Water-themes

[jackkm]

I'm not even sure these are implementable, or practically so, but I've always wanted to see spells that worked with water.

1) One spell, for example, would be an underwater Spirit of Wolf equivalent--perhaps with a similarly themed name. (Perhaps the spell increases movement, or ups your skill by a certain, high, number)

2) Another spell I've always wanted to see (which seems quite practical to me) is an underwater sight spell, allowing you to see underwater as you would above water. The game is already filled with other sight-altering spells, it seems like a good step to me.

3) I'd love to see an auto-follow that took vertical height in water into consideration. It's pretty tacky, and sometimes dangerous to have someone following you swim to the very bottom of the body of water you're in.

4) I would love to see water elementals do more damage whilst fighting in or from water. This is more of a role-playing concern than anything else, but it seems strange that a fire elemental can outperform a water elemental while it is surrounded by it's element. (It would be interesting to see earth elementals do better in cavernous areas, fire elementals do better in lava, and air elementals do better in the great wide open as well)

5) I'd also love to see fire spells do less damage within bodies of water. Spells like root could be completely ineffective, or perhaps replaced with a water counterpart. (Again, this is more for role-playing than practicality)

6) Another spell possibility that has interested me that is completely role-playing oriented (and would probably never be implemented as another spell can do practically the same thing, but better--however the same thing is true ranger snare) is water walk. Water walk would likely be for hybrid classes as a crappier version of levitation, that instead of levitating you, merely allowed you to walk across the surface of a body of water.

7) I think it would be interesting if frogloks had a higher swimming cap than other races. An innate bonus is nice, however it is fairly easily trivialized.


Would any of these be implementable--or desirable to other players? I do find that I like to role play, but admit that very few groups I find myself in role play at all. (It's mostly "mana?" "30m" "k") So I'm not entirely sure the general populace of SoD really cares for little role-playing touches.

 

[Ykari07]

1) One spell, for example, would be an underwater Spirit of Wolf equivalent--perhaps with a similarly themed name. (Perhaps the spell increases movement, or ups your skill by a certain, high, number)

I don't have much of a comment on most of these, but this one would get you killed so fast. With 250 skill, you already swim very fast and the worst part is that letting go of the movement button doesn't stop you from moving. You still have drift. It's been ages since my guild's been in Plane of Water or since I had a group in Kedge, but I always had a horrible habit of swimming face first into mobs. I can only imagine the horror if I could swim even faster.

 

[Bonk84]

not trying to pick it apart, but here's some thoughts

1. A speed buff designed specifically for water isn't all that useful for the devs to have to code. In the outdoor zones with water, Sea of Storms, Storm Sea, or Caldera, SoW or SoE work just fine. In the few "dungeon" water zones, they arn't large enough (or that many really) to really justify making a new spell for.

2. I believe this has something to do with the actual zone instead of being able to just change the transparancy of water, which would fall under the things that the devs cannot do.

3. Auto-follow was never really well implimented into the old game, as was the Z-Axis. I believe it might be possible, but that would break some mechanics like auto-following with lev on someone without lev. To be honest, you shouldn't have auto-follow on in water except for some rare occasion like working swimming on two chars in SoS.

4. I'm not sure if, again, its thesable to code in something that would be used in all but rare occasions. I believe that the dev's think elementals in their natural environments are fine, or otherwise would have added in something like this a long time ago when they put the elementals in their respected zones (Sirens, Red Sun Mine, Fae Woods). This kinda reminds me of how shitty it was back in the old game when you didn't kill a fire giant fast enough and they hit the lava and were completly healed. I know of at least one event that would have to be re-balanced due to being pretty much forced to fight in lava against fire elementals that are suddenly stronger for being in that zone or even lava.

5. This is another nice but hard to code in. They would have to individually re-code each spell to add in a water-clause. So take into account how many spells would be affected by water, then take into account what is best for the server in terms of bugs/fixes/content and time it would take to implement said idea. This would be an extremly low priority.

