New Skill Idea

[Waelos]

Hey. . .just occured to me that perhaps a useful new ranger skill or any class skill you want to give it to would be something like. . .


INTERCEPT
Reflexive skill

Aggressive: Yes

INTERCEPT

"Intercept" lets you make yourself aggressive to aggressive monsters, even when engaged with an enemy, meaning you will automatically attack them first when an aggressive monster walks in on you and your group.

Syntax:
> intercept : Check status
> intercept off : Turn off intercept
> intercept 120 : You will only intercept monsters when your hitpoints >= 120


It would be a skill that would be checked whenever an agressive monster walks in, and the character may engage that mob first, before it hits anyone else in the room =)


Thoughts?

Lost

[mynazzaraxxsyn]

Sounds like a great skill for dead rangers. But if it keeps the invoker or squid alive a couple rounds longer I'm all for it.

[Yayaril]

8)

Isn't this 'toggle aggressive'?

[Hyldryn]

Aggressive doesn't work while in combat.

[Sesexe]

Wow, now fighters won't even have to type 'kill <mob>'.

Just tog aggressive with this skill and fol the leader.

How's that auto-rescue code coming a long btw? All these warrior types are so annoying. Multi-bots will make a much better game! :)

[Waelos]

Critical point was this was a skill that wouldn't always work. . .*shrug* Idea sucks, delete thread I suppose.

[thanuk]

I think this is a really good idea personally. After us leaving clouds last night, I bet Vena does too!

[Gura]

yea a skill like that prolly woulda saved mynazz like 5 deaths in musel invasion.

[Dalar]

Wow, now fighters won't even have to type 'kill <mob>'.

Just tog aggressive with this skill and fol the leader.

How's that auto-rescue code coming a long btw? All these warrior types are so annoying. Multi-bots will make a much better game! :)

I'm so glad I didn't read your combat evolved thread after reading this statement.

If weylarii's skill was implemented, it wouldn't make a huge difference to anyone's autorescuer. It would save people from the initial hit and 0-X rounds of being hit, assuming no switches or whatever. I can have one alias just spamming rescue everyone.

[mynazzaraxxsyn]

yea a skill like that prolly woulda saved mynazz like 5 deaths in musel invasion.

Naw those skills already exist, rescue mynazz and cast 'full h' mynazz

[Sarell]

That is such a fantastic idea, hi5 wey!!!

This skill given only to rangers would give them a small niche in large scale grid romping where we might even bring one along. It fits excellently into what my personal perceptions of what a ranger should be, in a zone, sort of a quick light warrior / scout. It would actually more likely cut down on auto triggers for kicking incoming CC mobs that lag the warrior's bash than make any concern for skill. Would also make much more fun (and increase the skill of many warriors) for the warriors / melee in the group as we could watch out for when the ranger intercepts mobs and then get thew majority of mobs back onto the warrior tanks - thus giving combat on grids or busy areas a much more realistic feel than the current spam rescue and hope they don't hit the psi/elf. Really one of the best ideas I have heard in AGES! Great work wey!

[Sesexe]

Wow, now fighters won't even have to type 'kill <mob>'.

Just tog aggressive with this skill and fol the leader.

How's that auto-rescue code coming a long btw? All these warrior types are so annoying. Multi-bots will make a much better game! :)

I'm so glad I didn't read your combat evolved thread after reading this statement.

If weylarii's skill was implemented, it wouldn't make a huge difference to anyone's autorescuer. It would save people from the initial hit and 0-X rounds of being hit, assuming no switches or whatever. I can have one alias just spamming rescue everyone.

This skill should be called 'auto-switch'. You're fighting a mob, an aggro walks in, you auto switch to it. That's exactly what this skill is saying. So yes you've just removed the need to even engage in aggro zones. This isn't auto rescue, it's auto-switch/auto-engage. I never said anything about it being a form of rescue. I said fighters wouldn't even have to engage a mob. Read the first statement. I was being sarcastic with the rest because of the absurdity of a skill like auto-switch/engage. Why not just have auto rescue? Or Auto-assist? And while we're at it, why not auto-everything a warrior has a trigger for?

But let's not stop there. Let's do it for all classes too. I mean really. We can come up with a list for the top 200 most popular triggers and have them coded into the game as features. Then when we've taken any form of player difficulty out of the game and it's become mindnumblingly easy, let's smile to ourselves as we've just opened the door for multiplaying. By then it'll be easy to run 15 characters at the same time since the mud's handling their commands anyways. Then we can whine about how we should be able to multiplay since only 10 actual people are playing.

