[Khizan]

This is a repository for minor classlead ideas for the next round. I'm doing this largely because every time a round of classleads happens, there's a ton of people saying "I don't have any report ideas, somebody suggest something for me to report." Meanwhile, everybody is focusing on their major issues like Smithing, Summoning, and combat balance changes.

The majority of my ideas are non-combat related and deal mainly with accessibility and ease-of-use. The ones that are combat related are only related to combat by way of reducing the effect of a person's ping. I'd like to see this continue for any other suggestions, simply to keep the thread from exploding into arguments and flaming. The entire reason I'm making this thread is so that the next time I hear somebody saying "I don't know what to use my classleads on", I'll be able to point them here for a list of issues that need addressing.

Skillsets are in no particular order.

Knifeplay
Problem(Knifecrafting): There's only a handful of mobs in the game that make top tier sitaras, which are what all combat is based around. This means that most people end up having to get a tank to get their bones for them, or get a yanker to just cheese Rafe and Balan and such.
Solution: Equalize sitara bones so that they're all of the highest quality. This may result in more high quality sitaras, but anybody who is anybody is using a Rafe/Balan quality anyways. This would merely mean that lowbies might actually be able to make their own sitaras.

Problem(Knifecrafting):It takes far too long to dry and dye a sitara. You're looking at 2 RL days before you can reasonably expect to start using the sitara you start on today. A day to dry it, a day to dye it.
Solution: Make drying and dying instant. Anything that's overpowered to get instantly would be overpowered after a two day waiting period. Just make a limit as to how many times a day you're able to use the drying stone to preserve the current limit.

Problem(Knifecrafting): It's way too easy to ruin a sitara while making it, and with the length of the crafting time there's no real reason to force people to turn everything off and stop talking for the duration of the crafting.
Solution: Make it so that sitaras are only destroyed in crafting when the crafter does something that takes eq/bal.

Predation/Bowmanship/Archery in general
Problem: You have to be on balance to switch the type of your arrows and darts. Since there would be no way to do anything along the lines of "target left leg;blade flick target;target right leg;blade flick target", there is no real reason to require balance to change arrows and darts. Requiring balance to do these things just punishes players with a slower ping since they have to wait to regain balance to start their next attack and can't "chase" it.
Solution: Allow players to change their selected darts/arrows and the backups while off balance.

Weaponry:
Problem(Weaponprobe): It really, really sucks to be a novice who has to ask guildmembers what quality their armor and weapons are because the ability to see that is a fair handful of lessons down a non-guild skill.
Solution: Make weaponprobe an Inept skill in Weaponry. Any non monk/WD/predator wanting to get into combat will have to learn down to parry anyways, so this really shouldn't impact anything at all, except to make novicehood suck a little less

Perception
Problem(Elixlist): Imperian's healing can easily overwhelm a new player, and that's made even worse by the sheer irritance of having to count your various vials by doing "put epidermal in pack" repeatedly to see how many you have.
Solution: Make elixlist an inept skill. It's amazingly frustrating for a new player to have to spend ~30ish credits just to be able to easily see how many health vials they have.

Hunting
Problem(Affinity): Once you've chosen an affinity, there's no real way to see what affinity you've chosen. It's irritating to have to summon animals and look at your eq to see what affinity you've chosen.
Solution: Add a command that allows Outriders/Hunters to see what area affinity they have.

Bowmanship
Problem(Hookshot): Hookshot requires you to manually switch to a barbed arrow before being able to use it. This is just irritating and it serves no real purpose other than to add a slight ping delay to the skill's use. Juran would rarely notice it; Breav would notice it every time.
Solution: Make hookshot use a barbed arrow regardless of the currently selected arrow. If it could also be made to use rope straight from the rift, that would be awesome as well.

Tarot
Problem(Inscribing): Inscribing is incredibly irritating because anything you do will ruin the cards, forcing the player to spend large periods of time effectively AFK.
Solution: Allow players to use actions that do not take balance/eq without destroying the cards

Elemancy
Problem(Bashing): Lowbie mage bashing sucks. Really, really hard. It's horrible. With an astute statpack, stonefist does more dps than firelash, and you'll have to use it until staffcast at Mythical. But both are miserably, coming in at ~6 and ~8 dps for firelash and stonefist respectively. (Numbers come from Ryax, I have not personally confirmed them, but it's pretty hard to mess them up what with the game giving them to you directly now, so I trust them.)
Solution: Make the attacks suck less in PvE.

