Healer Mobs and Faction

Joined: Posts: -19

Ok, so I just found out that if you are an enemy of a city, that city's healing mob will NOT cast for you.

No heals, no sanc, armor, bless, remove poison...

How can we SERIOUSLY be expected to hunt with this? We can pay Priest players for potions, but they aren't always around...

And seriously. I DON'T want to stray and get attacked in some other city over being able to do stuff I should be doing in the first place, anyway. And for a fraction of the time before I need to stop and start repairing the fraction again? Please.

This is a HUGE mistake, and it will NOT attract players to this community when they can just stick with their other games where hunting is easier to manage.

In the NAME of Celtic Frost, change it back. It wasn't broke, so don't fix it.

Joined: Posts: -19

I agree, this is probably one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. It makes no sense that I would have to go and kill in my home city of Diabolus just so that I can get a heal or a regen in Sehaelas. Why would a light paladin go srtray himself in teh city he defends just so he can get a bless in Diab?

this really adds nothing good to the game, unless you're a priest. Please change it back.

Thanks,

T

Joined: Posts: -19

The idea itself makes sense: if a city hates you, why would their healer like you enough to provide you with spells to continue your massacre?

However, this change does affect hunting in a major way and I agree that it will not benefit the game at this stage. The playerbase is still too small to provide enough priests (of all alignments) and from an RP perspective it indeed doesn't make sense having to kill in your own city (if you have one) just to be able to kill your natural enemies again.

Like the trophy system before it, this system will not encourage people to hunt in different places. It will merely encourage them to find quick ways to improve standing with a faction so they can go back there again. The majority of players will ALWAYS hunt in the zone that gives them the most xp/entertainment. They will not go to a zone that offers less of this, if they can help it. Forcing them to do so will just be an annoyance and won't solve the 'problem'.
It will also not improve RP, since you probably have to kill those similar to you to be able to fight those opposite of you. A DP will have to kill in Diabolus to be able to hunt in Sehaelas. The Sehaelas part is good RP, the Diabolus part will be very tricky to pull off.

NOTE: If there are ENOUGH priests relative to the amount of players of different Guilds/ethos/religion, then I fully support this change. But this is NOT the case. With enough Priests, you don't need the local healers so it's alright if they hate you. Like I said in the beginning, I think the system DOES make sense logically speaking but right now, it will make both RP and hunting worse.

A possible solution to fix the RP part of the problem is to replace the deity-based priests in a city with 'traveling healers offering their services for money'. These healers wouldn't be connected to the city as much and won't care if their spells are used for the battles within its walls. Ofcourse Maraenna, Priestess of Lutyre objects to giving spells to people who slay Sehaelas Knights, but Larry the Greedy Traveling Priest might not!

Joined: Posts: -19

All true, but a healer is still a healer. I don't really see a priestess of the light standing by, coldly watching as anyone of any ethos slowly bleeds to death. They'd heal them, they just wouldn't like it.

Perhaps they could charge a higher amount for enemies of the city, or give a discount to those who aren't enemies? Maybe a 1.5 difference either way.

Joined: Posts: -19

I agree with the others as well. My solution, however, was to make the healers rooms 'safe' rooms, where no fighitng is allowed. That would keep people from taking so much advantage of the healers.

Joined: Posts: -19

You can't buy spells while fighting anyways, I think, so that wouldn't make much of a difference. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Joined: Posts: -19

I agree that they should heal regardless. I think the fact that if you're an enemy of a city that they attack you on sight should be bad enough. Now you have to make your way out of a city half dead to be attacked and killed because the priest/priestess refuses to heal you will be a bit of an overkill, literally.

Joined: Posts: -19

I have to agree with adun on this one, the system does make sense, yet i just dont think that the playerbase is large enough for this type of change. Also someone mentioned potions, last i knew you couldnt make potions of heal, now if you could, this change might not be so bad. Right now it doesnt affect me much since i am a low level and not currently hunting guards, but since once you get over say rank 100 or so there is nothing TO fight but guards(knights, guardians emisarries ect included) and since there basically is 1-2 hunting grounds for each alignment(neutral with a little bit more of course) your status with that town will sour, now this in itself isnt bad seeing as thats how it should be, but to get a new heal you must venture a LONG ways on the highways which drain your moves pretty swiftly.

