Shattered Kingdoms

Remove cure and detect poison from warlocks and give them identify. pretty pls

I haven't read all of the other replies, so apologies for any duplicates. I also haven't been playing any time recently, and my last character (an evil centaur priest of thuban) auto deleted after I lost interest in the game, so apologies if I'm making suggestions that may already have been implemented.

1) Faster leveling times/more active options. Long quest chains that would require travel, interaction with specific NPCs, collecting SMALL amounts of dropped items from certain NPCs (ie, "I need four pelts from the rats down in the basement" not "Bring me 350 beads from those villagers"), that at the end would provide as much exp as expending a grind area to yellow. Time to complete these quest chains should probably be 1-2 hours so that you still have a time investment in leveling, it just isn't majority spent sleeping, resting, or waiting dirt out and spamming skills. Balancing drawback would be a lack of opportunity to practice combat skills and spells, making optimal abilities for adventuring/pvp require a separate time investment, or else being subpar at initial stages of end-game.

2) Remove tribunal coffer drain through spam bounty NPC farming. In fact, remove bounty NPCs all together. Provide each tribunal with 4 balanced, high level groups of NPCs that can be positioned throughout their territory. Want to make a rift/gate guard at the stones? Set one group there, but now you don't have one to put at the major crossroads of Exile, etc. Add territory expansion in a king-of-the-hill type style. A tribunal has to hold a point (could just be a 1 room place in a wilderness area). You have to keep a PC or one of your NPC groups posted there for X amount of time. When you do, you take that area, which you can then use as a forward line to push further, since it's now your turf. Each area taken provides 1 extra group for the trib to use.

This brings strategy and active reasons for international conflicts. It encourages PVP and diminishes the need to keep every bit of saleable gear in the game totally devalued just to have warnings when your home city is being attacked. Alliances allow allied PCs to hold a point for Y amount of time (ie, during an active conflict to control a point, team A loses their NPC group, or all the Talon PCs got wiped and there's only a Fist left to defend the next wave).

Holding areas on a trib would increase monthly upkeep costs, but not significantly. It shouldn't be prohibitively expensive until you have basically invaded and conquered another nation, in order to incentivize coming to some sort of terms with the dominated parties.

In all honesty, a body transport for PC corpses to a room in home trib city would be a good idea, so that the conflict is limited more by RP and SD than by junk looting. Certain protections against a total wipe of months of effort in a five minute botched effort to defend or take would also encourage people to actually use and interact with this system. The balance to this is if a force wants to split itself to cover the gear room AND the point of engagement, there's still a chance to dehoard/be an evil jerk/otherwise stickitdodaman.

3) Reduce the coin farming grind. Reduce the maintenance costs of general trib and cabal upkeeps and restocks, reduce the costs of replenishing consumables (or introduce idea 4). The need to constantly farm coin and devalue sale-able items is soul crushing. More often than not it ends up falling to 1 or 2 people in a faction regardless of requests or orders otherwise and it really makes the game not fun to play. It's just barely a hair's width above the tedium of leveling a caster without med/trance.

4) Implement adventuring skill: crafting, in three ways.

First, allow resources to be combined to create consumables. Vials, Scrolls, Wands, Staves, etc. These are blanks/empties, and could have spells applied to them with the usual type restrictions (and class restrictions like resist elements etc). The quality of the materials used determines the quality of the base item. Weak vials and scrolls could be made with resources that spawn in the wilderness as REs, like birch bark chips for scrolls or amber fragments for vials etc. These would have a rot timer. High end materials would be collected as drops from specific, out of the way creatures. Items above, say 25th lvl would not have rot timers.

Second, allow items to be crafted that have a value when trib/cabal/church deposited at a bank. These items would have no effects or use beyond that, but would use the same materials used for crafting. This would help offset the costs of maintaining a faction for the 1 or 2 people who do it, possibly provide at least casual contributions if the low-tier resources they find as they are going about doing other things are not useful to their particular type of crafting system. The full available list of this type of crafting would be available regardless of type of crafting learned.

Third, allow equipment crafting. Similar to resource crafting, quality would vary depending on resources used to craft. Low tier stuff like wood and scale (made with discarded snake skins or whatever) would be cheap and easy to come by, while higher tier things like adamantite and mithril would require out of the way trips and might require you to hunt "mithril lizards" for the shards they drop. It's possible this might be best to restrict to weapons, or else exclude types that scouts can skin and include types they can't (energy, adamantite). A chance for up to 3 random innate enhancements at Mastered, with a lower chance of 1-2 before Mastered, would be ideal. It might be kind of neat to make the possible innate enhancements added sorted by type. Mages might have a chance to hit different innates than a merc. That provide a second level of impactful decision about customization.

As this would be an adventuring skill, its variations would be trainable by any character. You could have a mage that smiths swords, or a fighter that creates scrolls, but once you train one you can't train a different one.

