Item Creation

[Epona]

The day I suffer any guilt as the result of playing a computer game is the day I book in with a mental hospital [img]graemlins/saywhat.gif[/img]

[Stratos]

Just tell us where it is and we'll come and visit. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[SpiritWarrior]

Originally posted by ScottG: "Game balance. Guilt. Playing in character. Three very valid reasons." Not as far as a ruleset is concerned, what your refering to are subjective assesments. What is balanced, guilt causing, or playing in character is really up to each individual person - which isn't something that is readily quantifiable (I know, I've tried). Whats OK to you might not be OK to someone else - just look at the responses so far.

You have to agree though, that there is a general consesus on what is uber and what ain't....

[ScottG]

I'm not even sure about that, at least in comparison to character/opponent level.

for instance in HOTU I've tried on hit cast chain lightning and didn't find it "uber" - on the other hand against most opponents on hit cast harm is exactly what I'd call "uber". I think then at the absolute end of the spectrum virtually all would agree on what IS uber - but you have to get pretty far over to that end of the spectrum b4 you'll see that sort of consensus.

[SpiritWarrior]

Well I would consider both harm and chain lightning crossing the line. Anyone else out of the many I game with would too. Like I said, most servers worth their salt will strip OnhitCastspell anyways.

[ScottG]

see we don't agree, you would dispose of on hit chain lightning absolutely (regardless of level) and I wouldn't..

the nice thing about the striping though (provided your informed in advance) is that it IS objective - anyone jumping on that server doesn't have to think twice about that particular aspect of an item - just don't have it when you log-on.

[SpiritWarrior]

No, level 1 would be fine ideally but for 2 reasons:

1) We have many uber wannabe kids playing this game who would abuse such a rule and hike the level up. The theoretical solution is to script Onhitcastspell to be legal only at say, levels 1-5 but this is nulled by my next reason for practical purposes.

2) Onhitcastspell anything can cause severe lag. Make a weapon with 'Onhitcastspell Weird' on it and you'll see what I mean. Weird firing on every hit. For a higher level character who has multiple attacks per round this can crash a server and/or anyone else witnessing it due to severe video lag as the vfx duplicates itself successively.

The Onhitcastspell feature was made really for offline use, in modules created by the community and not to be attached to every item and dragged into every online server out there. George Zoeller himself concedes this, and tells us this feature was included mainly for the OC which can only be played offline and then just released to the public later.

[Chewbacca]

Hey just an FYI...I will be adding an item forge to my character mod in the next ten days or so. Thanks to Philip's scripting expertise, it will have some built in limits so one cant go too overboard but it will not offer the full range of modifications available in the toolset right off the bat either.

Sucks you can't rename items in the game itself or it would be perfect. Anyway if you like making items and you can stand the moderate limits, the forge maybe for you. Plus you can make an item and then go test you character with it in the arena in pretty much one setting as well. [img]smile.gif[/img]

It will be fairly easy to customize and easy to remove or alter the limits as well, so if you like the forge but hate the limits then you can tweak it all you want.

Creating balanced items is one of those things I agonize over as both a builder and a player. One wrong move and the whole balance thing flies out the window.

Best of luck and most importantly have fun! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Memnoch]

Well, I reckon that the On Hit:Cast Spell property is a bit of a waste of space at the moment, mainly because it fires every time a successful hit is made. It might not do what it's supposed to do every single time (ie if the opponent makes its DC checks or saves) but the spell, including graphics, etc will always fire on hit. At epic levels where your PC is pretty much hitting anything in sight it can get massively munchkinny, with all these fireballs, lightning bolts, etc exploding all around you as you cut a swathe through your foes.

That said, there's a place for it as an Item Property, as long as you can control the frequency with which it fires. For example, you might have an artifact (eg a sword) that does 1d6 points of electrical damage on hit, and on 10% of successful hits casts Chain Lightning. You were able to do this fairly easily in the Infinity Games using TeamBG's IEEP, but in Aurora I guess you've got to script it. I wonder if someone will eventually create a hak to get around this, eh.