Category Moon Mages -- The Moon Mage Observatory (18)
Topic Responses to Guild Guru Announcements (2)
By DR-RIGBY from PLAY.NET (Moon Mage Guru)
On Nov 4, 2001 at 15:05
Subject On Spells and the Destruction of the Universe (2136)

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Anyway...

GENERAL STUFF

* Power Perception does appear to be odd. I'm not sure how it got wonky, since none of the code for Burn or TKT touches the PP code, but I do have a suspicion based on something else that occurred yesterday during the release. I'll be investigating and fixing it once I get some pending issues with Burn and TKT resolved.

* Ironically, through all the bug chasing in code I've done over the past two days, I found the problem with Dinazen Olkar's "The goblin cries out as the noose of shadows closes around its !" and have fixed it. It won't go live until I've resolved some of these other pending issues though. As a result of this fix, you may notice a slight increase in power of Dinazen Olkar when it does go live, but since it's a higher tier spell anyway, I can totally live with this.

* I had some updates/fixes for Magnetic Ballista for the War Mages to do this weekend, but that's on hold until I can get the rest of this stuff fixed. If any of you care. <g>

BURN

* Burn still is not taking into account natural armour properly. Casting on armour/weapons on the ground will be adjusted to better match casting when worn (or at the very least, become easier). I believe the issue with the "cloth" armour is related to the natural armour (don't ask me why; it's a code thing). Note that Holy Weapons are exempt from being damaged at all right now.

* Burn destroying Ice Fortresses is, I'm sorry, a BUG and will be fixed shortly. <g> Just for flavour, it will damage the Ice Fortress, but this is purely aesthetic and certainly not consent.

* Here's the magic numbers that have the Thieves "striking." The very same numbers, I might add, that GM Shakahn tested and was fine with: Burn has a 90% chance of setting off the trap when casting on a box and an 83% chance per item inside of destroying that item. These are static values and are not impacted by skill of any kind. This success ratio is by far much lower than Compost.

So why am I telling you these numbers? Because I'm changing it. <g> It takes more code to do those checks, set off the trap, check each item inside and destroy it, etc than not doing it at all. Even when successful, the various box traps' messaging is clearly not updated to handle setting off the traps in this way. Additionally, there is at least one type of box trap that is causing problems being set off this way, so rather than adding more and more checks, I decided to scrap it and just destroy the whole box plus contents. Since the whole thing was an unintentional by-product of making sure you guys couldn't destroy someone's backpack full of goods in one cast, it's no big loss.

Though it would have been interesting watching Thieves cut their own noses off to spite their face, what with that whole strike over the possibility that there's someone out there with absolutely no sense whatsoever who would prefer the Burn way of opening boxes over a Thief of any level. <g>

Speaking as Magic Supervisor, note that Compost is going to have to be re-evaluated for the messaging problems as well. I see no reason to remove box opening from Compost, though, since the spell does so very little else, but the messaging when it does needs to and will be addressed.

TELEKINETIC THROW - DAZZLE - MOONBLADE

* TKT at lower levels is still not quite right. This was the hardest aspect to balance in testing and QC, and it remains the hardest to work with after release, but it will be addressed, even if I have to -ack- patch it.

* Overall, I'm pretty happy with the changes to TKT. Much less problematic than Burn has been.

* Moonblade duration messaging is inaccurate due to technical issues that can't be resolved without creating a resource issue. Thus, you'll just have to deal with the vague duration it gives. Though it technically is a bug, it can't/won't be fixed, thus I officially "Not A Bug" and will destroy any bug reports about it with wild abandon! I'd Burn the bug reports, but they have good natural armour.

That's pretty much it.

Rigby