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It is an old topic: Axes tend to look small, and they have all the same size.
I wonder, would it be possible to scale the axe mesh for different base items to add some variety in terms of size? E.g.
Reinforced Axe 100%
Battle Axe 120%
Reinforced Battle Axe 150%

Since the heavier axes take more materials, it makes sense to make them look larger as well.
Or will that mess up the weapon’s anchor points and attack animations?

When using a weapon with an affix that adds cold damage, the particle effects are pretty much excessive.

To make things worse, multiple hits will stack the particle effects, so after four or five strikes, the particle clutter gets quite heavy on GPU usage. This is likely to slow down the clients of many users (”lag to death”).

I suggest another particle effect is used, or only one instance of the spell effect is shown at once. If this is difficult, just lower the life time to something shorter than the fastest attack delay.

Hey Eonwind, thanks for the new affix tables, that looks nice so far.

As discussed with Venalan, I’ll leave a note here in case there are still some bugs in the mathscripts.

I have observed strange stats on weapons and helms that have multiple modifiers for attack or defense.

For example, the affixes scorched and of the Warrior have various modifiers, including attack*1.5 and attack*1.2, respectively.
If they stack as 1.5*1.2 = 1.8, that’s still weaker than the best attack modifier from a single affix, so I don’t expect a dramatic new capping rule.
However, the stats shown on my scorched diamond-edged battle axe of the warrior are Attack 0.96 and Attack 1.5 - one bonus turned into a malus! I don’t think that’s intended, is it?

Another example: Reinforced Dagger of the Warrior. That’s two factors of 1.2 each for attack and defense, as far as i can see from single affix items.
The result on this dagger: Attack 1.0 Defense 1.0 … Attack 1.2 Defense 1.2 - so two modifiers are completely negated?!

Hope that helps to get everything to work as intended. Thanks for your hard work!

As stated in the summary field - same for races with missing 3d art that use fynnwn as a placeholder model. Not pretty to see half of the head missing.

The topic is probably well known, but I would like to stick it to the tracker with a separate ticket anyway.
Most players I know consider NPC movement a nice feature, but think NPCs that are unavailable during night hours are a serious problem to the games “fun to play” directive. Immersion is fine, but is that worth it? So the feature request is to rearrange the day night cycles such that all NPCs are permanently available for player interaction.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that for ranged weapons, the distance to and motion of a target is completely irrelevant, and the facing angle only matters in the strict sense of the close combat rules. This rather unrealistic picture of archery opens a wide balance gap to other PvP elements.
If the chance to hit your target with a ranged weapon had just a slight dependence on the lateral distance, the situation would change quite a bit. The distance d and facing angle phi are already checked in combat rules, so the lateral distance dl=d*sin(phi) is easily accessible.
Adding just a small penalty term to the chance to miss, e.g. 1% per unit of length for the lateral distance dl, will have a significant effect, especially when the distance d to the target is very far (>200m). In this case, aiming in first person camera is encouraged, and stationary targets will be much easier to hit than moving targets.

With the new active magic window, it may be useful to have an option to filter buffs resulting from items. A set of armor with rings, bracers and necklace easily adds ten permanent buffs. Even if these used the proper icons, they would not be very informative, taking away much space and distracting from more interesting buffs.

Not a bug, but related to PS#6067.

If you attempt to /equip several items of the same type, e.g. a pair of weapons, the second equip command typically picks the first weapon that was equipped and just moves it to another slot, e.g. from the left to the right hand.

/equip golden battle axe
results in:
You need to have a lot more in NULL to equip this item.
Maybe the reqs of this item were accidentally set to some bogus when the mesh/texture/icon was changed. Low severity, but annoying.

First of all, this task is a continuation of PS#5784
Second, the current rules are perfectly fine for me, but some people have complained about “excessive” damage with the rarest combinations of affixes. The point is that Venalan’s suggestion in PS#5784 differs from what we observe now: Raw (slash/pierce/blunt/protection) modifiers are not added, but multiplied, e.g. +100%, +100% and +80% stack as a factor of 2*2*1.8 or +620%, and not as +280%. Given the rarity and value of some weapons and helms, the multiplicative stacking seems fair to me, but the decision is up to the rules department. Intended rule or not, a change of this will be a feature request of presumably lowest priority.

The new recipe feature of crafting books does not work with gem enchanting. All transformations based on one gem type are merged, and so are the skills requirements, e.g:

– Ruby Crystal —–
With Higher Brown Way skill you could: Enchant Ruby Crystal into Ruby Crystal using Enchanter of Power with a Armor Glyph, Cold Glyph, Arrow Glyph or Rain Glyph.

