Have Fortitude

With the pwipe, changes to classes that arose from the crafting system are now obsolete and should be reviewed. As usual, we'll start with a less controversial topic and work our way up to the big ticket items. This installment will address constitution as it is implicated with fallads.

1. Holy Hammer: This ability was toned mightily as a result of a single player's strength with stacking constitution on crafted gear. (Well done, Rheal, for you have left your mark upon Nodeka's history.) As it is, the prevention time on holy hammer is much too high. If there is a concern about further constitution stacking, a minimum prevention could be placed on it. As it is, canon of the second hammer is rarely used, because it (a) overlaps with guided canon of mending, and (b) isn't going to see use. Holy hammer's prevention time needs to be dropped back to in line with its pre-crafted incarnation.

2. White Flames of Prayer: This issue actually predates crafting altogether, and seems to have been left behind with the changes in design direction seen in other preventions. White flames of prayer receives no benefit from constitution training, which is unusual for preventions that are affected at all by constitution. The player must sacrifice a lot of his burst damage flexibility when finishing trains, because each 100 constitution trained increases the prevention of this ability by 3 minutes. The prevention time of this ability should not increase with constitution training; or at the very least, the downtime should be kept constant, such that a 2 minute gap between uptime and prevention remain constant, and training constitution at least increases the proportionate uptime.

There are other abilities that need to be addressed in the same vein. The next installment will likely address these abilities/features, especially those related to fallads.

Back in the Swing

There's so much to talk about, in terms of game design and balance.  There appears to be a clear hierarchy of classes and races (the distribution is quite poor), there are lingering issues on overarching mechanics (e.g. endurance as a terrible fighter bonus/money sink, intellect and wisdom being separate attributes), and there are in-game systems that everyone agrees should be addressed (e.g. Christof being overwhelmed, citadels are outdated).

But right now, with a new beginning, I'm going to shy away from controversy and ease back into writing by sharing a short piece of personal information:  I've finally upgraded mud clients.  I'm now on UMC, specifically created to work well with Nodeka, and it really does.  My botchecks are once again captured, which is nice, but mob tells are not, which is baffling (since they are usually more important than the crap that we spew when gabbing with our friends).  I can finally read past character #80 when you send me tells, so yay.

I do have questions, though, and since I'm a newbie, maybe someone can help me out:

1. Is there an equivalent function to #tabadd?  If not, would it be hard to add in this function?  The #tab function was incredibly useful for creating accuracy when dealing with difficult to spell names (Zqxm) and long names (follower_of_). 
2. Does anyone have a second window written up?  I'd love to push output for trials and the info channel (##) onto another window, for at-a-glance status.
3. Is there a way to use variables in #substitute functions?  I'm used to having battle output of "## Grim was just defeated in battle by Grim's gesko!" shortened to "## Grim's gesko killed Grim!".  Right now, everything is backwards and it's making my eyeballs itch.
4. Is there anyway to #highlight?  I've shoved stuff that used to be highlighted into my output window, but that's not exactly what I prefer.

It turned out that most of what I needed to work for me in a tintin environment was translatable to UMC, and the remainder (see above) seems like it should be pretty straightforward.  But I don't really know, since I'm not a programmer of any kind.