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- Spells:
- The second reason was the availability of Jesse's craft name stamping code. This is, as he puts it, the "Your name must be Billy to use this item's magic" feature. This nifty little trick makes any spell-based item useless for twinking and almost valueless on the Ebay market. If you want it, you have to earn it yourself - or buy a whole character. This also had the bonus of allowing me to make the item dropable/giveable. Going somewhere the Thau Plate will be useless ? Mule it and put something else on.
- So. The ground rule is: let's all be professional. Usually this forum is. Let's keep it that way.
- The former type of posts are both desired and encouraged. The latter... well, you've a right to your opinion, but please keep it out of this thread. If you post a well-considered analysis of the armor's merits vs. drawbacks and why my reasoning is faulty, I'll appreciate it. If you post just to make a personal attack, I'll ask a CoD mod delete your post from this thread.
- One of the first decisions I made was that the Plate would come in three pieces - girth, leggings, and coat. Unlike robes, in which one piece covers just about everything, I wanted to construct a "real" suit of armor, based on the model of postpatch Celdon GSA. Off the shelf robes, in my mind, make it too simple for mages to equip themselves for tanking. One set of item buffs can set you up to go toe-to-toe with Coral Golems. You can tank just as well in with Thau Plate, but you have to do a little extra work for it. The low / medium / high Nephol Golem test scheme grew out of the three-piece decision.
- I'm really gunshy about trying to balance items for PvP - I've learned that it's very difficult to avoid f**king things up badly. The problem is that most of the time PvP balance requires an item to be less "uber." If you can tank Corals in a store-bought Faran, no one cares . If you can tank swordsmen in a Faran, there's a problem. I wanted to make a cool, powerful item, so I was content to let it remain fairly useless in PvP.
- This armor is specifically for mages. It's designed with spell protections you can cast "over" and enhance. You can give a piece Unparalled protection in all four elements with level 5 banes. That's mighty. That's better than postpatch GSA, which, being non-enchantable, grants Unparalleled in only one element at the expense of having no protection in its opposite. Let's compare PP Flame GSA to Thau Plate, both the base version and with Impen and Banes of levels IV-VII .
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- Azeraphel emphatically said that if the armor had no defense against three damage types, it was a POS he would never use. So I gave them 25% protection "lesser" Durances. Hollow weapons trump that anyway. People have brought up the fact that the armor is useless against hollow monsters. To which I say, "stay away from where the hollow monsters are, or wear different armor if you go there." Hollow critters are always placed on fixed spawns. Mule the Thau Plate and wear something else.
- My first thought was to give the armor no defense at all against the "melee" damage types - bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. The principle behind the decision was that the armor was to be used by mages in combat against magic creatures and characters. Melee was supposed to trump it.
- Acid: 0.0
- Appraisal Resistance: 280
- Armor Level: 0
- Before we start, I'm going to lay one ground rule.
- Bludgeon: 0.0
- Short Description: An iridescent crystalline coat, covering the torso and arms.
- Fire: 0.0
- Frost: 0.0
- I've seen some complaints about the poor base pierce/bludgeon/slash protections. I expected some. But to be honest and fair with you, I'm not inclined to give them any more than a cursory listen. Here's why.
- Greater Consumption Durance
- Greater Decay Durance
- Greater Stasis Durance
- Greater Stimulation Durance
- Hieromancer's Ward
- Lesser Bludgeoning Durance
- Lesser Piercing Durance
- Lesser Slashing Durance
- Lightning: 0.0
- Pierce: 0.0
- Protections:
- Slash: 0.0
- Long Description: A heavily enchanted crystalline coat, of the type once worn into battle by the Exarchs of the Yalaini Order of Hieromancers. The seal of the Yalaini Seaborne Empire is embossed on its chest.
- Here's where we start dipping into controversial territory.
- As some of you know, the Thau Plate grew out of a thread started by Sturm on the "old" CoD Dev Board last December. The question was, "what type of quest item would be really useful to mages?" The list I got could be boiled down to the following.
