Reagents

the only good part about being a mage and summoning stuff for people is that you get to make fun of them for being cheap lazy bastards THAT'S IT
 
Obscenitor said:
Over the course of several high tier 6 man fights JB alone will provide 900 mana regenerated over the duration of the fight.. that is 2 big heals or 3 quick heals or 2 moon comets etc.. and you cannot bring an enchanter to the majority of high end 6 man content..

Bringing up Adepts in this type of discussion is pretty irrelevant as twinks make those fights trivial (Traekoth has been 6 manned).
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Kind of biased on the enchanter part. I agree we might not have the same damage output as say a rogue/ranger/bst/cleric... however when you look at an enchi who actually has a pair, and knows how to charm properly, the DPS output can be far greater.

Charmed pet during CMal 3 summoner is one example.

But back on topic - Reagents are a PAIN in the ass. Really. 90% of them are free because you can load up a mage to summon them for you.

A better intensive would be to somehow gear buffs to last longer if the caster is in the same raid/group as those who the caster buffed.
 
I still like the idea of having a buff last 20% longer if you have the right gem for it, and being able to cast them without the gems. Then you could remove the summon gems lines, and let mages summon pansies or something instead. ;)
 
Gulio said:
Kind of biased on the enchanter part. I agree we might not have the same damage output as say a rogue/ranger/bst/cleric... however when you look at an enchi who actually has a pair, and knows how to charm properly, the DPS output can be far greater.

Charmed pet during CMal 3 summoner is one example.

But back on topic - Reagents are a PAIN in the ass. Really. 90% of them are free because you can load up a mage to summon them for you.

A better intensive would be to somehow gear buffs to last longer if the caster is in the same raid/group as those who the caster buffed.
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Back off topic.. since when is Summoner high end? Pretty sure I solo'd the old cmal 3.2.
 
Ulandz said:
Are you saying everytime you group you get a gear upgrade ? Hard to beleive.




If having mana for 2 heals more really makes a difference then you're fightng too hard stuff
and should come back with better geared toons or an appropriate made up group.
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Then you will never get upgrades for your toon without buying them. Upgrades come from fighting stuff that's at your limit. If you come back with better geared toons, they won't need the stuff that hard 6 man encounters drop.

cornelweezy said:
I'll just lump clerics and shamans in here too, although as these are the two most boxed classes, I can understand the frustration of having to log in a mage for dots, log it out, then log in your tank. I suppose a levelling cleric's symbols are annoying too to find stones for, but those reagents are super cheap. I usually just bought a stack or two of them when I was levelling my cleric and I never ran out before I got to the next level of stone.
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I'm going to take a wild guess and say that your cleric wasn't your first toon, and that it had some sort of help (either directly or indirectly via cash) from your previously leveled toon. Having leveled a cleric naturally with a 4-some (my war and clr, and my wife's ench and druid) money for gems for symbols was not super cheap. I had to be very selective about who got symbols and used gems. And I also wasn't saving my cash for equipment; I bought virtually no gear to upgrade those toons, preferring to do it naturally.
 
darksabbath said:
I still like the idea of having a buff last 20% longer if you have the right gem for it, and being able to cast them without the gems. Then you could remove the summon gems lines, and let mages summon pansies or something instead. ;)
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Ok - well what about having a non-summoned gem give a buff 20% or 30% or even 50% longer duration? Or have buffs which use a summoned gem have a slightly shorter duration? Would be a good compromise imho no?
 
Cyzaine said:
I got it!

Remove all summon gem spells from the game.

All buffs use all gems as reagents.

You automatically use the highest gem in your inventory.

All buffs duration scale with the reagent used.

Max duration 20 minutes.

All problems solved~
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This would eliminate the buff bots right?
 
These spells have duration and would be effected by this change:
  • Sorcerer Familiar
  • Aegolism
  • Blessing of Aegolism
  • Relic: Gift of Aegolism
  • Levitate (Uses Bat Wings currently, not gems)
  • Enduring Breath (Uses Fish Scales currently, not gems)
  • Symbol of Transal
  • Symbol of Ryltan
  • Symbol of Pinzarn
  • Symbol of Naltron
  • Savagery
  • Death Pact
  • Symbol of Marzin
  • Marzin's Mark
  • Divine Benevolence


These spells cast instantly and would lose some of their situational nature with this change:
  • Alter Plane: Air
  • Alter Plane: Earth
  • Alter Plane: Entropy
  • Alter Plane: Fire
  • Alter Plane: Mercy
  • Alter Plane: Nightmare
  • Alter Plane: Tarhyl's Tower
  • Alter Plane: Torment
  • Alter Plane: Valor
  • Alter Plane: Water
  • Convergence
  • Cull Storm
  • Disintegrate
  • Summon Blade of Power
  • Summon Heartseeker Arrows
  • Summon Spear of Power
  • Thazeran's Planar Shift

These spells are runes and could bypass reagents completely:
  • Diamondskin
  • Dilated Shelter
  • Leatherskin
  • Manaskin
  • Relic: Runecloak
  • Rune I
  • Rune II
  • Rune III
  • Rune IV
  • Rune V
  • Rune VI
  • Shieldskin
  • Spellskin
  • Steelskin
  • Spellshield (Spell Rune)

I have a list of reagents with various sortable columns in my userspace.