Or maybe we shouldn't seek to make every aspect of the game easier and easier and easier, and instead leave some difficulty even if it is able to be handled by a mud client. I mean come on guys. You keep suggesting ideas to make things easier, and at the same time you're posting in threads about how the game is too easy now.

[thanuk]

#1. Take your ritalin.

#2. This skill would be a neat trick, it wouldn't really unbalance anything. Aggros walking in are a minor annoyance, not a heavily involved portion of game difficulty. Nobody ever got spanked in muspel because another fire giant walked in, alright? Only time it ever matters is when its a group of mobs, and the skill wouldnt allow you to engage multiple mobs on entry(see clouds group).

#3. This game can be made extremely more difficult in 1 step. Downgrade spell damage by 20% and its hard again. Its not that mob tactics make the game easy/hard, its that everything dies so fast that the mob tactics dont even matter. You know whats hard? CC with no invoker. Yan-C-Bin with 8 people and only 1 invoker is hard. Those zones with 2 invokers are so easy its pathetic. Go try zoning without invoker damage and tell me what's so friggin easy.

[Hyldryn]

I have no clue what point sesexe is trying to make. It won't change how tanks play at all, we still gotta rescue someone once the mob walks in. Only now, it's the ranger some of the time rather than the nearly always the invoker/psi. I mean whoopdie f*cking doo.

I don't think wey wanted the skill to auto-switch, in fact making it auto-switch would make create more work for a ranger who's trying to hit. Under this system, the ranger would have to manually switch to the original target (leader group-says 'target dragon')each time a new mob walks in. I think wey just wanted the ranger to have a chance to throw an extra attack on an entering aggro, thus engaging it.

As for removing the need to even engage in aggro zones with this skill. Why don't you think about it? You'd be the same as a ranger who just tog'd normal aggressive and went afk. You would never attack unless a mob area'd or walked in on the engaged group.

However, don't get me wrong I think the idea isn't all that great. It doesn't really help rangers in terms of group desirability. I think wey realized that after his original post.

[Hyldryn]

I disagree thanuk. It's not just invokers that make the mud easy. What truly makes the mud easy is blur and displace.

[thanuk]

I disagree thanuk. It's not just invokers that make the mud easy. What truly makes the mud easy is blur and displace.

A combination of both I suppose, but I still think the damage is more important than the defensive spells. They wouldn't be so overpowered if any of the mobs actually lived long enough to see them drop. That gives me an idea actually.

[Hyldryn]

Yeah prolly a combination. But when fights do last long enuff for spells to drop, there is only a 1 second to 15 minute window of vulnerability depending on how good your enchanter is.

[thanuk]

Yeah prolly a combination. But when fights do last long enuff for spells to drop, there is only a 1 second to 15 minute window of vulnerability depending on how good your enchanter is.

Heh remember when people used to run out of stones during fights?:)

[Sesexe]

#2. This skill would be a neat trick, it wouldn't really unbalance anything. Aggros walking in are a minor annoyance, not a heavily involved portion of game difficulty. Nobody ever got spanked in muspel because another fire giant \0\0 k0? Only time it ever matters is when its a group of mobs, and the skill wouldnt allow you to engage multiple mobs on entry(see clouds group).

I don't know about Musp, but I've been in enough spanks in Jot and Jot invasion when aggro mobs walked in and wailed on the un-scaled, un-blurred, only stoned and vit'd support class (like the needed ghealing shaman when we fighting some caster mobs or the only full healer) and caused a spank.

#3. This game can be made extremely more difficult in 1 step. Downgrade spell damage by 20% and its hard again. Its not that mob tactics make the game easy/hard, its that everything dies so fast that the mob tactics dont even matter. You know whats hard? CC with no invoker. Yan-C-Bin with 8 people and only 1 invoker is hard. Those zones with 2 invokers are so easy its pathetic. Go try zoning without invoker damage and tell me what's so friggin easy.

How can you sit there and say we need to reduce voker damage and then support a skill that supports vokers? :P Dood! Wtf?

Let me explain:
-We're in a group (doesn't matter where).
-We are fighting some mobs.
-You're tanking a bunch.
-I start casting an area spell.
-In walks an aggro mob.
WITH THIS SKILL you'd switch/attack/kick/wutever to make the mob that just walked in now target you.
-My big unbalancing super duper damage spell that 3 other classes can can do as well in slightly less time goes off.
-but the mob that just walked in doesn't target me do they? No they don't. Why? Because they are already on you. They've already targeted you instead. Now they have to switch to me to hurt me, fair play for rescue triggers.

