Weekly Dev Activities 9/4/07

[Talon_Moonshadow]

Once again, clerics get the short end of the stick with the new /death rule. For example, the other day I was doing Von2 with my lvl 8 cleric, and she got zapped by the beholder across the bridge by the shrine like three times. No problem, I just rezzed at the shrine and went about my business. However...the last time I got zapped, I was incap and stabilized. There was nobody in the party who could heal me enough to get me up and I had to slash death. Now, if that takes me to my bind point, that means I lose xp for dying as well as for having to /death.

I'm sick of the rotten apples ruining it for those of us who play by the rules.

Uhmmm....you might want to blame your friends who decided not to fill up their inventory with useless stuff like healers kits. This is a pet peave of mine, especially as my Clerics and Rangers and pallies and sometimes Wiz and Sorc fill up there slots on healing wands to use on others.......but whenever my toon is incapped no one has a healers kit.

I'm not saying I like the change: especially when it means i don't get to exploit something that others have been exploiting for a long time and profiting from.....not fair to the guy who just found out about it. (ok, ignore that last paragraph)

but the real reason for your argument is that no one ever thinks about making sure their toon can help the cleric.

this change screws up soloing too......and i really think they should tweak this a little. The easiest way would be that if you were incapped it would act like it always did before. Maybe invent an "unstable" command.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

/death while stabilized will not recall you. And Devs are also working on a regen from stabilized mechanic. So, doubly not to fear!

Hmmmm....guess i should have read further.

[Lorien_the_First_One]

Uhmmm....you might want to blame your friends who decided not to fill up their inventory with useless stuff like healers kits. This is a pet peave of mine, especially as my Clerics and Rangers and pallies and sometimes Wiz and Sorc fill up there slots on healing wands to use on others.......but whenever my toon is incapped no one has a healers kit.

People's heal skill is so bad half the time the kits don't work. Now aid clickies...that works nicely

[narizue]

General comment would be that just about everybody who is level appropriate to VON2 should be able to get a incapped cleric up somehow. Wands from pallies, rangers, bards, and prolly rogues. Aid clickies, GH from a caster or a gird. Bear's endurance. Mass aid. Inspire greatness. Virtue. Rage.

All folks have to do is think outside the box.

[Tanka]

General comment would be that just about everybody who is level appropriate to VON2 should be able to get a incapped cleric up somehow. Wands from pallies, rangers, bards, and prolly rogues. Aid clickies, GH from a caster or a gird. Bear's endurance. Mass aid. Inspire greatness. Virtue. Rage.

All folks have to do is think outside the box.

"Level appropriate" is around 7-10, which means no GH yet (6th level spell, so need to be L11 as a Wizard, or 12 as a Sorc). Girds are fair game, though.

[moorewr]

People's heal skill is so bad half the time the kits don't work. Now aid clickies...that works nicely

It doesn't take much UMD to have a shot with a CLW wand... every character I have (including my barbarian) can wand whip.. if you don't want to do that get your heal skill positive and carry some +whatever heal kits. Be safe, be prepared, boy scouts.

[HFGfeather]

Weekly Development Activities

In QA
These items are in QA and are scheduled for Module 5: Accursed Ascension (Litany of the Dead Parts 3 & 4).

General
[*]NEW - The /death command, meant to be used only in the most dire of situations, has been changed to automatically release the character to his or her bindpoint after killing the character. This change is meant to address several /death related exploits.

My /death command queston is this....
So now when ever we /death we end up back at the tavern. Just like if we click on the reserect box so why have /death at all? It does nothing more then the reserection box does, now?


There must have been some really really bad Exploits of this command that I don't know about or you Devs would not have disabled it in this way. The only /death I can think of is in the red Dragon (von6) where they would leads mobs away from the pillars then /death and get rezed. But they can just die and get rezed. Besides you already fixed the Red Dragon, so I don't get it. Besides you can go out and have a bard sing to the mobs. There was probably some others but why use /death, when we have DD and no one has to die. At higher levels you just don't want to die. So I don't get it. You are patching a hole that doesn't exist anymore for most of us anyway. If some fool wants to die to win let them. So now are you going to kill Demention Door because we found some unique places to use it?
Azari

[Lorien_the_First_One]

My /death command queston is this....
So now when ever we /death we end up back at the tavern. Just like if we click on the reserect box so why have /death at all? It does nothing more then the reserection box does, now?

It still works as an emergency escape if you are stuck and don't want to wait for a GM or are soloing and are turned to stone, held, etc, and you don't want to wait for it to wear off.

There must have been some really really bad Exploits of this command that I don't know about or you Devs would not have disabled it in this way.

I know of at least 3 others besides von (1 raid, 1 preraid, 1 GH keying quest). One exploits gets you a free chest, two let you avoid difficult parts of required content.

And given that I'm hardly a power gamer I'd be shocked if there weren't more.

[Vox]

I'm going to have to chime in with the anti /death change crowd a bit. Don't get me wrong... exploits are great to fix. Anyone who doesn't know, you can more easily access the water parts of the crucible by having people who suck at swimming /death and get carried through. However... this is a minor issue (you can kill yourself in that quest in so many other ways when compared with the suckitude of getting stuck inside a shrine in Gianthold while fighting the skellies before a dragon, and having to /death so you can move.

Worse, try this one on for size... how many of use have accidentally stepped into one of the sticky spots in VON3? /death takes you to the tavern... great now I have to go through the entry instance and it's 50 trolls? I can do this... a lot of the people on the forums can probably solo it just fine... there are a LOT of people who can't.

