Visible Cloaks, Spell Alteration and more

[KainLionheart]

Just a couple of ideas I had. I can't see them ever happening IG but one Dev or another may see it and it may or may not give them an idea, who knows

VISIBLE CLOAKS

You can turn Helms on and off, Armour Kits on and off, hell we can even see our goggles. Why not cloaks?
This idea is two fold.
1. On / off visible cloak function.
2. Purchasable cloak appearance kits. One idea that springs to mind is entire guilds deciding they want that style cloak. Presto everyone in the guild (who wants to) buys that cloak design. Got to be some profit for Turbine there, and game play immersion / fun for players



SPELL CHANGES

All of the stat boosting spells (Bulls, Bears etc, inc. mass versions) are ~nearly~ useless. (I am aware that they can be useful in some circumstances, but honestly, these occasions are quite rare)

Idea - Change the mechanics of the spell as such;

Caster level 1 - 10 +4 enchanted stat boost for 10 minutes.
Caster level 11 - 15 +6 enchanted stat boost for 10 minutes.
Caster level 16 - 20 +8 enchanted stat boost for 10 minutes.
Caster level 21 - 25 +2 insightful stat boost for 10 minutes.



MABAR

Change the CR bands to work.

At the moment it is possible for a level 3 to walk into the CR 8 - 13 and run around spawning CR 4 mobs. This means anyone who is level 8 and above and would normally spawn CR 6+ mobs gets no reward for the new mobs made by the level 3.
I understand level ranges need to be varied slightly, (there are currently 7) if anything else to limit the number of instances for lag purposes, meaning you cannot have a CR range for every 2 levels.
I would propose the below, and changing material drop rates to come from mobs up to 4 levels below the PC. (So a level 12 PC could kill a mob of CR 8 and still get a chance at a reward)

Shared - Fine as it is
CR 1-4 - Spawns mobs at minimum CR 1 and a maximum CR 4.
CR 5-8 - Spawns mobs at minimum CR 4 and a maximum CR 9.
CR 9-12 - Spawns mobs at minimum CR 8 and a maximum CR 13.
CR 13-16 - Spawns mobs at minimum CR 12 and a maximum CR 17.
CR 17-20 - Spawns mobs at minimum CR 16 and a maximum CR 21.
EPIC - Spawns mobs at minimum CR 21 and a maximum CR 28.

Have it so that only characters of the relevant level may enter (for example only characters between level 9 and 12 may enter the CR 9-12 zone. For epic it is levels 20+ only)

Increase drop rates on party size. Something like +1% per party member? meaning a full raid party gets a 12% bonus to ingredient drops, incentive to party without being over powered. This would encourage grouping, which in my experience is a good thing 99% of the time.

I think I had some more, but they escape me for the moment.

[donfilibuster]

Maybe the mabar idea should have it's own thread since it'd have more visibility while mabar runs.

For the cloaks, lost hope long ago when they didn't continue with the skinneable hats.
Kind of expected further development on those, then moved from non-skin shields to armor kits.

As far as cloaks could go with today tech, they could be like armor kits, just cloak or cape looking.
Ideally you could have two kits to toggle, one armor and another cloak.

[Certon]

Sure. I love cloaks. Make them toggle-able. ALSO make cloaks for everyone else toggle-able, so people with poor performing machines can turn them off to save themselves from graphics lag.

[joesully]

The fact that i cannot see my cloak has bothered me every time i have logged a toon into this game since i started playing.I'm glad to see this come up on the forums again, but i doubt that turbine will ever do anything to fix it.I do not understand why I cannot see my cloak and i dont understand why turbine has not fixed this yet, but im all out of hope.

[cpw_acc]

The fact that i cannot see my cloak has bothered me every time i have logged a toon into this game since i started playing.I'm glad to see this come up on the forums again, but i doubt that turbine will ever do anything to fix it.I do not understand why I cannot see my cloak and i dont understand why turbine has not fixed this yet, but im all out of hope.

Because dynamically deforming graphical objects such as cloaks (or realistic wavy hair, or sheets that flutter realistically in the wind, etc) are HARD.

