeye Fist having no changes. Other than the unlikely event of a racial skill sell back of course. I guess that means I made them right. The only change for later in life will be spec'ing Magic defense. Unfortunately this is not possible unless they allow un-training of racial skills. Like I said, this is unlikely. However it will be nice to have spec'd Mana Conversion with Jr. Whereas I would love to do this I worry that it is far too much. Gimp players made this game and it is time to reward them. Nevertheless having every player have the same skills will not make much sense. I would like to see some limitation to this. The inability to un-train racial skills will be one. A limit on the number of times you can do this will also help. Maybe one change for every 5 days of play would work. This will prevent the template I described above from becoming prevalent. Of course that would have players running a macros just to gain game time. Change two part one A day after writing the above more details come out. Number one you will keep unspent skill points from creation. This alone would be an amazing help for BM's. Two you need to go on a quest to change a skill. The quest is level 25 restricted so my template idea will not be as fast as I thought. Lastly this quest will have a two-week timer. A two-week timer is not that much. It will slow down things a bit but overall the spec'd Life/War/Magic Defense template will dominate, it will just take some time. To get Fist Life it will take me 56 days. This is if I hit it exactly right. Un-spec run (4), un-train Leadership (4), un-train Magic Item Tinkering (4) and lastly train Life. Of course there will be a big mental debate with myself on what to spec with Mage. A War that is not resisted would be great but with Creature going over 400 I always have the yield option. Spec'ing Magic defense will help me a lot more than spec'ing War at this point. To get both I would have to drop Creature to trained. I would rather not lose lock pick so the best I can get back is 8 points and that would take 50 days. Leadership and Armor Tinkering could go. I'll have the 12 points when I hit 125, sometime early next year. Tinker Mule One thing that will change for me is mules. I'll be making some mules with a little combat ability. After working them a bit I'll start picking up the tinkering skills. With max stats towards those skills I will not need to level them to high. The ability to un-spec the combat skills later will make it doable. It will not be fast or easy but it will let me grab back the points from Fist and Mage for more important things. When I first started to think of a tinker mule I thought it was going two be mules. Overall it still might be easier to have two mules but I have not run the numbers. What I did find was one mule could get max stats and be a halfway good fighter. My idea is to start a 4 school mage with the following stats. 100 100 10 10 100 10 Ok a mage starting with 10 self may not work to well at first. With level VII buffs we are talking enough to get it going. The three skills, Weapon Tinkering, Armor Tinkering and Magic Item tinkering, will all have the max stats. The tinker skills will be trained later in life of course but I would not use it for tinkering until the very end. This would take a whole lot of work and not be ready to work until high level. At that point it would have base 400 Weapon and Armor tinker. Magic Item would be base 350. I'm not sure if the base for Magic Item is to high but the max numbers are unknown at this point. It is possible they will change their mind on Spec'ing tinker skills in the future. The reason they are set at trained was to not give new players an advantage over the old. With the spec'd changes coming that is a moot point. If so this template would mature a lot faster. This template was created off the cuff. There might be some advantages with spec'ing some of the magic skills. It might make sense to spec War and grab other skills later. I looked at that to see what the path would be. This template could not go on its own as it is really made to be tweeked. With buffs you can put Creature and Item off until later. With point holdover allowed this would work nicely. This is what I ended up with. Spec War. Train Life and Mana Conversion. (4 points left over) Path Item (5), Creature (16), Weapon Tinker (26), Armor Tinker (40), Magic Item Tinker. (60), Lore (80) I added lore because of all the minor and major tinker items out there. I admit that this would take more work than many are willing to put into it. It would likely need some people to swear restarts to it as well. But the advantages will be great for the alliance that does it. Reading my mind I swore Turbine is reading my mind. No sooner do I get the above written then new information comes out to change it all. Most of what they said has little effect but there is one big one. This is a 50 point cap on Spec'd skills. This means everything has to be reworked. No spec'd Life, War and Magic Defense now. That is 60 points. For Mage, that will mean changing from an Og to a BM. I'll be able to make that change in 28 days. Of course that will mean being a Life mage for 14 days but I'll live. For those who worked hard to make a BM the right way I feel for you. Even those that start a BM now will have the ability to finish at 40. The two points that remain from creation will make a BM almost easy to make. For Fist this change is no change at all. I have 42 points of spec'd skills and will remove 4 of then when I move Run to trained. This would open up another debate for me. It would even be possible to spec Life with Fist. I'm not sure if I would want to drop missile as it has become surprisingly useful. I would also have to drop Lore to trained. The advantages of spec'd Life is overwhelming so this might be what I have to do. As all this will take