Topics

Finished the quest but the questgiver won't give me the appropriate dialogue.

I did not drop, lag, etc. Everything functioned normally.

I suppose it falls to me to start the least popular thread of all EfU history.

It's FOOTBALL SEASON, BAAAABY!

M-I-Z! Z-O-U! aka: RwG's state sux

GO BIG ORANGE!

I think that the Tome of the Isle book/thread should be stickied.

So I've been using the 614 day trial version of mIRC and apparently NOW is the time that I can't use it anymore.

I re-downloaded, but that didn't work either. Any suggestions on how to circumvent this guy from getting paid for his hard work that I've been using for free for the last 6-7 years?

[The Black Parish]

The Black Parish
"That which is evil is not necessarily that which is wrong."

Race: Non-monstrous
Classes: Non-paladin, non-druid
Alignment: Any evil
Deity: Any neutral or evil

The Quick: A very superficial and quick way to describe the Black Parish is as the evil mirror of the Numinous Order of the Three.

The Long: The Black Parish is a player faction attempting to gather evil-minded individuals under one banner to work towards common goals and plots. Many of them are secretive for obvious reasons, but the primary focus of the Parish is to push for proactive evil-ness that is done in broad daylight. There is a misconception that the faction is only for necromantic concepts possibly due to perhaps the majority of its current members leaning towards necromancy, however this is not the case as there is plenty of room for various evil concepts to develop and thrive. The more diversity the better.

Want to play a Banite mercenary captain? This is your prime recruiting grounds.

Want to play a lecherous Maskarran? Here's your safe haven.

Want to play a devious Oghman demonologist or infernalist who just wants to promote learning? We've got your hook-up.

Maybe a devious Gargauthan with illusions of grandeur? The people willing to push your schemes forth are in the Parish.

This is a challenging faction as there is plenty of conflict with the number of natural enemies such an organisation brings; however if you are up for action, exploration, and an experience with the darker (and sometimes downright depraved) aspects of EFU:A then you will find all that here.

Note: Although religion is stressed within the Parish by its current leadership, that is purely from a circumstantial IG reason. As mentioned above, Oghmans and Hoarans or even very unique evil twists on goodly deities would be a fine fit with anyone who is ready to embrace the dark side of life.

Although this suggestion is poorly timed given recent statements that if players do something it becomes "mundane", I think it would be pretty cool if players could set up "props"/placeables somehow without DM supervision. I can see why there might be some issues with putting down placables that are not "ghosted", so for now* let's just assume all placables can be walked through so they are merely for looks and have no effect on mechanics at all. They would be created at the character's standing location and would be accessed through the Crafting dialogue. They would cost the player a small amount of gold, depending on what the item was.

Props could include, but are not limited to:
-Candles
-Arcane marks (on the ground)
-Tables
-Chests
-Gold piles
-Torch racks
-Armor racks
-Tents
-Campfires**

For the purposes of this suggestion*, these props would not be persistant, would have 1 HP and could be destroyed with AoE, and would be strictly for aesthetic storytelling and PC plot reasons.

*Truly, I'd love to see objects like Spiked Barriers and other such tools that a player could use as additional mechanical strategy (outside of QAs). This would also make destroying these objects much easier, since they would be clickable.

** I'd love to see a way campfires could be made to last much, much longer. When they start to fade, they would send out an auto-emote along the lines of [begins to flicker, calmly fading] so players could go "refuel". Gold is probably the best way to do this, spending 2-3 gold (a generic use of a "resource") to lengthen the lifespan of a fire.

I've been tinkering with undead animation. This is my list so far after a few solid weeks of testing, playing, etc. on how to make the whole system work better. All in all, I've had a whole lot of fun with it and I strongly suggest players try it out sometime.

Some of this is meta-game exploitable information. Bear that in mind when reading through this.

Cheers.

------------------------

Corpses:

-The "Give weapon" feature is broken, and I've only gotten an animate to pick up a weapon one time. Then, he wouldn't equip it. Remove the "give item" feature in lieu of providing all animates with a reasonable weapon. Clubs for non-corpse zombies and goblins, giant mauls for ogres, etc.

-Give archers infinite ammo. They run out very, very quickly. Except for goblins and maybe kobolds, these corpses are almost useless. Alternatively, you could just give them a short sword or something so they aren't totally useless after running out.

