Who's There?

The skill "hunt" and its progeny recently gained a great deal of accuracy by allowing a second keyword.  This change brought much needed accuracy to single-target searching, and it's really a fantastic upgrade.

I think it's time for many of the area-wide scouting abilities to also include one or two keywords.  Currently, the majority of area-wide scouting abilities are subclass abilities, subclasses which are never chosen for a main character, because of their highly situational utility.  The problem is that these scouting abilities are limited to player characters.

Why would a warlock give up the strong defense of battle learning or the all-around utility and power of reduced lag/prevention times for only the ability to sense the players in an area?  Especially given that warlocks already have a silent, instant spy and sixth sense, there's a very narrow margin of usefulness for a scouting subclass spell, especially one with a significant prevention time.

What if NPC's were searchable with scouting abilities?  The use of a scouting ability with no modifier would return players as it does now, but adding a modifier should return any NPC matches with a short description of the rooms:

a tangle tree -- In the Mudhole
a tangle tree -- In the Mudhole
a tangle tree -- The Wetlands

This additional functionality would greatly increase the utility of scouting abilities.  For example, a hunter of the right subclass could much more easily find a lost pet or a single NPC within an area.  She could enter an area, scout for its room name, and turn on hunt when she arrived in the general location.

My understanding is that the following classes have scouting abilities in one or more subclasses:  hunter, warlock, druid.  Obviously, the strength of each ability could be adjusted according to the class.  The casters might have room exits returned next to the room titles because they are actually "seeing" their targets, whereas a hunter's ability might only return the room titles.  Perhaps druids would only have the strength to scout for NPC's from their havens, with remote owls retaining the current limitation.

If an NPC ability would be too cumbersome from a design perspective to tack onto the current abilities, perhaps these could be new skills; they could be used for expansion upon current classes/subclasses.

Oh Master, My Master

The majority of master class mobs should not be master class.

There are many master class mobs throughout Nodeka which serve as traps for the unwary newbie. Merchants in Lycaeum, the questgivers in newbie zones such as Kobolds, Orc Town, G'kir, and the general in Ruushi are all flagged as master class NPC's. My guess is that master class mobs were originally introduced (Raash and various Guildmasters) as a deterrent. At that time, there was no mechanism to prevent NPC's from being attacked, even in safe rooms, and thus it was necessary to prevent key NPCs and trainers from being attacked.

However, Nodeka now has !attack mechanisms available. San'vestra is not attackable, even though she is master class, which means her status as a master is flavor rather than protection. This is how all quest mobs should be. Why is Sajha attackable, but San'vestra not? Why are the quest npcs in kobolds attackable? Various key merchants? If these NPC's aren't meant to be attacked, they should be unattackable, not simply master class. If the game has a more precise tool, why isn't the more precise tool being used?

This is not to suggest that master class should be removed from the game. Kiskr in the citadel and the Tabernacle Curators are examples of NPC's that have good reason to be master class. (I might suggest that the volume of damage is excessive, but that's likely to be a matter of so much contention and debate that it distracts from my main point.) But quest NPC's? In memory of my many rdeaths, please just make them unattackable.

Ninja Races Breakdown

The most popular races are presented here. I'll write-up any race requested in the comments.

Veldruk: Racial !spy is more valuable on a ninja than any other class, because antei of the clouded mind will be a total mindfuck to the caster. High agi/dex/nr/quick/hit/dam (counting the str/dex) and very highly powered racials make veldruk a top choice, even without physical resistance. The enhanced physical recuperation is also a strong selling point to all ninjas except the author (rank affect cheez), and the highest racial lateral deterrence are just bonuses.

Daimonikos: 57% physical resistance and flight are great starting points for a race with high speed, dam/hit, all around attributes, and small bonuses to NR/quick (on top of that provided by wil/agi). Blackened strengthens the stealthiness of ninjas. Throw in sustain and !spy, and the only weakness to this race is the holy/spirit vulnerability.

Weretiger Khan: Again, high hit/dam/nr/quick make weretiger an immediate top choice. Unlike veldruk, weretiger khan has speed in addition to its racial attacks for a strong boost to "white damage". Difficult to hit is great on any class with high quickness, and since ninjas are especially vulnerable to impairment, the 10% impairment invulnerability is helpful. Even the improved hunting speed (which works with shi-ku) and see undetectable movement (better on a sneaky class than on non-sneaky classes) are useful for ninjas. Another top choice, comparable to veldruk, although with mental vulnerability instead of mental resistance.

Sprite: Improved dodge and high agility/quick lean towards a ninja's avoidance strengths, but a complete lack of auxiliary defenses makes sprite one of the easiest to kill ninja races. Invisibility is a fun addition, as is having flight, but the lack of +damage and the weakness of hasted assaults causes the relatively low amount of combined dex/speed/willpower to be fatal to this race as a selection.

But Where's the Stabbing?

We start our analysis of ninja race selection by looking at overall characteristics. They have unseen motion, blended, and a short-term cloak, but no trackless movement. Ninjas have !spy at 100% which overlaps with antei of formation. They have stun, a basic step impairment, and dodge. They get 2 bonus attacks (after training), and lastly, ninjas do not fly.

