Breathing life into some of the unused skills
Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 4:10 pm
Skills used to have more purpose in pre-aos uo. Back when you could gm everything, it did not matter what skills you took. Now with the 700 skill limit, you don't have that option so many skills like herding, forensic eval, etc have died out. Here's some ideas to ponder on for them. Keep in mind that these are all ideas and won't necessarily be implemented. Feel free to discuss!
Alchemy
-Add in new potions. Create some "custom" potions and emphasize on perfecting the alchemy bonus in conjunction with enhance potions. Let's bring back the pvp alchemist
Anatomy
-No change
Animal Lore
-No change
Animal Taming
-No change
Archery
-No change
Arms Lore
-Already affects crafting so that's good
Begging
-Begging to receive special and rare items from npcs. Instead of getting gold you could get ps's, decor and even more!
Blacksmithy
-Maybe making metal armor resist more than leather and give it the power to absorb spell damage per piece if it's a metal armor.
Bowcraft/Fletching
-UOML pretty much increased the usefulness of this anyways. Only thing I would personally do is make crafting arrows actually worthwhile (1 board = 1 arrow? I don't think so).
Bushido
-Upon finding that "unreleased" attack gump for bushido, we might consider going with my "dragonball" idea.
Camping
-Collect different wood types (Yew kindling, bloodwood kindling). Kindling lights depending on your skill (Like bloodwood kindling would take enough camping skill). The burning fires of different woods would give special bonuses
-Ranger skills. Upon successfully reaching 100% camping and 100% melee skill such as swords/macing/fencing/archery, they get the ranger title and have access to create and use special traps such as snares which can be crafted but only useable by people with sufficient camping skill.
Carpentry
-Boost to masonry (Stone Carving). Add more stone entries
Cartography
-Bumping treasure chests and adding relics (See relic idea in the forums)
-Terraform abilities upon GM (By reading a "terraform" book in the gargoyle city) Would allow the cartographer to manipulate the land (Create trees, rocks that would block people etc). Terraform is quite "out there" idea but would basically give the power to manipulate terrain for cartographers. A quest would likely be involved.
Chivalry
-No change
Cooking
-Adding more recipes for cooking (Grapes of wrath, skill fruits, all kinds of other beneficial items with magical properties)
-Wildlife attractors. These would be locked down in houses and created using the cooking skill. After some time has passed, these cooked goodies would attract special colored birds and other wildlife to the area
Detect Hidden
-Something along the lines of revealing hidden traps when you get within range. Also might add in a passive reveal at gm level.
-Could possibly increase its use by creating items/bonuses that spawn as being hidden and must be detected before they can be taken (Like hidden weapons, potions, etc in dungeons). Stuff that's hidden and can't be seen unless you detect.
Discordance
-No change
Evaluating INT
-No change
Fencing
-No change
Forensic Evaluation
-Avoiding Death/Assasinate. Seeing as the study of forensic evaluation deals with the dead, I thought it would be logical that there be certain bonuses to death. Here's the benefits of getting forensic eval:
-Avoid Death: Depending on how much forensic eval you have, you can avoid death (Kinda). When your hp drops below the "danger zone" (Danger zone being low hp like 20%), you go into a defensive stance. All your regens go up as well as your lmc and dci but your attack power and hci is halved during that stance. This allows you to avoid death while you go to heal up. Once you've healed over your danger spot, the bonus/losses are removed. This might not be a great idea however when it comes to pvp, but it's still an idea.
-Assasinate: Once your opponent's health is at a "danger zone" (How high the danger zone goes depends on your knowledge in forensics. More on that later) your attack chance increases against that opponent as well as a slight damage increase. This makes it easier for you to kill opponents who are near death without them healing up fully.
What is a Danger Zone?: A danger zone is a percent of health of either you or your opponent, that is near death. For example, 10/100 hp would be a severe danger zone, where you are moments away from death. With forensic eval, once YOU enter a danger zone of say 10 hp, your regens will increase to try and help you survive. Once you jump back up to a healthy state (Let's say, 30 hp in this example) the regens stop. Your danger zone will go up hp wise for every 10 points of forensic eval (Starting at 5hp). Human 20 skill gives you a danger zone of 10hp so when your hits reach 10hp or lower, your benefits kick in. When you get to about 20 hp, they will stop. For somebody with 100 forensics, their danger zone is 50 hp and it will stop at 60 hp.
Fishing
-Adding special fish to the spawn system to be used in aquariums. These fish would be things like "Minoc blue fish" and would be obtained through normal fishing or increased chances with half nets.