In summary:
I don't get drilled by an incoming aggro mob.
I don't suddently scream for a rescue.
I just keep on nuking. Area spell after area spell after area spell til everything is dead. No need to worry about spanks now. Voker never gonna tank and therefor never gonna die. (Don't even say area damage. I can't even remember when the last time in 2 years I died because of an area spell.)

You said it yoursel Nukk, reduce spell damage to make fights more difficult. What's better then killing the class off entirely during an encounter? They can't nuke everything in 8 rounds if they're dead. :P

[thanuk]

I don't know about Musp, but I've been in enough spanks in Jot and Jot invasion when aggro mobs walked in and wailed on the un-scaled, un-blurred, only stoned and vit'd support class (like the needed ghealing shaman when we fighting some caster mobs or the only full healer) and caused a spank.

Bring better tanks. I can't remember the last time that happened to me. Maybe 1 person will die, maybe.

How can you sit there and say we need to reduce voker damage and then support a skill that supports vokers? :P Dood! Wtf?

Let me explain:
-We're in a group (doesn't matter where).
-We are fighting some mobs.
-You're tanking a bunch.
-I start casting an area spell.
-In walks an aggro mob.
WITH THIS SKILL you'd switch/attack/kick/wutever to make the mob that just walked in now target you.
-My big unbalancing super duper damage spell that 3 other classes can can do as well in slightly less time goes off.
-but the mob that just walked in doesn't target me do they? No they don't. Why? Because they are already on you. They've already targeted you instead. Now they have to switch to me to hurt me, fair play for rescue triggers.

In summary:
I don't get drilled by an incoming aggro mob.
I don't suddently scream for a rescue.
I just keep on nuking. Area spell after area spell after area spell til everything is dead. No need to worry about spanks now. Voker never gonna tank and therefor never gonna die. (Don't even say area damage. I can't even remember when the last time in 2 years I died because of an area spell.)

You said it yoursel Nukk, reduce spell damage to make fights more difficult. What's better then killing the class off entirely during an encounter? They can't nuke everything in 8 rounds if they're dead. :P

Well first of all, I wouldn't do this, the ranger would. This would be a cheesy warrior skill, but would work well for rangers.

#2 either your tanks suck or you need more hps. Whether you engage the mob with an area or he just aggros to you first, he better kill you in 1 shot or else im gonna rescue you. Stop grouping with warriors who only have trigger rescues on switch, and you won't die from entering aggros either:)

[Sesexe]

Well atleast you're starting to see my point.

#1 What if that one class to die was the only group 'invoker'? There goes your increased fight difficulty.

#2 It doesn't matter if it's ranger warrior paladin anti paladin dire raider with this skill, as long as it's someone other then a caster class. Like you always say, casters rule this game. Plus we keep hearing about how rangers splat in record time, so it's really doubtful any ranger is going to be running around using this skill regularly unless they were getting regular scales/displacement/blur love.

#3 It's a lot harder to get high hps now bc of eq changes. :P Plus it's not about hps, it's about having the right spells up for taking melee damage. You know this. Until the other day when Shev allowed your dodge to go up, invokers tanked about as good as a warrior when both are spelled up. You've even said as much how many times?

As an invoker, I die when aggro mobs walk in and wail on me when I'm not spelled up. That's right. Melee damage kills me. I've never been in a single zone where every fight required everyone to be spelled up as well as the tanks. Without the right spells, I can die. Not every single time, but it happens. People don't do musp and have the whole grouped spelled up constantlly. If you remove the chance of a hostile mob walking in and taking someone out, you're just removing more chances for spank. Removing chances for spank is removing game difficulty.

[Cordan]

Not sure if this were intended or someone just said it out of the blue, but if this were ranger only, now you'd have to full spellup rangers too (well, almost, there's only so much you can do). Then warriors would have to rescue the rangers after the rangers "intercepted" the mobs going for the casters, cuz you know rangers can't tank well. This helps for wandering mobs yeah, but in a fight with a bunch of switching mobs, it's not going to make that much of a difference anyways. And it's not "autoswitch". Actually, autoswitching would suck. You generally run large mob fights in specific orders.

Compromise:
Give intercept to rangers
Bump mob switching up 1/100th of a notch to counter
Watch rangers die!

Anything that kills rangers is a good thing.

Giving it to all warrior classes though.... eh, well, in some cases it would make a big difference, in most others, not much of one.

[Salen]

Give it to clerics, I'll save your wuss ass.

[thanuk]

Well atleast you're starting to see my point.

I know exactly what your trying to say. The difference being that you actually believe a single wandering aggro mob is a potential threat for spanking, when that couldn't be further from the truth. The only even remote threat is if the mob happens to be a dragon, but then the ranger's attack will cause it to roar anyway, so the point is moot.

