Five on Friday - February 15, 2008
"When I'm crafting an item with a runic tool, do all properties have an equal chance of being used??"
Not necessarily - some properties are more common than others, and it depends on the type of item. Here's a general overview of the weighting:
- Shields and wands - all properties have an equal chance to be rolled
- Fishing poles - Spell Channelling is twice as common as everything else; all others are equal
- Jewelry - All properties are equal, with two exceptions: Night Sight is quite rare, and skill bonuses are grouped - see the note below.
- Talismans: Slayer, Crating bonus, crafting exceptional bonus, and creature resists are all weighted equally - all others are substantially more rare.
- Melee weapons - DI is quite common, HLA is uncommon, Hit Area is quite rare - all others are equal
- Missile weapons - Same as melee, except DCI is quite rare as well.
- Armor (non-elf) - Night Sight is uncommon and hp regen and stamina regen are rare; all others are equal
- Elf armor - as above, except night sight isn’t even an option
Property "groups": Certain types of properties are rolled as a group - slayers and creature resists on talismans are rolled for as a property, and then the sub-type is rolled. All the references to them above refer to the chances of these types being rolled as a group - any specific element of the group will of course be much more rare. This also means that you can't get, say, more than one slayer type on a particular item.
Elemental resists are slightly different - the math works out such that rolling any resist is the same chance as rolling another of the "regular" properties, but they are actually treated as five separate properties - so you can roll bonuses to more than one resist on a single item.
Skill bonuses on jewelry are a little bit different - the available skills are divided up into five groups of five or six skills apiece and then the subtype is rolled. It's possible to get more than one skill bonus, because they actually are treated like five different properties.
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Missing patch note + explanation:
Some folks have noticed a change that didn't show up in the patch notes - the omission was intentional, as it was a fix for a particularly nasty exploit. However, it does have some gameplay impact, so we'll explain it here. The note itself:
- Commodity item prices changed so that the sell price is never greater than the base price, and the buy price never drops below the base price
What this means is that vendors now have a "base price" for commodities - they won't sell those items for less than that base, nor will they buy the items from players for more. Prices will still fluctuate depending on how many of those commodities have recently been bought or sold, but players won't be able to make a profit by finding a vendor with a low sell price on, for example, arrows and selling them to a vendor with a high buy price.
We are aware that this impacts the Doom vendor and healer rather more than the others, and we'll be looking into tweaking them for the next publish.
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"The Life Leech and Mana Leech properties seem to be outside of the proper intensity range when I use a runic weapon. What's the deal?"
The chance to hit on Mana and Life Leech (but NOT Stamina Leech) are scaled based on the swing speed of the weapon. First, the SSI, if any, is run through an equation to create a modifier. Then that modifier is divided by 4 and multiplied by the intensity to get the actual proc chance (capped at 100%, of course.) Then, if it's a ranged weapon, the chance is cut in half. Faster weapons will have a smaller chance, and slower weapons will have a larger one, at the exact same intensity value. (The tooltip, as near as we can tell, is correct as to the actual chance for the effect to go off. It's just not at all representative of the intensity.)
What this means is, short of running some wacky math on every weapon you create, a crafter can't really tell what intensity he's rolled on a given weapon. I've updated the Item Properties page with a note to that effect :P
(Again, none of this applies to Stamina Leech - its intensity is simply its chance to hit / 2.)
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"So, what with all the exploding houses in Luna, I'm a bit worried about my own stuff. Should I be?"
Not if you're not cheating! We're dead serious about banning people who violate our Terms of Service, but we are also committed to careful research and thorough investigation. If you're in danger of getting your house blown to smithereens, trust me, you know about it.
There is one caveat, though (isn't there always?) If you have a vendor on another person's house, and that house gets blown up, your vendor will also suffer a gruesome fate. Vendor contracts are buyer-beware - make sure you know the reputation of that Luna vendor you're about to tie your name to, and be cautious if you don't know them personally. Customer Service will not restore a vendor lost in this manner, nor will they reimburse for losses.
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"When did the jwilson slimes return?"
Those vile critters reappeared with the most recent publish. Consider the return of this historic monster part of Wilki's final gift to you - no creature, from the mighty dragon to the lowly slime, escaped his glance.
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Playguide Update Roundup:
This week's changes were all about integrating Pub 50 into the documentation, plus some bonus updates as I work my way backwards through patch notes of yore:
- Item Properties: Added the note about the Arms Lore DI bonus and how it can cause an item to exceed the DI cap, added note about intensity ranges of Life and Mana Leeches and corrected their effects, clarified Self Repair, and added a bunch of whitespace because the page was giving me a headache.
- Runic Properties: Changed all the min/max intensities to match the current publish
- Bulk Order Deeds: Added the bonus high-level blacksmiths now get to receive colored BODS. (Note, this page is iffy at best at the moment - don't rely on it.)
- The Facets: Added info about double meat resources in Felucca. (Thoroughness is my watchword! No patch note too trivial! :P)
- Artifacts: Added info about the new Doom artifact drop system.
- Skill and Stat Management: Updated with stat cap and management info.
- Guaranteed Gain System: Updated with new stat gain info.
- Necromancy: Clarified Vampiric Embrace garlic damage.
- Parrying: Added info about Dex penalty.
- Animal Lore: Added Base Damage as one of the items Animal Lore reveals.
- Detect Hidden: Clarified mechanism of determining success.
- Bushido: Added weapon skill requirement for Evasion.
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What's To Come:
Next week the Valentine's Day Scavenger Hunt is the big story, plus we'll have a fix for the Salvage Bag bug and the weird rubberbanding y'all have been seeing this week.
The following week is the Town Hall in Jacksonville, then a week or two after that we are planning to get the next publish to Test Center, chock-full of eventy and bug-fixy goodness. Stay tuned for more details!
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Jacksonville Town Hall
Remember, the first Town Hall of the new year will be March 1 in Jacksonville, FL at Dave and Busters. Please do RSVP so we know how much salsa to order!
For our mid-Atlantic players, the May Town Hall meeting is also posted - you can get details on the Town Hall page and RSVP for that one as well. If you're in the neighborhood, don't miss out!
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Fansite News
If you missed out on the Stratics House of Commons chat this week, you can read the transcript here!
Into PvP? Like factions, but want more people to fight? Check out the Factions War teaser movie. This looks like it's going to be a truly epic event :)
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Bunnies, bunnies... it must be BUNNIES!
- Jeremy