Probably known to everyone but me, but - when did open rolls on lockpicking cease to be a 'thing'?

Doug

The reason questions are: why didn't you know you weren't going to be close without an open roll before you put the pick in?, and, why aren't you buying your vaalins in a cheaper shop?

(Note: a feeling in technical lockspeak means the endroll was 21-40 short of opening the box, which is actually really reliable considering its just a feeling)

"(Note: a feeling in technical lockspeak means the endroll was 21-40 short of opening the box, which is actually really reliable considering its just a feeling)" -- RathboneR

This is actually extremely useful info; thanks!

.

As to why I haven't gone through the Rogue's Guild (implicit in the question of why I didn't know the degree of the lock)... I realize that the conversation about the grind and drudgery of lockpicking was not carried on this folder (I think it was up in 'Discussions With Simutronics'), but seriously, do I have to say why I didn't go through the Rogue's Guild? The grinding process of getting the skills to simply add more steps to the process of opening a box?
(Getting some ranks in the Warrior Guild when it came out was bad enough, it pretty much turned me off to anything labeled 'Guild' forever.)

Two Bards, one currently my highest character (and likely to remain so for a while, it's just so easy to level him; push button/gain experience) and one still sub-20 (I want to say about 18th level?).

With the higher one, I did loresing boxes from [Stone Valley] periodically--particularly when I snapped a couple of picks on stuff from the [Illoke Stronghold]--but I largely got tired of looking at the GSWiki page to find out what meant what.
(And I was insufficiently motivated to set up a bunch more string highlights.)
I eventually started using Larton's as a LoreSinging-information-substitute. (Now, with No Mana Cost and No RoundTime! Tastes great & less filling!)
Basically, if Larton wants about 2700 silvers or less, my guy can probably pick it; if more, pay Larton and be done. Oh, look! I'm already there...

Then I just hand everything pickable to the mule(s) until they can't hold any more, at which point it is time to bring in the Thief. (High-Bard and Thief are on the same account.)

"<list of Good Stuff>" -- Starchitin

I won't say you've convinced me, but you may have made me willing to re-consider. :)

Ugh! That post sounds awfully arrogant; obviously not everyone can afford to throw away broken vaalin picks. My bad.

I'll have to amend it.

<I have stopped bothering with training in Lock Mastery for a while. It's tedious and time consuming, and I don't really need it now that I can wedge.>

The reduction to picking RT as you progress doesn't hurt either. Though I can get the burnout, I just made my way though it by getting reps as the boxes needed came to me unless I got a contest rep. Took longer then most, but once you get past all the room condition and spell messaging stuff in the beginning it's mostly chill if you let it be. Course, I'm comparing it to all the other guild skills available across professions and working my warrior through forging (talk about tedious).... so mileage may vary.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

>I ended up writing a small stormfront script to handle translating caliper measurements to numbers so I wouldn't have to keep cross referencing lists either on a wiki page or in short echoed data scripts. I wish it was inherent, though - the descriptions are all well and good, but locksmiths have enough data to juggle and keep straight in the eternal struggle to not to blow themselves and others sky-high or break expensive tools. It'd be a nice quality of life upgrade to just shove the numbers in there alongside the description.

I did this too. 10 I could manage, but above -400 they just get too similar and its like the "twist of mazy passages, all different" puzzle.

...

Its possible to hit walls in LM where you find it virtually impossible to progress on your own locks, but if you are regularly picking for alts that deliver boxes which you can't manage on a lored vaalin, thats not going to happen. Contests are liable to be an issue if you don't want to think about the mechanics and how to exploit them for your own benefit, traps are liable to be an issue if you don't save boxes and want a continuing sense of progression rather than being happy for it to take as long as it takes. LM is useful from just a few ranks in, unlike a lot of guild skills which are only become useful when you are almost mastered. It took me to about level 45 to master, but I was getting value from it at level 20.

...

>Bah. If I roll a 90+ and "get the feeling", I am NOT going to waste 20 minutes hoping for an open roll to come up.

I might. Because the only time this is going to happen is if I'm going for a record lock, and if thats the only way I'm going to get that -1625 box into my profile, thats what I'm going to do.

>If the box can be popped, I'll pop it; if not I'll wedge it.
Vandal! It might go in my locker till I've acquired a few more enhancives, but I'm certainly not damaging it.

>When I get to cap and have picking maxed out, I might develop this mentality.... but for now I'm also with the mentality of just get in there any way I need to. Not that I ever need anything other then a pick for my own boxes, mind you.

I didn't reckon it was worth optimising too much until I had 303 ranks, because the optimum changed each time I trained.

