Precision and Battle Learning Skills, Warrior Updates

New Soldier Skill – Precision:

A well practiced soldier can focus on the precision of their attacks to the point that some of their strikes will be impossible to dodge while they are affected by precision.

The duration of the precision effect is based on dex and str. The skill does have a recovery and gets close to 100% uptime at max stats but never quite there completely.

During combat, the chance of precision triggering on any specific swing is based on str/dex of the attacker vs that of the target. Because mobs don’t dodge as much as players at higher stat ranges, this skill will have more impact on PVP than PVM for superheroes.

Soldier Skill – Battle Learning:

Once their basic training is complete, a well disciplined soldier is able to learn more from their previous victories, leading to more training sessions gained with each level. As their training approaches completion (at superhero) this accelerated learning will slow significantly.

This is a fairly simple skill in terms of mechanics – it is a passive skill that is checked when you gain a level. Battle Learning will average a chance to gain trains each level just over the percent practiced (it is possible to gain 2). The rate of bonus trains slows to around 25% at hero / superhero.

Daily blessing bonus trains will double this. Chances to improve in the skill are limited so it is checked twice which means on some levels you might see two improves in a row.

Other Warrior Changes:

Some background on spells vs skills. Most spells that aren’t “nofail” have 2 checks – the first check is a random percentage against your % practiced. When this check fails on a spell, you fail to cast the spell at all. The second check is a check of various stats/saves/resists (depends on the spell) between you and the target. When this fails on a damage spell you usually just do less damage, or if it is a malediction type spell, you fail to blind the target or whatever.

On many of the warrior skills and thief poisons we have the first initial percentage check where the skill fails, then the second check based on stats. Quite often when this second check fails, the skills fails to do damage at all or even backfires and hits the attacker. I may not touch them all, but will be updating a lot of the damage skills to work more like spells so that using them is rarely a complete fail.

• The ‘kick’ skill now has a small per tier multiplier to damage. No pclass restrictions on this.
• The ‘bash’ skill has been made ‘nofail’ and there is now also a tier multipler on the skill. Both damage and chances of the additional effect are based on the percent practiced.
• Bash has also been modified so that you have to be a primary class warrior to get the ‘stunned’ effect. Not sure how widely known it is but if your target has low dex and you have very high STR you can keep the target stunned a good percentage of the time.
• The ‘hammering blow’ skill has been made ‘nofail’ and there is now also a tier multiplier on the skill. The percentage practice is applied to both the damage and the change to land the daze effect for primary class warriors. Impact of level difference on the chance to get the daze effect has been halved.

I’m starting at the bottom and top of the level range with updating the existing warrior skills and they will meet somewhere in the middle, which means the next ones up are cleave and stun, but I’m going to work on something else for a while to give this all chance to get tested.

Other Game Changes:

• The ‘pray’ command has been removed. Typing ‘pray’ will now display a helpfile containing a few hints that might be what the player is looking for.
• The ‘Natures Touch’ spell was missed from the update to show heal amounts last reboot, fixed in this one.
• Mobprogs that interrupt hammerswing will no longer leave you set as if you’re still using the skill. Solves the ‘you are already swinging your hammer’ error when trying to initiate combat.
• There is no longer a message to the room when someone trains mana or moves. The hp and stats messages were removed long ago so this is just some cleanup.
• When says and tells are used to test for mobprog triggers, and trailing spaces in the say/tell will be ignored. This solves an issue some phone users have with the client adding a space after their commands.
• A weapon that is envenomed will now show a (E) or (Envenomed) label depending on your ‘shortflag’ setting.
• While making the envenomed change I noticed that only Blacksmiths see the (T) flag for Tempered. I’m sure I had a good reason for that at the time but don’t remember it so made it visible to everyone.
• The ‘refresh’ and ‘rejuvenate’ spells will now show the amounts of moves restored. Cannibalize and Black Lotus will show the amount of mana restored. (Vost) Also modified Black Lotus to fail with a message same as heal and refresh if you area already at full mana, rather than restore 0 mana.
• The default on ‘group create’ is no longer private, but groups with only a single member in then will not show on ‘group list’, unless you’re an imm or it’s your own group or you’re invited to it.