-Adding in pirate spawns when you fish at certain levels.
-Adding in special "large fish" that are kind of like the big fish. These fish can be turned in to a special NPC that would keep track of the person who caught the largest fish of that type. Also, items would be given to those who hand in a fish, depending on how many stones it was.
Focus
-Might be something that can be done. Regen items have overshadowed it.
-Maybe have your skill in focus determine how much LESS stamina you lose from getting hit. Say for example, you get dumped by some spells and your stam goes down about 60 points, at gm focus, it might only be 30 points.
Glassblowing
-Add in more glass items.
-I'm thinking of having the empty fish tanks needed for fishing be created through a glassblower. These would produce "empty tanks" which would be an ingredient needed to create the tanks. Then a fisherman with enough skill can finish the tanks off. Therefore you'd need a glassblower to make the tanks and a fisherman to assemble them.
Healing
-No change
Herding
-This is a great idea. Have the tamer's skill in herding affect pack instinct damage. The higher the herding, the more damage the pack will do. Also, higher herding could unlock new pack instincts. For example, before you can use canine pack instinct, you must have 50% herding ability. We could add new ones such as undead, etc that can only be used by GM herders.
-Herding skill could also have an effect on creatures with pack instincts that aren't tamed by you. For example, canine pack instinct could have an effect on all types of dogs/wolves. Either tameable or non-tameable. Say a wolf like Gnaw is attacking you. Normally you cannot tame it. But say you use herding on it you can cause it to ignore you using your knowledge in herding. So when you use herding on it, it will stop being flagged against you. Either that or lesser animals like dire wolves and such would not flag against you if you have herding at a certain amount.
Hiding
-Possibly increase the chance of laying a trap without being revealed depend on how high your hiding skill is.
Inscription
-Ways of making scrolls useful. Maybe have it so you can use a scroll regardless of knowledge in magery/other and the like but have them take twice as long to cast. So even at 0 scribe, you could hypothetically cast "summon daemon" but the chance would be very small (Like 1%). As your magery increases, the chance and time it takes to cast that spell from a scroll would improve.
-Spell Embedding: Would allow you to embed a scroll into any blade. An embedded scroll would be like a scroll applied to a weapon, giving it charges (Kind of like wands). There would be a maximum amount of charges per weapon (let's say 10 for now) and any scroll could be applied to a weapon. For example, you could embed 10 scrolls of strangle to a weapon to gain the ability to cast "strangle" with your weapon. Only 1 type of spell can be applied to a weapon at any given time (So you can't have say, strangle AND cure on the same weapon). Also, in order to do this you would need to have at least GM scribe ability and you would need to make a special item to transfer the scroll to the weapon (Kind of like a switch and a scroll).
-More recipes. Most specifically books that require more than 100% inscribe to make.
Item Identification
-Perhaps bring back the curse/hex system. Sometimes an item may be cursed which means upon wearing it, you cannot remove it until the curse is removed (Removing the curse on the item would require a dispel hex scroll that would cost a sum of money from scribes. GM+ scribes could also create them). Also, cursed items would give minus skills + stats upon being worn (Won't show up UNTIL the item is equipped). There could be different strengths of curses.
Lockpicking
-Have lockpicking affect more than just chests. Have some doors which can be lockpicked.
Lumberjacking
-UOML pretty much breathed life into the skill
Mace Fighting
-No change
Magery
-Giving summon creature a used through a gump system allowing you to choose which creature to summon. Magery has been around for a long time so not much should be done with it. The ONLY changes for magery I could think of would be to bring back some of the spells that were more useful during pre-aos (Like reflect magic would actually reflect a spell back onto the caster or reactive armor working like reflect physical damage).
Meditation
-Because of all the mana regen items, this skill (Like focus) has become overshadowed. Have not yet figured out a way to increase its power.
Mining
-UOML already gave a use to this skill.
Musicianship
-Bardic Weapons. Instruments with charges that will heal, harm, cure or do something special depending on the bard's skill in music (Example, flamestring lute working like wildfire or "the peacekeeper" freezing everything within radius dependant on your skill in peacemaking.
Necromancy
-No change
Ninjitsu
-No change
Parrying
-No change
Peacemaking
-Possibly redoing the formula so that peacemaking is actually worth getting and can be used versus some of the tougher monsters.
Poisoning
-Add in darkglow + parasitic poisons so that they can be applied to weapons.
