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 |  | The Sweetened Condensed Grab Bag |  |
|  | Posted By: Sanya Thomas | 2002-08-09 18:15:38 |  |
| |  |  Here we go!
Q: Whenever I try to buy an item for a friend (that my own class or race cannot equip) I get the message “you cannot buy this item.” Is this a bug?
A: It is – but it’s only a half bug. While we work on fixing this, here’s the workaround – instead of clicking the name of the item and then clicking “buy,” click and drag the item’s icon to the buy button and click on it. That will allow you to purchase the item for your friend.
Q: I’m not blocking much more than I did pre-patch 1.52, but my friend is blocking like crazy. We have the same spec. Am I bugged?
A: No, but your friend is most likely using a player crafted shield. The quality of the player crafted item will make a significant difference – try it and see. The same goes for armor, by the way. You will take less damage while wearing the player made stuff than you will in fancy looted gear. That +1 str pair of sleeves? Bleh. Ditch them and support your nearest crafter.
Q: The new icons are very bright. What can I do?
A: Right click and make the bar a little bit more see-through. That will dull the colors and still make them easy to see.
Q: Did the change to Theurgist air/earth pets and their run speed go live? I don’t see a difference.
A: As of yesterday, the change was definitely live. To see for yourself, have a pet race between an air or earth pet and a theurgist ice pet (their speed didn’t change).
You need to use a target pretty far in the distance, because the ice pets will stop running and cast their spell when they’re in range to do so. But still, try it out. The new, faster pets will win the race. It’s not a dramatic change; you really have to see the old speed and the new speed next to each other in order to see the difference.
Q: Are the new hastener NPCs on the frontier working?
A: No. They will be fixed in 1.53.
Q: Why are archers doing so much damage to me now?
A: It’s not all archers, it’s just the tactical ones. Archers now have a variety of arrow types, which can be matched against the armor type for maximum damage. The archer who hit you extra hard chose an arrow that had a bonus against your type of armor.
Q: How do blocking and parrying work?
A: Both of these skills use dexterity, and the quality of your shield/weapon, to create a numerical value. That value is compared to your opponent’s weapon skill value to determine your chances to block or parry. If the numbers are equal, your base chance is determined entirely by your skill level. Also, before this comparison happens, the game looks to see if your opponent is in your forward arc – to determine that arc, make a 120 degree angle, and put yourself at the point.
Dual wielders throw an extra wrinkle in. You have half the chance of shield blocking a dual wielder as you do a player using only one weapon. Your chance to parry is halved if you are facing a two handed weapon, as opposed to a one handed weapon.
If you have multiple attackers, your chance to parry any one attack (which is determined in part by your skill in parry) will be divided by the number of attackers. Blocking is a little different – your chances of blocking multiple opponents partly depends on the size of your shield. (One opponent for small, two for medium, three for large.) You will have no chance to shield block any more than that number in any given round of combat.
So what did we do in 1.52 to increase your chances of blocking or parrying? Well, before this patch, the game was artificially inflating the number of opponents. (For instance, if you were being attacked by one person, the game was counting that player AND his groupmates as opponents against you, even if that guy’s group was nowhere nearby. There were other factors as well, but that was the biggest problem right there.) So for blocking, if one guy was swinging at you, but he was grouped with four people, the game would decide you had five attackers, and your small shield might “block” someone who wasn’t actually hitting you. And for parrying, obviously the division mentioned above would be a much smaller number. Now, the game is only counting people who are actively trying to cause you harm.
But you will never block or parry in RVR as much as you do in PVE, because in RVR you’re almost always facing multiple opponents, and as you can see from the above explanation, the chances to block or parry are directly related to the number of attackers. The change we made in patch 1.52 is most noticeable in one group vs. one group battles, but certainly has an impact in epic scale RVR.
Q: What is the percentage chance each kind of attack damage has to critical hit? Do things like the realm abilities that add to critical percentage stack on top of this or are they a percentage of this?
All attacks start with a base chance of 10%. If you have a skill that says “adds 5%,” your base chance is 15%. Incidentally, there is one attack that is an exception to this - an archer’s Critical Shot ability will never get additional damage from (lower case c) critical hits. Remember, because it is a chance and not a hard number, you will get runs of good luck and runs of bad luck. A true test is conducted over time. I believe we used four hours as a baseline the last time we tested this in house.
By the way, there’s a new gaming news site - Virtual World Chat. They’ve done an interview with Mark about Imperator, and a friendly little interview with me, in the last week. They’re trying to cover MMOGs in general. Give them a look!
Thanks for playing, and have a wonderful weekend.
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