6. Pretty sure not possible, or if it was, I believe they would have to code in all the parameters of every body of water, and would fall under what I said in paragraph 5 about dev time and what they are doing.

7. Possible, but I think they already start out at a higher swimming skill than the other races to add a little roleplaying touch.

 

[jackkm]

Replying to Bonk84,
-note, I may be completely wrong here, but reading your reply leads me to believe you have no experience with coding. That's not a problem, except for you've said many things are likely impossible or a lot of work, when, I doubt you know. I'm not trying to be rude here, so please don't be offended.-

1. I didn't realize SoW worked while in water. It doesn't seem to change it for me, perhaps I need to do more testing.

2. From my, albeit limited, experience with coding (also, I should probably note that I've never seen a speck of EQ code) and taking into account that you already CAN see everything under the surface of a body of water whilist at the surface and looking down, it seems like this would fairly simple to implement. Again though, that depends on the EQ code. (Edit: This seems like it could be done with an if, then, less statement.)

3. Again drawing from what little I know of coding, I believe you could deal with the levitation issue fairly easily. This too would depend on the EQ code. (Edit: This too looks like ti could be done with an if, then, less statement.)

4. This roleplaying suggestion seems, in my mind, to be on par with some already-in-existance SoD changes. Every undead monster has been changed to get more powerful at night time already, this doesn't seem like much more work. Again, EQ code reliant.

5. Again drawing from my limited coding knowledge, it seems like you would be able to circumvent that work by adding to the code of how water works, as opposed to changing every spell in the game (which could be simple as well, providing there was a relatively easy to search and update database).

6. I doubt this is impossible. A spell could, EQ code allowing, 'tell' the player character to treat a surface of water the same way it treats land. The downside would be that you could not swim underwater without first disabling the spell.

7. That roleplaying touch, though, is quite easily trivialized.

I appreciate the reply.

To AlterYkari,

Ah that's a very valid point. I had imagined stopping, as well as the ability to swim backwards, would be fixed with the spell. That however, may be a quite a bit more difficult to work with.

 

[Prospero]

I think most of the coding issues that were pointed out are issues of the client cannot be changed. It does not matter how much or little you know about code, if there is a client restriction on something it is simply not changeable.

 

[Wesell]

Replying to Bonk84... (lists of stuff)

I'm certain that only suggestions four and five would be possible to implement without some kind of hack to the client (which devs have said they wouldn't attempt).

Body of water based elemental damage adjustment makes sense in light of the existing weather based damage adjustments. It might be easy to have the zone server always consider certain zones to be in a "raining" state or something, determining when a player or mob is inside the bounds of a body of water also would seem to already be happening.

 

[jackkm]

I have a better understanding of client limitations now.

Making changes is a lot more difficult this way than merely adding a line or two of code, but I guess it makes things easier to look at.

I'll keep this in mind for future posts.

 

[Ikaa|LoveYums]

It looks like all of these would require not only intense coding work, but also alterations to the client, which really isnt possible to do. I.E. Vision underwater is clouded by the client, and as far as i know, is hard coded, meaning, there is no setting to see closer or further away, you see as far as you can see and thats it.

Things like reducing fire damage underwater are probably doable, but would require a MAJOR rework of the entire spell system to be implemented. It would first have to determine if you are casting a fire spell, then see if you are underwater, and then go through its other normal checks for line of sight and fizzles and things like that. So while it may be doable, its one of those things we'll probably never see as a "flavor" modification, cuz it offers so little at the cost of a lot of work better spent elsewhere.

Elementals performing better in their element is an interesting idea, but again, its simply impractical to implement for the result. It would likely require mapping out entire zones in areas, and having those specific areas impact your pet. That would take a year alone to do, most likely.

 

[jules4099]

1. I didn't realize SoW worked while in water. It doesn't seem to change it for me, perhaps I need to do more testing.

Even with movement buffs, if your swimming skill is low, you swim slower. Significantly slower. Although it does seem that you swim faster if you immerse yourself (i.e. swim deep enough to make your "air remaining" bar appear) rather than swim along the top.