New Ninja and Barbarian Skills, Hearfriends Command, GQ change, Others.

Blind Fighting – New Ninja Ability:

A significant part of Ninja training involves practicing the art of ‘blind fighting’ – covering their eyes during combat training and learning to fight with their other senses.

Whenever a ninja is blinded in combat their blind fighting ability will take over; preserving their ability to dodge incoming attacks and hit their opponent with their weapons. Other skills may still be affected, but the core combat ability of a ninja is unhindered by blindness once their blindfighting ability is at 100%.

There is no instinct available for blind fighting – it does not make sense within the context of this skill.

Ironfist – New Barbarian Ability:

Skilled Barbarians reign down their blows as if their fists were literally made of iron.

While affected by this skill the damage inflicted by Barbarian unarmed attacks will increase based on their ironfist skill and their strength plus dexterity.

Primary stat: Strength, Dexterity.

Resistance Bars:

There is a new ‘resist bars’ option that will show your resistances, but using the bars from ‘score’. Also added ‘resist magic’ and ‘resist physical’ option to filter just those types. The ‘physical’ and ‘magic’ options exclude the other so they can’t be used together.

Affects Filters:

There are a couple of new options with the ‘affects’ command:

  aff [options]   : Filters affects based on 'spells' options. See
                    'help spells' for a list.
  aff [filter]    : Filter is a phrase. The skill name or recovery
                    name must match that phrase to be displayed. Useful
                    to see if a specific skill or recovery is up.

Global Quest Change:

When a mob repops that is part of a gquest, and there is a non-afk player in the room who is on the gquest and has not already killed the mob and the player is not already fighting, the mob will automatically attack that player. If there is more than one player in the room who meets these conditions, the first one in the room will be attacked. If there is more than one player in the room that meets these conditions and more than one instance of the mob repops, the ‘not already fighting’ check should ensure that the mobs attack the players in order. If the mob is ambushed, ambush takes priority over this check.

There is no special allowance for if the mob is also a quest or cp target, you can wait for the 2 minutes it will take to repop. This is to address a growing trend to kill a GQ mob then have a friend who is not in the gquest tie up that mob indefinitely. This also gives the ‘ambush’ skill a little bonus. It is still ok to use setwanted / PK to get someone out of a room so that the ‘first person in the room’ order changes. If you gq join while in the room, your ‘order’ in the room is changed to act as if you were the last one in.

Other changes in this reboot:

• When using look, the phrase “at” will be ignored so that phrases such as “look at blackboard” will work. It is parsed as an option so technically “look blackboard at at at” would work, which is wrong. I don’t plan on fixing that, it’s harmless and not worth reparsing ‘look’ for.
• Using ‘identify’ on a portal will show the area it leads to, which means it will also show on auction etc. For lore and those versions of identify that use it, ‘found at’ is not necessarily the same as ‘leads to’ – in some cases portals in one area lead to a different area.
• The amount healed by incomplete healing is now slightly lower while the amount healed by regeneration is higher. As the highest cleric heal spell in the game, regeneration should do more.
• Whenever you kill something that doesn’t exist, you will get half a second lag. The intent is to make spam killing less worthwhile, and then remove that rule – if spamming is ok with a half second lag, someone spamming “kill lasher” would have a 25% chance of catching Lasher running through the room.
• The bonus unarmed combat hit that barbarians and ninjas get is intended as a partial replacement for dual wield. Other classes get dual wield earlier each tier because of tier bonus, so I have made the bonus unarmed combat hits work the same way.
• To help a little with kill speed, the lag on ‘zombify’ has been removed completely and replaced with a 4 second recovery. This means that using zombify to convert a mob to undead will not cost you that first round of combat. The spell has no lag on failure so if you want to spam it 3 times at the start of each fight to make sure it works feel free, but it’s going to be wasteful in mana terms. Keep in mind that when used against undead, necrocide is the most powerful attack spell in the game.
• There is a new commands called ‘hearfriends’. When you turn this on, you can go into ‘deaf’ mode but will still receive tells from friends. It also shows in ‘config’.
• Using ‘wish list’ will now show your actual cost for the wish if you don’t already have it.
• You will now receive a note when you are outbid on a marketplace item. You will always receive the note if it happens while you are offline. The default is to also receive a note if you are outbid while online. You can turn off receiving a note when you are online by using ‘marketplace notes’. The current setting of ‘market notes’ can be seen in ‘config all’.
• Quite often I will receive an email from someone who doesn’t know how to get started on Aardwolf and wonders why the game is asking them for a password. To us it is obvious, but someone completely new does not always realize it just means that someone already has the name. There is now a “new” option at the login screen that takes you into character creation. The old way still works, but this will help newbies a little.
• There is a new ‘Better hurry’ warning message that appears when you are down to 10 minutes quest time remaining. The other messages are unchanged.
• When using ‘finger’ on a t9 with redos, you will now see, for example, (Tier 9+2). For offline characters you will only start to see this after they login as offline finger data is cached and t9 info was not stored in it prior to this change.
• Have reduced the recovery time on assassinate by about a third.
• The ‘allspells’ command will now show your current percent practiced in a skill or spell.
• You can no longer ambush a room that is already being ambushed by someone else.