Provocation
-No change
Remove Trap
-Give a chance of avoiding the trap's damage once you've stepped on it (Take reduced damage or no damage at all)
-Disarms the trap when the button is used (Removes it and forces it to enter respawn mode. Perfect for scouting. The higher your skill the more traps you can disarm from the center target (Like a gm, any traps within a 3 x 3 tile range from the target would get removed).
Resisting Spells
-No change as of yet. Possibly have it reduce the damage you'd take from spells.
Spell Weaving
-No change
Spirit Speak
-No change
Stealing
-Allow stealing in trammel but not in towns (Insta guardwhack in trammel)
Stealth
-No changes
Stonecrafting
-Boost to masonry (Stone Carving). Add more stone entries
Swordsmanship
-No changes
Tactics
-I'd have more special shots require tactics (Equal tactics to special shots (1st special shot requiring 70 wep + 70 tactics and the second special shot requiring 90 wep + 90 tactics)) unfortunately, this would cause an uproar with every single mage. However, if we allow mage weapon to give mages the ability to use special shots and tweak certain mage arties to have that property, it might be possible. This is one of those "double buff" instances. If we remove the special shots from magery, there would have to be an equal benefit towards mages (Such as higher spell damage or more common weapon finds with the "mage weapon" attribute).
Taste ID
-Increase the effect of eating special foods such as grapes of wrath, other cooking and such (More bonus, longer timers)
-Add into the game special items that will require "taste" to identify. For example, magical pools of water around the world. Like, say you go into paroxysmus dungeon and use a bottle on the acid. The bottle would be known as "An unexamined subtance". Only way to be able to use the item in the bottle is to use taste ID on it to identify it. Once it is identified, you would find out that it's really "Toxic Acid" and it becomes a new item that can be sold or used (Toxic acid would work like an explosion potion, doing damage to whoever it touches and causing poison damage).
Another example would be the radiating lake of cold in the prism of light. You could get "frozen water" that can be used for other things. Even when killing enemies you can get items like this. If you cut some of them, they may drop "Unknown meat". If you use taste ID on it, you could discover it to be "Unicorn rib" or whatever. When it's been discovered, you can then eat it and get special bonuses. Undiscovered items will be greyish with the word "Unknown" in front of it (As though they were ghosted). Once they are discovered, the name is replaced with a new tag and hue and the item can be used.
Tailoring
-Like blacksmithing, give armors special properties. AOS really fucked up the armor system and there's really no benefits to armor besides look.
Tinkering
-No change
Tracking
-No change
Wrestling
-No change
Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:2523, old post ID:16047
Alchemy
-Add in new potions. Create some "custom" potions and emphasize on perfecting the alchemy bonus in conjunction with enhance potions. Let's bring back the pvp alchemist
Anatomy
-No change
Animal Lore
-No change
Animal Taming
-No change
Archery
-No change
Arms Lore
-Already affects crafting so that's good
Begging
-Begging to receive special and rare items from npcs. Instead of getting gold you could get ps's, decor and even more!
Blacksmithy
-Maybe making metal armor resist more than leather and give it the power to absorb spell damage per piece if it's a metal armor.
Bowcraft/Fletching
-UOML pretty much increased the usefulness of this anyways. Only thing I would personally do is make crafting arrows actually worthwhile (1 board = 1 arrow? I don't think so).
Bushido
-Upon finding that "unreleased" attack gump for bushido, we might consider going with my "dragonball" idea.
Camping
-Collect different wood types (Yew kindling, bloodwood kindling). Kindling lights depending on your skill (Like bloodwood kindling would take enough camping skill). The burning fires of different woods would give special bonuses
-Ranger skills. Upon successfully reaching 100% camping and 100% melee skill such as swords/macing/fencing/archery, they get the ranger title and have access to create and use special traps such as snares which can be crafted but only useable by people with sufficient camping skill.
Carpentry
-Boost to masonry (Stone Carving). Add more stone entries
Cartography
-Bumping treasure chests and adding relics (See relic idea in the forums)
-Terraform abilities upon GM (By reading a "terraform" book in the gargoyle city) Would allow the cartographer to manipulate the land (Create trees, rocks that would block people etc). Terraform is quite "out there" idea but would basically give the power to manipulate terrain for cartographers. A quest would likely be involved.
Chivalry
-No change
Cooking
-Adding more recipes for cooking (Grapes of wrath, skill fruits, all kinds of other beneficial items with magical properties)
-Wildlife attractors. These would be locked down in houses and created using the cooking skill. After some time has passed, these cooked goodies would attract special colored birds and other wildlife to the area
Detect Hidden
-Something along the lines of revealing hidden traps when you get within range. Also might add in a passive reveal at gm level.