>Mostly I'm just bummed I prolly won't get a new max lock or trap for a while. Went from needing lore to open half my own boxes in minotaurs to being able to open half of them with copper picks on plane 2 of the rift....

Its only the Vvrael have hard boxes on the lower Planes. I used to pick for Rift hunters at level 30 without any problems, as long as they were pures hunting the lower planes. The farmhands I hunted had more difficult boxes than they did. Pretty much all my records from about that level to cap came from picking for others rather than myself. I'd picked beyond what a mino would drop when hunting banshees on Teras and looking at Nelemar boxes when I was the only smith around.

Get to Plane 3 and lock difficulty will go up, I thought the warlocks on 2 had chunky locks, though I forget how they compared with minos. I did a lot of those levels from minos to cap in Kenstroms temporary grounds. I would have hated to have had to get from Plane 3 to 4 via 5 rather than Deadfalls.

I have seen several mentions or reduced RT here; to what degree are we talking about?
-1s per step (disarm, pick, repeats of either) is pretty small, but would add up over the long term (and especially so when Servicing down a bunch of levels).
-2s per step starts making headway ofretting +9s from calipers.
-3s per step or more, and you may have found a way to entice me.

> You can fix bent tips in the field (I think this is available only when you're mastered, but I might be mistaken.)

"fix" is something of a misnomer. The pick is degraded by the "fix" in the same way as if it had been broken and repaired, so unless you actually want to make a lower mod pick, you should avoid using this feature of LM.

>Are you aware that there's a correlation between trap difficulty and lock difficulty?
As a check on whether your lored vaalin might not work, its fine. Its not quite as good as knowing the critter, though rather better than only knowing the hunting area the box came from. However if you want to get decent experience from opening boxes, you need to use caliper measurements to select the pick to use.

>* The wedges you make are stronger and last longer
This can be a pretty big effect. Its ages since I used them, but at mastery I'd find myself still with the original wedge with plenty of use left in it in situations where I'd have needed to make 3 when I first got the skill.

>>But the picking RT by itself should be enough to make it worthwhile, no?

That's a tasty treat (and reduced trap RT would be, too. Does a master in LM detect an untrapped box at 0-5 seconds RT?) as are wedges, but how long do you think it takes before you've saved more time from reduced RTs than you spent mastering LM? I've heard people say, "Oh, don't worry about rushing LM, it'll just happen as you pick boxes naturally" except that isn't quite true. There are a bunch of time-consuming tasks besides "Open boxes you've found". LM is a huge time investment with many additional headaches such as needing locker space/mules/time to divvy up trapped boxes so you don't get marooned on the trap extraction reps. Plus audience reps which require you to perform a potentially deadly task and risk innocent bystanders' lives (Simu, y u do dis?). All that and you still will be a greatly inferior box opener compared to the town locksmith.

<I've heard people say, "Oh, don't worry about rushing LM, it'll just happen as you pick boxes naturally" except that isn't quite true. There are a bunch of time-consuming tasks besides "Open boxes you've found".

Of course there's the picking contests, making/repairing picks, etc.... but none of that is anywhere near as frustrating or tedious as the rock/paper/scissors tasks or having to clean more windows then there are in the guild that come with other guild skills. Don't even get me started on how much less tedious it is then alchemy or artisan skills...

<LM is a huge time investment with many additional headaches such as needing locker space/mules/time to divvy up trapped boxes so you don't get marooned on the trap extraction reps. Plus audience reps which require you to perform a potentially deadly task and risk innocent bystanders' lives (Simu, y u do dis?).>

This is what people are talking about when they say not to rush things. I went though LM without lockering a single box or using a mule. Sure it took longer this way, but I didn't get stressed out like those that did hoard boxes for it always seem to.

Then again, I also LIKE playing my rogue, hunting with him, and opening boxes for others. I set myself up in a town whose critters dropped a lot of boxes, refused tips to encourage everyone to choose me over the town smith, and let any other smiths that happened to be there know what traps I needed (never once did any of them have a problem with letting me disarm them if they found them). Eventually my rogue developed an obsession with picking (rivaled only by Rlen) that encouraged folk to not only bring me their boxes, but stay out in the field longer to ensure they had boxes for me when they came back.

Audience reps weren't that big of a deal, just get two other rogues in the room with you and you're covered. There were a few times when I got them at 3 or 4 in the morning and had to wait til the next day to do them, but I wasn't rushing so it wasn't a big deal. Of course, it didn't hurt that the main resting spot in the town I was in was also the main picking spot (and still is).

<All that and you still will be a greatly inferior box opener compared to the town locksmith.>

Maybe, but at this point I'd wager I have at least a couple million more silver in the bank then I would if I'd been going to the town smith.

