I think it means you should wait and see if the many changes cumulatively create any kind of new paradigm.

Or even if they'll never amount to being worthy, for you, perhaps they will for someone else.

>Basic details of how this would work:

>- Locksmith bounties are offered only to players with 2x-3x lockpicking skill.

>- Locksmith bounties function as a group task, using the group bounty timer separate from the personal timer.

>- Locksmith bounties are for 8-10 boxes and reward 800-1000 experience and BPs based on the skill level of the locksmith upon turn-in.

>- Players who provide boxes toward the completion of a locksmith bounty receive 25 instant experience and a small amount of BPs at the time the box is opened. It may be necessary to cap the amount of experience that may be gained in this way over a given period of time, but it should not be so restrictive as to discourage participation.

Must have forgotten than one in my Adv Guild 2.0 post: http://forums.play.net/forums/GemStone%20IV/Organizations%20and%20Societies/Adventurers%20Guild/thread/1710856?get_newest=true

I mentioned it here, though: http://www.tinyheroes.com/forums/GemStone%20IV/Discussions%20with%20Simutronics/The%20Good....(general%20compliments)/thread/1683648

"There could also be a bounty to pick so many local boxes if you have some threshold of lock picking skill."

Yawn.

---

Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

>What about letting 403 be cast ON the lockpicks for only the durability increase?

This is a nice idea.

>For 404... do you all get exp from disarming too? I have never smithed a box so I really don't know.

Yes, and 404 hurts trap experience even worse than 403 hurts picking experience. However, picking experience is the more important of the two. Maybe 20% of my smith experience comes from traps when picking boxes I've hunted off Plane 4, but less than 5% when picking kobold boxes in the East Tower.(it takes something like level 60 boxes to start pushing trap experience up for a capped smith)

<<
What would be our option for trap RT? Passive rt reduction?>>

Don't you need a toolkit to disarm these days? Cast on the toolkit.

Not all traps use the toolkit. You basically just use the items bundled in it for certain traps. How would that impact detection?

Maybe have 404 conjure a set of goggles that you use for the RT reduction. Heh... Or just get rid of the experience penalty from just having the spell up...

I wouldn't mind learning some water lore for the bonuses to 403/404 but, I can't because of how limited bards are in terms of lore ranks available and the high thresholds required to get max bonuses for songs like 1035 and 1009. Hopefully, there are plans to make water lore a viable alternative to air lore, or for it to be mechanically possible to learn more lore ranks (just enough to get some benefit from these changes) short of spending a fortune on enhancive items.

Archales

>Of course you could keep breaking a copper pick until it's modded down and try to get experience from an extremely weak version of that pick but even that can only go down so far.

>Right? (I have only broke/repaired a pick so many times)

It depends. I can't make pick with the right mod for primitive locks by doing the repairing myself, but Edwina can.

>The sad part is that at cap with less than 1x picking I could fry picking a bunch of kobold boxes.

I can and have fried off a sufficiently large number of kobold boxes despite being 100 (40) DEX and 303 ranks trained. Its a large number though because measurement takes time and an extreme reluctance to risk breakage rolls on a pick thats going to require multiple visits to Edwina to retune limits the experience per box a lot compared to what I'll risk on mid range boxes. My record of belled to fried is 6 boxes, 5 is just about within the range of achievability and with exactly the right lock and trap ranges 4 would be possible. Maybe 20 kobold boxes in the East Tower, but getting from numbed to fried is hugely variable on the luck of the die rolls and just how long there's a line of customers.

>The sad part is that at cap with less than 1x picking I could fry picking a bunch of kobold boxes. The system in general penalizes you learning more ranks if you are able to pick lower leveled boxes with a copper lockpick with no trouble.

Irony is, when Kaldonis was manually picking for about 18 months (be surprised what 40 ranks in picking/disarming, halfling dexterity, and knowledge of 435 allows...most Masrh Keep boxes), I had dyed a copper lockpick, which I always broke and got repaired.

So breaking the lockpick was an advantage. Breaking it over and over again. Hmmm, does make me snicker about the lore benefit a tad when I used the crappiest, most broken lockpick to help gain experience! (Sorcerers have no way to measure locks, so you measure by having a 20 pound belt [which phases] full of copper and steel lockpicks, basically).

---

Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

Okay, clearly I am misunderstanding the gauge of "nine out of twelve" and what it means.