Sabotage
Problem:(Bashing): Garrote sucks pretty horribly at low skill levels due to horrible accuracy.
Solution: Make garrote have 100% accuracy against mobiles, or remove the venom cost from dioxin and make it suck less. Either would work.

[evaldir]

For what my opinion is worth ...

WeaponProbe: Someone can always ask another person to WeaponProbe something, and most often(or at least for predators) the shops that sell sitaras are good enough for novices to use efficiently enough anyway. As far as other weapons go, WeaponProbe is an easy enough thing to ask for, and it isn't terribly expensive to get(most professions that use weapons need weaponry anyway).

Elixlist: Novices don't need elixlist, because at the beginning, most novices only carry around one of each elixir/salve. It's something that makes life on Imperian easier, yes, but it is not something that should come as low as inept. I would say lower it in perception, but not that far.

Knifecrafting: The only things that should be removed from messing up knifecrafting are says and tells. Since it is crafting a knife out of a bone with a dagger ... you have to put a lot of attention into this. If you removed all things that make it screw up except things that take balance/eq, you would find people walking around, or following people around while crafting knives. This kind of thing should be done while you are sitting in a room, paying attention to it. I say make it so you can talk fine, but anything else that screws it up should be the same ... As far as the dying and drying, I have no opinion on this matter, as the wait never really bothered me. It's just waiting for a new sitara, you can wait two days and still use a different one until it's done.

If you want my biased opinion, I think there should be a public drying/dying room, for the few that aren't members of a guild with one of those rooms. Sure, I could probably and will probably find someone to do it for me no problem, but that's not the point. Drying/dying rooms and toxin rooms should not be limited to the few specific guilds.

As far as toxin labs go, with them being limited to (four?)guildhalls, I would suggest a change to toxins, in that when you are using venoms(venom sacs) to prepare the toxins, you should be able to preserve them in vials all the same rather than just being able to envenom things with them. The toxin lab provides everything you need for preserving toxins in vials including the venoms, but I don't understand why the lab is -needed- for preserving. Make it so that you can use toxin labs to preserve toxins without using venoms, but you can still preserve them outside(perhaps with a specific tool/item to do it) by using the venoms that you have already gotten from the specific animals.

[Verick]

evaldir, on 23 July 2010 - 12:08 AM, said:

For what my opinion is worth ...

WeaponProbe: Blah Blah

Elixlist: Blah blah

Knifecrafting: Blah blah

This sort of response is along the lines of someone responding "Lol, you can just gag it via the client" when I brought up a spammy Harmony vibe message. The objective is to make it user friendly. Is it necessary? No. Is there any real reason -not- to do it? No. Will it decrease IRE's profits? No. Will it make life easier for people, especially those who are new to the game, and perhaps Muds in general? YES. (And I doubt it'd let you move while knifecrafting even if that particular change was implemented).

Go be a Republican (just say no!) on your school board or something, we don't need it in Imperian.

[evaldir]

Verick, on 23 July 2010 - 02:00 AM, said:

This sort of response is along the lines of someone responding "Lol, you can just gag it via the client" when I brought up a spammy Harmony vibe message. The objective is to make it user friendly. Is it necessary? No. Is there any real reason -not- to do it? No. Will it decrease IRE's profits? No. Will it make life easier for people, especially those who are new to the game, and perhaps Muds in general? YES. (And I doubt it'd let you move while knifecrafting even if that particular change was implemented).

Go be a Republican (just say no!) on your school board or something, we don't need it in Imperian.

Go troll your prom committee

[Raini]

I love all of these ideas.* I'm kinda hoping Dranor and Garryn read this thread** and decide to just add the changes to the last round of classleads that we did.. since most of these really seem like making Imperian more user friendly and most of them were things that when I first started playing, I hated. Including mage DPS when hunting PvE





*Not sure about knifecrafting because, as a non-predator I know approximately jack about Sitaras, but I support it because I can generally make someone a decent weapon in sub 10 minutes and waiting for a full 2 IRL days after paying to hunt a super-mob sounds like utter crap to me.

