Sailing System: Arguments Against Necessary Gear-Swapping

[In Sorrow We Trust]

Following recent discussions (that I have beaten to death with repetition by this point), I'd like to raise once again the tedium that is gear with Sail bonuses on it.

Currently, it's a general expectation that if you want to be performant at sea, you need a full set of gear with at least +2 sail on it, possibly also capping your wisdom for an additional +5 or more sail.

This is nothing but a nuisance. For some builds, there is no feasible way to fit Sail on a combat set of gear. Especially with Dweomercraft being the way it currently is. New Dweomer seeks to make this easier, but the reality is that it will not help in all cases. Those spare points we're getting in the new system to allow us to put more Skill Bonuses on gear will just be used for other things to better optimize existing sets, and we'll once again see having Sail sets be necessary.

Maybe I'm wrong/jumping the gun here and New Dweomer will actually make it slightly easier to put Sail on combat sets... but we're still looking at wanting Wisdom to boost sail a little more, and so we're ONCE AGAIN looking at having a separate Sail set.

I would really like to suggest this be reconsidered. My initial proposal at one point was completely removing Sail bonuses from the Basin and retroactively adjusting respective items, but I realize that wouldn't be very easy to do (and probably not fair to people who worked hard on their gearsets) without New Dweomer.

Being forced to carry around a set just for Sail means tedium. There's a -loadout and -saveloadout command but these don't always work properly, sometimes they misplace your gear all around your inventory, occasionally you'll see items falling out of your bags because you're trying to play tetris. It's extra inventory space to boot, and inventory space is already at a premium.

So, what's the solution? How can we reduce/remove the need for having a separate Sail gear set? For me personally, this is the one thing keeping me from sailing more often. I find this specific issue to be so unfun that the act of sailing is often just not worth my time unless I can get away with NO gearswapping at all (these circumstances are rare).

[-XXX-]

The sail skill uses the soft skill cap for balance, but the gear swapping can be very annoying.
IMO the best way to address this would be:

• an option like we already do have with boot spurs - just get an item or pay an NPC to have +2 sail skill bonus applied to any gear piece.
• making the sail skill key off CON instead of WIS (everybody gears CON on their primary combat gear)

[Myrmidos]

I concur. Personally? Sailing should have a similar system to the dart game. You gain skill at sailing over time, and it's not something you actually spend skill points on.

[Kythana]

I concur. Personally? Sailing should have a similar system to the dart game. You gain skill at sailing over time, and it's not something you actually spend skill points on.

100% agreed.

Sailing is an incredibly annoying system to break into, if you're not already fully dedicated to making a character surrounding it.

Furthermore, most sailing based characters can still do land based dungeons just fine. The only thing that is really a trade-off is pvp.

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If sailing skill must be kept around for technical reasons, then I would just tie to the rate of gaining the new 'skill.' Have it so that someone with fully invested sail skill, feat(s), gear, ect, can fully cap in a few hours, while someone who invests nothing might need to sail for a few weeks to fully cap it.

[-XXX-]

We only recently had a topic about sail score increasing gradually over time with sailing.
IMO it's not a very good idea. I can imagine people becoming much more reluctant to get into sailing if there were already well established crews that'd now get an advantage thanks to such system.

The gear swapping is a valid issue, but it mostly relates to the soft skill cap component. I'm sure there are solutions that wouldn't require a complete overhaul of the sail skill and the sailing system.

[LivelyParticle]

Inventory space is already at a premium for characters that want to sail (including repair mats, ammo mats, essential gear such as spyglass, sextant). This doesn't even cover if you want to fish as well as sail. (tried that!)

I'm definitely behind any suggestions or improvements to prevent needing to carry multiple different outfits for combat/sailing/sneaking/selling (for instance), or even just more bags for the amount of gear we have to carry to be able to crew a ship well.

[Critique]

Making it not key off wisdom, or any attribute for that matter, makes sense to me. I'm not sure why wisdom was picked over dexterity (essential for rigging sails) or others. I mean sailing is incredibly dangerous and being a sailor is one of the least wise career paths one can take. I'm being flippant and I know you can justify wisdom but it's D&D and if you write well enough you can justify anything. I think it's best if it's just a flat skill because being strong, smart, agile or sturdy all make as much sense as wisdom.