This is probably an LFM thing, about which I care nothing. <dismiss>

<<<I wouldn't mind learning some water lore for the bonuses to 403/404 but, I can't because of how limited bards are in terms of lore ranks available and the high thresholds required to get max bonuses for songs like 1035 and 1009. Hopefully, there are plans to make water lore a viable alternative to air lore, or for it to be mechanically possible to learn more lore ranks (just enough to get some benefit from these changes) short of spending a fortune on enhancive items. ~ Archales>>>

Ugh, I hadn't even considered that. Yes, lores are already a crunch for my bard. Can't even imagine adding water at this point...

~ GtG

Thanks for the info Rathboner! I was going about it the wrong way. I've been breaking the picks and repairing it myself... I think I broke a copper pick 20 (might be exaggerated) times when I was 3x'ed and still couldn't get it to the point where I was learning. I guess with lockmastery you keep repairing it back slightly better than Edwina? Or is there a floor that's different for lock mastery repair vs Edwina repair? I always knew that a lockmastery repair would have less degradation.. But didn't think it was that much or the possibilty that there was a point at which you couldn't degrade it further vs the other.

Or maybe I should have broken the pick more....

<I don't get what all the griping is about. Before it didn't have a lore ability and now that it does people gripe about it? LOL

If you're going to change something, change it for the better. I view most of these additions so far as pretty irrelevant. They either don't address the existing problems with the spell or add something that isn't useful in practice. For instance, the ability to point out unskilled hidden targets with 402 simply isn't a useful addition and adds nothing new. The changes to 403/404 are something new, but the classes they benefit most aren't likely to train in elemental lores and, due to some of the idiosyncrasies of locksmithing and related systems, there are good reasons why a locksmith wouldn't want another class casting 403/404 on them. If they had addressed that so that the water lore bonus could be applied fully when cast on others and without potentially causing them loss of experience/reps in the process, it would have been more well-received as both an improvement to the original spell as well as the addition of a new and useful lore tie-in. The 405 change is at least somewhat useful, but it could have been more so. We've been waiting a long time on that one and all we got was the ability to detect two of the most obvious attributes items can have. It's something and I appreciate the upgrade as an actual upgrade. But the spell isn't telling us anything we couldn't already determine on our own.

I'm hoping as we get further along and especially as we delve into the Major elemental and Wizard circle we start to see changes that fix the problems with current spells while adding new, interesting, and useful abilities to our repertoire.

~Taverkin

>If you're going to change something, change it for the better. I view most of these additions so far as pretty irrelevant. They either don't address the existing problems with the spell or add something that isn't useful in practice.

This is definitely better. I mean, it's something useful, without removing any feature. That's "better" by definition.

I don't even think they can be called irrelevant. Breaking lockpicks is very relevant. I used to go through a lot of them: so much so that my ability to actually make money doing lockpicking was breaking even at best most the time (well...except that I was mostly picking the boxes of my alts, so it was all kind of profit).

I think there's a big confusion with "Lore Review" and "Spell Circle Review" when it comes to MnE.

>The changes to 403/404 are something new, but the classes they benefit most aren't likely to train in elemental lores and, due to some of the idiosyncrasies of locksmithing and related systems

The only real conclusion here is that elemental lores could never be useful for 403/404. Yet it was a lore review. This statement cannot be read any other way than to say they should have been passed up in the review. As one of the few sorcerers who has dabbled at lockpicking in the recent years, I understand I may be odd and alone, but I like these changes.

I agree about the experience penalties not being addressed for 403 and 404. But we should agree that the problem here is much larger than the spells 403 and 404, and would be better handled in a general review of picking and not the ELR which included these spells. In the best case here, we could have hoped for some changes to the experience penalties, yet other problems with lockpicking would have remained. I find it generally re-assuring that they didn't fix those issues with these spells, since it may point to those problems being taken care of at another time in a more comprehensive way. Wouldn't it be a kick in the face if water lore addressed the experience penalty to 403, only to have a later comprehensive review alter the system anyway?

And there's still no way to get around the fact that so long as they were changing these spells with lores, it was inherently not going to be a thing that appealed to a large majority of rogues by the nature of the skills. Even if it appealed to them, only the most dedicated locksmiths would train it.

