I was talking to a couple people sitting at superhero level in Aardwolf yesterday while they power leveled me up to 200. They talked a bit about some of the new things that have come into the game. In particular there are apparently three new ways to get even more powerful by sinking tons and tons of in game currency. Apparently they start off being a pretty bad return on investment as far as power goes and then get even worse since they suffer from two different kinds of diminishing returns. You have to pay increasingly more per point of improvement and each point gets worse as you get more of them.
I came back to what I thought was a lot of currency (65k quest points, 60 trivia points, 4M gold) so I thought I should look deeper into what these new sources of power are. It turns out I'm really not very rich at all...
The first, and most boring, of the three is potential. Potential costs just quest points to buy. It starts at 100 and increases by 25 more each point you get. What it does is increases your maximum stat cap by one per point of potential. It doesn't raise the individual cap for each stat at max level. Instead it just lets you max out more stats. This is certainly good, but it isn't terribly exciting. It also is of pretty much no use to me right now. Maybe I'll sit and max out at superhero again in the future and maybe it will be worth buying at that point in time but when you're leveling it doesn't seem like it has much impact on anything.
Next up is mastery which is a percentage increase to damage done. Mastery works for an individual damage type and there are therefore 20 different mastery levels you can buy. The first point costs 100 quest points and 2M gold and the cost goes up by 20 qp and 250k gold per point. Apparently to do 5% more damage you need to pay a total of 4420qp and 68M gold. To do 10% more damage will cost 17860qp and 251.75M gold. I don't have the cash to do that in a single damage type let alone all of them! It feels like figuring out what damage type you do most often and sinking a couple points into it would make a fair amount of sense. For a warrior that's probably bash damage since that's the damage type of hammering blow? I also have a lot of fire typed weapons... And only 21M gold. So it may be a good idea to sit at max level and grind cash for a while to at least buy a couple points in fire and bash?
Finally there's instinct which uses a type of currency I wasn't expecting: trains. Trains are typically used to increase your stats as you level. Instead of doing that you can spend 200 of them and 2M gold (increasing by 25 trains and 100k gold per point) to buy a point of instinct in a skill. Instinct lets you increase an individual skill up above the default 100% maximum. When a skill is over 100% it gets better. It isn't clear how much better. (I have 1% in enhanced damage and have no idea what that does for me... Maybe it procs more often? Maybe I hit harder when it does proc?) On the one hand trains spent on stats while leveling up are thrown away when you remort back to level 1. On the other hand the faster I hit level 200 the faster I can start back at level 1. Saving up for instinct is a definitely short term pain for long term gain kind of thing. You can save trains up in chunks smaller than 200 so it's possible to just bank 40 or so from the last few levels and eventually make gains. I didn't know this at the time so I didn't raise any stats for my last 40ish levels in order to get my 200 for a point in enhanced damage. Knowing how it works now I probably would have waited another 20 levels or so before starting to bank them. You do earn trains while at max level so presumably that's the real way to buy instinct anyway.
So one of the three new wealth sinks only really does anything at max level and the other two are really only earned at max level but help the whole time. It feels like I should probably sit at 7x max level when I get there and power some of these things up...
Showing posts with label Aardwolf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aardwolf. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Aardwolf Primary Class
Back in the day when I used to mud on Aardwolf the class system was relatively straightforward. You chose a class when you first started and leveled up to the max level of 200. Once there you could do 'end game' stuff or you could start over back at level 1 with a second class. This time through you'd have all of the abilities of both chosen classes and would need more experience for each level to compensate. You could keep repeating every 200 levels. Restart at level 1 with a new class. Once you had all 7 classes at max level you could stop for end game stuff or you could start over at level 1 of just a single class again, but with extra powers. (Some bonus stats and you got to use spells and wear gear 10 levels above you.) You could repeat this up to 10 times! So much leveling!
Which order you chose the classes didn't really matter. Thief/warrior or warrior/thief were just as good at fighting as one another. I can only remember three ways in which your first class mattered... That was the class you represented in class wars. There was one zone with a room for each class and you could only explore the room for your class (which meant you couldn't explore the whole zone until you'd completed 6 entire tiers of leveling and had started in on the 7th). And your displayed name was a function of your first class and your tier number.