Making it a trainable skill, with boosts to Sencliff start characters and certain others, would be most preferable, I hope that's considered.

[ReverentBlade]

Locking an entire swathe of content and rewards behind a single mechanical skill and doubling-down with hundreds of hours of dev time was a mistake to begin with.

[Xerah]

It was certainly not a mistake; that's super rude to say. That is the result of a person with passion working on a project (with some support from others). If they hadn't worked on sailing, there wouldn't have been something else to replace it.

[Kythana]

It was certainly not a mistake;

The mistake part doesn't come from making the content itself, it's due to it being inaccessible for many players on the server.

Most players recognize that the sail system is pretty interesting, but having so many elements in play to restrict it make it less enjoyable. Nowhere else on the server is there anything like sail which locks so much content around a single skill.

I personally have known others(including myself here), that would like to sail, but play builds that really just cannot justify taking it, in its current state. The point here is to ultimately allow more players to enjoy it, which I don't think is a bad thing at all.

[Juuj]

I honestly don’t see the problem with the content being locked by investment in a single skill, this old game is based on D&d, not RuneScape.

You want to cast spells, play a wizard. Want to swing an axe, play a barbarian, want to experience sailing content - play a sailor!

It’s the philosophy of the game that our characters specialize in something in detriment of something else, I personally find that good: both because it incentivizes RP (my character that can’t do X has to find and interact with someone else who can) and because it drives replayability!

Only problem with sailing, as it stands, now is that the rewards are overtuned, but that’s being discussed ad nauseum in another post.

I’m not a fan of sailing myself but I’m very thankful for the devs that made it into the game! It was very refreshing to add such a complex feature to this anncient game, kudos to you all, really!

On topic: I’m in favor of the gear tax for the same reason, our characters specialize and the fact we can’t fit all we wish in our gearsets - forcing choice - is good.
I agree that the systems are a bit clunky sometimes but is an old game and -equip (with all it’s flaws)
is a godsend!
So as far as the spirit of the game is concerned I think it’s better to play as is.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

Locking an entire swathe of content and rewards behind a single mechanical skill and doubling-down with hundreds of hours of dev time was a mistake to begin with.

100%.

While we are at it, let's fix a few more "mistakes".

100 Search gives lots of riches, so I want that too. Open Lock and Disable trap too, I don't want to ever have to worry about a lock that I can't get or a trap I can't disable.

Oh, you know what, my weapons master wants 120 spot and 120 hide/ms too, those seem fun, no need to lock that behind single mechanical skills either, giant mistake.

And while we are at it, let's just give me access to 30 cl casting on my 30 rogue. All those new spells that devs spent time working on seem wasted only going into certain builds, so magic for everyone! But don't forget to add discipline to every class to make it easy for me to reach that threshold either.

Oh, and of course I want an extra x1 for my crits and a wider crit range on my 27/3 paladin too. Why do weaponsmasters get all the fun?

I mean, seriously, all these choices we have to make with builds are annoying, who wants to live in a world where different characters are good at different things? Let's all be good at everything!

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Now that we (hopefully) put an end to the fallacious arguments for the time being, I will say that I am all for ideas that lessen the gap between a monstrosity like say bard/evang/loremaster and builds that are actually fun to play when it comes to sailing. I even posted an idea here, but it wasn't popular-

viewtopic.php?t=48276

What attracted me to that idea was that it gave choices. You could take the feats and not have to worry about gear all that much, or you could skip the feats and need the gear/bard/whatever and still be in the same place. It also had something I personally liked but was a sticking point for many, a natural gap between an experienced sailor on arelith and someone who just maxed out sail before they even stepped on a ship that could be made up with a bit of time actually sailing.

Now, that idea was so poorly received I had to request for my own thread to be locked lol. But I bring it up because I believe that's the direction that makes the most sense to lessen the gap while still maintaining a good design space, which ultimately comes down to having to make choices. And I think that any idea worth its salt would have to do something similar, because build choices are a huge part of this game.

Maybe something as simple as adding a few sailing boost feats that folks can chose to take to not have to worry about gear as much is the way to go.

