Game update: 9/10

In the past, I've tried to strike a balance between "informative", "complete", and "readable" whenever posting live update news in the Message of the Day. I've now decided to split those goals between the MotD itself and this blog.

As I've mentioned in the 9/10 MotD entry, I will be attempting to keep each future MotD entry extremely brief (no longer than a single line per change, when possible). This should help to reduce "colossal paragraph syndrome", making the MotD easier to browse and making sure important changes don't get lost in the scroll.

In the interest of keeping you informed, I will now be posting a "Game Update" article on this blog whenever a non-trivial MotD update occurs (each reboot, generally). In these updates, I will talk about each of the changes and new features, letting you know how things work, why things have changed, and what each entry means.

Cinderskein:

In this evening's update, the biggest news is the new sorcerer spell - cinderskein. Available to sorcerers of all remort tiers, this one's a pretty cool new ability - it allows the sorcerer to "mark" a number of nearby targets with special runes, and then to unleash a web of fiery rays which will fry anyone who was thus marked. The sorcerer needs to raise her magus war-shell before she can use cinderskein, however - it's that dangerous. =)

The kink is that the web feeds on itself - launching a single heat ray will only do moderate damage, whereas launching several at once will cause each individual ray to be much stronger. Thus, the more targets which the sorcerer "marks" before pressing the detonate button, the more damage each target will take.

The "marking" process can be tricky. Whenever a victim is marked, a targeting rune is drawn on the ground where he is standing (and he gains a "cinderskein target" in his affects list). If the victim leaves the room before the heat rays are launched, the heat rays will not be able to seek him out (they strike the ground where he used to be instead).

The sorcerer's constitution determines how many targets she can strike at once (newbie sorcerers can only handle two targets). The targeting runes fade quickly, but their duration increases with constitution as well (to ensure that they last long enough for the sorcerer to mark enough targets to reach her potential limit).

Targeting:

The 'target' command's range is now based on learn curve. Previously, it used the same range calculation as the 'throw' command (which is strength-based).

Although it might be argued that it would be convenient to have 'throw' and 'target' share the same range calculation, this convenience would be somewhat arbitrary given that other variants may use different statistics to calculate their range (for example, telekinetic projection's range is intellect-based).

Colossal Smiting:

Previously, colossal smiting was slightly more accurate than a normal attack. I've changed it to be slightly less accurate than a normal attack instead; it's not a big change, but grey trolls make up 13-20% of the current population at any given time, and I feel this is a much more lenient and logical way to address the racial's damage output than a reduction in damage.

Vicious Fist mastery:

Just a small monk buff - I've slightly improved the rate at which vicious fist mastery beyond 100% adds to the damage of the monk's bare-hand attacks.

"radius" attacks:

There was an issue with many "radius"-type area-of-effect attacks, in which one potential target was always "removed" from the list of targets to attack. (This could only occur to a potential target in a different room - never in the same room.)

While this issue wasn't very noticeable when attacking a ton of targets at once, it became much more apparent in PvP situations where a player tried to strike a nearby victim with a radius-attack. If that victim was the only potential target in range (and he wasn't in the same room as the attacker), he would always be the removed from the list of potential targets - thus, radius attacks would always "whiff" and hit nothing in these situations.

This update should fix this behavior.