Shattered Kingdoms

Oh no. It was noticed in January, believe me. People are only bitching about it now, because you KEEP making things more and more hard. Sklz was trying to do it and I was like "WTF are you stupid?" So I went and tried the way I had levelled my warlock . . .

Definitely could tell.

I actually think he said, "D must've taken a nerf bat to it."

It affects any class with a ranged aoe, or ranged attack at all, but it directly affects warlocks even more so.

Basically, it was noticed in passing, but it wasn't until recently that it completely "made sense" and I sat down and sucked up a few deaths to test exactly what was happening.

This does affect warlocks leveling an absolute ton, and since they aren't the strongest class in the world anymore anyway, it definately weakens them even more since one of the few plus sides was a good XP curve that didn't rely on others. There are very few other classes that are entirely negated by armor enchants of a persistant player.

Simply put, I disagree with your assertion that it isn't a big deal, and I follow up with a question of what the warlock leveling numbers looked like for the time frames we're talking about compared to the game at large.

Not demanding an answer of course, but I haven't seen a ton of warlocks around really and while I'm not saying this is the reason, I'm suggesting it doesn't, and isn't going to help.

I disagree with the magnitude you apply to this change. Really, warlocks are a very easy class to level and with these twinkish options (Yes, I wholeheartedly maintain that it was twinkish) it became ridiculous.

I disagree with the way to fix the problem, but I can understand that it was the easiest. I would rather see the areas where it is a problem fixed, but well, this works just as well.

Addendum: Don't get me wrong, I hate leveling more than most. But to categorize this as some infringement upon the natural leveling order of things is just ... meh.

So, do you not get XP at all anymore from ranged things(and is this only affecting warlocks, or what?), or is it only when they can't get to you?

It's only for attacks that are made with ranged attacks when you are in inaccessible places such as flying over the ocean or sitting on a mountain-top (and the NPCs in question can't climb).

Someone mentioned that the NPCs should just go home. I could probably make them do that at this point, but I'm fairly convinced this would be almost as abusable as it was before. The warlock could run forward and earthquake again once they started to leave. Ideally, the NPCs would flee in all directions and run about semi-randomly before trying to return home, but that's actually quite a lot of work.

The problem is that leveling is NOT fun at all. Until leveling is made entertaining (I can only think through questing there might be other ideas), these plvling areas is the only thing from keeping people from just leaving the game due to boredom.

As I have said multiple times, I am all for more quests. I have been pushing to get more quests for a long time. Unfortunately, this is not something that I can do on my own. But hey, I will make another push on this need starting now, because I have always said that I want levelling to be fun (just not quick).

Make sure it's a push for something other than boring fetch quests. Walking halfway across the game to pick something up only to have to walk all the way back and give it to some guy is less interesting than grinding.

The quest to kill the rogue boss is an example of a good quest, in my opinion. Being sent to fight your way past aggressive NPCs and kill a boss is pretty fun.

I answered the other part of this post earlier, but just in response to this I went back over my thread "A newbie's impressions of SKs" or something similar, and found the most positive comment I made about the SKs leveling system as it then was:



That was thrown in there along with comments like "This is by far the most irritating part of SKs". I don't understand what part of that translated into "lol, you should totally nerf this". Assuming the average person plays SKs for three hours a day, and assuming I am twice as good at leveling as the average Joe who hasn't experienced the mud before, we're talking about 300 hours to get to champion status, which fitting in my scenario would be one third of a year of playing every day, doing nothing but leveling to get there. Assuming they RP half their time and level half their time, you're talking about 200 days.

I don't know if that is sinking in, but it should, or you really will end up with a game that no new players will stick with, ever.

Edit: Oh yes, additionally, I used the first bonanza exp to get from master to champion. All up including this change and unfortunate timing with no bonanza, we're talking about 400-500 hours of pure leveling for a newbie to GM. At 3 hours a day we're talking about 166 days of pure leveling.

[edit] Bah! I shouldn't do math while studying for finals