[Critique]

I honestly don’t see the problem with the content being locked by investment in a single skill, this old game is based on D&d, not RuneScape.

You want to cast spells, play a wizard. Want to swing an axe, play a barbarian, want to experience sailing content - play a sailor!

But those are classes. Sailor isn't a class, it's a skill you have when playing a (often unrelated) class. You have to be something and a sailor, and not all somethings work, and some of the classes best fit for sailing don't make the most sense. I mean there's no reason bards and clerics should excel as sailors over rogues and weaponmasters. Not that it's impossible to be a rogue and a sailor it's just more difficult or cumbersome or crippling to make it work.

I mean I'm not trying to make a hard-line argument here but I do think it may be too limiting currently, and there could be breathing room for more builds to excel at sailing.

[AstralUniverse]

Give everyone up to +22 soft sail bonus (capped by hard ranks) and disable all gear bonuses entirely.

gg

[PowerWord Rage]

Give everyone up to +22 soft sail bonus (capped by hard ranks) and disable all gear bonuses entirely.

gg

Or....give everyone a +22 soft sail bonus (capped by hard ranks) accordingly to your base level so that level 30 will have +22 soft sail bonus. Just an idea.
And...the epic sailing gear function the same as Appraise, being the sole few gears that increases sail soft score.
Therefore...adjust down the current epic sailing gear by 2 score?

Edit:
Tho...to do that, nothing that +sail can be grandfathered, they all need to disappear except the epic ones.
And...the epic gears need adjustment, sorta.
Rationale...no single character in Arelith will never take a ship...be it from skaljard to mainland or simply using laurick's boat. even in Underdark...i don't believe anyone that doesn't board gondolier exist.

[AstralUniverse]

Nah that's just skill bloat. As demonstrated by sailor players plenty of times, you get to the +50 soft cap easily enough that it doesnt really matter. Disable all gear and that's it.

[-XXX-]

Problem is that there are other sources of soft skill bonuses that are not tied to gear & are in many cases class specific, so simply axing gear would only emhasize strictly superior classes/builds.

Most notably it would exacerbate the "must bring a bard" issue.

If the current grievance is "the constant gear swapping on my WM is too low QoL", then axing gear would inevitably lead to "my WM will never be able to sail in the same league as bards, clerics or elementalists".

Finally, removing the sail skill from the basin wouldn't even address the issue as we'd still need to gear WIS so gear swapping would persist.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

Give everyone up to +22 soft sail bonus (capped by hard ranks) and disable all gear bonuses entirely.

gg

I mean, I'm not opposed to the +22 soft sail bonus, it's essentially the core of my idea though it was plus 30 and you gained it over time actually sailing similar to how the rouge disguise feats work. But taking away the gear with it seems backward, since like XXX pointed out now you are just putting the onus on certain builds and having bards again.

If you have both the bonus and the gear though, now bards are just a luxury that allow you to not gear swap while still making it viable without one.

[In Sorrow We Trust]

I mentioned in a conversation that removing the +10 sea shanties skill bonus might also be warranted, replacing it with maybe improved repair/furl speed and better chances of resisting environmental effects (gales, wind slow, storms etc)

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

The problem with removing bard song at this juncture, as has been mentioned every time this comes up, is that it makes sail even more class locked. There are two things that allow every build that will bite the bullet and spend the feats, skills, and energy around gear to be able to be a viable sailor. The 100 cap, and bard song. Without them every functional sailor (meaning someone who can hit 100) would be a wisdom-based class, probably cleric for the domains, and a loremaster dip.

Do I wish things were different when it comes to bards? Yeah, actually, but I don't see how you do it with the current system without a functional replacement, preferably one that is open to any class.

[-XXX-]

I mentioned in a conversation that removing the +10 sea shanties skill bonus might also be warranted, replacing it with maybe improved repair/furl speed and better chances of resisting environmental effects (gales, wind slow, storms etc)

Well, even the basic bard song gives up to +5 to all skills, which in the context of "nobody can get any soft sail buffs, but everybody on the ship with the bard gets +5 to sail" sounds really really powerful. So yeah, you could straight up delete sea shanties but if you also axe all sailing gear it ultimately plays out as a bard buff.

