Shattered Kingdoms

If we go far enough with that realization (which I agree with) then enchant doesn't really remain an elite thing, but rather, one of many things any player may be interested in trying.

This only creates an environment where the time-wasting of enchanting is more noticed, does it not?

The elephant in the room that gets quickly ignored is that the spell "enchant armor" could work better. This can go completely under the radar of PVP entirely, so pigeon-holing the issue into that situation seems to me a short-sighted move to take.

No, the reason it's valid to call it a PK issue is because typically your things will be recoverable from deaths in other areas of gameplay, meaning that you have more time between gear-loss to get a nice set and therefore whatever time it takes should be less of an issue.

The spell enchant armor could work "faster" - better is subjective. I personally don't think it would be better at all. I think enchants for everyone would hurt casters a lot and make NPC encounters that are currently hard trivial.

We've established that you personally don't enjoy "c 'enchant armor' boots", which is an opinion you're entitled to. I'm just not seeing how that translates to enchant armor being broken in its current form.

Because it wastes time. Basically that is what it comes down to. You gamble with time, and that contains not-fun elements. Broken doesn't always have to mean imbalanced, but you're right, making it more sane would mean more people would participate.

But it is perfectly possible for everyone to get any combination that selectable enchants would provide. The only thing keeping them from making those boss fights trivial is the fact that there are costs that dissuade people from doing it, we can safely assume after hearing many people voice that very point.

In other words, the enchant as it is now can be perfectly broken if enough people want to spend the time breaking it. Eh, let me try to put it another way...

scrolls were broken before gilgon rolled a character that used them. charm person was broken before it got casted on you, and so forth.

I would say its current form is balanced by making people not want to do what is perfectly possible. Does that sound like a fun system? Your mini-game is balanced because few people really want to play it to its full potential? To me it has so many potential problems that it would warrant being one of the first things to be spoken to specifically by the people who know how things are intended to work.

Grep, if it's really the time drain you're concerned with, why advocate for solutions that are just lesser time drains (targeted enchanting) or time drains spread out over more characters (sharing around the enchant armor spell)? Why not advocate for the utter removal of the spell (and thus all associated "time drain") as Salandarin suggested?

The real problem is that there are a currently a couple spells that can totally knock you out with no hope of recovery if you don't have decent enchants. If you just adjusted these spells (charm, sleep, etc.), I personally would spend almost no enchanting time on any character, nor would anyone else need to do so to be largely "combat ready" (as others have rightfully mentioned in this thread and the other one). The rest of the attack and debuff spells I would feel comfortable with the level of risk and carrying countermeasures (e.g., cure blindness herbs, heal vials, etc.)

I guess I fail to see what about the proposed "fixes" are any more fun or fair than the current system. They just seem like band-aids to help reduce the discomfort associated with enchantinng without really addressing the main balance issue.

Do the suggested changes somehow drastically improve the "fun" of enchanting and I'm just missing something?

We're all on other threads yelling at eachother right now. We used this thread all up.

Maybe so. I'm just getting back from vacation, so I haven't noticed any yelling yet and this thread seemed a fair place to continue the conversation!

Doing away with enchant armor is, in essence, doing away with the entire save system.

You would have to adjust the entirety of spell saves to adjust to what is considered normal by the back end checks-and-balance limit on stock gear enchantments, which is an inordinate amount of coding, on top of an inordinate amount of testing, on top of an inordinate amount of further tweaking in the code - and then IMMs would have to re-balance nearly all relevant gear in the game to provide potential couplings of good enchantments to avoid complete domination by spellcasters. It's a broad stroke that doesn't really take into account just how powerful a lot of spells can be without resists.

There are no simple two spells that end combat. If spells couldn't be resisted with a fair percentage of certainty, most of the damage spells above Journeyman are game enders, as are Hellions/necros/shamans with afflictions, warlocks with stacks of AoE damage... It's silly to think a full on call lightning/spear of faith/etc aren't just complete combat enders against melee when coupled with group formations, let alone low-HP caster classes. Then warlocks...fireball would destroy the game.

