Shattered Kingdoms

Only thing I can suggest is instead of being able to pick what enchantments you want have it do the following:

Item has no enchantments; c 'enchant armor' breastplate The breastplate now has runes of greatly increase *random* Be interesting if a single enchant would put the max runes of a various enchant onto the piece. It would make enchanting a bit faster yet still keep the element of wondering which rune will be placed.

A) Charm person takes 2-3 times as long to cast as other spells which are almost as devastating and have a lower concentration cost. The only thing that needs to be changed is that it does not need to bring back charmees with someone who quaffs recall, because this allows for drive-by charms.

B) I do not believe that the will save for charm person is actually bugged. I tested it myself with a 14 art sorc. If you disagree, then post your evidence.

C) Charm person has to be cast from a very fragile class, which if played against correctly, can be either completely avoided or forced onto the defensive within 3-4 rounds or sooner.

In conclusion, enchant armor does not need to change because of charm person. It needs to change because every spell sucks to fail a save against, and it sucks hardcore. Weaken, slow, curse, dispel, sleep, sanctuary and intimidation, not to mention <REDACTED> and <REDACTED> and <REDACTED> are all completely screw-you-through-the-roof bad to fail a save against. In fact, the only spell that doesn't suck bigtime to fail a save against is blindness. If you disagree then you're a noob that probably spam-dies or doesn't fight people that know how to play their class. Also, you probably don't know that your pants aren't meant to be worn on your head.

Dispel magic always will be completely sick awesome against prepared opponents, and I used it all the time as Antiira, just mostly only on NPCs because whenever I fought PCs I had better options in the form of cabal maledictions and damage spells.

I simply can't comprehend the assertion that it's just as bad to get hit with any of those spells as it is to get hit with charm person. You might as well be speaking a different language. I just don't get it. There's nothing I can say to address your argument because it is incomprehensible to me. I honestly just do not understand how anyone who has played the game could say what you're saying. I'm not trying to be funny right now and I'm not trying to be insulting. I just don't get it. I think we're at an impasse. I'm not going to keep arguing with you about charm person.

As far as the save goes, I only have one log of testing charm person. It was your sorcerer testing charm person and sleep against Rorey. I never kept logs on my other characters and I only tested charm person once with Rorey. The test you and I conducted was too short to constitute hard proof that the save is broken, but I will submit it to you anways, since it is the only evidence I have:

Your 14 art, 20 charisma sorcerer cast charm 23 times on my Giant, who had 28 willpower, 15 wisdom, and the bless spell. 6 of those casts were successful. 6/23 is just over 1/4, and comes to 26% success rate.

Your sorcerer then cast sleep on my Giant four times, succeeding once. Then I added two willpower to my suit, making it have a total of 30 willpower. You cast sleep eleven more times, and I resisted each time.

I do not think the extra two willpower is statistically significant. I mentioned it in case you disagree with that assessment. Your success rate with sleep was 1/15, which comes to 6.6%. While I never tested charm person again with Rorey, I did test sleep, and found that I could consistently resist it. The 6.6% figure may be a little on the low side, but it is not far off from what I think more extensive testing would have found.

These tests were too brief to mean much, but charm person landed 4x as frequently as sleep. The main thing that is relevant here is that you somehow remember these tests very differently from what they were. Maybe you have consistently misremembered how often charm person lands. My experience with these tests was consistent with my past experiences testing the spell with my sorcerers.

edit: Actually, the 6.6% figure is definitely lower than what more extensive testing would show, just judging from the testing I did with Joseph. It would probably come out closer to 10%.

That's my point. 23 casts. 23 casts is way too small of a number for testing, and hardly conclusive. On top of that, you were playing a giant with 15 wis, which is two more strikes against you. You weren't even furied during those tests either, which would have pumped your will save through the proverbial roof.

There were times when I'd have a 40% success rate in 20 casts of sleep on myself as a deep-elf sorc with 20 wis and 30 willpower. At most, no matter how many willpower enchantments were on my armor, I would still fail 10% of my sleep saves on myself. So, when you say that charm person's save is bugged from your pool of 23 casts, I say that's a load of crap in that it is not based on fact, but rather conjecture.

To perhaps give one more shot at illustrating my point, and after this I'll not bother trying to explain things to you any further, Antiira possessed the ability to have a nigh guaranteed kill on any person in a 1v1, unless a charm missed a bash or a taunt failed to land: And he could typically guarantee those kills, and thus win his fights, in the first 3-4 rounds of combat. He had the ability to do that because of his cabal spells that did not take 2 combat rounds to cast and did not take half of his concentration in combat, and because of some scrolls and wands on top of those: Not using charm offensively allowed him to not only still win fights with a very high success rate, but to do so while holding two charms if he wished to.

Now, most of Antiira's fights were against 2 or more other people. If he spent the first two rounds of those fights casting charm person, then that means he'd have to be going into those fights with only one charm, and if the first charm failed, casting another would have allowed his enemies to have five or six free rounds against either his charm, his pet in between him and his charm, or just shooting him up with arrows or hitting him with spell damage. Additionally, once the charm lands you then have to actually leave the field of combat without losing the person you charmed, because if you walk out of the room they can act freely and quaff recall or do whatever. I can't attest to the number of fights I would have won if I had used charm more often, but I can, however, guarantee you that Antiira won way more battles than he lost: And I'm not referencing just the battles where Antiira died, I mean every single fight he got in, he won the majority of them.

So basically, keeping in mind that I actually enjoy playing against people who don't suck and therefore have decent will saves, you're saying that it's a better idea to trade an almost guaranteed success in a fight to have a 20-30% (or lower) chance or lower of charming one person in any given fight that also leaves me open to a lot of weaknesses (You can go from 100% to zero in two combat rounds if you are playing against smart players), even though instead you could be ordering bash or taunt, casting damage spells, reciting sick scrolls, or all that jazz: And to that, sir, I say that you are wrong. Dead wrong.

So sure, feel free to disagree, but I will leave you with the fact that Antiira, while annoying in RP, got sorcs nerfed to where they should be through the concentration on magical devices change and being unable to order NPC stances change. Except for the whole "charms recall with you" crap. That needs to be fixed.

I already said that the only hard numbers I had were completely insufficient. Those aren't the numbers that I base my assessment of charm person off of. I base it off of tests and the pvps I did with my sorcs as well as the tests an IMM did with a 1000 willpower item.

I'm not going to address the rest of your arguments because we've already established that we're not going to get anywhere. I love you, man, even if we disagree on charm person.

+1

I'm really not convinced that making good enchantments any easier to obtain would make the MUD a better place. It'd certainly make it easier to create a powerhouse suit, but I'm not sure that's ideal and I think that a lot of game content would be trivialized and a lot of balance issues show up in PK if targettable enchants happened. Like JVJ said, I readily acknowledge that I might think otherwise if I wasn't playing a priest right now.

That's why enchanting needs to both be made targetable and also have its success rate tweaked: It's possible with a revamp of the enchant armor spell to code it so that getting an uber suit with 100 enchantments would take the same amount of time as it currently does (A freaking long time), but also allow for it to take much less time to get a suit with 50 enchantments that are the kind which you want.

This.

I like that. Sounds very reasonable.