There's another point I'd like to make (reiterate) - the sail skill on itself isn't such a big contributor to the gear swapping routine as is the WIS part.
It's not difficult to make a carbon copy of one's combat gear and simply substitute one of the skill properties for sail - we could then simply swap in the sailing set at the beginning of the sail and swap it out again after the sail's concluded (as opposed to gearswapping before every boarding action)*
This, however is much more difficult to do while sail keys off WIS which is awkward for most builds that naturally don't gear for it and adjusting their optimized combat gear would mean adding 3rd or 4th stat, which is currently not viable.

A lot of gear swapping woes would get addressed by simply changing the sail skill to key off CON rather than WIS.

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*sailing is mostly a PvE activity, for the duration of which we can get away with not having fully PvP-optimized values for discipline/spot/saves, etc. Even melee builds should be fine for as long as they can preserve their optimal AB/AC, the rest can be flexible.

[PowerWord Rage]

So....the topic is argument against necessary gear-swapping...

one of the poster mentioned that even if +22 soft score is accounted for...there's still wisdom modifer that requires gear swapping therefore...

1) +22 sail score that scale over base level reaching maximum at level 30 for all PC.
2) adjust the modifer that improves soft sailing score from Wis to Con ( should actually rectify this issue because Con is a super core stat which may not be the highest but surely, no one does not have +12 soft to Con in any gear building. )
3) Remove all current skill score that +sail and nothing should be grandfathered.
After that, lower the current epic sailing gear score to align the relevant +2 permanent soft sail score with their current skill bonus.
4) Remove enchanting the Skill : Sail just as Appraise is not included in the Basin.

With that, gear swapping should not exist anymore but of course, all other skills such as bard song, class locked etc are still there.

[Dreams]

Your character doesn’t have to be the best at everything. Gearswapping is happening because you’re trying to minmax sailing and then minmax combat.

If the required sail scores were lower, they would be easier for everyone to reach by whatever means and you wouldn’t need as much specific gear to hit them.

[-XXX-]

IMO, there's a lot to be said about actually optimizing sailing gear for combat. Gear swapping woes plague mostly people who never upgrade their sailing gear beyond the bare minimum +1 WIS +2 sail.

I don't swap gear during sails because I optimized my sailing gear (that conforms with the current basin limitations) and when I compare my character in sailing gear and in combat gear I'm basically trading some saves and discipline* for maxed sail/search/OL/DT but AC, HP and primary stat remain the same.

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*you really REALLY don't NEED to optimize these for PvP-grade values because sailing is 99,9% PvE

[-XXX-]

Let's say I wanted to optimize sailing gear for a STR melee build, I'd probably go about it like this:

Helmet: +1 WIS, +1 STR, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap, +1 Lore = 5% soft
Cloak: +1 WIS, +1 CON, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap, +1 Lore = 5% soft
Gloves*: +1 STR, +1 CON, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap, +1 Lore = 5% soft
Belt: +1 STR, +1 CON, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap, +1 Lore = 5% soft
Boots: +1AC, +1 STR, +1 CON, +2 Sail = 5% soft
Amulet: +1 STR, +1 CON, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap, +1 Lore = 5% soft
Ring1: +1 WIS, +1 CON, +1 STR, +2 Sail = Greater Rune
Ring2: +1 WIS, +1 CON, +1 STR, +2 Sail = Greater Rune

Armor: +1 WIS, +1 CON, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap, +1 Lore = 5% soft
Hand1: +1 WIS, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap = 5% soft
Hand2: +1 WIS, +2 Sail, +2 Search, +2 Open Lock, +2 Disable Trap = 5% soft

That maxes our sail while we still get +7 to three stats, then just add +5 from ZOO potions to reach the soft stat cap.
Now we can get away with swapping just armor and weapons before each boarding action and we should be fine.

This is just an example of a moderately advanced sailing gear that shouldn't be too difficult to obtain. Can also be used for breaking into runic chests.
While incorporating the legendary sailing items into such setup is possible, it's a bit more difficult and much more expensive as multiple masterwork runes are needed there.

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*there's some more options if we manage to get our hands on Gauntlets of Ogre Power - might even achieve similar effect with just one rune here