Fist de Yuma - September 16, 2003

This and That Well, got a whole lot on my mind but unfortunately most is non-AC stuff. I'll try to keep it to point as much as possible but I might want to wonder a bit off the beaten path from time to time. Most of this week has been taken up with the same as last week, playing my Xbox. The reason for this was a logic bug that locked up Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic with it about 80% done. I had 40 hours into it when this happened. The cause of the problem happens way before it locks up. I had three saved games going but in that time all had been overwritten. I called to the company and found I was SOL and had to start over. I was able to go from start to finish in 38 hours after restarting but Rosa was not happy with the late hours. The bug involves an escape from a spaceship. The player I used is a 14-year-old street-smart girl named Mission. While escaping she found a belt that allowed her to go into stealth mode, making her virtually invisible. After she freed the others I'm forced to use the three involved with the second part of the quest. This meant that Mission, along with several others, returned to my spaceship while the three of us worked to disable the tractor beam. We also got to kill a lot of Sith and Saul, the admiral of the fleet. We lose my girlfriend to the dark lord there as well. After we escape there is a big decision with the entire group. It is a set dialog of course. When it is Missions turn to talk the program cannot find her. She is still in stealth mode! Game stops and the only thing you can do is restart or load a saved game. All my saved games were after she was unplayable. At the end of the column I plan to put a review of the game. It might seem strange for me to give a review for an Xbox game when everyone here is PC. That will change in a few months when the PC version hits the shelves. For now it is Xbox but that is only because MS bribed them to delay the PC version. I hope the very few bugs are removed from that version and more content is put in. Side quests are a lot of fun. More would be better. Great loss I was sad to hear that a long time friend lost his battle with lung cancer in March. Trog of S.A.S. was Bleu Sky's vassal for many years. While I never had the chance to adventure with him we talked a lot. I was greatly saddened when I found out he was too sick to play AC a while back. It was a shock to find he did not make it. In this age so many survive things that were pure death when I was a kid that it is a shock when someone fails to beat something. In the last few years I have seen many people battle and lose their fight for life. I guess as I get older I'll see it even more. Still it is not something I'll ever get use to. Archers I did a lot on tank Archers last week. This week I would like to talk about other forms of the class. While I'm sure there are a lot of odd templates out there most focus on magic at the expense of defense. It was commonly known as a Mage with a bow template. If you would like to see what is was like on the old days you can try this. Take a 113 mod bow with normal arrows out and do a little hunting. I recommend you stick to very low-level monster because believe me you will not be hurting them much. Because of this problem players tried to find a way to de-buff the monsters. The first odd template to get popular was the Og Archer. This was one that went 10, 10, 100, 10, 100, 100. They would spec Creature and Life while training Bow. As you can see this was a bear to start. No melee defense, no healing and no Lore. Remember this template came well before you could change your skills. The low strength was not a big problem because they never train melee defense. Low quick was not a problem because no melee and it only take a little bit to get their speed up. The reason this template worked was most monsters had very low missile skills at the time. Turbine changed this but back then even an untrained bow could hit most monsters. In fact we use to level low melees with a bow because it did so much more damage. At one time I felt this was the most powerful template there was. Two things pushed the Og Archer to the dustbin of history; monster changes and level VII spells. The changes in monsters gave them a fighting chance against Archers. After a time a trained bow had a hard time hitting anything close to their level. With the advent of level VII War spells a mage could use war and hit as hard or harder than a bow. Given that you do not have to change from wand to bow even the added points for war is well worth it. Remember this was before the great bows of today or even the deadly arrows. There is still a place for this template. I have heard of Archers de-buffing monsters in VoD. Given the extreme conditions there I can see the value of an Og Archer. For anyplace else you would be better off with a pure archer or pure mage. Melee Melee templates seem to have stabilized into a few distinct categories. They are; Lot of secondary skills, PK, Spec'd