-Could possibly increase its use by creating items/bonuses that spawn as being hidden and must be detected before they can be taken (Like hidden weapons, potions, etc in dungeons). Stuff that's hidden and can't be seen unless you detect.
Discordance
-No change
Evaluating INT
-No change
Fencing
-No change
Forensic Evaluation
-Avoiding Death/Assasinate. Seeing as the study of forensic evaluation deals with the dead, I thought it would be logical that there be certain bonuses to death. Here's the benefits of getting forensic eval:
-Avoid Death: Depending on how much forensic eval you have, you can avoid death (Kinda). When your hp drops below the "danger zone" (Danger zone being low hp like 20%), you go into a defensive stance. All your regens go up as well as your lmc and dci but your attack power and hci is halved during that stance. This allows you to avoid death while you go to heal up. Once you've healed over your danger spot, the bonus/losses are removed. This might not be a great idea however when it comes to pvp, but it's still an idea.
-Assasinate: Once your opponent's health is at a "danger zone" (How high the danger zone goes depends on your knowledge in forensics. More on that later) your attack chance increases against that opponent as well as a slight damage increase. This makes it easier for you to kill opponents who are near death without them healing up fully.
What is a Danger Zone?: A danger zone is a percent of health of either you or your opponent, that is near death. For example, 10/100 hp would be a severe danger zone, where you are moments away from death. With forensic eval, once YOU enter a danger zone of say 10 hp, your regens will increase to try and help you survive. Once you jump back up to a healthy state (Let's say, 30 hp in this example) the regens stop. Your danger zone will go up hp wise for every 10 points of forensic eval (Starting at 5hp). Human 20 skill gives you a danger zone of 10hp so when your hits reach 10hp or lower, your benefits kick in. When you get to about 20 hp, they will stop. For somebody with 100 forensics, their danger zone is 50 hp and it will stop at 60 hp.
Fishing
-Adding special fish to the spawn system to be used in aquariums. These fish would be things like "Minoc blue fish" and would be obtained through normal fishing or increased chances with half nets.
-Adding in pirate spawns when you fish at certain levels.
-Adding in special "large fish" that are kind of like the big fish. These fish can be turned in to a special NPC that would keep track of the person who caught the largest fish of that type. Also, items would be given to those who hand in a fish, depending on how many stones it was.
Focus
-Might be something that can be done. Regen items have overshadowed it.
-Maybe have your skill in focus determine how much LESS stamina you lose from getting hit. Say for example, you get dumped by some spells and your stam goes down about 60 points, at gm focus, it might only be 30 points.
Glassblowing
-Add in more glass items.
-I'm thinking of having the empty fish tanks needed for fishing be created through a glassblower. These would produce "empty tanks" which would be an ingredient needed to create the tanks. Then a fisherman with enough skill can finish the tanks off. Therefore you'd need a glassblower to make the tanks and a fisherman to assemble them.
Healing
-No change
Herding
-This is a great idea. Have the tamer's skill in herding affect pack instinct damage. The higher the herding, the more damage the pack will do. Also, higher herding could unlock new pack instincts. For example, before you can use canine pack instinct, you must have 50% herding ability. We could add new ones such as undead, etc that can only be used by GM herders.
-Herding skill could also have an effect on creatures with pack instincts that aren't tamed by you. For example, canine pack instinct could have an effect on all types of dogs/wolves. Either tameable or non-tameable. Say a wolf like Gnaw is attacking you. Normally you cannot tame it. But say you use herding on it you can cause it to ignore you using your knowledge in herding. So when you use herding on it, it will stop being flagged against you. Either that or lesser animals like dire wolves and such would not flag against you if you have herding at a certain amount.
Hiding
-Possibly increase the chance of laying a trap without being revealed depend on how high your hiding skill is.
Inscription
-Ways of making scrolls useful. Maybe have it so you can use a scroll regardless of knowledge in magery/other and the like but have them take twice as long to cast. So even at 0 scribe, you could hypothetically cast "summon daemon" but the chance would be very small (Like 1%). As your magery increases, the chance and time it takes to cast that spell from a scroll would improve.
-Spell Embedding: Would allow you to embed a scroll into any blade. An embedded scroll would be like a scroll applied to a weapon, giving it charges (Kind of like wands). There would be a maximum amount of charges per weapon (let's say 10 for now) and any scroll could be applied to a weapon. For example, you could embed 10 scrolls of strangle to a weapon to gain the ability to cast "strangle" with your weapon. Only 1 type of spell can be applied to a weapon at any given time (So you can't have say, strangle AND cure on the same weapon). Also, in order to do this you would need to have at least GM scribe ability and you would need to make a special item to transfer the scroll to the weapon (Kind of like a switch and a scroll).