Looking at attributes:
A 0 signifies that a particular attribute has no implications for this class, and as mentioned previously, no mention will be made of universal benefits of an attribute.
Strength: 0
Dexterity: hurricane kick, au-sem-mao, quickblade, stun.
Agility: dodge, vanish, strike from the shadows (on ambush).
Speed: 0 (limited quickblade).
Intellect: 0 (no, joufu's arc doesn't count)
Wisdom: antei of formation, whispering wind antei
Constitution: 0 (limited antei of formation, quickblade)
Willpower: convergence of balance, shadow cast

Primary Attributes: Willpower, Speed, Dexterity
Secondary Attributes: Wisdom, Agility
Trash Attributes: Constitution, Intellect, Strength

One of the key characteristics of the ninja class is the lack of attribute influence. Ninjas have only two spellups that can be reasonably influenced by an attribute, namely convergence and shadow cast. Neither of these spellups scale in a sharp enough manner to justify stacking willpower, although shadow cast is the closest thing that a ninja can call a "strong" buff. But without the additional defensive option of evasion, willpower remains inferior to straight NR/quickness when selecting defensive gear for a ninja. Hurricane kick damage does, in fact, scale with dexterity. However, it also scales with +dam to such a degree that strength -- an absolute 0 influence attribute -- will improve hurricane damage about as much. The influence of intellect on joufu's arc is capped below 200 intellect.

Due to this low attribute influence, ninjas are freer to pursue direct character boosts, which include resists/NR/quick defensively and hit/dam/dex/speed offensively. And it's a good thing, too, since the class itself has extremely limited incoming damage control. Quickness and dodge is where a ninja's defensive abilities begin and end. In a bash/trip/multiple attacker environment, this creates weak damage avoidance with no damage mitigation. Therefore, there is a strong pressure for a ninja to select damage mitigation in a race.

With the sole exception of footpad (and footpads are always an exception for reasons which should be saved for future discussion), ninjas are the fighter class with the least combined hit/dam/attacks from class. That is the reason that speed is considered a major attribute for ninjas, despite having almost no influence on class mechanics. Dexterity is then tacked onto speed to prevent degradation. Normally, the author considers attack degradation to be an insufficient reason to wear dexterity in most circumstances. Only a very large difference (e.g. 150 or more) and exceptional circumstances (e.g. pk) warrant worrying about dexterity. However, the boost to hurricane kick and au-sem-mao help lift dexterity to importance for ninjas, although not to the point of making dexterity a necessary attribute.

Given low attribute influence, the presence or absence of a particular attribute is not key to selecting a race. Rather, the direct benefits of flight, resistance (of which physical is of course the most important), hit, dam, NR, quick, and racial attacks will have relatively greater importance. With these points in mind, several races have been selected as notable and will be presented with brief explanation in a follow-up post. At this point, the reader should be equipped to make guesses as to particularly good or particularly inappropriate races for the ninja class.

Imagine This

Imagine you're the clan leader of a clan which shall remain totally anonymous, and you've been dragging an associate through another ogre invasion. You've run out of pellets and go off to buy new pellets when your associate notices you standing in the next room, and this is what you hear in rapid succession:

[ Group: Syveril ]: 'are you iding your pellets for unique?'
[ Group: Syveril ]: 'you are, aren't you!!!'
[ Group: Syveril ]: 'you're su'ing your pellets!'
( beat )
[ Group: Syveril ]: 'want to do my darts next?'

(apologies for the delay in my series; real life interferes with my capacity to form cohesive analyses)

Selecting Races: Begin With Class

First in a series of posts discussing the selection of a race.

When evaluating the race choices, the obvious choice is to evaluate the player's concerns vis-à-vis his or her class characteristics. The class itself must first have its mechanics evaluated, and only after a person's framework of class abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, can a thoughtful choice of race be made.

After all, a race is a selection of attributes, attacks, and special bonuses that for the most part affects not the overall abilities of a character, but rather the effectiveness of those abilities. Race is the clothes with which we choose to dress our characters up in; and therefore we look to the body of the class before we choose our clothes.

The first step we make in this direction is to establish how a class is evaluated. Keeping in mind that our primary goal is the selection of race, we are not concerned with how a class compares to another class, but only with how it functions with respect to the bonuses that a race provides: attributes, attacks, special bonuses. Furthermore, in evaluating the desirability of a particular attribute, we must focus on the bonuses that stat provides to each class. For example, agility provides quickness to all classes, and therefore, agility is not considered unless it provides some bonus particular to that class, because it has, for example, dodge.

While it is true that quickness has varying benefits for each class depending on the presence or absence of other forms of defense, such evaluation is perhaps too advanced for a series of blog posts and often too small/remote of a consideration to warrant specific mention. Mention will be made of notable exceptions, but on the whole, the reader that objects is perfectly capable of conducting his or her analysis without a detailed breakdown from me.

It is with these basic principles in mind that we will begin our discussion. I cannot guarantee the usefulness of my posts, but I can promise that the rest of this series will be less dry.

Chewing Loudly

I've been toying with the idea of doing a generalized review of races, and taking each one and evaluating its merits. However, this game is a class-based game, where a race is merely the uniform in which you perform your duties as a stealthy deliverer of stabby goodness.

At the risk of excessive navel-gazing, it's possible for me to begin by evaluating the ninja class's overall strengths and weaknesses, with an eye towards race selection. This method would allow me to cycle through the various classes and suggest races for each. If either of you (my faithful readers) has any input, I will consider your suggestions carefully.