Despite that I can remember staying up late debating the 'right' order to choose the classes with Byung and Tom. You really wanted to be a mage because they had the best damage spells. Thieves had the best opening round with backstab, especially when you had high level weapons. Warriors had the best auto attack damage. Clerics were the best healers, and had great buffs. Psionicists were almost as good as mages at doing damage and brought a bunch of utility and more buffs. Paladins were worse than clerics at healing, and worse than warriors and fighting, and worse than psions at damage and buffs. A fine first class, but once you had 3 classes you really didn't want paladin to be one of them. They did have a couple unique buffs though, so they weren't terrible. Rangers were terrible. The only thing they had going for them was the ability to skin the corpses of every monster you killed which would give you an item with random stats. If you got lucky you could make best in slot gear for several slots at every level. But you were so bad! So there were interesting decision to make while leveling based on what combo you wanted at each number of classes. Mage/thief/warrior/cleric/psion/paladin/ranger may have been 'best', but there was definitely debate to be had. It looks like Byung's last setup was thief/psion/mage/warrior/cleric/ranger/paladin!
When I stopped playing I was midway through my 4th tier. I don't even remember what my first 3 primary classes were but I know I chose different ones because I wanted to explore that entire zone. This time around I was a paladin because the display name was slayer and one of the available races is vampire. So I was a vampire slayer. Woo? And I had to get paladin out of the way at some point!
Things have changed significantly since then. They decided they didn't like that all characters with all 7 classes were pretty much identical and looked for a way to shake things up a little. The solution they came with was to make your primary class much more impactful. Each class now has a few spells/skills that can only be used if you have the right first class. Many of the other skills which carry over are significantly more powerful with the right primary class. For example, I have thief as my third class so I have access to the backstab skill. But I don't have access to the enhanced backstab skill as only primary thieves get that. Also, my backstab is worse than a thief's backstab would be. Right now I seem to be backstabbing for around 12% of enemy health. I'm just guessing here, but I bet I'd be doing more like 40% if I was a primary thief. On top of that change, you also get to pick a subclass for your primary class to get even better at something they do. I appear to have chosen to be a guardian which gives me improved safeguard and rescue abilities in order to protect other people in my group. I bet it's a useful subclass for endgame PvPing, but it's absolutely worthless for leveling and questing. If I was a thief I could subclass into assassin to do 25% more damage on backstab. That's probably 10% off the health of every monster I engage on instead of the nothing I have now!
Because they made this change they've granted everyone the ability to change their primary class once for free. You can also pay quest points to change again after that. This means exploring that one zone is a lot easier, and it means I could switch up to something better for more power. (I've also already visited the paladin specific rooms in that zone, so switching out for free makes a lot of sense regardless.) The way it works means if I switch one of my current classes in as my new primary class I end up just swapping and keeping paladin. So I can be a thief/mage/paladin or a mage/paladin/thief or I could throw paladin away entirely and be something like warrior/mage/thief.
I wish I could remember what classes I've already done for that zone. Wait! I have random logs saved from various clan applications over the years... YES! Tier 1 I was a ranger (got that out of the way early) and tier 2 I was a cleric. I'm 95% sure my tier 0 was mage. So I still need to make my primary class thief, psion, and warrior. But I can do that for a bunch of quest points if I end up exploring all the other zones and really need to get the last few rooms in this one. So probably what I should do is pick the primary class/subclass that I actually want and maybe use exploring as a tiebreaker.
Which order you chose the classes didn't really matter. Thief/warrior or warrior/thief were just as good at fighting as one another. I can only remember three ways in which your first class mattered... That was the class you represented in class wars. There was one zone with a room for each class and you could only explore the room for your class (which meant you couldn't explore the whole zone until you'd completed 6 entire tiers of leveling and had started in on the 7th). And your displayed name was a function of your first class and your tier number.
Despite that I can remember staying up late debating the 'right' order to choose the classes with Byung and Tom. You really wanted to be a mage because they had the best damage spells. Thieves had the best opening round with backstab, especially when you had high level weapons. Warriors had the best auto attack damage. Clerics were the best healers, and had great buffs. Psionicists were almost as good as mages at doing damage and brought a bunch of utility and more buffs. Paladins were worse than clerics at healing, and worse than warriors and fighting, and worse than psions at damage and buffs. A fine first class, but once you had 3 classes you really didn't want paladin to be one of them. They did have a couple unique buffs though, so they weren't terrible. Rangers were terrible. The only thing they had going for them was the ability to skin the corpses of every monster you killed which would give you an item with random stats. If you got lucky you could make best in slot gear for several slots at every level. But you were so bad! So there were interesting decision to make while leveling based on what combo you wanted at each number of classes. Mage/thief/warrior/cleric/psion/paladin/ranger may have been 'best', but there was definitely debate to be had. It looks like Byung's last setup was thief/psion/mage/warrior/cleric/ranger/paladin!