Loxo said:
This would eliminate the buff bots right?
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I must be missing something with how reagent-changes are going to really impact buffbots, except when we load a magebot for DS we wouldn't need to summon dots. That's the only real impact I see, other than making life easier on chanters and beastlords (yay) and making some spells that should be situational, not (pretty boo imo).

People use buff bots for three reasons I can point out: A guild/group doesn't have an active player who uses that class, encounter/zone restrictions on group size where taking one class over another is a less attractive option, and finally people solo/duo/exping who just want full buffs and don't want to be buggered bringing along buff classes.

Beastlords and Enchanters have seen a rise in popularity over the last year from what I've seen (purely based on my own experience). Mages to a point but ... not really. Druids for sure, but seeing more than one in a raid is still questionable. If we don't want to see classes left behind in town, their class needs to be desirable in terms of both DPS and utility so groups will want to include them. Leastways, that's how I see it.
 
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I changed the min to max in quoting cyzaine, 20 minute buffs would make me probably cry irl because i'm so close to having all the 65 buff classes as bots, but it would indeed make them pretty inconvenient to use as buffbots.

Cyzaine said:
Make peridot the 'baseline gem' as it's summonable.

All buffs use all gems as reagents.

You automatically use the highest gem in your inventory.

All buffs duration scale with the reagent used.

Max duration 20 minutes. Maybe 30 if you burned a jacinth or diamond.

All problems solved~ And more platinum sank~
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here's a more serious edit addressing reagents portrayed as 'not just inconvenient anymore'
 
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My post wasn't really serious. Just saying.

If we were really going to mess with reagents, well it'd be a good time to redo ALL buffs. Because there is more broken with buffs than just that some use reagents and some don't.
 
Your serious-levels were evident, I was just trying to illustrate why any blanket fix for reagents isn't going to work: The spells that use them are not created equal.

Heck, you know I'm with you on a spell review and readjustment, but trying to solve buffbots with a new implementation of reagents is lol and people don't seem to understand that.
 
That is one thing I kinda liked about DAoC Clerics. You could only buff based on the amount of Constitution you had... so you could buff around 30 buffs max.

I know you cant change the client, so things like that are well not going to happen.

One idea could be to get rid of reagents and to remove non-SB Relic/Ancient buffs on zone. (or if can be coded - remove buffs on zone if caster is not in same group/raid).
 
Looking over all the posts I don't think anyone but Hillary seriously put forward a notion that the issue of buffbots would be solved with changing reagents. However there are some good ideas on changing the implementation of reagents to act as better cash sinks, and some address to the issue that buffbots are a problem because buffs last so damn long.
 
I personally do not see what is wrong with buffbots. I dot have many, but they were given to me by either friends or guildies. They all still play, but even if its an old character that no longer plays I do not see a problem with being able to log someone in and get a useful buff. At one point in time someone had to invest thier time into getting a character up to the point where they can have good buffs and good duration inc. What they decide to do with their toon and the access to said toon should be up to them to decide. If they want to donate it to thier guild or give to a friend I see no problem with that.

Also, as far as buffs fading when the caster leaves the group or using higher level gems as cash sinks for use of duration time, I do not see that being very useful or ebneficial to the server either. It will make people more stingy with the buffs they have and can cast as the majority of people it will affect can afford the gems or coudl be huge detriment for lower end guilds trying to progress. Also most of the best buffs are allready harder to get they require a t 3 - t ? raid and getting the spell scroll to drop and winning or being awarded the the spell.

If buff bots truly are an issue imo it should be handled on the character retention side and not the client side. Make it if a character hasnt been logged in by the 'original' owner or the POA in X amount of time make it go innactibe and unable to log in unless by the POA or the owner. This wouldn't eliminate them all together but an alternate solution.
 
Aslo, I do not really see anything wrong with the reagent system. There are only a handful of spells that need real reagents and those are not really gamebreaking. Plus peridots are pretty cheap all things considered if you do not bring a mage with you to raids or have a mage bot.

The requirement of dots for things like runes and bst buffs are part of the utility and reason to bring a mage to a raid. Sure you can load a mage and summon a bunch before the raid, but what happens when you run out or run low then you lose some of the utility of those buffs.
 
