Arelith

I’m honestly more concerned about what’s gonna drop to balance this. I feel like Arelith was a small arms war and soon everyone is gonna be walking around with suitcase nukes. Balance by adding a dispel essence or ammo with any reliable DC sounds awful and provides a hard counter that basically negates buffing entirely. There should be very few on hit dispel abilities out there, paladin and SS wielding this is already spooky enough.

Also the principle from a IC perspective that not every mundane should have access to higher level magics seems to have been undermined by mundanes having access to literally the highest order magic (epic spells) potentially.

I’m not super peeved about any change in particular, more concerned that the idea that change is a good thing to do because “we can” has prevailed. The saying “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rings true. There’s a lot of cool content that could be added and so many labors of love I’m sure devs would take on that don’t fundamentally disrupt mechanics that frankly worked for the most part.

Objectively I see a group of people (Staff) trying to do their best to support a community and a passion, that probably could be more focused on preservation than innovation, and maybe communicate a little better. Do I like or agree with all the changes? No. Do I appreciate that someone is working hard to curate an experience for me? Definitely!

We all need to take a step back and chill out. We gamers are a salty bunch but disrespect is never ok regardless of how bad someone’s decision making was or if you were disrespected first, most of us should have learned this as kids.

I would encourage the team to draw from the best practices of any team that manages an experience or product for a group of stakeholders. Balance your vision with input (I think you try to do this pretty well), be transparent and communicate (could use work) and own mistakes when they happen. It’s a hard job and you’ll never please everyone, I empathize. I think this can be a learning experience for everyone, but we need to all calm down and discuss this like “adults.”

Understand that you’re playing with something that people love and have invested themselves deeply into, better isn’t necessarily “better.” Arelith is a constantly evolving entity but there is no pressure or need to reinvent the wheel. New classes, weapons, terrain, items, recipes, plots, clases, spells etc... content... is awesome. Tweaking mechanics... is awesome. But be cautious of going too far and breaking something fragile!

Big read done, Head tired, But;

First of all, A lot of the update is really good.

I like the weapon feat change a lot.
The new weapons are nice
Sai needs to be a 1d6 I think though

Commoner needs a -lot- of work, Personal opinion

Okay, I just liked the weapons.

Second, I'm since the servers were a single server against the loot matrix:

-Loot is often crap
-people overselling them
-some of the loot would be neat as a craftable item.

These wands.. Eh, I maybe get greater ruin on my arse, I'm okay with that, I respawn, He lost a "wand" that is a pain to find.
I call that my win.

I honestly don't care for the scroll to lore change, Though 80 lore? really?

Hear me out: I used to pay 10k for a scroll to stop time, I barely used them cause, Eh..That is 10 k, Who am I fighting that I find worthy to spend 10k on? But I guess to some coin farmers with trillions on tens of bank accounts care fewer of it.

I am still waiting for updates like:

-Crafting boots that are usefull to other classes besides sneaks.

You know, Minor silly things.

Anyway, Let's pray a DM starts a 6 month long spellplague event.
Or Irongorn makes casters a 5% class.
You know, To balance it out.

The issue with this update and what is now coming from the snippets of talk on the forums and the reason why people are so up in arms is because it all contradicts itself at all levels.

1. Remove scrolls because not all classes should be able to have access to high tier magic at a whim when the use of scrolls before required at least an investment.

To..

2. Add in ~even more powerful~ items that require zero investment that add back in the worse offending spells & also the highest tier spells that were previously not available that represent the most sought after and most restricted (one user per day for balance) arcane ability.

These two approaches simply do not make any sense. Zero. You can't have one and the other. It's baffling logic. So this then creates cracks in the trust of the community and makes the lore change ever more confusing.

What I don't understand is...If UMD was too easy at 15-16 ranks to cast spells... why not just raise the requirements to what you think is a better requirement? That instantly achieves goal no.1 and paired with slightly easier to remove summons, makes every build jumping for time-stop, MD and WoF less necessary. Lore is also based on INT, wizards are INT heavy and skill heavy do they really also need to be given such a bonus to one of their key skills/abilities?