-More recipes. Most specifically books that require more than 100% inscribe to make.
Item Identification
-Perhaps bring back the curse/hex system. Sometimes an item may be cursed which means upon wearing it, you cannot remove it until the curse is removed (Removing the curse on the item would require a dispel hex scroll that would cost a sum of money from scribes. GM+ scribes could also create them). Also, cursed items would give minus skills + stats upon being worn (Won't show up UNTIL the item is equipped). There could be different strengths of curses.
Lockpicking
-Have lockpicking affect more than just chests. Have some doors which can be lockpicked.
Lumberjacking
-UOML pretty much breathed life into the skill
Mace Fighting
-No change
Magery
-Giving summon creature a used through a gump system allowing you to choose which creature to summon. Magery has been around for a long time so not much should be done with it. The ONLY changes for magery I could think of would be to bring back some of the spells that were more useful during pre-aos (Like reflect magic would actually reflect a spell back onto the caster or reactive armor working like reflect physical damage).
Meditation
-Because of all the mana regen items, this skill (Like focus) has become overshadowed. Have not yet figured out a way to increase its power.
Mining
-UOML already gave a use to this skill.
Musicianship
-Bardic Weapons. Instruments with charges that will heal, harm, cure or do something special depending on the bard's skill in music (Example, flamestring lute working like wildfire or "the peacekeeper" freezing everything within radius dependant on your skill in peacemaking.
Necromancy
-No change
Ninjitsu
-No change
Parrying
-No change
Peacemaking
-Possibly redoing the formula so that peacemaking is actually worth getting and can be used versus some of the tougher monsters.
Poisoning
-Add in darkglow + parasitic poisons so that they can be applied to weapons.
Provocation
-No change
Remove Trap
-Give a chance of avoiding the trap's damage once you've stepped on it (Take reduced damage or no damage at all)
-Disarms the trap when the button is used (Removes it and forces it to enter respawn mode. Perfect for scouting. The higher your skill the more traps you can disarm from the center target (Like a gm, any traps within a 3 x 3 tile range from the target would get removed).
Resisting Spells
-No change as of yet. Possibly have it reduce the damage you'd take from spells.
Spell Weaving
-No change
Spirit Speak
-No change
Stealing
-Allow stealing in trammel but not in towns (Insta guardwhack in trammel)
Stealth
-No changes
Stonecrafting
-Boost to masonry (Stone Carving). Add more stone entries
Swordsmanship
-No changes
Tactics
-I'd have more special shots require tactics (Equal tactics to special shots (1st special shot requiring 70 wep + 70 tactics and the second special shot requiring 90 wep + 90 tactics)) unfortunately, this would cause an uproar with every single mage. However, if we allow mage weapon to give mages the ability to use special shots and tweak certain mage arties to have that property, it might be possible. This is one of those "double buff" instances. If we remove the special shots from magery, there would have to be an equal benefit towards mages (Such as higher spell damage or more common weapon finds with the "mage weapon" attribute).
Taste ID
-Increase the effect of eating special foods such as grapes of wrath, other cooking and such (More bonus, longer timers)
-Add into the game special items that will require "taste" to identify. For example, magical pools of water around the world. Like, say you go into paroxysmus dungeon and use a bottle on the acid. The bottle would be known as "An unexamined subtance". Only way to be able to use the item in the bottle is to use taste ID on it to identify it. Once it is identified, you would find out that it's really "Toxic Acid" and it becomes a new item that can be sold or used (Toxic acid would work like an explosion potion, doing damage to whoever it touches and causing poison damage).
Another example would be the radiating lake of cold in the prism of light. You could get "frozen water" that can be used for other things. Even when killing enemies you can get items like this. If you cut some of them, they may drop "Unknown meat". If you use taste ID on it, you could discover it to be "Unicorn rib" or whatever. When it's been discovered, you can then eat it and get special bonuses. Undiscovered items will be greyish with the word "Unknown" in front of it (As though they were ghosted). Once they are discovered, the name is replaced with a new tag and hue and the item can be used.
Tailoring
-Like blacksmithing, give armors special properties. AOS really fucked up the armor system and there's really no benefits to armor besides look.
Tinkering
-No change
Tracking
-No change
Wrestling
-No change
Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:2523, old post ID:16047