When I stopped playing I was midway through my 4th tier. I don't even remember what my first 3 primary classes were but I know I chose different ones because I wanted to explore that entire zone. This time around I was a paladin because the display name was slayer and one of the available races is vampire. So I was a vampire slayer. Woo? And I had to get paladin out of the way at some point!
Things have changed significantly since then. They decided they didn't like that all characters with all 7 classes were pretty much identical and looked for a way to shake things up a little. The solution they came with was to make your primary class much more impactful. Each class now has a few spells/skills that can only be used if you have the right first class. Many of the other skills which carry over are significantly more powerful with the right primary class. For example, I have thief as my third class so I have access to the backstab skill. But I don't have access to the enhanced backstab skill as only primary thieves get that. Also, my backstab is worse than a thief's backstab would be. Right now I seem to be backstabbing for around 12% of enemy health. I'm just guessing here, but I bet I'd be doing more like 40% if I was a primary thief. On top of that change, you also get to pick a subclass for your primary class to get even better at something they do. I appear to have chosen to be a guardian which gives me improved safeguard and rescue abilities in order to protect other people in my group. I bet it's a useful subclass for endgame PvPing, but it's absolutely worthless for leveling and questing. If I was a thief I could subclass into assassin to do 25% more damage on backstab. That's probably 10% off the health of every monster I engage on instead of the nothing I have now!
Because they made this change they've granted everyone the ability to change their primary class once for free. You can also pay quest points to change again after that. This means exploring that one zone is a lot easier, and it means I could switch up to something better for more power. (I've also already visited the paladin specific rooms in that zone, so switching out for free makes a lot of sense regardless.) The way it works means if I switch one of my current classes in as my new primary class I end up just swapping and keeping paladin. So I can be a thief/mage/paladin or a mage/paladin/thief or I could throw paladin away entirely and be something like warrior/mage/thief.
I wish I could remember what classes I've already done for that zone. Wait! I have random logs saved from various clan applications over the years... YES! Tier 1 I was a ranger (got that out of the way early) and tier 2 I was a cleric. I'm 95% sure my tier 0 was mage. So I still need to make my primary class thief, psion, and warrior. But I can do that for a bunch of quest points if I end up exploring all the other zones and really need to get the last few rooms in this one. So probably what I should do is pick the primary class/subclass that I actually want and maybe use exploring as a tiebreaker.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Back To Mudding
Sceadeau has been trying for the last little bit to get Robb and I to start playing on the Arctic mud with him. I went to give it a spin the other day but ended up learning some things that made me uninterested in playing it heavily.
While I was playing I got to overhear a shouting flame war between some other players. It would seem the mud is what they call 'oPK' or open player killing. This means anyone can attack any other player in almost any room at any time. From what I was able to gather about this particular situation one of the players attacked someone else. Said someone else then sent out a request for help via some out of game channel (a Skype chat room or a Facebook group or something) and then 10 people were suddenly involved in the fight. They killed off the attacker, took his stuff off his corpse, and then proceeded to taunt him via shouts.
I find this very disturbing. In particular the idea that a high level player can decide on a whim to kill me and take all my items is very bothersome. It pretty much negates one of the best things about games like this: collecting gear. Either gear is so trivial to come by it doesn't matter if someone takes your stuff or gear is hard to obtain and then the best way to get gear is to find someone with gear and gang up to kill them. I am not terribly interested in being a bully, or in getting bullied, or in having my progress removed on the whim of a stranger on the internet.
Another problem was the inability to log out anywhere you wanted. If you quit the game anywhere but an inn you instantly dropped all your stuff on the ground. If you rented a room in an inn you had to pay an hourly fee based on your gear. So again, either gear is irrelevant and it's ok to lose it or you have to go to great lengths to protect it. The worst would be taking a few extra days off, running out of money, and losing all your stuff.
Now, maybe you can make the claim that this is pretty realistic. Having to watch your back all the time and not being allowed to just quit when you want does make for a more realistic virtual world. My problem is I don't think it makes for a particularly fun one. Sometimes I want to play a hardcore game where I can lose all my progress if I make a mistake or forget to eat or whatever... But then I'll go and play Don't Starve or zAngband or something where if I fail or not depends on my skill and random luck and not on some high level guy having a bad day and taking it out on me.
