Fist de Yuma - October 8, 2002

Joy Joy do the Joy-Joy dance In case you have not heard Ken Karl is going to have +Admins start banning people who run combat macros. This will not be immediately as they need to get some tools in place to catch them. For one they need to find a way to prevent +Admin detection. Macros can add a flag to log off when a +Admin shows up. The cheaters will do a lot to try and get around the system but overall I think Turbine will catch most of them. At the very least the cheaters will not have the "It is allowed" excuse. Most of us knew that it was allowed only because Turbine/MS had no clear way to stop it. Of course many of the cheaters have threatened to quit. I hope they do. For every one that quits I predict two players who have quit because of macros will return. Ken Karl has taken a lot of abuse over macros. I'm sure he was as frustrated as we were over them. The lack of tools to clean up the game prevented him from doing so. He felt that if they could only get rid of 50% of the cheaters it was not worth the effort. So expect to seen a horde of cheaters (macros) going 24/7 in the best places to hunt for a short while. They will get as much as they can before being forced to stop. Meanwhile excuse me as I dance. Joy-Joy dance. The really funny thing on the board was the macro supporters. They came up all sorts of lame reasons it would not work. Many tried the flood approach. They thought their few numbers could be made up for with 30 postings each. There were some that bragged there was no way for Turbine to stop them. The really funny ones thought that half the server would quit over it. Half? They really think that half the server macro? Hell the survey Turbine did had overwhelming support for banning macros, this despite macros supporters being sure to vote all their accounts. If we lost this type of player the game will improve even more than ridding us of macros. Arrogance loud mouth kids are not what any game needs. Meanwhile excuse me as I dance. Joy-Joy dance. Why Archers? Why O Why is it that if there is a total ass in a place it is almost always an archer. I have never had a melees or mages do what archers routinely do. A passing mage will toss and imperil or heal. A passing melee will heal me. A passing archer will start shooting over my shoulder. I have a 60lv archer and do my best to never shoot into another person's battle. This may mean waiting a few second to be sure the monster a person is attacking is not my target but it is something that an archer must do. I'll give an example of the things I face. I was headed to get a pincer in EVL with my mage. When in one battle a Melee ran over and healed me. Remember I'm a running Fist de Mage at the time. When I got to the pincer room there was two Melee's and an Archer. There is a spawn and four EV's start attacking the melee's. From across the room the Archer starts firing into the battle. One spawns in front of me, I'm even with the archer ten feet to his side. I put bludgeoning vuln in it and start my windup for shock wave. The archer stops firing at the Melee battle and kills the one I vuln'd with a single arrow. He then turns to the Melee battle and starts shooting into that again. Of course one of the EV's run towards the archer, dragging the melee while another EV gets back shots on him. The EV is right in front of the Archer so I figure I can safely fight without him interfering. An EV comes out of a side passage and I fire off Bludgeoning Vuln. The archer abandons his battle to one shot my target before my war spell goes off. I would really want to stop my war with griffer archers. It is getting old. There are so many of them who think this is a single player game and the hell with anyone but them. That is so short sighted. Melee, Archer and Mage working together can do so much damage it is scary. Archers have a weakness of being shield-less and need mages and melee to be effective in big battles. Why they would infuriate the people they need to play at advanced levels is beyond me. All I can think if is they don't understand how much better off they are working at a team. Filling up (This was written before the Ken Karl statement on Macros was posted. I cleaned up a little of it but some is dated.) One things that Turbine needs to look at is crowded spots. The crowding creates stress and short tempers. I know of many who accept more limited play so they can avoid crowded places. Places like EVL are crowded for a reason. Actually there are a lot of good reasons EVL is packed. It is a sign that Turbine did something right. The next step is to fix the crowding by adding dungeons such as EVL to other places. As bad as the Crit and BSD are now imagine what they would be like if there were only one of them. When this idea was brought up in the VN board there was an unexpected reaction. Some were against it because it would give combat macros another spot to camp. I'm not sure if that would be true. More likely it would spread out the combat macros than bring more in. (Of course the new policy makes this point moot.) In any case two or three more EVL's would help the normal non-cheating player much more than the cheating Dweebs. As it is a melee wanting to level would be better off in the Grotto than EVL. Combat macros are everywhere and there is nothing we can do about it. The best we can do it try and ignore them until the tools are in place to clean it up. Opposing a good idea because it helps something you hate is understandable. We have to put that chance behind us and support something that helps the non-cheater, even if it helps the cheater as well. Clarification Some people got upset over