* Items with very low Arcane and very high magic skill reqs , for use by the specialized peeps.
* Items with War Magic skill checks, for use by "real" mages. * Prevailing theory holds that hybrids don't usually take War. This also "buffs" War.
* Orbs with unique Recall or Summon locations that use all their mana with each use. I tried this with an item called the Aerlinthe Cynosure. This was an orb that would allow its wielder to recall to Aerlinthe. The problem is that spells attached to a wand/staff/orb can only come in two flavors with our current tech. You can cast a spell on someone else, or have an enchantment cast a spell on you when you wield it. I tried it as an enchantment, but it broke PvP like Recall Gems do - there was no casting delay. Instant escape. So that was nixed. The Cynosure was pulled out of January at the last minute and reworked into the Aerlinthe Recall scroll for February.
* More orbs, wands, and staves with unique, unresearchable spells.
* Orbs, wands, and staves that have normal spells, but look unique .
* Anything useful with low weight. Mages are perpetually overburdened with comps. Burden was a woe mentioned again and again, and I took it to heart.
* Quest items with special Item spells that can lower other magic items skill checks or Arcane difficulty. These would have to be tightly controlled, for obvious reasons.
* One-time magic caster assembly quest like SoCS. One final object for Item, War, Life, Creature. Final object skill checks its school at high level.
* Possible spell combinations include War Mastery 5 / Lightning Bolt 5, Life Mastery 5 / Heal Other 5, Creature Mastery 5 / Magic Yield Other 5, Item Mastery 5 / Portal Recall. These wand/staves would cast with a spellcraft equal to a Level 6 spell.
* As above, but the final item provides "Dispell All Negative Other" spell that sucks all 500 or so mana out of the thing.
An SoCS style one-time quest that requires a player to pick his buffs .
* Smouldering / Sparking / Stinging / Shivering Orbs. Converted Atlan stones that cast bolts and prots. For example, the Smouldering Orb might cast Flame Bolt V and Fire Protection VI. I didn't like this idea, because IMO the stones are already one of the most overused/overcollected items in the game.
* The "Atlan Wand" idea is very popular, though, so the concept may see light one day in one form or another.
Mage armor, because aside from robes, most armor is too heavy for mages.
Out of these, you can guess which one I found the most intriguing. Now I'll go through the stats one by one.
- The idea of stackable spells was first put forward by Jesse. It seemed like a good idea for the Plate. A good piece of armor could be made great with your r33+ magic ski11z. This left the problem of deciding on an AL for the Ward. Again, I hearkened back to the use of Postpatch Celdon GSA as a guide.
- There were two main reasons I chose not to give the armor any base defenses. The first was that this was supposed to be, well, mage armor. I wanted to create an item that would be totally useless to non-mages. The only sure way to do that is with spell activation requirements. Other than an enchantment's "You must have Skill X at Level Y" check, there's no way to limit an item's utility to members of a particular group.
- As with most major quest items, these have already elicited heated responses on both the Game Issues and AC Discussions boards. I've digested a number of reasonable and well-considered posts, and I've seen a few people who posted only to tell me that I suck.
- Nothing much to say here. I wanted it to look unique, I wanted to see a Yalain Imperial Seal , and, on a whim, I added the choice of three colors. In case the rumor is still out there, the color of the Kindling Stone you use only effects the color of the resulting armor. The spells &c. remain the same between all the color variants.
- This is a rather poor example, but someone had posted that they appreciated the "extra lore" you got from successfully appraising the Staff of the Nomads. They thought it was "Appraisal Skill love." Truthfully, the extra lore on the Staff and the other Ithaenc quest items were because I'd written inscriptions for the items that were too big to fit in the inscription box . But it was a good stopgap approach to the Appraisal problem, so I added "extra lore" in the long desc strings for many of the Plate quest items. You might have noticed that the emblem of the Hieromancers is only described in the long appraisal strings of the KindlingStones, Strange Humming Crystal, Puzzle Box, &c.
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