Testmume feedback on scout changes revision 2

[Edvard]

I agree with you Razoor, but we can't both have the cookie and eat it. Perhaps what we need to focus on isn't keeping the traditional sneak/flee-system, in order to preserve thieves means of protection, but to add something to their offensive force. What this is and how it would be balanced is an issue for discussion. A new form of attack maybe which is connected to thieves extreme agility perhaps, ability to dual-wield daggers (think i got that from Rogon), or something else that gives thieves an advantage in 1vs1 fights while making them more vulnerable to hunters.

[Rik]

I noticed a few things when testing:

1) You follow your leader if you'r e not engaged and he escapes the room
2) searching out a hidden t enemy seems to be quite hard in the forests (10x search q usually not enough, and even 5x search t not enough), however praccing a lot of awareness helps, but it still seems totally random.
3) you've a reasonable? change of intercepting sneakers who spam by your room when you flush quick.
4) escape is so fast you got 0% change to bash the thief if he doesn't fail an escape (which I never did 1 on 1)
5) escaping an incap opponent failed (as troll)
6) escaping from guardian mobs did fail once in 10 times (when 4 guards are engaged)
6) a new prompt when s goes to S would be nice. Now I have to count myself that sneak is back on.
7) shoot + sneak doesn't work vs flushing opponent
8) could it be backstab is harder now?

Totally unrelated:
7) gh gates are bugged
8) fix the ! (it's quite annoying when you're used to use that because I don't have page up to get previous command)

[Snarp]

What is this fixing? Why are thieves the only class being nerfed? Why can't you fix it so you can stab sleeping targets whether you are sneaking or not (i'm sick of getting the you've been caught by surprise message on a sleeping victim).

Now everyone will spam flush because it works like old search/flush? Paranoid change is silly. I just think this change is far too complex when there are simpler changes. Like making hide less effective, tada done. No more hide circling or whatever.

And I don't like the word escape. I'd prefer abscond.

[Mindy]

just a couple things i noticed

roughly 1/10 chance of revealing a thoroughly hidden scout with reveal q
with the time it takes to reveal quick, theres a 50% chance to reveal someone in 9 seconds
It takes 14 seconds to hide thorough

so for a sneaker with no mount (think zorcs), how are they supposed to regen enough moves if being chased by someone with a clue? here's an ideas because i do like the new reveal
-increase regen based on hide % which ONLY takes effect while hiding to account for the above

when revealing someone, let the sneaker know they've been revealed. If its going to be easier to reveal a hidden scout, its reasonable to not let them get bash/nuked by whatever group is chasing them. Perhaps keep is so that if you reveal someone upon entering the room, the sneaker doesnt know, only when search/reveal command is used

i like escape but i dont think it has too much of a practical use in pk. It's probably fast enough to avoid a bash, but not fast enough to avoid qspells like flee is. not having sneak for 4 seconds in a closeable is suicide vs anyone with a faster link than you.

[Edvard]

roughly 1/10 chance of revealing a thoroughly hidden scout with reveal q
with the time it takes to reveal quick, theres a 50% chance to reveal someone in 9 seconds
It takes 14 seconds to hide thorough

so for a sneaker with no mount (think zorcs), how are they supposed to regen enough moves if being chased by someone with a clue? here's an ideas because i do like the new reveal
-increase regen based on hide % which ONLY takes effect while hiding to account for the above

Ok let's think Zaugurz. First of all, Zaugurz is a class made not for the experienced players on mume, but for the very experienced. This implies that the race is going to be hard to play, harder than the rest, so you can certainly provide them with challenges. This includes choosing smart places to hide, where there's mobs that doesn't allow attackers to search q 10 times in a row, IMO. As well as using waters, climbable mountains and so on. Second of all Zaugurz got virtually free supply of draughts which increases their moveregen substantially. Them having the abilitity in todays MUME to hide pretty much anywhere they want, with the moveregen of draughts, and enemies unable to search them out is as far as im concerned an insult to the ** next to Zaugurzoption when creating a char. It's simply not hard at all.

[Ugurz]

First of all, why was the test mume shut down so fast? I had maybe 30-40 minutes to test it earlier today, got home this evening, logged in and saw the 10-minute shut-down notice. Not cool.

Here is my feedback based on my brief test. I like the new escape. I thought it failed just enough. I was able to test some basic exping in goblin caves as Ugurz and thought it worked nicely. I failed it enough to eat some bashes and take a decent amount of damage also. If escape is changed to fail more often ... will not be a useful skill in my opinion.

