Shattered Kingdoms

I'll stop talking about how bad they are when swashbuckler stops being such a horrible class. But that's neither here nor there.

The updates to the colors was not due to aesthetics (although I tried to pick readable colors that were already in use for other similar skills). The change is functional.

- Dark green ($2) is stil used for defensive skills, but only ones that you are using to protect yourself.
- Light green ($2$I) is now used for defensive skills that stopped your own attacks.
- Defensive skills that are not affecting you personally are now the default color ($A).

- Dark blue ($1) is now used for all offensive skills that you are using yourself.
- Light blue ($1$I) is now used for all offensive skills for which you are on the receiving end.
- Offensive skills that are not affecting you personally are now the default color ($A).

This does mean that an observer loses some context that they had before. While I wasn't out to specifically hurt observers, the point of this change was to make it easier to see the portions of combat that are affecting you personally. By definition, this does turn out to mean glossing over the stuff that you are not doing.

Keep in mind there were only a handful of color options available. ASCII only has 16 colors and the best of them were already in use during combat to highlight something else.

Familiarity has the exact same effect on your XP gain that it did before. Yes, you will burn into the familiar zone 30% faster. But that's because you earned XP 30% faster. In other words, you can use a zone for exactly the same range of levels that you could before -- you are just leveling faster.

My philosophy is that having a charmed NPC of class X should never be as good as having an equivalent level PC of class X. It should also not be quite as good as a non-charmed NPC of class X. I think this change is consistent with that vision and updates the spells to account for mental bonuses that were previously ignored or non-existent.

While we're talking about code and colors and stuff.

In vt extend mode in the bottom right hand corner of the prompt, there's a little period that appears to denote whether or not you're in the command lockout state.

It would be really nice if we could have a way to access that lockout character via the command prompt custom variables.

Also, is anyone else color blind? I am. I've always had a major problem seeing dark blue ($1). I was hoping you might consider not using that color. If not, that's fine. I think I can change it on my client.

Seeing as this isn't a public safety issue, I'm not too inclined to think that this is really necessary.

Also, are taunt and heckle able to be used while prone since they are verbal skills?

I hadn't made any changes here with taunt and heckle works the same, so the answer is no. Could that become true? Maybe. I can see arguing for it making sense either way. I doubt swash needs that kind of power-up though. Skills should have answers, and getting knocked prone is a common answer.

Damage bonus. Update notice updated.

This came out of the fixes for AI rather than because I was trying to tweak combat, so you shouldn't expect huge changes here. The in-depth explanation is that the amount of bonus/penalty as you stepped did not used to be uniform (aka going from medium->large was not the same proportionately as going from large->giant, etc). Now each step in either direction gives the same bonus/penalty. It's this that determined where the new modifiers are set for tiny and huge.

Open to tweaking things a bit based on opinions after we spend a few months at the current settings.