-Corpses are extremely difficult to harvest, making skeleton in the closet direly necessary for any devoted animator. For example, I killed an entire camp of orcs. No corpses. I killed an entire tribe of goblins... and did not receive a single corpse. Making them 5-10% likely to drop would be reasonable I think. See next point for more thoughts on this.

-If someone wanted to put in the time, a system similar to skinning could be implemented called "Corpse Preservation". It would be a simple check off of lore and/or heal. Successfully beating the DC provides a corpse. The system could be expanded later to provide varying qualities of corpses, too! That's a lot of work though, but just an idea to throw out there. A passing thought- corpses might need to be preserved in the first 12-18 seconds of death instead of the 3-5 minutes for skinning, just so all these bodies don't just start piling up and causing crazy lag issues.

-This is more of a general note than a suggestion, but most animated corpses are not incredibly useful without a healthy amount of undead enhancement. The orcs are, and the jungle cats (probably) are because of sneaks, maybe ogres (although their downsides outweigh the positives right now) but the others are not.

-Skeleton warriors cost me as a GSF: Necromancy level 8 cleric five summoning points. I have a total of 160. That's 32 skeleton warriors I could control. That's far too little summoning point cost, because they're extremely useful when I get done fixing them up. I'd suggest making them cost twice as much as they do and giving them a small bonus, like one more level and/or better hp.

-Goblins and kobolds (probably, haven't found one yet) are relatively worthless, yet cost more summon points to animate than skeletons. That's a little silly. They're not totally useless, but should provide a good alternative to the crap non-corpse animates for low level necromancers without costing too many summoning points.

-Get rid of the visual effects for both the cloud of filth and the flies. Mechanically, they're not very useful. They also cause a great deal of lag. This may make a good "undead enhancement" feature, however, but it shouldn't be standard form.

Animation spells:

-Wizards are royally screwed over from becoming great undead animators. Because the spell comes at level 9, they can't ever have control of more than 1 undead minion. If items could be used to allow multiple summons, this would make the world much brighter for these folks. See next for a work-around.

-Why not allow a way to "detach" undead from your control via a convo? This would effectively make an animated corpse an NPC instead of a summoned creature. From there, via convo, an animator could choose to either make the zombie totally docile, without any will of its own at all, or totally hostile to all living things. A necromancer could set up a few of these bad boys near the super-secret back door that they want to protect, for instance.
If this could work, a necromancer could use an animation scroll, then detach, then use another, then detach, etc, making building up an undead force feasible. It would also allow them to go do something while they wait for another day to pray for spells/read their spellbook and they wouldn't lose their main animated corpse to resting. An important point, this would encourage necromancers to build secret lairs so that their unprotected docile creations aren't merely destroyed. Lairs are super rad.

-A note-- you always lose your first animated corpse when you rest. That really sucks. Yesterday, I hit a bug where it unsummoned all of my remaining four corpses when I woke up. That REALLY sucked.

-The Death Avatar is fun to play around with, but it's not particularly combat effective compared to its hang-ups, being the cost for summoning it (which rises with time, and is now higher than ANY of my animated undead) and its slow speed make it mechanically meh. Imo, give it some spellcasting powers instead of being a mindless brute. It IS the avatar of "The Archmage", after all.

-PLEASE fix the quest system so that undead minions don't make spawns harder. It makes quests much harder, making it a sort of zero-sum mechanical benefit because these things that are inferior to NPCs are adding too many enemies.

ADDED:

-Special corpses that required a whole ton of manipulation, but also provided more enhancement options, would be AWESOME. Bloated goblin corpses that spew acid on death, for example. Or abominations of the creatures, so they have like, 4 arms, 2 heads, shit like that.

The new "Control Creature" player tool is amazing, but can it be modified?

If so, I'd love to see it expanded to be more useful. Controlling more than 3 minions is damned hard. Two ideas come to mind.

Unit grouping. Via talking to the summon or the /c system you could assign pets a number. Then, use a combo of /c group # and clicking on a location to have them move towards their assignment.

That may be a pipe dream. But what about a command to select ALL your units. Maybe if you use the Player Tool on your PC or using a /c command to control all units to do whatever you tell them.

In regards to this improvement of necromancy: http://www.escapefromunderdark.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35292

Shouldn't it apply both alchemy AND consecration (more appropriately, Desecration)? Ideally, it just uses the higher if the two.

I think it should.

Having labeled boxes for potions and equipment and weapons and stuff was extremely cool. Jance is standing around, not doing anything. I nominate him as the Box Merchant.