[Sesexe]

Well atleast you're starting to see my point.

I know exactly what your trying to say. The difference being that you actually believe a single wandering aggro mob is a potential threat for spanking, when that couldn't be further from the truth.

Not just spanking, but making any fight more difficult. If we keep chipping away at the mud's difficulty, soon we won't have any left. :(

[Vahok]

Ummm, I don't think this skill is unbalancing or makes the mud easier. It would only help two sets of people

1. AFKers and weak skilled warriors. If a new mob enters a room, there is a good chance I'll rescue whomever it hits.

2. Rangers and dires. It will add a bit more flavour to them, add some more zone use to them, and increase the chance they will die.

It does make characters a touch more robotic but with the trigger sets some people have created, some players are robots anyways.

[thanuk]

Not just spanking, but making any fight more difficult. If we keep chipping away at the mud's difficulty, soon we won't have any left. :(

And then you downgrade area damage, and its difficult again:)
I really cant beleive your arguing about this. It's such a rare situation where this skill is even useful..i just dont get where your coming from.

[Sesexe]

Ummm, I don't think this skill is unbalancing or makes the mud easier. It would only help two sets of people

1. AFKers and weak skilled warriors. If a new mob enters a room, there is a good chance I'll rescue whomever it hits.

2. Rangers and dires. It will add a bit more flavour to them, add some more zone use to them, and increase the chance they will die.

It does make characters a touch more robotic but with the trigger sets some people have created, some players are robots anyways.

Are you saying the MUD should support AFKness? And now support bot behavior insead of punishing folks for it? Did you even read what I said earlier about why don't we just code in the most popular 200 triggers so people are effectively bots and where that would lead the MUD?

How does not needing to be at the keys at all, make a game challenging? Omg zoning would become as boring as exp. :P

Nukk, it's not the skill specifically I'm against, it's the TYPE of skill it represents. It supports bot behavior. It's not important how small of an effect it is, with enough ideas like this kind coming in they'll pile up until it makes a significant difference.

I can see it now. If this skill was in, soon we'd see people grumbling for a version that attacks multiple mobs entering the room. Or we'd see one wanting to just attack any mob entering the room.

Let's not let this snowball keep rolling. The mud is easy enough!

Question: How is this NOT auto-switch when the only way to attack a mob that just entered the room, by not using a skill or spell, is to type "kill <mobname>" and you get the "switches targets" deal?

So this skill should work like say 'kick' where you tag it and now it's attacking you? How does that not reduce the usefullness of the rescue command to a degree? Didn't we just have a thread not to long ago with people about auto rescue?

Stop supporting bot behavior no matter how small the effects, because if you add them up they will become something big!

[Waelos]

Well, I thought I'd add my 2 cents for clairification.

The intent of the skill was to buy time for warriors/other characters in large frays when the warriors are lagged to death from rescuing all the switching mobs, etc. The reason the skill needs to be reflexive is that no matter how good you are as a player, or how fast your connection is, you won't be faster than a mob walking in and attacking someone. . .and alot of times there is targeting issues. . . like 5 knights in room, you can't spam 'kick 1.knight (that is what the new incoming mob would be, 1. knight) as you would just be lagging yourself with commands on the 1. already in room.

I don't really see how this would oversimplify the game. The skill isn't failsafe. I do see the problem with casting tank spells on yet another class. It is hard enough to get a haste ;) Enchanters are overworked, I suppose!

Lost.

[mynazzaraxxsyn]

Thanuk, Sesexe, here's to you.

[Vahok]

Are you saying the MUD should support AFKness? And now support bot behavior insead of punishing folks for it? Did you even read what I said earlier about why don't we just code in the most popular 200 triggers so people are effectively bots and where that would lead the MUD?

No, but I'm agreeing with you. Tons of people do it anyways, so adding a skill which could help, say rangers, wouldn't upset me. As for punishing the behaviour, I'd agree with that too. But sorry, the robots and AFKers would just get the honour of deleting one trigger and maybe it would help another class. True leaders and players know who is paying attention, who has playing skills, and who is just a robot. So a code which drops trigger isn't always a bad thing. Or should we go back to typing to eat and drink?

I understand your point Sesexe but honestly, I tend to think of it this way. If there is a law, and 90% people break it, what's the point? I admit to using a very basic rescue trigger, but I can't spell a gnome's name to save my life? So should I be shunned for that? We all know many people have triggers for the above skill (I don't personally, like to be flexable and type it myself), but name one person this skill will hurt?
And it will not make the game easier..give me a break. People are already doing this, so that point is moot.