Rari said:
Your serious-levels were evident, I was just trying to illustrate why any blanket fix for reagents isn't going to work: The spells that use them are not created equal.

Heck, you know I'm with you on a spell review and readjustment, but trying to solve buffbots with a new implementation of reagents is lol and people don't seem to understand that.
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Why would a blanket fix be required? why couldn't the reagent for a BST buff that lasts 6 minutes or whatever be split into 100 pieces or hell, isn't there only a few encounters in the game significantly longer then 6?

Being Optimal has a price, look at rangers and how much fletching costs

Why are they the only class that has to do that? shouldn't there be a choice for Beastlords as to whether a buff is really worth X to him?

Shouldn't an enchanter have to go hmmmm this Rune actually costs me something, it will speed things up, but it will make this fight easier, but it will cost me something,

As a Cleric if/when I ever get rGoA I should ask myself is it worth giving this Elds group rGoA or just GoA,

Thade said:
This still doesn't solve the fact reagents for anything you need to cast regularly on a serious basis are dumb.

Reagents on spells that are supposed to be situational makes sense. It means you won't just be casting them willy-nilly. Reagents on spells you need to cast tons of times or even just a handful of times a day (IE raego) are just an inconvenience and add nothing to the game except a platsink that literally is just nuisance for a handful of classes. As much fun as farming for thirty minutes and then necking to south newport is so you can have a stack of dots for two weeks, this really ends up just being a thirty-five minute nuisance.
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Why should it be a thirty minute nuisance, why can't it be a 10 hour annoyance to be able to cast it a handful of time IEs rGoA if your actually playing that Cleric, this shouldn't be an issue 24pp is nothing to cast a buff that lasts seemingly forever, throw reagent conservation into the mix and its not even that. farming that takes 10 hours for a couple casts of a spell like rGoA should be worth it if you are actually a main of that class, and not just logging it in to cast on yourself.

Make these insanely awesome spells cost something to cast, in Platinum or time, or both.

Any mained character should not have a problem with any of the changes I suggest to there reagents (maybe the platinum part of it, but as for killing buffbots, that part wouldn't be as needed to act as a deterrent)

Balance it out to be fair the the beastlords, to be fair to the Enchanters, maybe several new gems would be in order, Lesser Bleh for low duration buffs, and Greater Bleh for high duration ones, or a request to a NPC to split a greater Bleh into X number of Lesser Blehs to make it fair to the classes that spam certain high end buffs

Kill these buffbots by making people actually play them for buffs that they want, they will stop doing it.
 
I actually don't hate the idea of having crystallized mana or spellstones or some other such thing as a universal reagent and just having higher level spells consume more of them/more often.

As far as the current reagent system, I don't mid the idea of spells that have an additional cost beyond mana, but I do think that the current system could use a little tweaking/rethought. For example (in my head) it makes perfect sense to me that a shield (rune), or summoned item would require some physical component but teleports and aegolism not so much.

As far as a deterrent to buffbots there are really only three ways: End account sharing (not likely or preferred), End buffs entirely (yeah no), or revamp buffs wrt to duration or make them all shared mind or something such that you cannot get buffs from someone who isn't grouping/raiding with you (best option but still probably not happening and the last time it was discussed was kind of a shitstorm).

also this just came to me in a dream but really what if spell reagents were metals instead of gems? Skip a middle step and less stacking/space issues.
 
As a Cleric if/when I ever get rGoA I should ask myself is it worth giving this Elds group rGoA or just GoA
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Every other stupid thing you said in this post already has been adressed, except this bit. You shouldn't. Relics are meant to replace the old spells, no choice intended.

You are trying to fix a problem with buffbots that doesn't exist. Every time someone complains they can't get a group they are always a class who has buffs who screams "I can't get a group because I these people have these buffs!!!". No. The reasons people can't get groups is they don't have enough xp to do ikisith xp/they are bad/multiples of x class in a group doesn't make the group better/people don't like doing pick up groups and want to group with their guildmates or friends.

Just over 2 years ago I was the fresh 65 shaman with no gear or aa's. I did a ton of tmaps and bought deepmetal, made some friends. Spent a month or two aug questing and collecting my first 100 aa's and holy crap I got into a guild and kept progressing. All you have to do is not be anti-social, not be a dick, and not be 100% terrible and you will make it in this game.

Your entire argument is "make it harder for everyone else so it's easier for me". The entire HIGH - END GAME is balanced around having these buffs. Not having them means you are looking at spending months if not years to rebalance all this high end content. Do you know how incredibly unfun it becomes to be one of the guinea pigs who has to zone into a 6 man/12/man raid and get raped by it when it worked perfectly fine before?

If you want to be universally accepted in groups join a guild that isn't dalaya's beginners and stop trying to rock the boat because you won't adapt to the circumstances that everyone else has.
 
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