I don't just mean hard as in "2+2 is easy, but trigonometry requires a bit of thinking"-hard, I mean hard as in the calculations required to create flexible materials like clothes and cloaks are so complicated that its only relatively recently that they started appearing in CGI films - and they use prerendered with supercomputers! (This is one of the reasons the first CGI films like Toy Story were about...well, toys and things that had nice easy solid moving parts.)

Think how much computing power this would require for a real-time game! Of course there are always corners you can cut that might make it workable on a high-end machine these days, but then people would just moan about how the cloaks don't look right when they run etc etc. Its probably really not worth the effort.

[KainLionheart]

Because dynamically deforming graphical objects such as cloaks (or realistic wavy hair, or sheets that flutter realistically in the wind, etc) are HARD.

I don't just mean hard as in "2+2 is easy, but trigonometry requires a bit of thinking"-hard, I mean hard as in the calculations required to create flexible materials like clothes and cloaks are so complicated that its only relatively recently that they started appearing in CGI films - and they use prerendered with supercomputers! (This is one of the reasons the first CGI films like Toy Story were about...well, toys and things that had nice easy solid moving parts.)

Think how much computing power this would require for a real-time game! Of course there are always corners you can cut that might make it workable on a high-end machine these days, but then people would just moan about how the cloaks don't look right when they run etc etc. Its probably really not worth the effort.

Not saying you are wrong, but my experience has been...

To be fair DDO isn't exactly a graphical masterpiece. There are many games with cloaks that work, some with far better graphics engines (Skyrim for example, there are two very popular cloak mods that work VERY well) and games with poorer graphics (e.g. Neverwinter Nights, which was released in 2002. Albeit cloaks didn't show up until about 2005 or 6 though)

I would imagine the major problem would be 'clipping' (when parts of your character stick through the cloak) but I'd be prone to giving them some leeway with clipping, if you cant stand it, turn it off. Next to Druids in Wolf form with shields floating 2 feet above their head, I'd be ok with my feet occasionally poking though my cloak when I run

As I said I am not saying you are wrong, I know very little about how computer games work, but the above are two reasons why I assumed it wouldn't be too problematic.

[donfilibuster]

Clipping may be a problem, considering the various bugs like the recent one with hovering weapons.
But that aside, it may be doable by just taking over the body graphic the same way armor kits do.

If the cloak will cover the full body it can be made similar to the robes, which do cover the legs.
If it'd be worn like a cape it might need more work.
It'd be great if you could toggle this, and even more by donning the hood separately.

[nibel]

I remember a dev post (IIRC, by Eladrin) saying that cloaks are not a physics problem. It's simply that DDO have a ton of race models, and the devs would have to make animations for each race separetelly, and the time and cost involved on this is too large for the benefit.

Basically, they need to create cloaks from scratch. And that is expensive. And would be a long-term plan because they can't finish it in a few weeks. So, yeah. Give up any hope of seeing cloaks on DDO.

And no, they can't just copy and paste the animations from Lotro because the avatar models don't match.

[cpw_acc]

Not saying you are wrong, but my experience has been...

To be fair DDO isn't exactly a graphical masterpiece. There are many games with cloaks that work, some with far better graphics engines (Skyrim for example, there are two very popular cloak mods that work VERY well) and games with poorer graphics (e.g. Neverwinter Nights, which was released in 2002. Albeit cloaks didn't show up until about 2005 or 6 though)

I would imagine the major problem would be 'clipping' (when parts of your character stick through the cloak) but I'd be prone to giving them some leeway with clipping, if you cant stand it, turn it off. Next to Druids in Wolf form with shields floating 2 feet above their head, I'd be ok with my feet occasionally poking though my cloak when I run

As I said I am not saying you are wrong, I know very little about how computer games work, but the above are two reasons why I assumed it wouldn't be too problematic.

