It’s been about a week since I decided to work on an actual transport system that didn’t involve hand-wavy magic or teleporting pseudo-vehicles. There has been a fairly decent state of progress in them technically; I have done very little to work on flavor.
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Feb 232010
It’s landlocked, WTF. Losthaven is no longer situated on a river since the deployment of Almeria3D. The whole area is pretty crappy, only some of the monsters even re-spawn and has a quest that is more likely to destroy your weapons than whacking Krythe. It has a few redeeming factors like being an excellent low level area for combat, having the most random gem drops I’ve been able to locate and has the only race to be drastically redefined past a quick rename.
The other thing that needs to be brought up is the boat between Almeria (GONE), Centaur Isle and Devonshire. We have a pair of coastal cities on Almeria that would benefit from the addition of a stop to this route: Mycenae and Halfmoon Bay. I didn’t know the layout well enough at the time to realize these options were available, Et’zlaerhi may also be interested in setting up a dock on the surface for trade and travel.
The Shrieking Siren could be relocated to a more appropriate spot without much issue, just gutting out the slide from the sewers. It would however leave Losthaven with less beginner content. Spiderwood has a nice scaling difficulty to it, but the barrier to entry still feels a bit high for some of the green newbies that arrive.
Gems of Protection once were vastly different. They’d let people withstand bathing with Abhoth and allow Ringwielders to walk around as if it were night.
This worked because the old gems were granting insane resistances, namely +100 resistance in whatever their devotion was. Give Prince Avryx a gem of protection from lightning and he’s fine to follow you no hassle. Aligned negating the weaknesses from echo with replicated gems. Since the gems worked through resistances and not actual absorption they tended to be fairly durable.
A brief list of changes in the gems includes removing the resistance modifiers and decreasing the variety of attacks a certain gem would protect against. They now offer some physical absorption, an increased (re)sale value and and an artifact version (Dragonheart).
Although they still are quite useful when I run across them, my experience seems to show that they are vastly less durable under stress, cost prohibitive to purchase for their relative effect and only seem to offer marginal protection vs very specific damage combos. The old ones needed to go, but I’ll miss being able to complete ignore the old turn undead with them.
Following Lysators lead on this I’m going to see how posting about development progress goes.
Yesterday Shuthu used his snake familiar to turn much of himself into lexoth. This would seem like a fascinatingly awesome form of self-transmutation however pretty much every race uses the actual elements in its generic race description. The elements no longer present were causing his descriptions to error, not unlike one of the common issues with looking at shoggothim when they were fl’hlgath flgath at breakneck speeds. This was a nice little incident to spur this part of work on the Symbiotes ahead.
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This is the first in what may become a pretty common series, of things that you could exploit YESTERDAY. Much like well… lets just wait and see whats in store.
I find some of the most random things in this game have some sort of fringe case exploit in interactions between old and new code, and sometimes its just something that is out of an expected range.
For this installment we will visit the Basilisk in Sanctuary. Under normal circumstances Enas Yorl‘s manservant, Feileth was supposed to admit guests by blinding them and leading them past the basilisk without harm. Neither of those things were common at all. Continue reading »
