So is any progress being made on making Water lore for these two spells, you know, good?
I remember posting about this within the first 2 days of these changes being made and I received a very vague answer that it was being looked into. That was like, what, almost a year ago now?
I'll reiterate my concern.
First of all I'd like to say that I think the actual benefits from Water lore for these two spells are actually very good and they were very well thought out bonuses.
However when you dig deeper into how these spells work with other systems you quickly realize the benefits are very lackluster.
Take 403, the way experience gain works with lockpicking is the more challenging the lock compared to your lockpicking skill (which takes into account bonuses from the lockpick being used as well as 403) the more experience you gain so most people only use 403 on really challenging locks, or they don't care about the experience gain. This means the lore benefit of not damaging your lockpick has very limited use because most of the time people don't actually want 403 on. My suggestion is to make 403 give you like a 1 minute buff when cast that gives you the damage reduction from Water lore, that way you can cast 403, gain the buff, then STOP 403 and still have the water lore buff on you. Go ahead and make this buff self cast only if needed.
The main problem with 404's water lore bonus is apparently the lowest RT you can receive from disarming a trap is indeed 5 seconds. This might not sound like much of a problem except for the fact that I remember doing some testing and it turns out my rogue already reaches the minimum RT of 5 quite frequently even without water lore, and almost all of his trap disarm RTs were 8 seconds or less, meaning his -9 second RT from 404's Water lore bonus was largely useless because at most he only saw a 3 second RT reduction, and even that was rare because most of the time he saw a 0 or 1 RT reduction.
My solution here is easy enough; remove the 5 second minimum RT when someone is using 404+water lore. Heck, make it a zero RT minimum. If a rogue has 303 disarm ranks and 91 water lore ranks then they deserve to go ahead and have a zero second disarm RT.
As it stands now I'm probably going to use my upcoming FIXSKILLS to remove all of his water lore meaning I will have wasted a FIXSKILLS to train him into water lore and will waste another FIXSKILLS to train him out of it.