Removing enchant armor would necessitate an over-simplification to one enchant - "saves" - that could be put on by builders. A lot of other muds do this and don't have enchant armor. But, just because that's so, doesn't make it worthy for SK. This is a game for strategy.

This whole thing is like complaining about, in Risk, having to wait a handful of turns to get a big army to go on your rampage and just cutting the middle-man boring turns out and throwing 10,000 units on the board and letting it all out. Or playing Monopoly, and being bored with rolling the dice, so just distribute the properties amongst everyone so they all have monopolies and let things play out then.

It's not the point. Shattered Kingdoms is a game of strategy and like all things worthwhile some aspects take patience and time. Removing enchant armor or focusing it to targeted casts on armor so you can build your kit, to spec, posthaste - it seems ridiculous to me.

The only thing I could think to use as an adequate analogy is getting your eyes ripped out because street signs are starting to get fuzzy. Just put some glasses on.

To me, glasses would be spreading the spell out to other PCs. To others, the glasses are focusing the spell so you can build a to-spec kit with ease. I really dislike the latter, but it's a valid argument to make. I mean, I'd love it and it'd be fun...but just too much. It's one of those bad ideas everyone loves. Like adding a chance-to-kill-outright to, say, blitzkrieg, with no downside...like cleave. Mercenaries would love the hell out of it, and every merc would want it...but that doesn't make it a good idea.

Removing enchant armor entirely seems, to me, ridiculous when thinking of all the work that'd have to go into the game to balance it. So does focusing the spell.

Just let most, if not all, caster classes do it. It's a 5 minute change in the code and solves the awkward timesink issue, in my opinion. All things should take time but if a lot more people are carrying an equal burden of the time weight, it'd lessen the burden enough.

I understand your position, Jerinx. I don't think enchant armor should be removed. I am just suggesting that if grep's main gripe (hehe) is wasted time, a more internally consistent position would be to aim for a total removal of that waste of time rather than just spreading it around. In practice you'd not want to do it because of the massive amount of coding and rebalancing required.

To be clear, my position is to tweak a couple of high end "I win spells" downward and leave enchant armor otherwise as it is. Your solution, IMO, will overbalance the system against casters because it will a) raise the average quality of a given player's suit across the board and therefore b) lower spell effectiveness across the board where it's currently not warranted.

I still agree with jhorleb.

We still disagree. This has no effect other than easing the life of the two classes with enchant. There's almost always an enchanter in reach as it is now, 99.9% of the time, if someone wants a kit enchanted. It's not going to stop people from enchanting, nor is it going to make people suddenly want to enchant gear... let alone even know the right balance of enchantments to have to be effective.

It's a matter of spreading it around to the classes that should be able to enchant so it's not stuck on only two classes, and making it less of a grind that you impose on other people. Only 6 classes needing to bug other people for this kind of grind instead of 11 makes a good, light change. The grind doesn't change, the knowledge needed doesn't change, needing to be able to acquire loot doesn't change.

To this presumption that it's going to affect anything else: a lot of priests and sorcs right now are saying yes to enchanting. I can think of three lighties most any lightie can get to enchant for them with almost no hassle. They're commonly around. By your theory, every lightie noob on the streets has phat lewt enchants right now because of availability.

This isn't the case, so the entire point is already proven as a non-issue. This concept of more classes with enchant equating to more availability and a raised status quo just doesn't work out in practice, because availability has been in practice for years. Availability is availability. This is not some earth shattering balance thing I want to change, nor will it be changed. It's just a matter of common courtesy and a basic logic (if one can logic sorcs and priests into enchanting, there's equal logic to all the other caster classes) that takes a handful of minutes in the code, with no real epic changes...but some nice ones.