Making Mining Better

[Haenir]

Not that its a priority but..

Couple of ideas to make Mining less awful:

• have the mining effect pulse (i.e., you click it and it mines 10 times or some other arbitrary number)
• better yet have it be an active effect that is on until you're interrupted by:
  • exhausting a vein
  • being attacked by... earth elementals / gemathians / etc. that are upset by your mining shenanigans (i.e., mining has a chance to spawn auto-aggro mobs)
  • that anti-macro check (though w/ the possibility of mobs attacking you maybe this would be obsolete?)
• having some % of rock lumps be gems of various sorts
• having some % of mining swings find "treasure" of some sort

 

[Titanas]

I like the idea of getting gems from mining. I would like to see mining benefit Jewel crafting as well. JC could use some love also, but I don't see that ever happening. I think i've made a few posts for that in the past.

 

[Grinkles]

I'd welcome any attempt to make mining less awful. Heck, I'd simply be happy with something along the lines of /cmd norocks, a command only accessible to miners of 250 skill that would block rock lumps from ending up in your bags upon a failed mining attempt. That isn't to say that ore would be more common, just that a veteran miner wouldn't have to put up with the tedium of micromanaging one's inventory quite as much.

The risk of being attacked by rock-themed mobs, on the other hand, I disagree with. Assuming the majority of mining bots are undergeared, underleveled, unskilled toons (usually Dwarven Rogues), wouldn't this render most mining bots unusable? I imagine that would would probably upset at least some of the remaining established tradeskillers whose blacksmithing supports the server. All it would take is for one or two of those players to feel disenfranchised and leave the server in a painful drought of smithed goods -- most notably T2 augs.

 

[Haenir]

The risk of being attacked by rock-themed mobs, on the other hand, I disagree with. Assuming the majority of mining bots are undergeared, underleveled, unskilled toons (usually Dwarven Rogues), wouldn't this render most mining bots unusable? I imagine that would would probably upset at least some of the remaining established tradeskillers whose blacksmithing supports the server. All it would take is for one or two of those players to feel disenfranchised and leave the server in a painful drought of smithed goods -- most notably T2 augs.

If you combine it w/ that auto-mining idea, on balance I think most tradeskillers who mine would find it a good deal.

Though the point would be to make mining interesting enough that you would be willing to do it on a non-mining bot toon. To a certain extent there is already some nodes where you have to deal with mobs (i.e., deepshade / red sun mines), maybe a more ideal situation would be to have more valuable nodes in areas that have mobs -- i.e., you get more ore the more difficult it is to mine an area. As it is, I've never gotten anything but iron ore and rock lumps from deepshade and that requires a high-end group to clear the area with nodes.

 

[Ezie3205]

UO had a system eventually that allowed magical mining picks (with limited uses) to more often dig up the rarer mining materials but also have a chance to spawn an angry elemental of that type. In this case, instead of rock lumps a failed attempt would yield a golem/rock creature of the that type that would also drop ore of that type. This would make the risk of having to fight something more profitable but also allow miners to choose where and when they wanted to use the enchanted picks.