the German reference I had last week. Others were upset that I even thought their grabbing the spawn was something wrong. As far as the spawn issue I guess we have different ideas. No one owns a spawn but there should be some respect for the person who got there first. There are enough places to hunt that there is no need to poach. At least ask. If they had been smarter they would have had a mage willing to imperil and hunt with them. When I see an American being an ass to someone I get angry. I have seen players curse out others for speaking a different language. That is stupid. I have seen Americans toss insults to others for their country and do my best to get them a vacation from the game when they do. The majority of Americans are not like that. Nevertheless a handful of them can create a lot of grief for the majority. We are all labeled with their misconduct. People from other countries are not blameless. There are many who are insulted by anything an American will say and have a very distorted view of what America is about. The reasons for this is not something I'll go into but to say this distorted view is all they hear. It is generally up to their countrymen to fix the problem. If an outsider tries to correct their conduct it only creates more problems. This was my error in the last column. I shouldn't have said they were German and instead talked to their patron of someone like Romside. This is a multiplayer. You have to play it with the idea that your actions influence the fun of those around you. If you act like you are all that matters you hurt the game and, in time, your own enjoyment of it. Look long term when you play. Big change Someone asked me if I had heard anything about specialization changes coming. I had been out all that day with Doctor appointments so I had not heard a thing. I asked what he had heard. "We are getting 10 points added to spec'd skills in the next patch." My reaction was "Rrrrright", which for those that don't know the jingo means, "No way". I said I had not heard that rumor and would track it down. Well it was no rumor. Turbine in a note to the players said this is going to happen in the next patch! As my players are very spec'd heavy this is great news for me. The only drawback will be having to start working on War again with Mage. I like to keep War within 10 points of Life. This means nine points of War at a cost of 900 million xp. Very costly and will take months of play. The biggest winner will be Jr. He spec'd Life, Melee and UA. Ten points of Life will mean far fewer resists and fizzles. It also means that combat use of VII's will someday be possible. You really need 360+ to use combat VII's with Life. This is far higher than any other magic skill. Jr's Melee Defense was going to be lower than Fists. He had to start with lower Quick to have enough Focus. With this change his Melee D will someday be even or higher than Fist's is now. Fist's skills are so high a skill that 10 points will not make much different. I always hit and I'm never hit in return. Well not totally true but mostly. I'll be able to pass on buffing Lore to equip some items. I might even get enough melee to evade the Queen. I had planned for 10 point into melee defense. This will mean 20 overall. For UA I'll gain twice. Damage with UA depends on strength and skill. With 10 more into skill I'll do a little more damage. Even better is the fact that the new infusing on the weapons work better with more skill. I have almost all my weapons with one of the two critical hits. My failure rate on Sunstone keeps me from having Armor Rending on any of them. My current adventures with Fist has shown me that level V and VI protects are a big drawback. After a vuln and blast he is running for his life. The only thing that kept him going on my last adventure was buffs from the mages. With this in mind I may have to push Deadeye a little less and concentrate on getting Jr higher. On WE my players will get a big bonus. It is at lower levels that this will be really strong. With a BM and spec'd Sword I'll have an easier time leveling them up. So overall I'm very happy. I'm guessing that all but a handful of the old second generation players will be as happy. I have one player (Soclaim) who is second generation. He has a lot of skills but way behind in the numbers. A little History If not a long time reader you may not know why second generations templates have so few spec'd skills or even why they are called second-generation templates. When the game started we had little idea what was needed for long-term play. We had a few hints that spec'ing skills was a good thing but no real data. Even people who had played in Beta were unsure. What evolved was templates with a lots of spec'd skills. The main distinction with this template was not maximizing stats. Mages were made with 90/90 self/focus or even less. Fist started with 80 strength and 90 coodi. This is something that would never be done today. A few of the more well known players started with stats in the mid 70's. The reason for this was the thought that we needed as much endurance as possible. There just was not enough points to have 50+ endurance and maximize skills. After a few months it was noted that the points for spec'ing was not worth the cost. It worked out to around 10 points total. It has been some time so I'm not sure of the exact number. You can be sure that, at that time, spec'ing a skill was a total waste of points. The points for spec'ing nowhere near made up for the lack of skills. In response to this a new template style became popular. This template had a load of skills but none of them Spec'd. Given the advantages of