The Call To Nahfiotos & Kheh's Chaos Star

[Syveril]

The reason that !spy is on such high % is because of the brute force nature of lagless charges: If a witch/sorc/wizard/warlock (hereinafter wiorcardlock) wants to spy you, they just throw charges at you until one sticks. There's no chance of delay unless they have been spying you or someone else so often and for so long that they run out of charges.

Putting aside charges, by giving a small downtime to failed spies (in the same manner that necromancers who fail to spy a targets simply CANNOT do so for a short while), we can lower the % of !spy on races. Keep the spies as charges or don't, but I think a short downtime should be implemented for when a spy is eaten by protection from distance magic.

I'm guessing the downtime could be anywhere from 30 seconds to something substantial like 2-3 minutes a necromancer experiences. It could vary with training or with class, and I'm not concerned with the actual number; my main concern lies instead with the capability of brute forcing spies.

It's actually pretty difficult to run out of spies as a wiorcardlock unless your target has significant protection from distance magic, and my guess is that's why !spy is so prevalent. Put in a time penalty for !spy, and then it becomes reasonable to lower the % of !spy.

[Argh]

Originally Posted by Odinn

I'm going to have to disagree here. All spies have been changed to a charge based ability or are on a lengthy prevent ( see necro ).

There is an over abundance in my opinion of !spy currently. Every other race is !distant magic, do you know how hard it is to spy people these days, let alone visit them with !distant magic?

The change for !spy races was actually so fighters weren't completely engulfed by casters who could spy and teleport in. Making it harder to spy does 2 things(given the current framework of !distant magic):
1) it deters people from PKilling because they have no idea what is waiting for them
2) it gives fighters an edge over casters because now the caster's aren't able to prepare for whats coming( granted neither can the fighters now that they can't have a friend spy, but fighters can prepare on the front end a bit more than most casters )

Regardless of spy or not, there's always going to be the lockdown factor in an online pkilling situation. Happens in all kinds of games.

i actually do have an idea of how hard it is to spy people...so it takes a few seconds more than usual...big deal...end result's the same...basically, if i wanted to spy you, i will...and if you're not a race with !distant magic, you're screwed even more...and i really don't understand what you're trying to say with #2...are you actually implying that fighters are stronger than casters??
and i really can't see anybody locking anybody down without spy/port...