quite some time so I can think about it. Taking it easy Sometimes it can be fun to just hang and talk with friends. I did not feel like hunting today. When I logged I was just going to sell off a few things and run an inventory program. My inventory program had been updated and was working again. It would skip things like scrolls and magic items after one of the patches. As scrolls and magic item were what I needed to look at that was a pain. I had downloaded the update a day before. After running the program I had a good idea of what I had. When you have two accounts and six mules a good inventory program is a must. I got a tell while selling about doing some Armor Tinkering for someone. After I got to the mansion a line formed for Tinkering. I was logging Fist and Mage back and forth depending on what tinkering they needed done. Duri mentioned he needed a few scrolls. Having just run the inventory program I started alt'ing out and checking his needs against my list. I got a few for him. That started others breaking out their mules and it became a scroll exchange program. I even got three scrolls that Jr needed. For the next hour or so I passed out "stuff" and others joined in. If I did not have it others would search their mules or it. Now a lot of the stuff given away this evening could be auctioned off on the VN board for goodly amounts. The Elders just give it away without any thought of compensation. It did my heart good to see Elder back to the way it was. For a while the new members were not in the swing of things. I was on line for around 3 hours and never hunting. I just talked to people, gave stuff away and was given stuff. It was fun. That is the great thing about a game like this. It is not all about killing stuff and leveling. It is also about having fun with friends. Word of Warning There could be a bug that will cost you items. I'm not sure of this is strictly Sanctuary or all portals but Sanctuary is all this has been reported for. A guy ported into Sanctuary to get some tinkering done. He moved his bow while still in portal space. When he came out of portal space the bow was gone. Others reported this happening as well. Be sure you are well out of portal space before moving items in your pack. Strange luck My vassal Wuyung has had great luck with infusing of weapons. I have done 4 or 5 for him and I don't think I have failed once. He has spec'ed Sword and UA so he has had a lot of weapons to infuse. He joked one day that I should give him all my weapons. He would have them infused and give them back to me. With him having 100% success and me hovering around 15% this seemed logical. Today he needed something done that was a lot safer than infusing. He had two bags of iron to add to his sword. This was only the third tinker. The iron was over 5 and the workmanship was 5. Using Caerthalion's Tinker program that give me a chance of 99.97%. So after beating the odd on infusing over and over again he gets a sword destroyed with a .03% chance of failure. This means with 10,000 tries this should only happened 3 times. Like the story said. It may only be one in a million chance you'll get eaten by a wild animals in your home, but once is enough. Meet the Fists Part III This will be the last of the Moringthaw players. I have players on all the servers but only WE is active. It is getting to I have a hard time getting there even. I might post the WE players next week. It will depend on how I feel. Deadeye Fist Created 6/1/01 Age 6 days 6 hours Level 60 Starting, Current 100 201 10 108 100 232 80 187 30 138 10 101 Health 146 Stamina 201 Mana 170 Spec'd Skills/ Current Bow 291 Melee 302 Lore 211 Trained skills/ Current Fletching 236 Healing 211 Item 142 Jump 184 Loyalty 108 Magic defense 74 Mana Conversion 141 Run 254 Unarmed 148 Goals Life at 75 Creature at 115 As you can see this is your base no thrills tank Archer. I ran into a PK Archer today that a very high UA could not touch. It seems by that I'm on the right track with melee defense. It will be a long while until he can fight big stuff without outside buffs but he is coming along. Looking forward to patch The only thing I really know about this patch is spec'd skill get 10 more points. That in itself would be outstanding. There is a rumor that the macro ban will go into place as well. If so I'll be doing a lot of dancing tomorrow. This group of developers seems to be very different than we had before. They are willing to take more chances. At the same time they seem to want to do it right. The delay last month with the patch was an example. They spent the time to make it right. No big bugs. For a while it seemed like patch day was something to be feared. Of course there could be very good reasons for this. Better tools, better support and/or more money. So I'll not condemn the former developers. Only praise the ones we have. Next week I did something today that I was sure I would never do. So far it has cost me a little stress but I hope to see that improve. I took Fist PK. So far it has not been a happy experience. I'm hoping that the lag with my IP gets fixed so I can at least last longer than 10 seconds against a mage. The biggest problem is I have to use inferior weapons. Anything worth using is also in danger of being lost. I'm not rich like some and what I have is precious. I already made an error and missed muleing an item. That was looted and I hope to see it returned. The main thing is I'm doing this for fun. The trashing kiddies are making that kind of hard. PK seems to be, fight if you are sure to win, all the while trashing the victim, or run like hell and escape if there any chance of losing. What issues I'll be printing next week remain to be seen. I'm not going to trash anyone as I have gotten away from that. It will be an effort to get around the emotions of the moment and give a clear impression of what happens.