having the skills and the little advantage of spec'ing this template made sense. Turbine realized their mistake very quickly. Within a few months of the game going retail the word was out. They were going to improve the curve with spec'd skills. I'm not sure when this patch went in but I think it was around March of 2000. This change really helped us. The second-generation people still thought that having more skills was better and, for the content, they might have been right. What the second-generation players did not expect was that content would be raised to such a high level as to almost make the second-generation templates almost useless. This started when Aerfalle island was put into the game. Many second-generation templates saw that the points needed to be effective there were way beyond their ability. Remember this was before cheating was wide spread. There had been a trend towards melee's lowing the amount of endurance a few months into the year 2000. My second-generation Fist on Solclaim started to test this with a 30 endurance start. It was hard but after a time not impossible. For mages most spec'd Lore or Mana Conversion. Many would have id skills. As even the lower magic skills were enough to toss the max spells (level VI) at and early age there was not much need for spec'ing a skill. The idea of having 10/10 Coodi/Quick was not thought of. So there was no real changes in mages from first generation to second. Og the one eye started to talk about his new third generation template around August of 2000. Another writer did not like the Og template and pushed for the BM. The pain of the BM was seen as far to hard for most and the Og gained in popularity. I was one of the first to jump for Og the one eye's ideas. His logic made sense to me. This started the trend to third generation templates that are popular today. Low endurance for melee and as many spec'd skills as possible. Mages spec one or two magic skills and forget spec'ing lore or mana conversion. Max stats for your main skills and any skill that is not important or ever hit a ceiling was left at 10. You might say there are a few templates that can be called forth generation. These are templates that are almost impossible without cheating so I will not go into them. There has been a lot of changes to the game over the years. The first year had most of the important changes. These changes affected the game quite a bit. This new change will be right up their with the top ones. Adventure, if nothing else I got a tell from someone earlier in the week. He wondered if I would be available for the Gaerlan quest this weekend. I said yes and scheduled some time for it. He said to meet at the mansion at 2PM Saturday. I got to the mansion at the scheduled time but there was no quest going. Miss Smurfette had been asking around about the quest. Illumini also wanted to go. I was not sure if the three of us could do the entire quest alone but was willing to try. Illumini is a 126 BM and Miss Smurfette is a strong mage. With me as the only melee it was going to be iffy. There are some monsters that even a strong mage cannot land well on. MS has a tie that is a little run from the pit. We are still not sure how to trigger the portals in Eastham. We will need to find out as the route we took will not be available after the patch. We had a few people jump the portal. I told them not to follow us as they might die. They were all lower levels. The highest level of the group, around 39lv, decided to go with us. We did not pick a good place to jump. I took around 250 damage and Illumini landed with a grunt as well. Of course the 39lv went splat. We found pieces yards away from the body. I looted his body and MS volunteered to recall and give his stuff back to him. As it was his armor and diamond shield we felt it might be best not to wait. So Illumini and I waited for her to make the run back. The three of us started in. Many run through this part. We decided to fight our way in. We did ok until fighting three of the acid golems. I had to run and heal during the battle. I only have V bludgeoning protection. With a VI vuln I was taking big damage when they tossed shockwave at me. The three of us ended up in a corner. I had healed and was pounding away. MS cried out from a hit but did not run. Fist has few deaths because he knows the limitations of the system. I know that running away to a safe spot is the only way I'll live. Going out of combat mode and healing is far to slow. Also when you have a lot of damage failure during a heal is likely. Going into peace mode is good way to get a big hit on you With mage I'll tend to stand in and try to heal. I always feel I can heal the damage before taking another blow. When drain worked well that was the natural try. The problem with that is the monsters always hit mages. Before you can get that spell off there is a good chance the final hit will do you in. Many of the smarter mages have stam to health or other heals on their quick bar. I never got into the habit of doing that. Likely I would have saved a few deaths if I did. Whatever the reason MS did not run or have time to heal. A short few moments later she was dead. Illumini looted her body and the two of us continued on. MS said she would run back. A little while later we saw another death message from her. We negotiated the maze and seemed to be making good progress. Almost to the end we were in a big battle with elementals. In mid swing I froze. I quickly rebooted and logged on. I had not died but was at my LS in AB. The anti-cheat code had messed me over again. This was the second time in two tries that this has happened. I recalled to the mansion