Shattered Kingdoms

An interesting discussion took place in the SK facebook group this morning (well its morning for me!) about how to make enchanting less frustrating and how to make it feel less of a punishment to re-gear after you've been looted. What it boiled down to was this idea (I can be creative in the morning):

Enchanting is changed to allow the caster to enchant what they will on the armor/weapon, it makes some sense that the caster is attempting to put something specific on the item to begin with. The randomness enters with the level of skill of the spell caster, the lower skill with the spell the bigger the chance to instead put on something random on the item rather than what you were trying to add in, that chance lowers the closer to mastering the spell you get with the end being only a very small chance of putting in something random to represent the nature of magic sometimes not being what you want it to be, but once you master the spell you can make it do what you want it to do.

Thoughts, ideas, comments, keep it civil though, please, I can bite back

This has already been brought up dozens of times.

Edit: Plus the randomness of enchanting is quite fun. Spells need to be left alone.

It makes sense to me.

Considering the earlier conversation about what is or is not fun in the game, I don't think anyone (except LionHeart?) thinks sitting around for hours trying to get the perfect set of enchantments is fun. Especially not when you just lose them later. Seeing as enchantments are so crucial to proper PK, a lack of good enchantments prevents some players from seriously competing and the current system only rewards people who have ungodly amount of times to stay online.

Uhm....no. It isn't.

I do not agree with a spell that needs to be mastered before it can be used to its full potential.
Other than that I am fine either way, although this would end up in suits that would almost render
the barer immune to spells.
That would be another wimp to spell casters and they seem to have taken a lot recently.

This has already been proposed many times.

In fact, the proposal I just linked was from me, and years ago. Yet, even though half the mud agreed with me and a quarter still would have liked enchant armor to change somewhat, it's still the extremely boring grindfest that takes too dang long, is frustrating, and punishes people for going with a group to retrieve armor in difficult areas because they're better off enchanting stuff that's easy to get.

Strange thing is, when I play chars that have enchant armor, I think the spell is just fine, but when I play something that has to bug other people to get his enchanting done, I absolutely agree that it needs to be made easier in some way.

I think the fact that this spell hasn't been changed is related to how much time would have to be sunk into coding to make it more what just about everyone wants it to be.

The idea of a decreasing amount of randomness with spell mastery, while good, is probably even more complicated to implement. I'd rather it just be made targetable in the first place (assuming the spell will ever be changed), as it's a simpler option and more likely to be actually accomplished.

Except that would also completely throw game balance out of whack, which is much worse.

Enchant armor is a single spell with some code written for it. All you have to do to change it is change the code for the spell. The change I suggested which uses a three-step process to determine enchanting success (Quality of item, overall number of enchantments, number of enchantments of the desired type), with one of three result types based on the enchant roll itself could be coded in a few hours or less, and that's giving plenty of extra time to account for balancing the numbers themselves.

The enchantment code on this mud is completely customized from the original source, so only Dulrik can attest to the difficulty of such a change; however, in the original source it is less than 30 lines of code, each operating with relative independence.

It should be an incredibly easy adjustment to overload enchant armor to take an optional argument for the type of enchantment one is shooting for, and should also be quite straightforward to alter that code to provide a strongly diminished chance of achieving that enchantment, with a higher fail and critical fail rate. Something like





In other words, leave the existing codebase exactly as it is, and provide an additional method stub to allow for specialized enchantments for those who would rather trade the frustration of randomness for the frustration of failure.