To a lesser degree, being able to label your OWN boxes would be super rad. If it's possible, it would be a nice touch.

Wow. Talk about a mechanical disaster. Honestly, this is almost a bug report and I'm not even sure of any good ways to fix it.

So the gate functions exactly like the gate to the Ziggurat. Which is fine when there aren't Nightrisers on the other side, and when you don't need to react with running. But because it's a convo script used to flee, there IS no running. There are two guards down there, sure, but they are utterly useless because it's just a jump via convo script.

So, I suggest this be changed to a two gate system with the outermost swinging open and able to be closed and locked via a floor switch. Also, guardsman goblins in the central area to help.

Lingerie Football League

My favorite team:
http://www.lflus.com/chicagobliss

It would be nice if the Quest Tool to add/remove players was removed from a PC's inventory after quest completion.

[Kharst Delzoun]

Kharst was great fun. He was my most challenging PC to play thus far for many reasons, the most important of which being the playing of a non-human and the different sort of mentality that you have to keep in mind constantly. Of course, dwarves have some great advantages both mechanically and socially, which makes them my new favorite race even over humans. I encourage everyone to do their homework on dwarves, come up with a great and unique concept, and make awesome happen. Now, for this post, I'm not going to name names because simply put, I tried to effect everyone on the server and likewise be effected by it, even if Kharst was a super-conservative, mildly xenophobic, somewhat self-inflated dwarven nobleman. So kudos to everyone out there for making Kharst such a fun PC.

Before I get into it, a note. One primary thing I saw about the dwarven race early on - dwarves are builders. I challenge all dwarf PCs to go out, make a change to the server that effects the race (for better or for worse, so long as its interesting), then pass it on to the next generation of dwarf PCs. Kharst was not the first and won't be the last. That being said, his success was mostly due to some awesome support from a number of fellow dwarf PCs. Thanks, Union dwarves.

Kharst Delzoun
This character was created on Tuesday, May 26th at 11:05:20 PM.
Since creation, this character has logged on and off 185 times.
The character has spent 14 days, 22 hours, 53 minutes, and 14 seconds online.

Some fun facts about Kharst...

- Kharst was something like a nobleman-knight of dwarves, slated to be an elder of his clan (Delzoun being an ancient, honorable, and nearly eliminated name of enormous prestige); this didn't happen because he was pulled from home just as his father was dying

- Kharst never consumed alcohol as part of a sect of dwarven lords from his home that had made an oath of sobriety so that they were always vigilant and prepared to defend their homes. His diety was, appropriately, Gorm Gulythn.

- To those who learned a bit about the above, Kharst made it sound as if he was a big badass warrior in his first life. That was not the case, which I tried to reflect in his early acts of mild cowardice on Ymph. Or at least, he was not nearly as brave as in the end days.

- Kharst successfully committed suicide once. More on that below.

- Kharst left Ymph very rarely, but once was magically teleported to Tethyr, later venturing to Amn by boat and eventually back to Ymph. This was done IG.

- I had actually planned on having Kharst die of natural causes when he found a PC heir to lead the dwarves. Unfortunately, his time had come and none had shown themselves. So he was devoured by a +39 AB super-demon, which was pretty badass.


The story...

Early days as a Deputy. Good times.


Kharst was never a great fan of the Stygians, despite many similarities with them. Trannyth was the only one he could stand, and they got along pretty well. Anyways, during the Stygian land grabs, Kharst decided to go behind their backs and take the mines by hiring the Iron Halo. This happened over about 2-3 days. They never even found out, proving his point that their claims were silly. It also earned him Retainership.


From the Larenius situation. By the way, Kharst really did kill Syndri. Well, sort of. The last is Team Dwarf with me.




Oh, so frequently unlucky. I got hit by lightning 3 times in 2 days, this one during a nightriser invasion.


Another unlucky situation. A glitch causing 514 acid damage.


The Mist was never a major player in Kharst's life, but Kharst got a great mist dream once. A huge part of the struggle that was Kharst's existence was his service to Sharboneth, fulfilling his innate need for a sense of duty, and his service to his people, fulfilling his social needs. Here, Kharst is shown the scenes from two futures, one where he chooses the dwarves and one where he chooses Sharboneth. For the dwarves, he became a king with a noble son, fighting the Sharbs and Stygians for dwarven sovereignty (and barely winning). For the Sharbonethans, he became Master Retainer of the House with many honors but had waged war against "dwarven rebels in the mines" to earn it. It was then that, after being ordered to execute one, he tosses his sword to the rebel dwarf and then grabbed a hunk of iron, sinking himself to the bottom of the sea to drown. Sadly, I only got pictures of the future dwarf lord.