The crafting transformations are still properly functional, just the instructions are broken, i.e. they are not shown if one of the three skills is insufficient.

(Side note: The rain entry is not a bug, just an exception that was present since enchanting was introduced.)

Yesterday evening GMT I was curious about the new tribe behavior, but all of the NPCs on OjaRoad1 and the arena were perfectly passive - Attacking the NPCs, casting spells on them, sitting on their feet, any combination of these actions… no response, all NPCs were like paralyzed. I hear the monsters fought back and chased other players at the same time, so maybe some of Bonifarzia’s Stats or anything else causes a broken response of the tribe entity.
Problems: Abuse for hunting, no practice possible from being hit.

According to the affix IDs returned by the spell dweomer detection, the convention for random item names is:

<suffix> <prefix> <name> of the <adjective>

I guess there is either a trivial bug in said spell, or the actual convention in use is nonsensical.
The following permutation seems somewhat reasonable:

<adjective> <prefix> <name> of the <suffix>

The evaluation at the bottom of the description window seems to be broken.

Talad announced the evaluation rules were improved, so this could be a regression. Anything I inspect “appears to be” “feeble”, “as intelligent as a stone” and “not any effort to defeat”, i.e. the lowest physical, mental and relative category, respectively.

Summary: High quality armors absorb to much damage from weapons of equal quality.

Could a tester look into this and verify (or disprove) the repeated complaint? (I suggest q300 gear and normal stance for both target and attacker, because this stance is the relevant one while using magic. The question is under which conditions (ranks, gear type) it becomes impossible to inflict any damage.)

Options to adjust the rules:

a) Lower the defense modifiers associated with each stance
b) flatten the dependence of an armors defense on its quality
c) Change the combat rule from additive to multiplicative damage reduction

Option a) is maybe the simplest, but makes non-crafted armor rather weak. Option b) nerfs crafted armor, but if you keep the additive damage reduction, even a small gain of defense can still be very useful. Option c) seems by far the most reasonable one, but as it will take some tuning for both PvP and PvM, this is unlikely to be considered any time soon. Buffs that enhance defense are also less problematic with option c).

I have the impression that enchanting a diamond with a skill rank very close to the minimum requirement gives by far a better success rate than enchanting rubies with the same rank. Maybe there are some inconsistencies that need a little testing and tuning.

Sapphires and all enchanted derivatives cannot be equipped to hand slots anymore. The other three gem types work fine.

Garbage items of gem enchanting do have the prefix of the enchanted gem and equipping them seems to add a buff. I doubt this is intended. This also prevents stacking of garbage produced with different glyphs.

The public notes in the members tab of guildwindow.xml sometimes get truncated after approximately 200 characters with a delay of hours to days. The intended behavior is maybe a limited text length and warning message, just like with the guild motd.

After the update on zeroping described here
http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=38227.0 all items i checked with affixes that affect a weapons damage or delay value
now have the items base damage and the minimal delay value (1.5).

At the moment there are five different attack stances to be accessed by separate shortcuts or clicking buttons.
I would highly appreciate a user command that adjusts the attack stance relative to the current one, so only two shortcuts would be needed, which fits nicely with a scroll wheel.

Suggested syntax:
/attack raise → switch to a more aggressive stance, for example from defensive to normal
/attack lower → switch to a more defensive stance, for instance from bloody to aggressive

I would like to open a task that addresses a small collection of bugs, glitches or partially missing mechanics that I do consider the main reasons for the remaining balance issues with magic. Much effort has been put into revised spell rules, so I think addressing the following will be a comparatively small but important step. The purpose of this task is not only to summarize the problems and put them in context, but also to suggest some simple workarounds. I hope this does not cover any spoilers that would require a confidential task (which might exist already). If preferred, feel free to split this into child tasks.

1) Interruption of spell casters

A character that is not already in an attack stance will switch to a fully defensive stance when being attacked by means of combat mechanics. This is also true while casting spells and is probably intended to instantly interrupt the spell. However, the actual spell is not interrupted, even when being hit by multiple enemies while casting a slow spell such as missile shower.

Suggested workaround: None. I hope this one is easy to fix without the need of a temporary solution.