I will say this once again ... sneak/backstab fails way too often. I tried to backstab a single goblin warrior that was in the room with the goblin shaman and easily failed sneak/was sensed 20+ times in a row. Unacceptable for a level 83 scout with 109% sneak/backstab skill and max dex/per stats. I was maybe a few pounds over tad uncomfortable.

I had no time to test the flee / sneak-malus stuff and had planned to do so this evening so I can't provide feedback there. I had that happen 1-2 times vs. a demon wolf and it didn't seem horrible ... but he chases a tad more slowly than a pack of angry uber-linked euros! Honestly I can provide no feedback in this area.

If escape is to become so very important to a scout, zaugurz scouts should be allowed to practice it 16 times. The race is allowed to practice all other primary/important abilities to max levels and this skill should be no different.

Also, this is an ability that very few players bother with in my opinion. Other scout skills need to be less hard (fewer pracs) to learn in order to make up for most of the 16 pracs that most/all scouts will want to spend on this skill. If this is not done. then you will see even fewer warrior-based scouts in the game as they wont have the pracs for it ... and from what I heard in other posts on this topic, the non-scouts would like to see more scouts that are willing to 'fight' vs. just backstabbing.

Along thses lines ... I'd like explain something about Ugurz ... he used to be more war-like, bash skill etc. Why did I change him to more of a pure scout? Due to the changes that the gods made. As sneak/backstab was made to fail more and more often, I started to decay warrior skills in order to increase sneak% so that backstab would actually work. Also, I noticed that I really needed to keep my weight carried very low or sneak/backstab just would not work at all ... so wearing armour in order to last longer in toe-to-toe fights became nearly impossible. The outcome ... much less ability to fight toe-to-toe and as sneak % increased from 101 to 105 ... so did backstab skill ... and backstab damage.

[crackle]

I agree with Wobbler that there should be some sort of way to see if you've canceled hide. It was somewhat surprising on testmume to see what did and did not cancel. Smiling doesn't reveal you to a player in the room, but licking your mouth and smiling does. Running into a wall doesn't reveal (it didn't use to be this way iirc) but resting does. Dropping or picking up any number of items does not, but draining a corpse does. Maybe all this is common knowledge among regular players, but I think it could be made a little less obscure.

I had tried the same thing Ryalnos did, aliasing dir keys to escape. Not a good idea, at least if you have a slower link. When you're fighting a large pack of tracking mobs and you really do want to flee, as in 'oh crap I'm going to die, run away, run away!', spamming escape <dir> means mobdeath.

Also, as I mentioned to Ilie already, escape from say, a butterfly, should never fail, whereas escape from a Moria patrol should almost always fail. As it is now, mob level has no effect.

[Snarp]

I agree with Wobbler that there should be some sort of way to see if you've canceled hide. It was somewhat surprising on testmume to see what did and did not cancel. Smiling doesn't reveal you to a player in the room, but licking your mouth and smiling does. Running into a wall doesn't reveal (it didn't use to be this way iirc) but resting does. Dropping or picking up any number of items does not, but draining a corpse does. Maybe all this is common knowledge among regular players, but I think it could be made a little less obscure.

I had tried the same thing Ryalnos did, aliasing dir keys to escape. Not a good idea, at least if you have a slower link. When you're fighting a large pack of tracking mobs and you really do want to flee, as in 'oh crap I'm going to die, run away, run away!', spamming escape <dir> means mobdeath.

Also, as I mentioned to Ilie already, escape from say, a butterfly, should never fail, whereas escape from a Moria patrol should almost always fail. As it is now, mob level has no effect.

I agree, I know a few commands I can and cannot use whilst hidden and thats about it. And escape should scale with level.

[Ryalnos]

Well to be honest, I didn't wander into any serious largegroup mobs areas. But escape like that worked pretty decent for avoiding routine patrols. You can still hit 'flee' if you need to .

[Dak]

It is rather ridiculous how hard it is to stab mobs nowdays. 109% backstab and still getting sensed 20+ times in a row is not right.

[Jahara]

It is rather ridiculous how hard it is to stab mobs nowdays. 109% backstab and still getting sensed 20+ times in a row is not right.

the number of lights in the room and how much you're carrying is very important these days

[Azazello]

Edvard, it's too easy surviving playing scout if you play with backstab and in the open.

This change does not make that kind of scout ANY easier to kill what so ever. Rather it will
be even easier to survive with them, since they can now escape away from any potential risk
of fleeing into a closeable, which was the only way of killing them before.

Any scout who tries to fight in a closeable is reduced to ridiculous alias-spamming.