Kharst's Dwarven Defender quest was AMAZINGLY done. The DM that ran it calls it his crowning achievement as a DM so far (and maybe life? heh). Here are a few snapshots, including when Kharst became the wealthiest PC EfUA has ever seen. Eat it, Highhill. Sadly, this was a typo on part of the DMs as I would later discover to my great displeasure. The second picture is the crew that went with me, all geared up for one of the hardest fights I've had on EfU.



Another picture, when leaving the Dwarf Defender quest.
http://img42.imageshack.us/i/totethyr.jpg/

This weapon is why the aforementioned fight was such a pain. I carried it around for months until the day of Kharst's death when it was destroyed by angels. If I had only killed a few hundred babies...


A quick glance at the leading soldiers in our strikes against Queen Ixpadia. I wish I had been there during the grand PvP of her takeover, but it was still fun for what I did get to do. Funny enough, after she won, Kharst realized that he actually benefited from her victory in many ways.


The last Patricians' Council. I loved these things (full disclosure: Kharst also created the idea and wrote up the basic rules and function), and hope that there are similar events in the future where PCs can meet in-game to argue and discuss policy.


The events leading up to Kharst's death, the battle through a corrupted celestial prison, were awesome. The plot twists were hysterical and epic, as these pictures show.



Most of Kharst's latter days were spent exploring the island, hunting for random events with a relatively small but fantastic and dynamic cast of allies. And making fun of a certain Retainer of House Sharboneth. Oddly, this behavior was so ingrained in us that we still did it when we died together.


My first Endlude ever.


The End


Aaaaaand...

The Loot








Funny accidental ambient loot...


Well, that's all. Out for a while. It's been fun, boys and girls.

I entered a Random Event (Stargazer Shaman, offerings, dead Stargazer one) in the East Foothills near the Dwarven Hold.

I left the Random Event area and it put in in Johan's mill at the cemetary.

When entering the Dwarven Hold, a brief yellow message comes up saying, "Substitute description".

I'm assuming a normal yellow description is supposed to describe the scene but a little hiccup messed that up.

There were some rough patches today that could easily have lead to some OOC gripes, but everyone I talked with today was extremely level headed and great to work with. Some awesome moments happen, and it reminds me why I like playing here. I hope everyone had fun throughout the sneaky raids, the desperate battles, and the courtroom dramas. Well played by everyone.

So I found this free browser based game. After bringing the addiction that was Urban Dead to EfU, I thought I'd try it again.

The cool thing about THIS is that you can build up to 24-player teams to conquer the globe. I am not of the mind to spend hours pouring over all the info with a dedicated team who actually spends MONEY on the game in order to win, but I do think it could be fun to raise a little hell with anyone interested in learning how the game works and taking over continents for kicks and giggles.

http://www.battledawn.com/

Try it out, and let me know if you're interested. I hope to get a group of us going for when the Mars map comes out (they're using Earth right now, Mars comes out in a few days or so). The game only takes 15 minutes a day, can be played in any browser, is actually fun to play (unlike KoC and those other bullshit browser games) and... yea, that's about all I can think of. Post here if you want in.

I like the idea behind the change to animal skinning, but a few things concern me.

Heal is already a very amazing skill to have. This makes it even better. And why are clerics the bomb-diggity at animal skinning, since 90% of clerics have amazing heal skill? They can't even use most combat blades, but they can wield a skinning knife with the greatest skill around! Warriors of all kinds without any heal though, who carve things up daily, don't have a clue, sadly. Not so much a suggestion, just something to ponder. Maybe someone else has a better idea on balance.

Not everybody whose character should be able to skin animals proficiently will take heal. Almost all, but not all. Rangers and druids come to mind-- perhaps, in the case that Animal Empathy is HIGHER than heal, it could be used instead?

So I'm looking for a new 360 game to blow 60 bucks on.

Right now, Left 4 Dead is in the lead because I looooove fragging zombies. But I already own World at War, and Nazi Zombies is pretty amusing, so I'm not rushing out to buy it. Any other suggestions, especially games made this year or coming out by the end of the summer?