Life and Spec'd Magic defense. Fist de Yuma has gone the spec'd Magic Defense route as I have written about. His skill is currently at 282 base, very high for a melee. His only other skill is Lock pick. To get lock pick I had to finally give up missile defense. I wanted to keep missile, despite the worthlessness of the skill overall, but I have to have at least one Melee with Lock pick. The idea of a Grief UA is fair power with great defense. UA will never have the hitting power of the bigger skills. To make up for that UA needs maximum defense. As Mage is resisting most war spells with 10 less points I expect Fist will be in great demand for quests. Of course Turbine is having a bad habit of putting un-resistible magic skills on boss monsters these days. I'll get into that later. Jr has gone the spec'd Life route. Even with the hardest hitting melee skill, sword, there will be times when good life skills are needed. With a base of 306 and a goal of 315 he will be resisted more than not when fighting the big stuff. Nevertheless he has a chance of de-buffing a monster where the trained Life will have a zero chance. Really I don't expect to see many spec'd Life Melee in the future. With the advent of Render weapons the need is no longer there. If this were my only melee player I would be looking to move it to trained and pick up some secondary skills. I'm not sure if the "Lot of skills" player is a melee or a mule template. There are a few reasons to make a "Lot of skills" player. Using a skill, like dagger, a melee can quickly build up a tradesperson. The low cost, and ability to sell skills, a single account player can build up an outstanding tradesperson. They will never be as good as the chained tradespersons in armor and weapon skills but for the render skills this would be ideal. If smart they would swear to other tradespersons in their allegiance and build towards a community. The new PK melee has reversed a long time trend in endurance. When we started playing most melees had 50 or better endurance. Slowly the word got out that players were better off with less endurance. You started seeing players with 30 endurance and in time 10. A while back I started to notice that the PK's were moving their quick to endurance. The current trend is to have 100 endurance! The other trend is to move their melee defense to trained. Many of the top PK melee today have the extreme template of 100, 100, 100, 10, 10, 10. Given that most of the top PK-Melee on MT are in chains they use xp to overcome the disadvantages of this template. I can vouch for the fact that they can still adventure. Paraduck has such a template and could still baby-sit Fist though the Caul. My baby PK is using 100, 60, 100, 40, 10, 10. I hope to have the time to level him up a bit soon as PK-Lite is looking very exciting. We will know more about that Thursday. Turbine did us a big favor when they put in the skill temples. The purist might not think so. I feel it gives normal players a shot at the extreme templates. Those with less time would find it hard to level up such a template. Of course buff-bots are a big help. Before they came out it was very hard to level these templates. Getting them over the hump to self-buffing was not for the timid. Today we have PK templates that will never be self-buffing. I expect this is not the last word on Melee templates. It is likely not the last word on any of those I'm write about today. Turbine has made changes that evolved templates and will likely do it again someday. Mages Skill temples and extended spec ability has really affected Mages. For a long time there was only two long-term templates, Og and Battle Mage. I'm getting a little ahead of myself here as I want to talk about the older templates first. If you hit the CoD board you might find discussions on some of the older templates. Some of these did their best to get Melee defense into the mix. I was talking to Jeff today and he wanted to know if a melee defense mage was possible. He is tired of getting his head handed to him by melee monsters. Mages are having a difficult time with hard hitting monsters like upper level Olthoi and Tuskers. Unfortunately there is no solution for this. Even Melees with very high skills and a bonus on their weapons are being hit. With no bonus a mage has no chance of avoiding a hit, even if they max'd quick and coordination. That was not so when we first started. Melee defense on a mage worked when we started because you did not need the focused skills you require today. I have an old mage on a different server with melee defense. To get melee defense he had to lower focus and self and not spec his magic skills. For the time it worked but as content was pushed up it became unplayable. It was not beyond memory that someone with 400 skill was a God. There were very few of them and most were leveling freaks. I remember the shock when someone with 400+ skill had a hard time hitting a Plasma Golem. This was when the ladies island first opened up. With today's content 400 skill is just