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

>>There's no change in the detect RT when a trap isn't detected, only on the successful detection of a trap and on disarm attempts...I think its something in the region of 3-5s at mastery.

No reduction to untrapped detect is frustrating and 5s reduction to trapped detect/disarm is underwhelming. Let's say that it averages 17.5 seconds for a non-LM picker to detect an untrapped box, 20s to detect a trapped box, 30s to disarm a trapped box, and 17.5s to pick a box. Tgo once showed a sample of 1000+ boxes that were trapped 36% of the time so let's say 1/3rd of boxes are trapped. Then a non-LM picker averages around 46s per box, LM picker (15s picking reduction and 5s reduction of detecting/disarming a trapped box) 33s/box, and an NPC 0s/box. 13s reduction is better than nothing, but 13 seconds times how many boxes equals the time spent mastering the skill? To, again, be way, way slower and more dangerous than the NPC.

>>Maybe I can look through my logs and answer that. I picked over 100 Nelemar boxes in one session Wednesday...

That was fairly easy, actually.

All my picking since Monday, when I returned:

93 boxes were not trapped. (That's high by 1 or 2 because I probably double check a couple of them. Some were therefore double counted as not trapped.)

175 boxes were CLICKED! or wedged open.

So that's 82 trapped boxes and 93 untrapped boxes.

It sure seemed like they were all trying to kill me, however. :)

The vast majority of the boxes were from Nelemar or OTF.

The only times that I can recall people NOT grousing (all that much) about Guild tasks are:
- Adventurer's Guild, with its reward payoffs, and
- the Warrior Guild's opening. (Because at the time, no CMans at all, and DF Redux wouldn't be announced for another year.) So Warriors basically had "attack <creature>", and--for the previous year and a half--"ambush <creature> <location>", so absolutely anything new they got was a huge plus for their effectiveness.

Beyond that, my personal takeaway has always pretty well matched what others have said or posted about them: dull, boring, and mind-numbing. I get plenty of that hunting, thanks, why inflict more on myself? <dismiss>

>>You have that backwards. It takes more time to NOT find anything than it does to find the trap.

You're right. I went over my logs and I'm averaging 17.6s per untrapped box and 16.3s per trapped box. All those scarabs and springs made me think the average was higher.

>>Also, say, there's 5 things you need to look at when searching for a trap. Once you find a trap, there's no need to check the other items for danger.

I never realized this, but a hierarchy definitely appears running from plated and fire vials at one end to springs at the other.

>>So that's 82 trapped boxes and 93 untrapped boxes.

You're at 47% in Nelemar/OTF, Tgo's at 36% (out of 1736 boxes) in high level Icemule-ish areas, and I'm ~40% in low level Icemule. If 16s detect per trapped box is roughly accurate, then it's 25s/box if traps are 33.3% or 27s if traps are 47%. If the detect/disarm system had the same 15s reduction as picking, applied to all detect/disarm, then time per box drops to 8.5s and 9.9s, respectively.

My main gripe holds: player pickers are terribly slow compared to the NPC and it'd be really nice if LM (or player picking in general) was reviewed to see what could be done to close that gap.

>>lets have something new that is designed to give us an advantage over wagglers and NPCs rather than makes us more like them.

The NPC part is simple, both mechanically and politically.

1) Add RT to the locksmith NPC.

2) Charge more: base it on the trap as well as the lock. I might be wrong about it being based only on the lock right now, but the bottom line is make it more expensive.

3) Let the NPC sett off the trap sometimes. The NPCs should be worse than the PCs, not better.

I think, mechanically, 1 & 2 should be easier to do than #3. I suspect the most difficult part of a change like this would be that it probably falls under the jurisdiction of the WL town guru GM (or some other GM) and not the rogue guru GM. ;)

But I think you won't encounter a whole lot of objections to the concept of "the NPC shouldn't be better than the player characters" because in general you want to encourage players to interact with other players rather than with NPCs.

As for the pickers vs. wagglers part of this, I have no comment other than that it's a much more complicated discussion. We're more likely to be able to get the locksmith NPCs nerfed a little than we are to make rogues (and other pickers) even better, comparatively speaking, vs. wagglers. Nerfing the NPC seems like "low hanging fruit".

Clearly, he just doesn't cost enough. Losing (essentially all) the silver, and any chance at a scarab or trap component, is insufficiently disincentivising.
Have him take out gem(s, 1 or more), or (do this VISIBLY) the boxfound item (s)....

Scarab already do that: PC, or no scarab.

Just expand on the benefits, to go with the variety of carapaces.