The rogue guild training administrator assigned my baby rogue to open boxes with SPIN. Four repetitions. He's gotten two. I don't know where the first one came from, but the second came from a krolvin merc in Liath Bheinn (so a level 17 creature), and the lock was -250 (fairly easy, according to the GS wiki).

I think that my rogue could get the reps more easily if he offered lockpicking services, but the problem is that I don't really know what his upper limits are with lockpicking. The SERVICE verb usually has lockpickers say things like, "Can pick up to troll kings" or "minotaurs and below."

I don't know what creatures drop boxes in the -240 to -275 range. I do know that he's Level 17 with a 95 in DEX (giving him a bonus of 32) and a 98 in AGL (giving him a bonus of 29). He has 45 ranks each out of a possible 57 in Disarming and Picking Locks. He has no spells (and is not likely to get them any time soon, given that spells cost 67 mental points each), but he has 18 out of 19 ranks in Arcane Symbols (so far--he's going to pick up the 19th rank this level) and has successfully dealt with spiked onyx scarabs, glimmering opalescent scarabs, and sea-green glaes scarabs.

I think that he might be able to pick more than one level above him, but I have no way of knowing knowing how far. -250 boxes are few and far between where he hunts (Danjirland, Liath Bheinn and the Caverns and Abandoned Village in the Lyserian Hills). What other creatures drop boxes with fairly easy locks?

Please, please help, because I'd like to know his possible maximum...and the numbers that I have mean very little to me.

Audience reps require "decent" locks which is about 67% of your maxlock (which in turn depends on your pick, spells, training and stats when you make the attempt)

You also have to use a high quality pick, what counts changes quite rapidly at early ranks, (could be anywhere from gold to laje for SPIN reps).

Assuming you still able to use glaes and are using a fresh glaes pick, your max lock with it is 1.6 (glaes mod) * [ 145 (pick skill) + 32 (DEX bonus)] = 284 and you would get a rep from -195 or harder locks

(actually slighter easier ones can give reps too, because being trained a bit over 2x drops the fraction lower than 67%, possibly just 60% with your training, and damaging your pick drops the maxlock from it, you might get a rep off a -160 lock with a damaged glaes pick) If you were still able to use gold, you might get reps as low as -120 with a damaged gold pick.

Audience reps require an audience, which in most places is 4 people, with guild members counting double and guild masters triple. Picking for the public does help you acquire an audience, but if its not big enough they may not be happy waiting around for a friendly guild master to show up.

Getting the locks for reps can be tricky in the landing when you are needing 250-300, that sort of lock rarely showed up in the East Tower in my experience and the critters seem to have pretty easy locks for their level once you get past zombies (which is where I got a lot of my early rep locks from). I'd stick to the mercs for the time being, but use picks with the smallest mod you can to start with when trying for a rep and once you have calipers use them to check whether you should be using your smallest mod pick for the best chance at a rep or need to use a better one to open it.

If you haven't checked Tsoran's guide to LM yet, do so. http://gemstone.tusatusa.com/app.php/page/tsorans-lock-mastery-guide is one place it can be found.

I'm not sure if I'll get this totally correct or not but...

Lich is basically a set of code written in Ruby that allows you to interface with various Muds (such as Gemstone). On top of that you do have things like LNet (LichNet) which is basically a chat program accessible within the game. But you also have scripts that can perform well... pretty much any task you can do in the game and then some.

Some of the basic things that I use Lich for:
- Talking to other players via :LichNet
- Travelling within the game via ;go2
- Map references via ;narost
- keeping attendance for events using ;attendance (this is something I wrote)
- Pulling up quick references on metals (;metal), woods (;wood), containers (;sizematters), etc.
- And most recently, helping myself and others hopefully better understand locksmithing (via the development of ;lockmaster)

If you are enjoying the game without Lich then no need to jump into it at this point! There has been some recent discussion in the Locksmithing and Traps folder around the formulas for lockpicking so you could do your own math as well

Picking Locks

baselock = Picking Locks bonus + Dex bonus

selflorelock = baselock + (Level / 2) + (Picking Locks bonus / 10) + Dex bonus + (Minor Elemental Ranks / 10)

#lore mod bonus cannot be greater than pick lock skill bonus

Note: I noted a formula error in the prior version of ;lockmaster where I was using Picking Locks Ranks vs. Bonus in the lore calculation which was creating an even more conservative (i.e. inaccurate) self lore result.