getting started. I can barely land on most plans monsters with 411 war and any de-buffs puts me over a barrel. For a while some suffered to make templates that are close to recommended today. A template that took until 90lv to mature, and was very ineffective until then, was more than painful to make. Remember this was before the popularity of chains and buff bots. Even if you got buffs from someone they only lasted 8 - 16 minutes. There were attempts to make chains but without macros few of them succeeded. Very few players wanted to place a player at the bottom of a chain with the promise of xp in the future. Few players knew how to set up and run a chain. Macros changed that but I'll not go into that today. Many of these odd templates did not have war. While an Og working to 26lv was one thing, a Grief template that did not mature until 90+ was another entirely. Content has narrowed the choices of templates. At the same time Turbine has removed the pain of creating the templates. Ease of leveling, left over points from creation and skill temples mean you can start with an easy template change it to an extreme one later. I recommend everyone work towards one of three templates; Battle Mage, Battle Og or Grief Battle Mage. A BM is spec'd War and Life. The BM has been around from around six months after retail. For its time it was considered extreme because it did not mature until 55. Remember that there were very few players above 50 at the time and a 57lv player sold for $5,000 on E-bay. Things started to change as Turbine fiddled with the skills. An added skill at 32 lowed five levels off of the mature date. The skill added with the DM upgrade lowered it another five. The skill temples made this an easy template to create. The big advantage to this template is lots of secondary skills. The Battle Og is spec'd War, Life, Creature. I expect we will see most players use this one. It is an outstanding support player along with solo ability that was unheard of when the game started. The added advantage of this skill is six points left over for a secondary skill. Most take lock pick. Fist de Mage is using this template. The Grief BM is what I'm working Fist's Armorer towards. (He is finished at 115 but you can do it faster if you're willing to do without lore.) This is Spec'd Magic defense, Life and War. This is a solo players dream. Abin is using this template for solo killing in VoD. I expect to see FA walking almost unmolested around the plains when he is finished. Of course all these templates, with the exception of BM, take a long while to mature. The ability to have a lot of skills also makes the BM a great tinker/tradesperson player. That was my original idea with FA. The pure fun of playing him changed my mind. Also the ability to make my old Archer into an Armorer had a lot to do with it. Changes I've written here about a lot of the changes Turbine has made to the game since retail. Each has fundamentally changed the game. Two were skill points being added and skill temples. These changed the game more than anything else but I've gone into detail about them above. A lot of smaller changes have also affected the game in a big way. When we started playing spec'ing a skill did not have the great advantage we have today. In fact spec'ing a skill started looking like a losing proposition about three months into the game. Paying double the cost for a skill for only 10-12 points was hardly worth it. At this point we started seeing second-generation templates with few if any skills spec'ed. Turbine got the point and around March made a change that added another 10 points or so to spec'd skills. This instantly made the second-generation templates obsolete and brought in the third generation template era. The last change came about a year ago when they added ten more points to spec'd skills. Armor started out at a fraction of the AL we have today. In fact the original Shadow Armor was removed from the game because it was unbalancing. With only around AL 200 and average protects it was too powerful! For a long time the armor to have was leather. That may seem amazing today but it was true. I had a set of leather leggings with AL 125 that was god like by the standards of the day. Why was this true? It was protects. Most armor in those days had very poor protects, if any at all! Yes, most armor had holes of zero protects. If you did not bane them the AL was zero. As few people banned we had a big problem when attacked by things that used one of the missing elements. Olthoi Acid attacks were quite deadly in those days. A single Ash G could wipe out an entire party of high levels without breaking a sweat. Finally Turbine decided to change the armor. It took a few patches to get it all upgraded but armor with .4 or better protection became standard. The mattie coats and leather legging were muled off and mages started putting on armor. Melees stopped fearing Ash G's and mountain rats. The next change to effect armor was tinkering. With a little luck, a lot of time and work, a player can get