**And the model people. Let's keep it clean.

[Dino]

Verick, on 23 July 2010 - 01:00 AM, said:

This sort of response is along the lines of someone responding "Lol, you can just gag it via the client" when I brought up a spammy Harmony vibe message. The objective is to make it user friendly. Is it necessary? No. Is there any real reason -not- to do it? No. Will it decrease IRE's profits? No. Will it make life easier for people, especially those who are new to the game, and perhaps Muds in general? YES. (And I doubt it'd let you move while knifecrafting even if that particular change was implemented).

Go be a Republican (just say no!) on your school board or something, we don't need it in Imperian.

This. There is no reason to not support those ideas, and all that post boiled down to was 'lol I already have all of them anyway, so why make things more convenient for everyone else'.

I can't say a bad thing about any of those ideas. They're all worth implementing.

[Apoloc]

Khizan is usually full of good ideas so he's basically got my support on any idea that is able to be supported. And that other guy complaining is Yurii so you really can't take his statements with any seriousness.

Good ideas though imo.

[Labil]

evaldir, on 23 July 2010 - 02:38 AM, said:

As far as toxin labs go, with them being limited to (four?)guildhalls, I would suggest a change to toxins, in that when you are using venoms(venom sacs) to prepare the toxins, you should be able to preserve them in vials all the same rather than just being able to envenom things with them. The toxin lab provides everything you need for preserving toxins in vials including the venoms, but I don't understand why the lab is -needed- for preserving. Make it so that you can use toxin labs to preserve toxins without using venoms, but you can still preserve them outside(perhaps with a specific tool/item to do it) by using the venoms that you have already gotten from the specific animals.

I honestly hope you are trolling, because that is what your post is screaming to me. Either that or just complete lack of understand of Imperian.

Of your post this is one of the worst parts. I hope you are aware that you can preserve outside the lab. Unless you are talking about uniques, which I'm not ready to believe.

Edit: I like all of Khizan's ideas.

[Guardas]

Here's an addition, pretty much for the same reason as Tarot cards.

Devotion:
Consecration

Problem: Devotioners cannot do anyhing while consecrating, effectively AFKing. Performing any action will cause consecration to stop and willpower to be wasted.
Solution: Allow devotioners to perform other actions that do not take balance/equilibrium including tells and using channels.

[ivellios]

Same thing with artistry please. While crafting instruments, if you do anything, you wreck your crafting and waste commodities. And even when you trans artistry, it takes a while to make a full instrument set, sketchbook and quill. So if we could do things that don't take equilibrium/balance while crafting, says, tells, channel talk, etc, and not have it wreck the crafting, that would be very, very, nice.

[Zuljin]

Since Outriders have ridebyshot but cannot most of the skills in bonding while mounted give Outriders (and not hunters) quickmount.

[Alarick]

I don't think drying should be instant. I suppose there's no reason dying shouldn't be, since it won't make predators overpowered. I wouldn't have any opposition to drying time being cut down dramatically though, like to maybe an hour or two rather than a day. We shouldn't completely throw away all RP aspects just for convenience, but there is a balance to be reached.

Knifecrafting to me is in the same group as consecrations, totem implanting/uprooting and tree uprooting - you should have to stay in one place to do it, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to talk, read messages, help files, or whatever.

And I have been a predator before. Given, I absolutely hated the class, but the only time I was ever in a position that I desperately needed a sitara immediately was when I went inactive and everything I had decayed.

[Guardas]

Zuljin, on 23 July 2010 - 01:38 PM, said:

Since Outriders have ridebyshot but cannot most of the skills in bonding while mounted give Outriders (and not hunters) quickmount.

On this note, horses that can learn intimidate. It's annoying having to choose between class skills and getting smashed by overpowered bard sketches.

[Zuljin]

Guardas, on 23 July 2010 - 06:59 PM, said:

On this note, horses that can learn intimidate. It's annoying having to choose between class skills and getting smashed by overpowered bard sketches.

There are at least two (to my knowledge) animals that have mount and intimidate. Mammoth and behemoth. Otherwise you're going to have to get an artifact pet.

[Guardas]

Zuljin, on 23 July 2010 - 04:35 PM, said:

There are at least two (to my knowledge) animals that have mount and intimidate. Mammoth and behemoth. Otherwise you're going to have to get an artifact pet.

Yup but neither can learn the skills necessary for Knights to use joust or sunder.