Disarming Traps

basetrap = Disarming Traps bonus + Dex bonus

selfloretrap = basetrap + (Level / 2) + (Disarming Traps bonus / 10) + Dex bonus + (Minor Elemental Ranks / 10)

#lore mod bonus cannot be greater than disarm skill bonus

For either formula you add a D100 and subtract the lock difficulty and need an end result >- 101. Lock Picking is further modified by the pick that you use - each pick has a different modified:

Material | Mod |
.................
copper | 1.0 |
brass | 1.0 |
steel | 1.1 |
ivory | 1.2 |
gold | 1.2 |
silver | 1.3 |
mithril | 1.45 |
ora | 1.55 |
glaes | 1.6 |
laje | 1.75 |
vultite | 1.8 |
rolaren | 1.9 |
veniom | 2.2 |
invar | 2.25 |
alum | 2.3 |
golvern | 2.35 |
kelyn | 2.4 |
vaalin | 2.5 |

Hopefully that was more helpful than confusing!

-- Robert

Damp deeply exclaims, "It's a wizard's locked project!"

Calipers at your Lock Mastery rank are worse than useless, imo. They'll waste 10-12 seconds of your life and give you unreliable information in return. If you do use them, make sure you use them after you've disarmed the box. For boxes that you didn't detect a trap on, measure them in a non-public area because they can (will?) set off traps.

When trying to get reps for Lock Mastery, I always used the lowest quality pick I could get reps with (this will be veniom by rank 20) unless I needed a higher quality pick to get it. Sure, I missed out on exp picking a lot of boxes I could have used lower quality picks with, but I always saw the exp from picking as incidental anyway and I got a lot of reps I would have missed out on (I hunt for exp, I pick for fun and to save silver).

I know there's a lot of min/maxers here that will see red at the thought, but until I finished LM I only carried copper, veniom, golvern, and vaalin picks. Once I leveled away from RR and moved to the Landing, I cut that down to copper and vaalin cause I found that if I couldn't get a box with copper I was gonna need the vaalin (along with lore half the time.... derned minotaur boxes). Obviously you'll want to use lower quality picks at least until you're rank 20, but locksmithing doesn't HAVE to be as laborious as some here choose to make it.

As an aside, it is really difficult to find what you're looking for most of the time with the wiki article for LM. I'd recommend bookmarking Tsoran's guide that's much more comprehensive and easier to reference. It was a life saver for me when I was still working through LM: http://gemstone.tusatusa.com/app.php/page/tsorans-lock-mastery-guide

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.

>> Here's an idea. What if the measurement messaging gave us feedback on our confidence in the accuracy of the measurement?

I think the whole point is that you are learning to use the calipers so your measurements are not going to be that accurate (nor is your judgement about how accurate your read was going to be very accurate).

Once you have mastered lock mastery (or potentially at some point prior) your reads get to be much more accurate with calibrated calibers.

-- Robert

Damp deeply exclaims, "It's a wizard's locked project!"

I'm trying to follow along (for reealsies because HC) and I'm completely unable to deconflict these two statements by myself (emphasis mine):

>>What I did suggest was giving rogues on the path to master LM an opportunity to approach the accuracy that a wee bard has if said rogue is willing to invest time repeatedly re-measuring a box.

>>Meaning it adds ~5 minutes per box to have a ~90% chance to nail down the range.

Is my disconnect just centered on your intentions of '5 minutes' being the hangup point? And after LM, what's the add (and knock on effect to actually picking)?

Doug

>Is my disconnect just centered on your intentions of '5 minutes' being the hangup point? And after LM, what's the add (and knock on effect to actually picking)?--Doug

My intentions were mainly to give rogues that hadn't progressed far into LM some way to arrive at a point where they could say, "It's approximately this difficulty." As opposed to now, when they could measure until their arms fall off and, if they aren't aware of finding the edges of the 9 or more difficulty range, be thinking it could be -120 or -475 and who knows what it really is. When I got calipers, I rushed out to start measuring my boxes. When I discovered how stupidly inaccurate they were, and not having either the cleverness or patience of Rathboner to discover their pattern, I threw up my hands, stuffed them in a container to gather dust, and turned to a bard's vast lockpicking expertise instead. I'd rather see rogues view calipers as a useful tool far sooner than they do now. The time was a secondary benefit, though necessary, and my suggestion would lop off quite a lot of that 5 minutes.