I can kind of see the logic of "Let's not force every melee build to require a bard or rogue dump", but I simply cannot see the logic of "Let's reduce the frequency of mundane builds using high tier magic all the time by replacing it with higher tier, game breaking spells that can be cast by everyone". Even if they are one time per use items, if you spend weeks and months building up to some major RP and then get insta nuked by a handful of people all dropping their epic spell wands at the same time, the majority of people are just going to caster "greater delete character" and stop. People can take being outplayed, people can take being beaten by better politics, or even random bad luck. But what people will not be able to take in the grand scheme of things, is being nuked by unavoidable hoarding of one click I win buttons. That's simply not acceptable. There's a reason why these spells in the first place are restricted in their use to even the highest level spellcasters, they are complete game changers and their overuse is simply game breaking.

Ultimately if these items become readily available, it will turn high end conflict from "Let's play my class as tactically as I can" to "Let's grind and save for the same epic spell rods so that every meaningful RP combat is effectively the same, regardless of class, or situation & revolves around who has stockpiled the most epic rod weapons".

If that does happen and the server follows this logical progression and becomes an arena for people stocking up on Greater Ruin Rods & other Epic Spells to Spam, I guarantee that Arelith will sink faster than the Titanic. It will break immersion, it will break the reason to invest time in a character, the reason to invest time into RP in the first place & more than that it will be incredibly boring to be part of as a player.

Please keep in mind, Arelith is not invincible. I've watched many many very active NWN worlds die over the years since I started playing NWN in 2004 due to poor decisions and all of them at some point in time thought it wouldn't happen to them because they were "insert name of server" and it went to their head and they bore the consequences.

The lesson of the NWN graveyard of worlds over the years that should be heeded by Arelith is, be very careful with how close to the line you push your core playerbase, because when they eventually break, it's very hard to reverse.

1. From a roleplaying perspective (which is what Arelith SHOULD be all about), putting Epic spells as items greatly undermines the oft-used character arc of many casters finally unlocking 10th level magic. In ye olden days, caster characters often had this as a thread or storyline in their roleplay, drew people in, set people off on adventure, and shrouded many-a-wizard in that enigmatic swirl of Gandalf.

Putting a character-building device into the loot matrix vastly undermines, if not shatters, the level world-building believability. If Epic Spells became findable in dungeons... why is not the whole continent invading the archipelago for just a mere taste of this power?

I know, I know, Arelith has always struggled in its campaign setting. Some people rightly argue Arelith should be its own campaign setting.

But Epic Spells as rods both upsets the values of narrative and characterization AS WELL AS a broader believability, and dare I say...

"immersion."

2. Putting them in the hands of DMs is not good. I'll beat this drum until I die, but Mithreas removed the 30 RPR and Planetouched because of "muh subjectivity" and "can't trust DMs" and "abuse of aasimars being actually 11,000 year of angels." I don't see how this dissimilar.

I thought we've learned by now that the optics and perception of Arelithian favouritism has absolutely nothing to do with the debate of whether it exists or not (we all know it probably exists). The optics and perception of Arelithian favouritism has everything to do with any opportunity for it to potentially occur.

You can say whatever you like about DMs having guidelines, values, and codes of honour, but the fact remains that a group of individuals has been given authority to hand out Epic Spell rods like candy at Halloween. Unless they post Gift Receipts on the forums about the guidelines, the incident, and why a DM felt compelled to award such a ludicrous thing, there will always be the perception of subjectivity, bias and favourtism.

And that's what it should be a nay nay.

I think everyone else here has more or less covered my trepidation about epic spell rods and other items (both in loot and as reward items), but I want to bring up something in particular.

We all know there are certain Discord groups that are more than happy to metagame. If epic spell rods are added to some chest somewhere for even a day, let alone a week, I can 100% guarantee that the second a player who participates in one of these Discords finds it, that whole Discord group will be all over that dungeon grabbing up the epic rod whenever it respawns. Or maybe it won't be a Discord group, but just the one guy, stockpiling as many as he can so that he can cast Hellball a dozen times.

It's something that risks rewarding epic dungeon grinding and soloing even more than it's currently rewarded. You get a WM, or something else, who throws up EMA, hits your group with a couple Hellballs, or gets to fight alongside a (theoretically, in the future, less nerfed) EDK, and you have a recipe for disaster.