405 was a little lack-luster, it's true, mostly because the spell itself has degenerated into little more than an RP tool (check someone's spells without lich). I figured it would at least tell the type of flares given the release...not because it's hard to find out, but because it's....ELEMENTAL DETECTION. "I detect some elements here!" "What kind?" "What do I look like, a wizard?"

I think we know well that upgrades to 405 give issues for bards...which is highly ironic because bards also know the spell, and improving it in that direction is even more useless to them.

I will definitely say, since it's on the topic of 403, the ability granted is really great. It goes in perfect line with when you use 403. You use it when the lock is known to be (or suspected to be) hard, which is one of the most likely times to break a pick. And I had not foreseen that as a concept to upgrade this spell. Water lore was a surprise (but Bruce Lee proved me wrong), and as usual with low-level Minor circle spells lore perks are expensive. In the end, I don't really see what the fuss is about with this spell update, though.

---

Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

Just a thought on the 403/404 lores. Why not add into the water lore bonus, a decrease in the experience penalty as well...so that essentially as the lore bonus improves the penalty also diminishes...eventually down to nothing at appropriate ranks. This would give an incentive to train lores for some at least.

Also, I said it before...aside from spell bonuses, make lores provide general TD bonuses for lore type (elemental, spiritual, sorcerer) and/or resistances...that would give non-spell casters a reason to want lore outside of what it does for spells.

> You sense that the frosty blue longsword has been elementally charged with the power of molten lava.

Uh... Sorry about that. This should be fixed now!

~ Konacon

>Well, perhaps if you had at least bothered to copy the full sentence instead of cutting it off halfway and then responding to a fragment of the idea attempting to be conveyed to you [. . .]

That's okay (or should be) since you do the exact same thing when replying to me.

>[. . .] screwing them out of lockmastery reps, and/or reducing their experience gain when casting these spells on them. Fix that and we have the addition of something new and useful.

Note my entire paragraph discussing a general overhaul to the lockpicking system, which could never have been addressed with the ELR.

---

Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

Ok, I'll bite, once.

>>I'm certainly not belittling the dev GM's effort

Based on your tone, arguments, and subject matter. I would disagree with the above statement. In fact, it seems the entirely of the point of your posts lately.

>>It just seems to me that the attempt to get wizards to train in the admittedly neglected water lore is somewhat artificial.

Given water lore is a "neglected" lore, and this is an elemental lore review, logic would dictate that it be made more favorable to train in. It would seem pointless to reach the end of a lore review still have water lore "neglected."

>>The MnE circle and the updates that have been released so far are of little interest to the majority of wizards,

The MnE circle isn't exclusive to wizards, therefore it would follow that they should be of interest to more than just wizards.

>>Maybe it's just me being paranoid, but I can't help but evaluate these changes in the light of the stated Simutronics aim to "slow down" wizard advancement and weaken several key spells that wizards use in combat. Something which everyone else seems to have forgotten, but which I consider quite relevant to this discussion.

Relevant how? You expected 402, 403, 404, 405, or 407 to somehow bridge any preconceived notions you have about a wizard combat nerf? Exactly how would any lore addition to any of those utility spells boost your combat effectiveness or address your concerns about wizard combat? If they all used air lore for the new effects instead of water lore, you still wouldn't be any step closer to being more effective in combat than you are with water lore. Also, the minor elemental circle is not exclusive to mages, it's a circle that's shared and used by half the professions in the game. Minor spirit isn't peppered with religion lore to favor clerics, so it follows that the minor elemental spell lore setups wouldn't strictly favor mages.

Yes, you're being paranoid. We get that you're concerned over the potential nerfs to core mage spells, but that's a discussion we've asked for feedback on and continue to consider, and should be confined to the mage forums as it's a mage concern - not in every other forum folder. As I've said there, we're listening there and considering feedback we get.

Meanwhile I find that you belittling the unrelated MnE additions that are made, that aren't intended to bring any balance back to the mage class, is a bit insulting to those GMs (not me) that have worked on the changes to read some of your comments - my opinion. If you want to debate the merits of each spell addition on it's own, great we welcome the feedback, but attempting to hijack each and every new thread on your crusade to combat imaginary wars is distracting and derailing. When we look through threads for relevant feedback posts only to find complaint after imaginary complaint, it makes the job an exercise in tedium.

Viduus

...Viduus's post...

Well said, and I completely agree.

-Taakhooshi, and Me

For the Story of Taakhooshi:
http://www.gsguide.net/index.php?title=Taakhooshi