Now I'm not one to complain about something without offering some solutions.
1.(the most obvious) Change it back.
2. like i mentioned before make heal brewable so that way being an enemy of said town wouldnt really matter
(My Favorite)3. Add new zones neer peoples "Home Town"(Sehaelas, Diabolus, Tyr) of the opposite alignments with high level mobs with strength comparable to sehaelas knigths and guardians, ie neer Diabolus like a camp of holy knights and a camp of Diabolus knights outside of Sehaelas(since diabolus and Sehaelas are at war, according to the Diabolus mayor, it would make sense). And for outside of Tyr not really for sure, like higher level goblins or somethin? also with this solution if you get a little banged up you can retreat back into the respective town to grab a quick heal from your healer.

Joined: Posts: -19

More zones would be nice, but let's be realistic. It's not going to happen overnight, or next week, or next month. New zones take a long time to make, and having a healer for the opposite faction in each new zone is most likely not going to happen.

I see the reasoning RPwise. But it's never been an issue before. There are lots of things that don't make a whole lot of sense RPwise but are necessary for the game to work (priests having to kill in order to become better healers, for one).

while having a game that makes EVERYTHING fall in line in an RP sense is a nice idea, it's easy to get a little carried away and sacrifice playability for realism. This is one of those cases. Please, please change it back. It worked fine, and any changes to that now would be a change the current pbase really can't afford.

Joined: Posts: -19

Not to mention the fact that the knights of each city's faction don't "bounce back" as fast as the city's faction, when you try to realign your factions. Also, the factions themselves are unbalanced. I've been killing wall guardians in Sehaelas, and then Mercs and Drow in Diabolus, and my faction with Sehaelas goes bad WAY faster. I'm in "the red zone" with Sehaelas Knights, and by the time I get THAT corrected, and have Sehaelas knights at neutral: Diabolus knights faction are red.

I've been killing pretty evenly in each place, but the knights factions are one off from each city faction AND I seem to stay worse with one town more than the other.

Heh, I am not even sure if this is entirely coherrent. If anyone ones to put my mumbling "example" into a more understandable version: feel free. I always end up doing more explaining what I meant than getting the actual point across.

Joined: Posts: -19

Uh..

You can kill all the mobs in Diab and still not be in good with Sehaelas, and instead of fixing it you end up with neutral to bad factions in both cities?

I don't understand the point of having healers in the cities you're hunting if you can't USE them.

Joined: Posts: -19

This is a bad idea all together, and the only way I can see it to be ok again is if it is changed back. Even if zones are added as was stated above, it still will hurt DS wayyy too much.

Thanks,
//Aikmen\

Implementor Joined: Dec 9, 2006 Posts: 202

Not sure when this was added but I see it is a script on the healers.

I have tweaked it slightly, so you need to be very out of favour with the faction, not just slightly out of favour.

Joined: Posts: -19

I think Adun has it right, here. If a city hates you, why would it's main Priestess want to heal you, so you can keep killing her Knights, and Guardians? If I, personally, had the power to heal, and someone was going around my city killing all the cops, I wouldn't think twice about letting him bleed to death.

Think fo it from an RP point of view, not a convenience point of view. If you're hated in a city, would that city's Priest really come to your aid when you needed to heal up, so you could keep killing off what could possibly be his friends and family? The only thing I'm seeing here is people that are mad because of an inconvenience in leveling grounds.

Aye, Factions need to be tweaked a bit, and then it'll be a bit easier to manage, but for right now, it's a good part of roleplay, if you can manage to stay in-character while playing.

Joined: Posts: -19

Like I said before...

Tarris wrote:

I see the reasoning RPwise. But it's never been an issue before. There are lots of things that don't make a whole lot of sense RPwise but are necessary for the game to work (priests having to kill in order to become better healers, for one).

while having a game that makes EVERYTHING fall in line in an RP sense is a nice idea, it's easy to get a little carried away and sacrifice playability for realism. This is one of those cases. Please, please change it back. It worked fine, and any changes to that now would be a change the current pbase really can't afford.

In this case, the problems this causes actually hurts RP rather than enhance it. LPs will have to hunt Sehaelas in order to kill in Diabolus without a priest. DPs will have to take out Diab in order to take out Sehaelas. Good will have to stray by killing good just so they can take out bad. Seriously, unless all you ever hunt are lasen guards and zombies, you can't RP your way around this change at all.