There really isn't much fun factor in it at all, to be honest, except for those players who love to be more powerful than everyone else and win all the time.


As for DM favoritism, in some ways I'm less concerned about intentional favoritism, than I am just about DMs having friends. A DM who's buddies with one or two other Arelithians might very reasonably let them know, "Hey, gonna be having a cool event tomorrow starting up at the Mage Tower". There's nothing wrong with that. But what if that cool event ends up with players who participated being awarded epic spell rods? Then, 3 months later, that DM has another event where their friends show up and again gives out epic spell rods.

That DM very likely didn't even think about "favoritism", or about treating their friends better. They just wanted to do an event, and wanted their friends to be included in the fun event. But because they gave out an epic rod at the first event, and then at the second event, now their friends have two epic rods.

This doesn't even have to be friends of the DMs. It can much more easily just be someone with a large enough network to hear about upcoming DM events through the grapevine. They show up to lots of events. The DMs very reasonably don't want to give out too many epic rods, but they do want to give out some. However, this player is at a lot of events by a lot of DMs, and ends up getting quite a few.

My point is, it doesn't require foolish mistakes or malicious intent from DMs for this to become a problem. It really just requires players who know the right people and want to get epic rods. Unless DMs are handing out epic rods so rarely that only a couple people per RL ever get one with even a single charge, some players will inevitably build up a collection of them, to everyone's detriment.

As a point to Subutai's post, we are not supposed to run events for our OOC friends. We all have them, and some of us, by nature, are simply loveable and everyone is our friend (not me. But some of us.) But it's our policy to be "hands off" where our interests lie, and I am quite firm about that, as is Spyre.

If there is a case where I, or the admin, have the feeling that that is occurring, we will be watching, and anything we perceive as favouritism will be addressed.

Carry on.

If there is a muling script preventing players to pick up stuff they shouldn't maybe there is or will be an anti-epic-rod-farming-and-inventory-hogging script? <.<

And I have no problem with potential DM handing out reward stuff. If I do not trust DM to be fair, why would I sit down at their table or join their server in the first place? If a DM is doing favoritism he/she can be reported.
And maybe there will be scripts also to trace the handing out of reward stuff and even the loot-dropped-things.

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And they could always introduce SEVERE drawbacks to using hyper epic-legendary-style-items. e.g. PERMADEATH as a chance on use or a cummulative number. <.<

DM Atropos wrote: Fri Oct 18, 2019 9:43 am As a point to Subutai's post, we are not supposed to run events for our OOC friends.

To clarify, I meant it more as the DM is running a public event for anyone, and just pings a real life friend or two about it, to let them know it's happening.

"Hey I'm doing an event in Guldoand tomorrow that you might think is fun" kind of thing. I don't know if that's the same thing you were addressing!

I don't mean to sound like I'm saying DMs will intentionally hand out rods to their friends, but more that their friends might, by virtue of more communication or whatever, simply be present at their events more often than others would be. I would think a DM might not be allowed to host events for their friends, but wouldn't be required to ban their friends from their public events?

Anyway, thanks for the info!

Irongron wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 4:04 pm Single use means they destroy when used, and nobody yet has anything to my knowledge, besides one of Greater Ruin. When I say added them to the palette, that means they simply exist in the game engine. Base NWN is full of such OP items, many of which would entirely destroy Arelith balance if distributed, which they're not. If anyone is asking whether I trust a DM to use a single-use Hellball rod during an event? Yes, of course I do, but they're not, by any definition, being distrubted to players.

Thank you for clarifying this.

Items like rod of epic warding "appearing" in hands of players can easily lead to a lot of OOC...tension.
I already seen one server sink to such tension long ago and when I first heard of "rods of epic warding as a DM *reward* to players" I was quite worried for a second there.

P.C
For those that the lines above will look like I don't trust the DMs, and if you don't trust why are you here on Arelith, you low-rp etc etc etc...
I have full respect and admiration to Devs, DMs and any contributor that contributes to Arelith and my and everyone else fun here.
We are all people. DMs are people too and make good and bad decisions like we all. I don't mind that much if such a rod is used against my PC. The rule is 24hrs after all, right? I do mind what this in general may bring since I saw the consequences before.