2) Defense values while spell casting

As a consequence of the mechanism described in point 1), spells may be cast while blocking attacks in a fully defensive stance. The spell casters damage output per time unit is not reduced. To compare, physical attacks are greatly reduced in defensive stance and absent in fully defensive stance. The intended behavior is probably a minimal prefactor in defense when unstanced, as the one in bloody stance.

Suggested workaround: It is probably not to complicated to force attacked unstanced characters into bloody stance (and if unresponsive, make them switch to fully defensive after less than 1.5 time units).

3) Mana supplies as limiting factor

This is a well known issue, but needs to be emphasized here. For as long as magic sleep is available in its current “implementation”, spell casting is like playing with an infinite mana cheat, which obviously disables some aspects of balancing.

Suggested workaround: Until the engine supports the intended effect, the regenerative phase could have some heavy speedup at the costs of much longer casting times.

4) Mental stamina as limiting factor

The current rules for the use of mental stamina seem to make it widely irrelevant when casting spells. To get a regeneration rate lower than the stamina a low level caster can spend, you most probably end up with a negative amount of maximum mana. Even the fastest spellcaster with greatly debuffed mental stats cannot run out of mental stamina without consuming half of the stocks of an alchemist’s shop. The intended feature is probabably a short time limitation for excessive spell casting, as mental stamina regenerates much faster than mana.

Suggested workaround: If there is no table of diversified mental stamina costs implemented yet, simply scale the value that is currently used, maybe by a factor of ten or twenty.

5) Learning curve for hunting mobs

I am well aware that there exist a few spells that support the mechanics to be less effective against certain victims than others and everyone is looking forward to the implementation of antimagic. Still, the vast majority of spells can currently take down any mob, regardless to the casters stats and skills. Even spells that deal reduced damage are highly effective against strong mobs, as the reduction is based on probabilities and few cases, but not additive as with weapons. A progression curve for hunting with magic is therefore absent.

//Suggested workaround://
This will be much less relevant once the other four points are resolved.

The extra damage dealt by the “flaming weapon” buff seems to be the same at rank 20, K=0% will 200 as at rank 100, K=100% will 200. As all other spell caps yielded integer damage values, I suspect a minor bug in the rules for this spell. Duration, mana costs etc seem to work fine.

Possible dependence: http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/flyspray/index.php?do=details&task_id=1578

It would be desirable for players to obtain all or more of the technically relevant information about weapons, armor and other items that can be equipped. For now, stats for weight, size and quality are displayed in the details window of all items. Weapons only have additional information on attack delay, damage type and damage base value. Armors and shields do not show any clues about their individual properties. Therefore, the diversity and balancing of available equipment appears somehow dull and imbalanced, although it is well possible that many other combat variables are affected by equipment: Attack range, block value, counterblock value, attack value, quality of hit and - of course - effects from item enchantments (loot affixes) that do not directly alter stats or skills. Some of this information may be displayed as additional base values in the details window of an item, although it would make sense to access such knowledge with a spell such as dweomer detection or analyze. Also, the impact of an items quality or affixes on its base values could be displayed in brackets. For now, there is no such information for crafted weapons, and no base value for enchanted items.

Related tasks:
Rules for probabilities to miss: PS#4616
Calibration of ranges and damage outputs: PS#2956
Armor base stats: PS#4510
Armor types and chances to dodge: PS#4335
Lack of weapon identification spell: PS#3325

Judging from the outcome of some tests on the RP server, the chances that an attack misses the target is hardly (or possibly not at all) affected by the attackers stance, the distance to the target and the equipped weapons and armor (given the same skills are associated). In contrast, some stats of the target seem to have a huge impact on this probability, as well as the skill rank associated with the attack. From an intuitive point of view, however, the chance to miss should depend more on the attackers skills and equipment, i.e. the difficulty to handle a certain weapon precisely when bearing the weight of some armor.
For the combat stat comparison between attacker and target, there are already chances to dodge and block. Therefore, a player could make more intuitive use of combat messages if the chances to miss would not depend on the properties of the target, in order to adopt his strategies. With the newly introduced ranged weapons, the distance to the target should be the main factor to determine the chance to miss with respect to the attackers skill ranks.
The last point that could be added in this context is that some mobs, such as consumers and ulbernauts are huge and bulking. A system message reading that you missed such a beast looks somewhat ridiculous.

I would like to add an explicit task for this, although I assume it is a well known issue. If this is a duplicate of a confidential task, any feedback on its progress is highly appreciated.