and MS arrived to pick me up. We ran back and did the jump, this time a better spot. We had to get another nugget as the time had expired. MS's body was not far from the start. I told her we should just run from there. Without Illumini big life skills landing an imperil was going to be unlikely. We ran but it was laggy. I had to wait and let MS catch up a few times. At one point I could not stop and lost MS completely. I had to slowly kill off the monsters and work my way back to her. We got to the end of the worse maze and found Illumini. He had been wondering around and had not found the golem. I saw a white dot coming through the maze. I quickly clicked to see who it was. It was my old friend Talon Proudhawk. It had been over a year since I last saw him. He joined up with us. It was a good thing because we lost the mages while running and got surrounded by a door. Talon and I cleared it but it was not easy. There was no place to run so if we got into trouble it would be hard to survive. Talon had to heal several times. I have put a lot into Magic defense so I resisted most of spells. Only the golems give me trouble and there no golems none in that battle. After we cleared that we got to the last room where the Golem and portal is. Both were missing. I know now why Illumini could not find it. We found our two lost mages on a ramp buffing. There were a lot of monsters trying to get at them but the ramp was safe. I buffed there as well. We headed back to the golem room and waited for a while hoping the golem would spawn. No such luck. While there I found that Talon had a very high weapon tinkering skill. MS had some iron on her she gave me. He worked it out at 92% to add to my Cestus. I was willing to take the chance as my skill had it far lower. He was successful so my Centus is now 5 to 19. It is doubtful if I'll get it any higher. With no golem we called it a wash. Someday I'll have this quest done. Meet the Fist's part II Fist de Yuma Jr Ok it is not the most original name I ever came up with. I made to many mistakes with Fist to make him my long run melee. I have some nice skills but I would dump a few for Life. With that not possible I created Jr. Those that were shocked with my low death total with Fist and Mage will be apoplectic with this one. I leaned how not to die and he has had the advantages of high level protects for his entire lifetime. At first Mage provided the protects and then he could self-buff. Also power-leveling is generally safer than general hunting. Created 07/13/01, Played 10 days 10 hours, Deaths 8, Level 84 Starting stats S 100 E 10 C 100 Q 50 F 60 S 10 Spec'd Melee Defense, Unarmed, Life Trained Lore Path Healing (9), Item (20) , Mana conversion (40), Creature (80/75 w/credit) Current Cost (in million) S 233 3.5 E 136 2.0 C 238 5.2 Q 182 3.2 F 196 4.5 S 146 4.5 Health 183 .5 Stamina 251 .5 Mana 255 .3 Spec'd skills Life 258 2.2 Melee Defense 321 5.2 Unarmed 338 5.2 Trained skills Lore 200 1.3 Creature 242 6.4 Healing 240 .06 Item 237 4.4 Jump 322 .03 Loyalty 141 .1 Magic Defense 156 .2 Mana Conversion 202 3.5 Run 252 .01 Plans; Lock pick at 105. As you can see this is a player in training. When the big adventure that requires a melee comes up I send the big guy. Jr mostly power levels when he plays. I have had him over a year and he only has 10 hours under his belt. Given that I average over 4 hours a day of play that is not much. He is at the point where only the really hard to land stuff resist his Life skills. With all my items Life buffs to 330. The added 10 points this patch will really be welcome. I'll still be 20 points from my desired level of 360 for using VII's in combat. The advantages of Jr over Fist will start getting bigger as he gets more XP. His Melee defense will always be behind Fist's because of 10 less points overall to base stats. However his UA started with a 30 point advantage. This means he will catch Fist soon in UA skill and surpass that quickly. His immediate disadvantage is magic defense. That also will go past Fist in time but for now this and health keeps Fist as the main for quests. Health will always be behind Fist but there are a few items that help Jr there. Fist needs every slot for protects. When there are monsters that don't use Fire or Cold he has a finger open for Elsa's ring. Jr can use the ring along with other minor items and still have slots open. When I find a Major Endurance item I'll have room to use it. This also means that Jr will require fewer mana stones as he does not have to keep a bunch of protect items charged. I have noted one very big advantage I never thought of when I created Jr. After a big battle Fist is sucking Stamina Elixirs or resting. Jr will pull his wand and use Revit to recover stamina. This means far less down time and he can carry far fewer Elixirs. Of course imperil is the bomb. When his melee defense is high enough that he stops having his head handed to him with a wand in hand it will really work well. Right now I can only use Imperil from a distance. When in combat pulling a wand to imperil will give me a lot of damage. With Life's ability to recover mana he can bane his armor. This is something that Fist can do but it takes far to long. Fist generally does not need to, as melee hits are not that common with him. Jr will be hit, especially when he pulls a wand. With the new points from spec'd skills I think I might be very close to semi-retiring Fist and letting Jr do the work. He will need to have a lot more health and stamina of course but they are cheap for now. I'm really happy with how he has turned out. I look forward to playing him a lot more. Next week I'll out profile Deadeye Fist.