5) More accessible direction for a broader group of players to end-game content.

I probably have other things I'd like to see, but incentivizing conflict while softening the blow (though not outright removing it) from early efforts or small mistakes is the general thread of what would get me playing this game again.

In reply, leveling is really easy these days. Someone can go about leveling ONLY during happy hour times and GM most classes in a month. It takes less than 50 hours to GM most classes. Used to be such a pain, but then things like Lower Morea, etc, were opened up. Put in some work.

I have to say that I like the bounty hunter system, as it's a very good tactic for locating an enemy who is roaming your land. Granted this means actually spending the time getting to know the kingdom you are protecting, which generally ALL tribunal members should do. Yes, it is an extreme pain having to replenish the vast amounts of obsidian coins when your enemy can just walk around for hours on end decimating your forces, but MAYBE we could just reduce the costs incurred with diplomacy.

I'm aware leveling is easy. I haven't had a GM take me more than 50 hours for several years unless I wanted it to. That isn't my point. My point is that in it's current incarnation, it's tedious af and is a major obstacle to playing this game for me. Interesting PvP and PvE doesn't become available until end game (high master at earliest). I play DCUO for the most part these days, and the set up is very similar: leveling might as well just be an extended tutorial of your power/role. You can go from fresh character to level cap in 8 hours. Then you spend several hundred or thousand hours in the far more interesting and challenging end game content and pvp areas. And the 8 hours from fresh character to max level seems more like 5 or 6 because, while many missions require you to farm some NPCs, the majority of them are kill 10 NPCs here, collect these 15 things in the same area, kill 5 stronger NPCs, defend a transmitter for 30 seconds, then blow up 10 Lexcorp vehicles, and finally finish it off with a short solo instance that combines clearing out enemies to secure objectives, and fighting a boss with unique mechanics. I don't expect SK leveling from newb school to GM to take 8 hours, but it would be nice if it was closer to 20 and didn't involve, for the majority, spamming who/inf/score/wort/att while waiting for ticks to go by.

My point was not for easing leveling; it's already easy if you know anything about the game. It's just *boring* which is why it's an impediment to playing for me.

I've played my share of trib members. I know how useful the bounty NPCs are for reporting. The groups of NPCs would report as well. The difference is, it encourages more active conflict and more protracted conflicts when groups have an opportunity to retreat/regroup/re-engage, and trib members aren't required to do the very *boring* task of grinding coin in the amounts they're required to now, with an extremely limited set of options for how to do that effectively. Again, it's easy to farm gear from the halfling village, the taslamaran palace, the x, the y, and the z place. It's not about easy or hard, it's about *boring.* Games are meant to be fun. These mechanics are not that, to me and to many others.

Most of my ideas are pie in the sky anyways, since they're way more involved code-wise than I suspect would be implemented on realistic time scale.

I'll give you an example Dulrik and a few others might remember. When the Fist had the Blood Orb for literally ever and the noob squad Adepts finally got it back, CRS was bugged and the hq guards weren't spawning. This allowed literally every other faction in the game to rotate groups and rez right inside the hq and the adepta to rez and caval gate back in every time the guardian was involved.

As frustrating as it might have been to expect the system to work a certain way and not have it do so, that remains one of my favorite memories of this game. It was an hours-long, high-stakes, make-or-break rpk event and it was awesome.

I would like to see usable weapons for casters. I don't mean just a pole-mace, I'm thinking more of like a scepter that fires out magical bolts as its basic attack. 3rd row ranged capability but no range from rooms away but no requirement for ammo.
Perhaps making the weapon use a small amount of mana per attack. Just something that is feasible for casters to use as a weapon if they run out of mana during a fight and are in the third row (I don't really consider slings as feasible), or are unable to cast for some other reason such as null magic rooms or certain spells afflicting them.

Also, I think that once you hit GM you should still be able to gain XP via conventional means, not just from enlights. So that if you have to end up death questing and Happy Hour is 8 hours away you don't have to grind to get that third of a level back. There's plenty of things that you do while you're GM that would give you tons of XP but you don't get credit for it unless you find yourself knocked back to champion again.

Dulrik, please give third spec to GM level as reward for training completion, instead of third age mark.
I know its a reward for following up the progress of the merc, but being honest no many people at the moment age their characters.

-M

Mercs definitely don't need a third spec until they're old. Oh yeah let's go ahead and give the best class even more power. Genius I say.

Sounds as if you are on the verge of receiving a board warning dub.

It is probably better to offer alternative ideas like..reducing the token respecialize cost instead of criticism.

I really, really think that the staff needs to review their list of sitebanned players and think about letting them all come back. I don't know about the rest of you but i'm sure having a BLAST playing with all 5 other people that play this MUD anymore. /sarcasm