If you consider a fight in oakendoor, moldywall and oakendoor blocked. Scout vs mage.
What will happen is that the mage will spam close pegs;qbolt;close pegs;qbolt. This forces
the thief to do escape;open pegs;d. If the mage then does d;qbolt;u;qbolt;d;qbolt, the thief
will be unable to do anything else than spamming escape for the whole fight, rendering him
completely out of control and unable to attack. Since the mage will be INSTANTLY after him
in the next room, you will have to eat 1 qbolt for each pierce you land. There is no way you have
time to go down+hit since you have sneakdelay and the mage has prespammed.

Even IF you'd be the one starting to attack, you'd have to spam d;k man;esc;u;d;k man;esc;u etc.
It'd be a fight reduced to nothing but spamming of the same commands, until one part is dead.
No playing with doors, no clever hitfleeing, no switching to bows in midfight since you can only
do damage with pierce.

You seem to be awfully biased in this topic.
You do not have to sneak (thus you do not have to use escape) in order to kill a mage in two rooms as a thief :-/
Nor to kill cleric.

As of this change a thief could use his snea bonus once in a while and the rest of the time - well, just pierce or shoot.

[Wobbler]

Making it possible to find hidden scouts in forests certainly increases the chance for the boring backstab-run-hide types to die.

[Elec]

By the way, about changes with escape.

I was just thinking and I realised that hey, escape should be (alot) more powerful, faster and useful than flee. It should not be inferior to flee in whatever aspect there is.

Why, you ask, I'm certain.

Well, lets look at that this way.

Flee. everyone gets it. and I mean everyone. you me, everyone.
You get it *free of charge*. Absolutely no effort is required by your part to learn it so that it would actually work. It's one of the most basic skills. Yes your stats etc affects it but still.

Now along comes scout/thief and starts to learn how to flee *better*. In other words, escape. Alot of valuable prac sessions is used in the process.
So, escape should be in superior to flee in every aspect. Since you already know how to flee and now you learn how to flee better. Outcome? suprior flee skill, in other words - escape.
I'm sure my opinion will be razed to the ground by those who really dislike scouts and thiefs but I hope you agree with the reasoning above.

And yes, you should be able to escape without a hint to opponent about the direction you took. Just grab a handful of dust from ground, throw it into your opponents eyes and poof, youre gone

Just a thought

[Wobbler]

BAnd yes, you should be able to escape without a hint to opponent about the direction you took. Just grab a handful of dust from ground, throw it into your opponents eyes and poof, youre gone

The rest of your post has some merit, the problem is how to balance it right. This part, however, is senseless.

[Azazello]

Now along comes scout/thief and starts to learn how to flee *better*. In other words, escape. Alot of valuable prac sessions is used in the process.
So, escape should be in superior to flee in every aspect. Since you already know how to flee and now you learn how to flee better. Outcome? suprior flee skill, in other words - escape.
I'm sure my opinion will be razed to the ground by those who really dislike scouts and thiefs but I hope you agree with the reasoning above.

Escape skill, as in the current implementation in testmume is already much more superior to the flee skill.
Thieves will never flee in closeable, unless by mistake.

Slowlinked players whine about sneak not working as an escape route from the bottlenecks. But current escape allows you to escape all the way outof ANY and MOST craziest bottlenecks.

Imho, it's an interesting change.

Generally i think that we should not nerf things, we shoud improve things. Image if everytime some class had a great advantage over the others we would improve the other classes in some way, instead of rendering the superior class to completelly useless?
Might be a good way to go.

[Ilie]

Generally i think that we should not nerf things, we shoud improve things. Image if everytime some class had a great advantage over the others we would improve the other classes in some way, instead of rendering the superior class to completelly useless?
Might be a good way to go.

If we improve each class, we also have to improve all the mobs and so on (this is already way overdue). It is probably easier for people to accept that a mob gets 100 more hitpoints than that all your hits hit for less. Anyway, we're trying to balance some game mechanics now, it will not end with this thief modification.

[Azazello]

If we improve each class, we also have to improve all the mobs and so on (this is already way overdue). It is probably easier for people to accept that a mob gets 100 more hitpoints than that all your hits hit for less. Anyway, we're trying to balance some game mechanics now, it will not end with this thief modification.

Khm, i must admit being almost completely PK-centric i left mobs outside of the scope. :-/
Tja. :-/

[Elestir]

i'm sick of getting the you've been caught by surprise message on a sleeping victim

Didn't this get fixed several rl years ago?

[Razoor]

Azazello, I may be biased, but wouldn't it be silly to argue from a perspective of which I
dont know as much? Sort of like what you're doing right now about thieves?

I've spent at least 50% of my time on MUME over the past 3-4 years playing scout,
i think my comments have merit. It may seem biased to you because it involves specifics
from my playstyle, but the points are still valid imo.