There would be a slight benefit to LM masters I believe. I haven't tested it, but I think that if a lock is on the edge of a range, then a LM master would get 2 difficulties from repeated measurements and know it's within a -75 diff. range. My suggestion would usually let them know on the 1st measurement of the accurate range. But that's merely a 'nice' side-effect. I've been told repeatedly to slow down and smell the roses in regards to LM. I said to hell with that and charged through it, but most people won't or will stop when they see the effort it takes. My suggestion was so those people had an instrument that was somewhat worth it's salt for the year(s) it will take them to get through LM.


>(and reps don't actually need you to get it spot on so you get the information you need a lot faster)--Rathboner

I think you need to hit the adjacent range at least. I can't recall if even that wouldn't be enough if, say, you measure it as -200 to -235 and it ends up being -160. I hadn't considered the effect on caliper reps and that would be a good boon as well.

>>>(and reps don't actually need you to get it spot on so you get the information you need a lot faster)--Rathboner

<<I think you need to hit the adjacent range at least. I can't recall if even that wouldn't be enough if, say, you measure it as -200 to -235 <<and it ends up being -160. I hadn't considered the effect on caliper reps and that would be a good boon as well.--me

I went back through my logs and it appears that caliper accuracy is a non-factor for 'find yourself some boxes, measure 'em, and pick 'em'-tasks. I think those are basically the same as 'pick some tough boxes' that just checks to see if you measured it first. Accuracy does matter for 'field calibrate'-tasks. I had 4 attempts when my measurement wasn't the exact range: missed by at least -55, no rep; missed by -35, rep; missed by -10, rep; missed by -35, no rep. Weird results if you ask me.


<<Got it. Thanks for explaining that perspective!--Doug

No problemo.

>At level 17 you don't need them ... you can make do with lores from scrolls/imbeds

What are imbeds?

And he's not using scrolls. He probably would if he could, but Magic Item Use costs only one point less than Harness, and I'm struggling to find an extra nine points to train him in Harness every now and again. In order to cast Disarm Enhancement and Lockpick Enhancement from a scroll, he'd need the scroll, three more levels in Magic Item Use (24 MTP), and at least two more levels in Harness (18 MTP). OHE x2, Ambush (which is practically a requirement when training Sweep), Dodging, Disarm x2, Picking x2, Perception, Trading, First Aid and Survival (a.k.a. Skinning) seem to eat up all the mental training points.

I'm trying to figure out how ANYONE can afford to train as a magical rogue. Sixty-seven points for spells, nine for Harness, and you probably need Elemental Lore on top of the spells, so that's another fifteen MTPs. I would need 91 mental points just for those three categories. That...seems unlikely.

I just capped; which means I have been working on spells more or less since the beginning. It's something you need to plan for.
However, with fixskills now available, it's a bit more practical now. Once I get 10 more MTPs, I will change 101 over to 413 and pick up 414.

>>
Guennwhfar (at level 100), your current skill bonuses and ranks (including all modifiers) are:
Skill Name | Current Current
| Bonus Ranks
Two Weapon Combat..................| 5 1
Armor Use..........................| 230 130
Shield Use.........................| 206 106
Combat Maneuvers...................| 214 114
Brawling...........................| 308 208
Ambush.............................| 302 202
Physical Fitness...................| 291 191
Dodging............................| 292 192
Arcane Symbols.....................| 74 16
Magic Item Use.....................| 74 16
Harness Power......................| 93 21
Disarming Traps....................| 303 203
Picking Locks......................| 304 204
Stalking and Hiding................| 355 255
Perception.........................| 302 202
Climbing...........................| 146 46
Swimming...........................| 146 46

Spell Lists
Minor Elemental....................| 12

Spell Lists
Minor Spiritual....................| 1
Training Points: 15 Phy 57 Mnt