Saturday, May 23, 2009

Poison

Poison isn't fun. The big problem with it is fighters are generally the ones that have the major defenses against poison, such as troilus and detha. One unlucky shot can mean a healer is poisoned for over an hour. And mystics? Forget it. The only thing that makes it bearable is that you can easily get rid of it by falling, but that isn't fun, just a nuisance.

So how should poison work in my ideal world?

1) It should reach full potency and reduce its effect much faster. Anything close to an hour duration is unacceptable for a "debuff" effect.

2) It should affect all classes more or less equally.

3) It should make things exciting rather than just be a hassle.

The solution? Well I don't have it solidified yet. But in terms how how to reach all points

1) This is just stat tweaking. Speed things way up. Preferably have it reach full potency quickly, stick there for a little while, and then rapidly dwindle. And I'd need to change the effect of potions so they're still useful.

2) There are a few ways to do this, but I don't want to reveal how the current system works. But I've considered having Awaria help out on the healer side. As well as generally tweaking the formula so it is more fair to all classes.

3) #1 already achieves this to some degree. The idea is the effect should be really worrisome during one fight, but after that fight is over you'll probably be fine. Potions might need to be reworked to provide resistance since using a potion in the middle of a fight definitely counts as a hassle.

I'd also like to remove falling as an option for getting rid of poison, but hopefully with the changes you wouldn't usually want to fall. I just don't think you should be rewarded for falling. When phasing in the new system I might keep the falling behavior until everything gets set and remove it when I'm sure the system won't make poison unbearable.

I plan to introduce poison resistance bonuses to people who have trained to make antivenoms. This doesn't fit any specific poison related goals, but it is something I generally like to do with trade skills. Just to give them some real combat related effectiveness to encourage real people to train them.

5 comments:

  1. *starts to build an altar for worshipping Slarty*
    Equalising it over the professions...

    The potions are actually very cool the way they are, just not used enough.

    The falling thing should only be done with when the alternative is working, please. Rangers got morphs for this strategy.

    Speaking of which, any chance there will be a potion against drunkenness?

    And poison resistance for potion makers is a real incentive to study the potions. Awesome idea.

    Awaria is about as attractive to train as troilus, so it would have to be stronger than the troilus effect.

    Just my random thoughts, at 5am after not much sleep ;)
    Talin

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  2. Woo, Slarty. Thanks so much for making a blog. And glad to see how much consideration is actually going into the game! Class imbalances regarding poison are a concern of mine as well.

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  3. Wonderful ideas, Slarty. The effect of poison on healers and mystics as opposed to fighters is a massive discrepancy.

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  4. I agree that falling to remove poison seems silly, a massive break from IC, and overall "bad."

    That being said, I still do it. Poison seems too common to carry potions. My initial thoughts on this were to simply make poison happen less often, but that would just result in people using the same "fall" exploit, only using it less.

    I like this increased speed in both directions effect. It seems an elegant mechanic. Perhaps if you were to do this, increasing the damage of any given poison could give a further incentive to using AV potions.

    Thumbs up.

    -Martilan

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  5. I like the direction you're going, although unless the recovery speed were very fast (on the order of magnitude of healing speed), I would still try to fall to stop the poison. Due to my training (I think - negative Evus), any poisoning is fatal. At least I'm sure it was a couple years ago, and I haven't noticed a change. So maybe the max poison rate would need to be tweaked too.

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