If you are going to change this, PLEASE work on a better mechanism for escaping stuck spots. If there is a better way for escaping these situations, please publicize it better because I don't know it

Vox

[Delaz]

I'm with the ones also dissapointed by the /death modification. I see how some exploits could be done with this command. But in game terms the /death is our ability to perform suicide. To commit suicide and have the cleric ressurect you in a different location is not an exploit, it's a legitimate strategy!! And beside this is the quick and dirty way to avoid a 15 minutes wait to get a "character stuck ticket" answered in the middle of a raid. So instead of ruinning this basic and viable game option, why don't you try to fix the specific exploits. Something is the style of "dungeon modifications"; like so many as been made before.


So next time I bring a greater human bane dagger to my neck and "/" myself to death I want my due rest time in the Great Beyond. So this is a message to all Silver Flame Brother, and the others, let us perform "seppuku" with honor, or we'll start seeing who's rezzing you guys.

[Lorien_the_First_One]

I'm with the ones also dissapointed by the /death modification. I see how some exploits could be done with this command. But in game terms the /death is our ability to perform suicide. To commit suicide and have the cleric ressurect you in a different location is not an exploit, it's a legitimate strategy!!

Any good gods would likely quickly without the raise/res spell. Neutral and evil gods would probably be good with it. I'm gonna guess there are more good than neutral clerics out there....but I could be wrong.

And beside this is the quick and dirty way to avoid a 15 minutes wait to get a "character stuck ticket" answered in the middle of a raid.

Log out, log back in, you should be unstuck.

[Vordax]

I'm going to have to chime in with the anti /death change crowd a bit. Don't get me wrong... exploits are great to fix. Anyone who doesn't know, you can more easily access the water parts of the crucible by having people who suck at swimming /death and get carried through. However... this is a minor issue (you can kill yourself in that quest in so many other ways when compared with the suckitude of getting stuck inside a shrine in Gianthold while fighting the skellies before a dragon, and having to /death so you can move.

As for getting stuck in the shrines in GH tor, you can use a DD to get out, or at this point you can just recall because the quest is already completed. Someone else had commented that you can actually still use the portal to the dragon while in the shrine, but I haven't verified this.

Vordax

[Pharaz]

Weekly Development Activities

In QA
These items are in QA and are scheduled for Module 5: Accursed Ascension (Litany of the Dead Parts 3 & 4).

General

• NEW - The /death command, meant to be used only in the most dire of situations, has been changed to automatically release the character to his or her bindpoint after killing the character. This change is meant to address several /death related exploits.

So your soloing an adventure and you drop below 0, but stabalize. The shrine is like 5 feet away and /death is the only way to die so you can shrine. You're taking this option away to those fortunate enough to stabalize. Can you make it so if your solo you just don't stabalize?

[Tanka]

So your soloing an adventure and you drop below 0, but stabalize. The shrine is like 5 feet away and /death is the only way to die so you can shrine. You're taking this option away to those fortunate enough to stabalize. Can you make it so if your solo you just don't stabalize?

They've said they're fixing the Risia bug where you release when stable. If you're stable and /death you should not release.

[The_Cataclysm]

So your soloing an adventure and you drop below 0, but stabalize. The shrine is like 5 feet away and /death is the only way to die so you can shrine. You're taking this option away to those fortunate enough to stabalize. Can you make it so if your solo you just don't stabalize?

If you are incapped you won't autorelease if you do /death for that exact reason.

[Dharma]

It also works if stuck in a Tor Shrine pillar that you can log out then back in and you will spawn next to the shrine you were stuck inside.

The /death thing has many exploits... Unfortunately, the change won't stop them from being used IMHO. It will just make people more creative about how to get the same result.

With all the traps in crucible you shouldn't find it hard to die in one or drown so that your stone can get carried. (1 example)

I think it would have been more wise to fix the "rez" trick than change the /death command. Not that I am a fan of using either to navigate around the game mechanics. The /death change won't impact my play so it is a wash for me.....

I think maybe when it comes to changes like this Turbine should ask the "3 whys?" you do when evaluating a problem. If your house burns down because you left the iron on when you left, would you decide not to own an iron next time or would you just be smarter about its use?

Problem: People /death to get into the Reaver raid rez room and man the lever.
Why 1: Why do they end up there before the "quest" starts?
- Because death in the zone sends you there...
Why 2: Why can they die before the "quest" starts?
- Because they can /death...
Why 3: How do they get alive and on the lever without flying to it?
- Because there is a rare way to end up rezzed inside the zone.

Now fix the answer to the 3rd why and the first ones become irrelavent. This same can be done to most controversial or exploit "fixes".

[Issip]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Quarion
The /death command, meant to be used only in the most dire of situations, has been changed to automatically release the character to his or her bindpoint after killing the character. This change is meant to address several /death related exploits.


Sadly the /death command is also useful against many persistant bugs like being stuck as well as for exploits. Being incapped in front of a shrine and stabalizing will be great.

Thanks for the cheap band-aid, much easier than coding.

[HFGfeather]

In a different game there were places we could get stuck they implimented a command called /rewind if you could be still for a few seconds and type /rewind then you would end up where you were just befor you got stuck.

That would be a great help in a world of sticky code. Specially when we can't /death, to get the job done.

I am just saying give us a different command to get unstuck. Then deal with /death however you want.
Azari

[Tanka]

For stuck points, there, plain and simple, needs to be a /stuck command. Every MMO I've played in has had one, except this one.

[Meriadeuc]

Weekly Development Activities

[*]NEW - Freedom of Movement will now protect against the Crippling weapon effect. This change will include some monsters with wards that are similar to Freedom of Movement.

I hope that the second sentence does not imply that red and purpled named bosses will be getting yet another blanket immunity.