Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Bridging the Gap -bottom tier vs top tier characters.

For a long time I've had this idea. Mainly due to alot of my old mains being totally unusable and worthless. It would be nice if that first character you ever authed, and aved without knowing you should max con, has crappy base stats and would be deemed worthless other than for 500 weight of storage (or 999).

The idea is this:
A lonnnnnng quest chain. Containing everything from search and retrieve to mkill (mob kill). That would boost your base stats and hp up to "below average" levels (meaning it wouldn't do as much for "perfectly" stated chars as it does for the newbie. It would give PERMANENT stat and hp bonuses to help the "trash" character be at least usable.
Limitations: If there were no limitations it would be abused and imm's would never let it enter in the first place.
a) it ONLY helps the character's PRIMARY stat AND only up to 16.
The example I talked with Versetch about yesterday was an H-Orc thief. you could auth it with 18str, 18 lck, 18con, and 9 dex. With the quests you would be able to add a few extra points of dex to it. (In my opinion... up to 3 max which would still penalize a player pretty heavily for a bad choice, but still help make the character useful to them). In this case you would have a base of 12 dex instead. Of course the "most" logical way to abuse this would be to auth it at 13, then let the quest boost it to 16 for 3 free stat points. However it still leaves the character slightly below average in terms of stats meaning even with the 3 extra permanent stats, it would still never be gamebreaking.
b) It will help the character gain max hp up to -20 ish 30 hp off average.
Taking the thief as the example again, whats considered average for a thief is 730hp. So the quest would allow a permanent hp gain of up to a total of 700 base hp. Again great for first chars, still wont help the perfectionist looking for an 18/18/18 750hp thief.
c) the quest chain will be balanced also to help characters learn to use some of the basic skills offered to the class and once the hp/stat bonus gains are over, all the prizes are converted to items/gold. That way the quests will still "exist" for every single player but will have the most impact on helping newer players acclimate to the huge difficulty curve of the post leveling game... assuming they get there.
d) the quests are Av only and non repeatable. Done in the fashion of miniquests like Haven of Everlasting Light or Temple of the Moon with each segment completed rewarding a prize (perm stat gain/hp gain/item/gold)  and all this would help fill out class deficiencies, and hopefully open up more eq options for some classes with still fairly bad wear loc combinations.

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