Healermancy

I was brainstorming healer abilities recently and came up with this one. I'm pretty excited about the idea, it's likely I'll release a test item soon, although I haven't started coding yet, so we'll see. The idea:

Allow healers to "burst" fallen people who are sharing them, but instead of a normal burst heal it instantly revives the person for X seconds. After that time is up, they die again, maybe retaining some of the damage they took while alive, making them harder to heal. They probably are only returned to a fraction of their health, maybe there would be an additional penalty if they died while this ability was active, but that probably isn't needed if we already penalize for damage taken. Healing received while the ability is active would work while the target is alive, but won't have any effect on how fallen they are (they will always return to their previous level of "fallenness", plus any additional penalty I feel is needed for balance/risk.)

I anticipate the ability largely being used instead of a chain for escapes, but I can imagine some other really cool uses. It's not uncommon for a very strong healer to be the last member of a group who is alive. That healer bursting up the most powerful fighter, and then healing another player while the fighter protects them sounds really exciting. I like the risk that the fighter in that case might end up unhealable as part of the last ditch gambit. I suppose on a routine hunt it could be used to burst weaker players for their last minute tags, which is significantly less exciting, but probably also fun for both the healer and the dead player who otherwise would have had to sit out the fight.

One great thing about this ability is Faustus, Sespus, and Horus can be important ranks. Some combination of Faustus and Sespus can determine how much the dead person is healed, and Horus could not only enable the ability to be used on people who are more fallen, but will be useful when raising fallens who take damage after this ability is used on them.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to make this ability trainable, my intuition is that it does, but maybe it needs a cap. For each rank to feel substantial I think it'd have to be pretty effective, but the ability has some natural caps (it probably doesn't make sense to go above 100% health, or stay alive more than some number of seconds). Or maybe it would end up being best as a consumable item primarily driven by existing stats. I'll probably start it off that way to test it out, that way I can play with balance without screwing up peoples training.

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.

To Do

Any posts with a "todo" tag are generally notes to myself. Things I've thought of doing, but don't have the time or inclination to do. They let me get my thoughts down so I don't forget, and also give readers an idea of what I've been thinking of so they can say complain about theoretical changes as well as actual ones. (When I have readers, that is. You have to use google to find me now.)

Random Ranger Changes

1) Last Hits

I've been going through the code using some new tools we got a while back to detect combat actions (like "swung" "swung and missed") to fix up a lot of older code that used hacks and tricks to find the same information. Stuff like poisonous snakes and amedons are a lot more likely to actually poison you/set you on fire when they should because of the fixes. (It goes both ways, there were some false triggers as well as cases that didn't get caught.) It occurs to me that rangers probably need the same overhaul for their last hit detection. Right now I believe if two people hit a creature at the same time the chance of the ranger getting the last hit is 50/50. And I don't know what happens if Bloodmage damage over time spells kill a creature when a ranger was the last one to hit it. I think the ranger gets it, even if they hit it 15 seconds ago, but I'm not entirely sure.

So they're long overdue for a refactor that tries to assure that if they hit the creature on the same frame that the creature died, they get the last hit. I don't know how easy this is as there still might be some tricky guesswork and timing issues involved even with the new tools.

2) Growling

Rangers should "growl" when in a shape changed form. It gives them a special speech bubble, the text log shows up as "growls" instead of "says", and it sometimes makes a growling sound. This is probably a trivial change.

3) Tracking

Tracking could probably be improved in a few ways, but the most important is giving an actual reason for training to a longer duration. Some possible improvements include automatically switching to another monster of the same type if the monster you are tracking dies and/or automatically finding a new target whenever you or the monster switches snells.

Discarded Abilities

Here are a few of my favorite ideas that didn't quite make it in to CTF.

Illusions/Hallucination - This could let someone toss a projectile at a group of enemies and cause them to see dozens of random sparkles and images (including flags and flag markers) for about 10 seconds. You would usually use it before moving in for a big attack to confuse the enemy.

I was really excited about this idea but never had the time to implement it. I also couldn't think of a class where it fit. Spy was the obvious choice, but they were already the most fully featured class: they didn't need more toys.

Speed Boost - It became clear in testing that speed was a huge asset. If you could outrun your opponent you could usually survive. That is why the flag decreases speed when carried. All too often once a flag was grabbed it was as good as captured. Slowing down the holder encouraged more fighting. It is also why the paladin saw a speed decrease. He used to be very fast so he could stay with groups and heal, but it became clear right away that speed and troilus was a nearly invincible combination.

Along those lines I wanted to give some class a temporary speed boost in order to catch up to someone at a critical moment (or get away). It never really fit the themes or the balance for the classes. Obviously it fits the theme of the Scout, but considering it is more of an anti-scout ability in terms of use, it makes more sense to give it to a slow class.

It came closest to being given to the Pusher. Allowing them to spend spirit to move faster, push further, and not suffer any "push back" from their push. But it never quite got there.

False flags - I thought it would be fun for spies to be able to set false flags on the ground, or carry a false flag. It would appear on the radar just like it was the enemies flag, causing people to chase you while a teammate snags the real flag. I also considered adding an "information" class that had all these information related abilities, including hallucinations.

Team beacons - I considered letting scouts set down a beacon that would direct all players on their team to that location.

I also thought about letting all players toggle an ability that shows where everyone else on their team is currently located relative to yourself: much like the flag markers work. Bonus for paladins: Color coded indicators to check on health. Overpowered bonus for spies: When disguised, you see the enemy instead of your own team. (That would never happen.)

Obviously if you are a disguised spy (uncloaked) this ability would show you as being on the other team, so it couldn't be used to sniff out spies, except that someone might be suspicious when a marker disappears or suddenly appears!

None of this got in because the markers get in the way of flag tracking, we'd need a more obvious flag marker before we could use these abilities well in ctf. But they work really well for the new game mode. Although they're less needed in such a compact space.