a set of AL 400 armor that buffs to over 1200 with banes. While Turbine is upgrading monsters many of us still feel like walking walls of steel. Adding length to spells was a really big one. To begin with spells lasted around 15 minutes with many creatures spells going half that. This was why we did not bane. If we did one of the 10 minute buffs some do today you would only have 4 to 5 minutes of hunting before having do it over again. First they extended buff times to 30 minutes. Then 45 minutes with VII's and finally what we have today. Before these changes a mage was extremely hard to play. Speaking of mages another several changes to the magic system have also helped them out. I'm mainly talking about comps and pyreal. To those new to the game you may not know how hard it was to carry comps in the old days. We had our packs filled with comps that were heavy and had a high burn rate. The first change they made was to lighten up the comps. I'm not sure how heavy a comp was back then but I would guess double what they are today. Next addiction was peas. This helped extend the time a mage could stay out hunting. Before peas most mages had to head back to town for comps very often. Few could carry enough to stay out over an hour. Another big change was the /fillcomps command. Before that was created we had to buy each comp from the vender. Talk about a pain! Another problem was Pyreal had weight. Mages had to be careful not to sell so much they hit 300 burden. If they did they had to find away to get under burden before they could buy anything. Before pyreal became weightless it was hard to cash a D note and M notes were unheard of. Minors, Moderates and Majors have had less effect because they were mostly matched with upgrades in content. It just added another round of things to acquire. More recent we have had the Rend upgrades. This is a tremendous change for us. My mages are killing EVs with one shot about half the time. My melees have vastly increased their damage. I worry about people not banding together more because these weapons make solo so easy. Big Quests Strategy I had intended to write about the Harbinger quest today. The problem is it is 1am and I still have a lot of work to do with editing. So I'll put that off until next week maybe. What I will say is this was a big test of my magic defense strategy. Remember from above I felt a high magic defense would make up for my lower damage. This partly worked as we moved down. I resisted a lot of war spells if few de-buffs. When I hit things like the floor damage I had no resists. It could be that this damage is not made to be resisted. Where the strategy failed completely was when we faced the Harbinger. Nothing he tossed was resisted. I might as well have had zero magic defenses for all it affected his ability to land on me. This inability coupled with circumstances almost robbed me big time. We had killed him once and half the people got an item. I had no idea what the item was for but figured you needed it to get the reward. (Plus one to the desired skill.) In fact this item is not needed and groups are better off existing at this point. (It is for the title and, really, is that worth another battle and deaths?) Not knowing what the spawn rate was we figured five minutes. That meant a rebuff, which we started. In fact the spawn is closer to two minutes, maybe three. It spawned with all the Melees/Archers holding a wand! I had my weapon and shield hot keyed so I quickly aborted my buff, re-equip and rushed to battle. There were two problems with this. One was I had my normal melee shield hot keyed and not the one that lowered war damage. The other problem was none of the other melee reacted with the speed I did. I think many were using buffing programs what are hard to abort. I found myself fighting it alone. The mages did what they could to help me out but when the Harbinger starts to focus on one melee, no matter who they are, they're in big trouble. I took some heavy de-buffs. I dispelled them but not before taking big damage from a War spell. A mage healed me but the next war had me in danger of dieing. I took off running a circle around him but did not get far. I'm not sure of there was much I could have done different. Maybe some PK experience would have helped me. In any case my strategy of high magic defense on quests did not work in this case. What was funny was I had to work to avoid the portal. If I had lagged into the portal it would have saved me several hours. To set up the story for next week; You have to exit the portal to get the reward. This meant that even killing the Harbinger had no effect. I had to go back, re-kill the Harbinger and exit the portal to get the reward. Those that exit through the portal are not allowed back into the dungeon. This meant my group was unable to help me go back and kill/exit. I'll also try to fit in my Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic review and some guest columnists' work I have stacked up. I'll start early this week so I can get it all done.