Shattered Kingdoms

Impairment isn't a PVE mechanic. You have to have a bonus to start with before you can be impaired and the majority of NPCs don't have any external bonuses.

I'm refering to fully-equiped and partially enchanted NPCs.

I'm also refering to impairment effects being directed at me via NPC.

I would just like to clarify here that the main problem with enchanting -from the perspective of the enchanter first, and the recipient second - is not the randomness. It's the time sink, which is directly tied to the randomness.

Most power players rely on suits with "weaknesses" only because it's just too frustrating random and time consuming to make the "perfect suit". But, in order to get to the frustration part, a good two hours will probably pass. Hours that neither of the two players will be able to engage in much else, as one provides the items, the other provides the spells.

It just takes too long. That's my only concern.

I like the way it works. Maledictions like weaken and slow are some of the most powerful spells in the game. They are also lower level spells. Spells like petrification, which are mentor, do more damage to enchantments, while spells like weaken do less damage. It also seems intuitive, like it should work this way. I wonder why it took Dulrik so many years to implement it.

Also, spells like weaken, and curse might be doing something like 1 damage to enchantments while petrification is doing 10. If you couple it with art trains (like a hellion, and shaman should be built) then it definitely works out in the favor of the caster. I could tell you at least that I would have killed to have a -1 penalty to an enemy's saves every time I cast a spell with Iureana.

Pretty sure that Dulrik said the longer the cast time, the bigger the impairment. Slow takes about 2/3s the time of petrification to cast, and probably should be a bigger debuff to saves than -1 (if it isn't already, it might be). Weaken and blindness, and similar casting time spells, should indeed have a -1 to saves. I don't think anyone's disputing that.

However, as I'm reading Dulrik's above post, impairment doesn't attribute-based saves at all, just enchanted ones. Not sure if that's in-theme with the whole impairment system, but whatev.

I agree that impairment is good as an idea. Just not sure that the effect on saves is what it should be.

I can't recall what Antiira's jewelry had on it, but I know that his armor all had 8+ enchantments without MR, including great MP on all but maybe one of those. Some of his jewelry had 10-12 enchantments. That kind of stuff either takes forever and being moderately lucky or taking a long time and being really lucky. I think I had to enchant a set of high-level energy armor though ten or twelve iterations to get that result, maybe more, which effectively translated to 20 hours of enchanting (divided over half a dozen sessions), to get in the ballpark range of 110 enchantments. For most people, they need another person to help them gather elite armor that starts out nicely, but I was able to do it myself. I can't imagine asking other people to sit there for 20 hours and help me regather my crap when it blows up.

Personally, I think that the time required for enchanting a decent suit is a bit much, because honestly I would have liked to have had more enchants, evidenced by the fact that even with all that I still bounced off high-level sanc way too often. Really, I would have been happy with just a lot of will and protection and some decent fort.

I've said my piece already, and I still think that a change like this would be one of the best changes SK could ever see to make it more fun and less boring. Most of the playerbase agreed.


If my linked post is tl;dr for you, I basically wrote the pseudo-code for changing enchant armor to be targetable while also making it just as difficult as it currently is to obtain an "uber-suit" with high saves in each category. I also accounted for added difficulty in adding too many enchantments of one type to a specific piece (like putting 8 MP on every armor piece), and I also included that higher-level items should have a much higher chance of fading, not evaporating, and lower-level items should have a much higher chance of evaporating, not fading, in order to actually give a reason to group up and kill higher-level NPCs instead of just requesting/buying crappy gear with zero enchants on it and working from there.

Very weary of seeing the requests for enchant armor changes so I'll just come out and say: Yes, Enchant Armor will be changed sometime in 2012. However, it's pretty much a given that changing Enchant Armor WILL change the face of the game. It's practically unavoidable. And there will no doubt have to be many rounds of tweaks afterward that will continue to send out shockwaves. So you can look forward to and/or fear the coming of this change sometime this year.

Why in the world would you spend this much time enchanting if you were going to repeatedly zap yourself with chain lightning during pvp?

oooh cool.

And I totally only did that chain lightning thing once I think.


Okay, twice, but only once during a fight.

I am pretty sure that you did it more than once, but whatever.