Cataclysm Quest, PVP changes, other MUD updates.

Cataclysm Goal:

Ancient tales still survive today, about the world as it was once known. It was a time of chaos. Horrible climate changes, random layouts, dogs and cats living together- mass hysteria! This is one such tale of the first major changes, a small preview of what was to come in the following ages. The author is unknown, yet the story continues to survive.

The world has finally settled. The great cataclysm is over.

After many years in peaceful existence the people of this world started to experiment with magical methods of travel. One great wizard stumbled across an ancient text which described a spell called The Great Portal. This wizard and his fellow mages studied this text until they believed they fully understood the nature of the great portal. A spell which would allow one to travel between worlds. On the day of Thunder the wizards set out to test this spell and gain fame and fortune. Little did they know that the spell was actually an evil device long ago created by the Demon Lord Valkur. Upon the casting of the spell the wizards stood in awe at the shimmering portal of light which opened before them.

Then a strange figure stepped through and gazed around. This figure smiled a wicked smile and with one point of his finger destroyed the wizards where they stood. Thus began the cataclysm! Valkur’s demon hordes ravaged the land around the portal for days, bring mayhem and destruction to everything they could find. Word quickly spread to the Great Kingdoms of the land of the great bane the wizards had brought upon the world. Soon Solace, Thalos, and the lost kingdoms of Ofcol and Midgaard marched their armies of proud troops across the continent to battle this foe. The two forces met just to the west of the city of Solace.

The forces battled for two straight weeks, until the clerics and mages of the land gathered enough magical force to strike down the Demon Lord, but

Valkur would not fall so easily as his body was being torn apart by the magics he attempted to destroy the world, but alas he did not have enough strength left after maintaining the strength of his army during the fight. Instead of destroying the world, he only managed to sever the massive continent into smaller fragments. The remainder of the demon forces scattered through out the newly formed western continent awaiting their lord’s return. Even though the forces of good were victorious, Valkur’s evil presence still looms over the world. Swamps and evil creatures arose from the dark woods and the great kingdom of Thalos sank into the sea leaving only a portion of the culture surviving. Some still say that Valkur was not destroyed on that glorious day, only that the wizards and clerics destroyed his body, leaving his evil soul to roam about the world seeking a way to return and exact his revenge.

The demons have been summoned, and now the people fighting for their lives. Can you stop the demonic invasion before it is too late?

Goal Difficulty          : Medium
Goal Recommended at:     : 195
Goal Converter           : Domain
Area Author              : Baktosh

Game changes in this update:

A lot of smaller changes in this one, but some of them are important and affect PVP:

• The ‘attr’ and ‘stats’ commands where not picking up the new higher train ranges in the 70-130 range, so some of their numbers were wrong after the last reboot. Now fixed.
• Mobs in the range of 1 to 4 levels below your level will now have slightly higher exp. If you’re having trouble leveling, particularly as a single class, you might find the ‘worried about the idea’ mobs a more practical way to level now.
• The duration of blindness from the blindness spell has been reduced, by a lot. Just no point forcing someone to walk around with 20 minutes blindness long after a fight is completed.
• If two or more mobs were fighting player A, and player B killed the mob player A was aimed at, player A would be taken out of combat even though other mobs in the room are attacking them. This has now been resolved.
• There is now a ‘containers’ option to compare. When doing, for example, ‘compare sword all’, using ‘compare sword all containers’ will show a slightly different display and compare to items inside all your containers. You can also combine this with ‘wearable’ to show only items wearable right now. ‘Bags’ also works as a shorter version.
• Parry should have always been partly based on your knowledge in both your own weapon skill and that of the attacker. This was not working and has now been fixed. Parry against an unarmed mob has not changed, but parry against a mob wielding a weapon, or a player, is affected. In the case of an unarmed player, the ‘hand to hand’ skill counts for the ‘knowledge in attackers skill’ portion. When a player is dual wielding, it is the weapon type of the dual weapon that counts.
• Higher constitution will now help reduce the affect of Desecration in PvP. Player vs Mob is unchanged and even max con is going to leave less than half your total sanc bonus intact, but it should help a little at least.
• When using ‘market bid’ or ‘bid’ to identify items for sale, you were not always getting the full identify. Now fixed.
• Using the syntax ‘friend online’ will show only friends that are online right now.
• You can no longer use ‘setwanted’ on linkdead players.
• Quest time will now show when using the ‘group’ command. If the group member is already on a quest, the value will be shown in green with an asterisk next to it. In this case the time shown is time remaining to complete the quest.
• You cannot have the @@, * or % characters in a pet name. Change was made in pet shop buying, dust devil, summon elemental and call warhorse. Please let me know if any were missed.
• Casting curative spells such as cure blindness and cure disease is always less effective when fighting. This is still the case, but I’ve reduced the penalty a little. You’ll find this matters far less as your int / wis increases and at max int/wis there’s almost no difference.
• The messages on ambush have been tidied up a little and will now show after the room name and info is shown. Before this change it was too easy to miss the fact that you got ambushed because the message appeared before the room desc etc.
• Fixed a bug in ambush that only matches on either a whole name or one keyword. For example, with mob keyword ‘elite red guard’, ambush ‘elite’ or any single keyword would work, but ‘ambush elite guard’ would not. Note that you can’t abbreviate mob keywords for ambush and that is intentional, this was a different issue.
• Now that pray is only seen by helpers, imms and advisors it makes sense for channel that determined whether or not you see prays be ‘helper’ rather than ‘immtalk’. This change has been made.
• Advisors now have access to the ‘findcorpse’ command.
• Using ‘learned’ or ‘practice’ now shows the number of training sessions available at the end in addition to practices.
• When using ‘lottery tickets’ or ‘lottery prizes’, you will now see how many tickets you can still buy in this draw.
• Target being in a global quest, or your clan at war with the targets clan, was prevent ‘hunt’ from working during lasertag. This should not be the case during lasertag, now fixed.
• Using ‘tags’ with no argument will now show at the bottom whether or not the global tags (tags on/off) option is on.