More Warrior Changes, Other Improvements

Warrior Skill Changes / Upgrades:

• Increased the trains from Battle Training a little, both at SH and during regular levels (bigger increase at SH).
• The ‘Precision‘ skill now has instinct. Increasing instinct will increase the percentage of your attacks that cannot be dodged. Diminishing returns as with all other instinct skills.
• The ‘cleave‘ skill is now ‘nofail’ and has a small damage bonus per tier for primary class warriors. It can also now be used with a hammer and costs 50 moves to use.

  This skill used to have a chance to destroy a shield when used against mobs. That extra chance is now available only to primary class warriors and no longer destroys a shield completely. Instead of destroying the shield it sets a (Weakened) flag on the item that temporarily makes it signifcantly less effective as a defensive shield. Now that equipment is no longer lost, this does also work against other players.

  Chance of success for weakening a shield is based on the attackers strength vs the Dexterity of the target and, with equal stats, the base chance per use is fairly low (10-20%). Duration of the ‘weakened’ effect is also fairly low but much longer against mobs. Can tweak the numbers as needed, more interested in making sure the mechanics work for now.

  Cleave still really just meant as a regular leveling damage skill, but now with a ‘perk’ that might be useful in some situations.

• The ‘scalp‘, ‘sap‘ and ‘bodycheck‘ skills are now ‘nofail’ and also have a small damage bonus per tier for primary class warriors.

  For skills like ‘sap’ that do damage and have a possible extra effect (sap will leech the target’s mana/moves into hp for the attacker), nofail means that the first damage hit will always succeed and do a percentage of its base damage based on your practiced percent. Unless noted, the stat based chances for another hit or the extra effect have not changed unless noted otherwise. If the skill could previously ‘backfire’ and hit the attacker instead, that will no longer happen.

  Other changes specific to individual skills:

  • Sap does pretty low damage so the chances of it actually leeching
    hp have been increased.
  • Change of bodycheck dazing is lower if you are not a primary class
    warrior.

Orlando Goal Redo:

We have done a lot of cleanup on the Orlando goal to solve a lot of the syntax issues and fix a few bugs in this area. I’m not going to go into detail on everything single one of them but hopefully this goal is a lot more consistent for new players to try out now. Thanks to everyone who tested this and particularly to Redryn and Ani on some fairly extended research into paths through the goal.

Whenever a goal adds a new taskhint you will now see the notification below.

    ** Task Hint : Your ‘tasks’ list has been updated with a new hint.

This was done mainly for the Orlando goal but applies to everything. Part of the problem there was newbies were getting the clues but not realizing it.

Other Enhancements this reboot:

• Added some new code to support automation of the ‘Aardwords’ game. Rhuli will write more about this later.
• Use the syntax ‘group create [group name] private‘ to create a group and flag it private at the same time. You’re going to have a hard time getting the word “private” actually into a group name without quotes, not going to try to fix that.
• Increased the chances of skill improvement on bypass.
• Increased the impact of ‘instinct’ on Toxic Cloud as it was quite a bit weaker than other spells.

Bug Fixes

• The reboot for battle training included a very minor change to luck powerups that was never intended and could reduce your total pups gained. Total impact was maybe 2 to 3% but still worth fixing.
• If you were in a group using autoswing, not the leader and got the kill autoswing would stop. If you have a new target that you would switch to (someone hitting you, or your groupleader, or another group member in the room), autoswing should not be stopping / resetting.
• Fixed some buggy behavior in Black Lotus when recited on another player that was caused by the last reboot. Main thing was the heal numbers shown were based on the caster not the target which can very when black lotus used from a scroll (bugs board #15198).
• The ‘group stats’ command is back to normal.
• Attacking as a blacksmith with spells like web, blind, etc was not triggering ‘autoswing’. This should be resolved now but need to make sure it didn’t break casting / multicasting spells in other ways, particularly against multiple targets.
• The per-tier damage bonus added to hammering blow last reboot should have been warrior only, now fixed.
• When a mob in a group with you gets purged or purges itself it does not correctly get removed from the group so the group has a count of 2. When the player leader leaves a ‘ghost’ group is left behind with -1 -1 levels. Should now be fixed.
• Fixed quite a few places in the code like ‘put X apple’ where you would get ‘You do not see a apple here’, which should be ‘an apple here’. I’m sure there’s plenty of these not found but it’s a start.