I don't know those games, but I'm sure you're right. My *guess* is that the animations for these characters are 'pre-formed' to account for the cloak. That is, hard-coded to look a certain way at each stage of the animation. This would be one of the 'short-cuts' I mentioned to getting it to work - but as a previous poster mentioned, in a game like DDO this would have to be done for every character type in every possible animation/posture to avoid clipping all over the place. I still think it would be a lot of work to make something decent looking, which most people wouldn't appreciate. Imagine the boards filled with people moaning how their feet stick through their cloaks!

[phroggiepuddles]

Cloaks sound cool, but the implementation is extremely difficult as mentioned above - even to do them in a basic fashion and look **** it would be a big undertaking.

The stat spells (Bulls Strength et al) are usually only meant as an early game boost, with rare application beyond level 10. If we had a "low magic world" as it was known in Neverwinter Nights (NWN) then these spells are extremely powerful later game (as well as D&D spells like Greater Magic Weapon) which makes the arcane classes much more powerful. In DDO to have these spells scale would be a huge swing in power towards the classes that can cast them and making the other classes less powerful by removing their facility and niche.

[bigolbear]

nice suggestions.

visable cloaks: yes id love em, most players would. turbine have stated tho that its a major task, and although they would like them too its a lot of work.

stat spells:
not a bad suggestion actualy.
as you say they are essentialy useless past lvl 10. A lot of low lvl spells are tho.
Id say a reasonabe compromise would have them scale with caster lvl, as you have suggested.

+4 stat and and additonal +1 per 6 caster lvls. (max CL 18...)
1-6 = +4
7-12 = +5
13-18 = +6

and then with epic destinies there could be ways to increase your max caster lvl on certain spell schools.


mabar: yeh definately, spawns should be based on instance rather than nearby player lvl.

[Karavek]

If you enjoy the look of cloaks and capes, go play city of heroes before it shuts down at the end of the month. THey added their capes way back in year one before DDO even existed. Makes you wonder why a newer game like DDO didnt launch with something so obviously needed by adventurers.

[shadereaper33]

Not saying you are wrong, but my experience has been...

To be fair DDO isn't exactly a graphical masterpiece. There are many games with cloaks that work, some with far better graphics engines (Skyrim for example, there are two very popular cloak mods that work VERY well) and games with poorer graphics (e.g. Neverwinter Nights, which was released in 2002. Albeit cloaks didn't show up until about 2005 or 6 though)

I would imagine the major problem would be 'clipping' (when parts of your character stick through the cloak) but I'd be prone to giving them some leeway with clipping, if you cant stand it, turn it off. Next to Druids in Wolf form with shields floating 2 feet above their head, I'd be ok with my feet occasionally poking though my cloak when I run

As I said I am not saying you are wrong, I know very little about how computer games work, but the above are two reasons why I assumed it wouldn't be too problematic.

See, what you say here is technically correct and relevant, but the fact that DDO's sister game LOTRO has visible cloaks, which means they know how to do it, and are in the same office building, really kinda takes the wind out of the cloaks for this one.

[donfilibuster]

stat spells:
not a bad suggestion actualy.
as you say they are essentialy useless past lvl 10. A lot of low lvl spells are tho.
Id say a reasonabe compromise would have them scale with caster lvl, as you have suggested.

Low level spells do get useless, it's a tiered system and the spell slots decide the repertoire.
Scaling is straightforward, but it's a major change since it basically renders the tiers useless.
DDO has the scaling and the spell power mechanic to grow with it, but so far it only applies to the damage spells.

Another thing to consider is that the buffs are supposed to be redundant with gear, you use one or the other, non-stacking.
The stat spells looked useless even before the min level of the stats gear got lowered.
What is missing is precisely that under the tier system you are supposed to get better spells later on.
Only DDO's repertoire of spells is fairly small, both in d&d and invented spells. (which are also valid)

The same goes for any of the immunities that can be had on gear, you are supposed to pick whats best for the quests.
Difference is, in PnP need to be a lot more versatile to face unexpected dangers, whereas in DDO you can know the quests beforehand.
I'm not against either system, but gotta note the devs may just address the lack of spells rather than reworking the mechanics.