Observation:
The physical resistances of several mobs are high enough to make them effectively immune to all types of weapons with the current rules (on skylab).
The desired tactical advantage for different attack types (slash, pierce and blunt) against mobs is hardly relevant.
The vast majority of attack spells, however, can easily inflict damage on any type of mob.

Request:
A simple adjustment of the mobs resistance values in accordance to the lowered damage outputs will do fine for now. More sophisticated vulnerabilities and immunities to specific types of both physical and magical attacks are a feature request that I assume to require additional or altered game mechanics.

Related comment in the complaint department: http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=37537.msg428169#msg428169

Today I observed mobs running right through an obstacle after colliding with it for about two seconds when chasing a player. This could be the intended behavior to prevent players from casting magic through walls, which would be a nice idea. However, it has the problematic side effect that mobs are now very likely to fall through the floor when chasing somebody over some slope. Thus, mobs will get out of bounds very easily and be unavailable to players until someone issues a respawn.

The current capacity of a bowl is 2, but some cooking transformations require more space. As the number of melting cheesy stews to mix has been increased to 4, the needed capacity for this step is now 3.3. There may be some other mixing transformations causing trouble when they yield products beyond the bowls size.

Probably to be added to
PS#2889

While playing around with the GUI I noticed some problem with the background of the trade window. It seems to always insert a frame from the lower right of components01.png near (250, 200), no matter which background you define in the xml file. The same strange background shows up in some of the boxes during character creation.

The title is self explanatory. It seems characters falling down from cliffs are the main reason why this feature is rarely used.
Related topic on the hydlaaplaza forums:
http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?PHPSESSID=e3775f9bca3dce2693459849beabda73&topic=36280.msg413248;topicseen#msg413248

A short and simple feature request: I would love to see crafted steel falchions.

Technically those would not differ (much) from sabres, but it may add some variety in terms of another highly efficient sword class of a different design.

I would like to make some suggestions/requests for the movement system.
Apologizes for the case that I missed duplicates of this or part of it.

Observation:
The movement speed for a combination of either forward or backward movement together with strafing seems to follow vector addition. Although sidesteps are clearly slower in run mode (apparently they are the same as in walk mode), diagonal movement is significantly faster than the natural way of running.

Suggestion:
Simple scaling of velocity for the case of combined movement would prevent abuse of this rather strange behavior.

Observation:
Running characters are abruptly interrupted when their stamina drops to a value that triggers “to exhausted to move” messages. Players in this situation frequently alternate very short periods of resting until minimal stamina has regenerated and running until the next brake is enforced.

Suggestion:
If the concept of scaling velocities is considered, a connection between movement speed and relative stamina may add some depth to the rules. A trivial example would be to set movement speed proportional to the current percentage of physical stamina. The standard value of movement speed could be used for a decent amount of remaining stamina, thus allowing higher peak velocity for a short sprint. In contrast, walking speed may be kept constant, so exhausted characters naturally switch from running to walking.

Observation: Dakkru's curse reduces all character attributes by half, which leaves many of its victims unable to move due to inventory overload. In addition, the stamina drain glitch is greatly enhanced. As a consequence, many players are forced to either wait or abuse the relogin glitch.

Suggestion: In the spirit of a curse, some overall probabilities may be scaled by a given factor, for instance 1/3. The cursed character thus has a greatly reduced chances to successfully cast a spell, hit an enemy, dodge a blow or block an attack. Movement is not interfered. Different character builds should be affected rather equally. Further probabilities concerning professions may be considered.

Observation: The path through the death realm is rather short, repetitive and linear. The upper floor is meaningless and the portal's destination coordinate is a race specific constant. Suicide is therefore highly encouraged for short traveling times.

Suggestion: Store the latest valid coordinate upon character's death (as for /unstick) as respawn point. Introduce randomness to the death realm. Active doors should be an easy way to implement some. A short quest which requires some search before passing the portal would be awesome. This may involve to obtain a random type of item, which can only be found and carried in the death realm. When the effort to return to the world of the living is greater, the severeness of Dakkr's curse may have to be rebalanced.

When I chose different paths from the character quick creation screen, I end up with stats corresponding to the races exact base values.
Is this intended, although the paths are described with some distribution (percentage) of ranks in stats? If not, this bug will give quick character creation a serious penalty compared to the detailed creation process. Please correct me if I got something wrong. So far, I tried dwarven and diaboli enchanters and knights.

I have asked about this first in both, the games help and petition channels. I did not get a clear answer but have been encouraged to post the problem here, where I was not able to find a similar task.