New Goals, Ranger Upgrades, Amnesia Rewite, Other Changes

Ascension Bluff Nursing Home – New area and goal:

A nursing home is the safest place for the elderly. Or is it? It seems that there is dirty work afoot at the Ascension Bluff Nursing Home! Perhaps the chief nurse there could use a little help in reuniting the nursing home’s various residents with stolen items.

Level Range         : 100 to 120
Goal Difficulty     : Medium
Goal Recommended at : Level 110
Goal Converter      : Guinness
Area Author         : Guinness

Note: The player will need to be able to wear a level 100 item in order to complete the goal.

Coral Kingdom – New Goal:

Since the dawn of time, the Coral Kingdom was a place of peace and tranquility where mermaids and sharks lived together in the capital city, Sharkatan. One day, disaster struck, and the king was overthrown by his most trusted advisor. The king fled the city, and took refuge from the evil tyrant, to wait for the day that he could be rightfully restored as king of the Coral Kingdom.

In the years that followed, the new ruler of the Coral Kingdom brought pain and suffering to the mermaid citizens, whom he mercilessly mistreated. In spite of the tyrant’s rule, a few subjects still remain loyal to the true king, and await the day of his return.

Level Range         : 30 to 50
Goal Difficulty     : Easy
Goal Recommended at : Level  45
Goal Converter      : Arthon
Area Author         : Valkur

Game Enhancements:

• There is now an ‘instinct mbuy [amount]’ option. Works pretty much as you’d expect – should save a little time after doing an instinct rebuild.
• The ‘rlook’ command will no longer look into inventory – just the room. Keep in mind this command does also look at exits so if you’re getting strange results you might have an exit in the room the name you’re looking at, or, you might have just found a bug.
• Trains gained from mobprogs haven’t been adding to ‘trained’ totals for rebuild. This was by design originally but started to matter more since the release of Terra and has now been changed so that they do count towards rebuild total.

  I have a log of all trains gained in Terra since November 2012 and will be adding them to ‘trained’ amount in rebuild check along with a free rebuild which will make them recoverable. If you are affected by this you will be hearing from me separately.

• There is a new clanadmin feature called ‘MOTD’. A clanleader can type ‘clanadmin editmotd’ to be put into the description editor. You have 1024 characters to work with (same as description) but I strongly recommend you keep them to 23 lines or less for paging reasons on older / default terminals.

  If a clan has a ‘message of the day’ set then members will see it during login. There is a ‘banner’ that the mud ads. This is kind of a hack but if you don’t want the MUD to display the header because you’re adding one of your own, make the MOTD begin @w@w. Clan members can also type ‘clanmotd’ at any time to see their current MOTD. There is no way to see the MOTD of another clan unless you are an imm, in which case you can ‘clanmotd [clan name]’

• Amnesia has changed to decrease a fixed percentage rather than a skill amount. This is a pretty big buff to the spell but the only real impact is how the spell works when the target has instinct. I’ll post a note on mudinfo with more detail on this. A couple of other changes to go with it to highlight that you’re losing a fixed percentage and not a skill amount when the spell is applied and in ‘affects’. Also fixed a bug where the resist being checked was for ‘bash’ and not ‘mental’.

  Amnesia does work on mobs but does not affect mobprogs as spells cast from those don’t go through the regular ‘skill’ system. If I were using this against mobs I’d probably just target their second attack or a dodge, not that mob people will really need this against mobs at all.

• If you use ‘reply’ with no arguments it will either show that you have nobody to reply to, or show you reply target’s name.
• Using ‘tpspend bag’ with any other argument will now give a warning to use the correct syntax rather than buying a trivia bag.

Ranger Spell Upgrades:

Last year we did a review of mage, cleric and psi spells last year to allow them to continue to increase in power all the way up to level 201 and add a percentage bonus per tier.

The high end ranger / paladin spells (eruption, apocalypse and heavenly balance) were given a smaller tier multiplier as partial caster classes but the lower end ranger / paladin spells were never reviewed. This reboot has the update to the ranger spells, paladin will follow shortly.

The biggest overall changes are the the per-tier percentage bonus on each spell and an increase in base damage on the mid-high level spells (rainbow to eruption). Other specific changes are included below:

• Reduced the lag time on ‘Fire Rain’. No reason for this to be higher than all the other ranger area spells.
• Lowered the level of ‘Wind Blast’ from 35 to 30. No change in stats, just fills in the gap between Sunray and Fire Storm a little better.
• I removed the align restriction from Sunray and Moonbeam which really just made them duplicates of each other. Sunray has been removed, if you had it practiced you’ll get a few pracs rewarded which I guess is a bonus because you still have the capability now, just combined into Moonbeam.
• Reduced the mana cost on ‘Rainbow’ to be more in line with the other ranger attack spells.
• Lowered the level of ‘Earth Shroud’ from 124 to 118.