Maybe the last straw that drove me away was the non-Euclidian geometry in the starting town. I'm fine with weird room layouts in dungeons and the like, but the starting town? Are you trying to confuse me just for your own kicks? Walking in a circle should get me back to the same spot, not get me to a room above the starting room. It didn't help that I'd downloaded a new mud client that had automap software that was really, really confused by it.
After futzing with that client I decided to see about logging into the mud I used to play a lot back in the day, Aardwolf. I finally went and salvaged the hard drive out of my old dead computer and hooked it up to my working computer. I was able to get all my old scripts and import them into the new client. Woo! Most of them didn't work because they changed how brackets and quotes work between zMud and cMud but at least it gave me a framework to work with. I cleaned most of them up and now I have a functioning spellup script and a campaign window like back in the day. I even managed to win a global quest!
So much has changed, with the world layout completely redone (busting most of my speedwalks), the class system changed, and all sorts of new stuff added. I got kicked out of my old clan (probably for not really playing in 6 years or whatever) which is a little sad. I did get a couple tells from people though! One from someone who used to be a clannie in Amazon (I think) and one from someone trying to recruit me into the big evil clan. I'm not a huge fan of random PK, but at least on Aardwolf there aren't really negative consequenced for being PKed. You lose a bit of time casting your buff spells again and whatnot but you don't get any gear stolen or anything like that. There's a lot of new stuff to figure out, but I still have my old gear and all my big numbers from before which is nice. I like big numbers!
While I was playing I got to overhear a shouting flame war between some other players. It would seem the mud is what they call 'oPK' or open player killing. This means anyone can attack any other player in almost any room at any time. From what I was able to gather about this particular situation one of the players attacked someone else. Said someone else then sent out a request for help via some out of game channel (a Skype chat room or a Facebook group or something) and then 10 people were suddenly involved in the fight. They killed off the attacker, took his stuff off his corpse, and then proceeded to taunt him via shouts.
I find this very disturbing. In particular the idea that a high level player can decide on a whim to kill me and take all my items is very bothersome. It pretty much negates one of the best things about games like this: collecting gear. Either gear is so trivial to come by it doesn't matter if someone takes your stuff or gear is hard to obtain and then the best way to get gear is to find someone with gear and gang up to kill them. I am not terribly interested in being a bully, or in getting bullied, or in having my progress removed on the whim of a stranger on the internet.
Another problem was the inability to log out anywhere you wanted. If you quit the game anywhere but an inn you instantly dropped all your stuff on the ground. If you rented a room in an inn you had to pay an hourly fee based on your gear. So again, either gear is irrelevant and it's ok to lose it or you have to go to great lengths to protect it. The worst would be taking a few extra days off, running out of money, and losing all your stuff.
Now, maybe you can make the claim that this is pretty realistic. Having to watch your back all the time and not being allowed to just quit when you want does make for a more realistic virtual world. My problem is I don't think it makes for a particularly fun one. Sometimes I want to play a hardcore game where I can lose all my progress if I make a mistake or forget to eat or whatever... But then I'll go and play Don't Starve or zAngband or something where if I fail or not depends on my skill and random luck and not on some high level guy having a bad day and taking it out on me.
Maybe the last straw that drove me away was the non-Euclidian geometry in the starting town. I'm fine with weird room layouts in dungeons and the like, but the starting town? Are you trying to confuse me just for your own kicks? Walking in a circle should get me back to the same spot, not get me to a room above the starting room. It didn't help that I'd downloaded a new mud client that had automap software that was really, really confused by it.
After futzing with that client I decided to see about logging into the mud I used to play a lot back in the day, Aardwolf. I finally went and salvaged the hard drive out of my old dead computer and hooked it up to my working computer. I was able to get all my old scripts and import them into the new client. Woo! Most of them didn't work because they changed how brackets and quotes work between zMud and cMud but at least it gave me a framework to work with. I cleaned most of them up and now I have a functioning spellup script and a campaign window like back in the day. I even managed to win a global quest!
So much has changed, with the world layout completely redone (busting most of my speedwalks), the class system changed, and all sorts of new stuff added. I got kicked out of my old clan (probably for not really playing in 6 years or whatever) which is a little sad. I did get a couple tells from people though! One from someone who used to be a clannie in Amazon (I think) and one from someone trying to recruit me into the big evil clan. I'm not a huge fan of random PK, but at least on Aardwolf there aren't really negative consequenced for being PKed. You lose a bit of time casting your buff spells again and whatnot but you don't get any gear stolen or anything like that. There's a lot of new stuff to figure out, but I still have my old gear and all my big numbers from before which is nice. I like big numbers!
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