New ranged attack, skill changes, new goal, more

New “Mindflay” Skill:

There is a new mentalist ability called Mindflay which allows you to damage a target in a nearby room by channeling the power of your weapons into a ranged mental attack. The attack works similarly to ’shoot’ but does not require any special equipment and, while it does require you to be close by, does not require line of sight. This is a skill rather than a spell and will not work on other Mentalists. The attack will do the equivalent of a single hit from each of your weapons. The only dodge that works against it is ‘Time Shift’ but you can still “miss” the hit based on stats or just bad luck. The attack does the damage type of your weapons, but if a mob is immune to mental damage will not work. Adding instinct in Mindflay will increase the chances of additional hits.

There is no lag on success on the attack but there is a small recovery - it is intended to be more of a slow steady damage from a safe distance than a major attack. The mobs will not hunt you down so feel free to sit 3 rooms away and safely kill something. Similarly, if you see someone OPK idling somewhere they shouldn’t, feel free to mindflay them down. I can see an obvious temptation to bot with this skill - please don’t do that, getting removed from the game will not help your character progress.

Expect changes to this as it’s pretty experimental. Damage may be too low, too high, just right, I don’t know. I won’t be at all surprised if I have to limit the potential for 20 mentalists to sit in a room and waste an epic by remote control. If certain mobs really need to be immune to mental because of this let us know. There’s a few additional pieces of information on the mechanics in the skill helpfile.

Critical hits and other skill / spell changes:

• There is a new critical hit feature where each weapon hit in regular combat has a hitroll based chance to do a critical hit. Primary class thieves have a higher chance of doing additional hitroll critical damange and can also critical hit with backstab. Mobs can also get these but at a lower rate, and they also tend to have less hitroll anyway.
• If you are displaying full damage message you will see this with a ‘*’ at the start of the damage message. If you have combined / average damage on then it will just be rolled into the totals - you will see a “*” if any of the attacks that caused that message were a critical hit.
• I wanted to make this high enough to be worthwhile at higher HR but a 15 to 25% buff to melee damage at high level was too much. It’s still a buff overall but base damage against mobs at higher level has been reduced to account for this. Note that none of this affects spells or skills other than backstab. (Watlok)
• Holy Reprisal has been turned down by a few percent to counter the effect of the HR hits as I’m not adding even more damage onto Avenger. Righteous Anger has been changed from double damage to be more around 60% because it was OP, and probably still is with crit hits but we’ll see.
• I have changed the way Amnesia works. In addition to targeting a single skill it will now also do a lower amount of reduction to all skills and spells so it is like a longer-lasting mini daze. It does also stack with daze. The duration has been increased and, when used against players, the timeout has been increased by the same amount.
• A venomist using the ‘envenom’ skill may now add the argument ‘poison’ or ‘disease’ to the command which will set the damage type of the weapon to poison / disease for the duration of the flag. When the weapon affect expires, the item will go back to its previous damtype. The duration of the effect for venomist has also been increased. (Tymme)
• The previous change with illuminate was to make it still possible to cast the spell even if an item already has a (Glow) flag. It was supposed to still set the Illuminate flag on a successful cast but was only doing that when stats were added. That made it possible to keep casting until you land stats and making enchanter’s focus pointless. This has now been fixed.

Equipment Capacity Changes:

• When you have saved superhero stats, and your saved Dexterity and Strength are higher than your current Dex / Str, then your max item and weight capacity will be determined based on your saved SH stats. You won’t have the full capacity you had at SH because you won’t have the benefit of stats from SH equipment and spellups, but this should at least help a lot with inventory issues right after remorting. Using the ‘weight’ command will show when your saved SH stats are being used. (Redryn)
• Once you have reached level 201 and remorted, your aard bags will stay at level 201 but Tiers won’t get the full benefit of bag over level 201 until they reach the appropriate level. Main reason for this change is to help with the equipment weight problems after a tier / remort / redo without increasing carry capacity overall at high level. (Redryn)
• You can now ‘quest sell’ a bag back to questor for 1,000qp. This seems like a fair price given that people have had use of the bags but now may have more than they need with the above change.

Other Changes in this Reboot:

• There is a new goal and an extension to the Diamond Soul Revelation area (DSR), both were created by Teleron. More information in the DSR helpfile.
• When typing ‘friend’ you will now see players who are invisible to you and it will show (Invis) next to their name. This only works on people who are also friends with you. (Sammael)
• The login screen no longer shows date last rebooted. Not sure if it was good to show we’re stable enough to be up 3+ months or bad to show we haven’t rebooted for that long. Either way, I don’t think new users care about reboot time and existing players logging in after a reboot already know about it.
• Fixed the alignment for a player kill in ‘lastkills’ (Tymme)
• When you have autoloot / auto sacrifice on and couldn’t carry the items in the corpse, the autosacrifice would not go through. This was not working the same way with special “always loot” items. If you kill a mob with one of these and can’t carry the special item, the corpse will no longer sacrifice (Ocho)
• Some skills / spells that can remove all stats from an item when they fail such as sharpen and reinforce will now also remove enchants recorded on the item. (Roume)
• Using ‘runto kflag’ in Aylor was taking you to the wrong room. Now fixed. (Bitties)
• Fixed a bug with large gold amounts in market bid charging the wrong commission. (Ixultar)
• When a clan changes its tax rate, it will no longer be broadcast to the whole MUD on the info channel. (Tymme)
• When you ‘look’ and see another player in the room, the ‘is here’ will no longer be shown if they have a title set. You will still get the message if they are sleeping, resting, etc.