The newbie experience

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demiskeleton
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The newbie experience

Post by demiskeleton »

Hello all, recently me and my friends joined this game and community and have been enjoying it a lot. the old school feel of an MMO where things aren't just handed to you is wonderful, it actually feels like i'm exploring and discovering again.

There are some shortcomings though mostly in just knowledge availability which I think is just product of not many newbies giving their feedback and most of the players being well experienced. Even when we get stuck and ask for help a lot of people have forgotten where NPCs are and have to find them again as they haven't done the quest in years.

I'll make this thread where I post all the questions our group had that was difficult to find / not on the wiki. A lot of the time we would ask in global and get kind of just "oh just do X!" and we would ask why and the response was "because that's just how it is" which we are thankful for but still wish to know the mechanics of why.

questions:
what is the defense formula?
how much dmg does poison do? (learned 30% player current hp a tick and 1% enemy hp a second)
what does a magic orb do? (increase mana regen? how much is it worth it?)
can tint's stack? (seems not)
explain shrines better? like why would anyone use black? over just pure
how does +2 affect things? like staff vs sword changing spells is it just +2 dmg a hit?
staff does what for casting? like hard values
tints affect necromancy?
do boss mobs give give more exp?
what do large mobs do? just more hp? more exp?
tints on items? fishing rod/ quill are these useless ?
most guard quests are go kill X at Y. this lead us to diving WAY too deep into dungeons when often the X was on floor 1 or 2 hidden.
nightvision seems useless? does it affect hit chance or targeting distance?

updates:
faveoux share kills for quests. we found a lot of early game quests had this issue when doing a party. only the person who got the kill got credit
faveoux was a major for this we had a group of 3 so had to kill him 3 times.
early pets need hp buff so they are viable perhaps hpMax += player taming lvl - taming lvl requirement
so a cow of 0% being tamed by a player with 85% taming would get a cow with +85 hp but an imp of 80% requirement just gets +5 hp
unless this is intended to make anything but late game pets useless which seems kind of sad and empty content
different type of arrows / ranged as a class. my friend sleeves who is playing a rogue archer kind of had the feel that all the rogue stuff was meant for stabbing / hiding and not much for ranged. i'm unsure i'll try to get him to post here with his thoughts more
make some deaths public just a fun little "player died to cursed res scroll" types
rogue quests for lord byron advisers not showing in quest log

now these are just our questions we've had so far. please don't feel we had a bad experience the good far outweighs the bad for me so far!
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Balmung
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Re: The newbie experience

Post by Balmung »

demiskeleton wrote: Thu Jul 16, 2020 3:23 am questions:
what does a magic orb do? (increase mana regen? how much is it worth it?)
can tint's stack? (seems not)
explain shrines better? like why would anyone use black? over just pure
how does +2 affect things? like staff vs sword changing spells is it just +2 dmg a hit?
tints affect necromancy?
do boss mobs give give more exp?
what do large mobs do? just more hp? more exp?
tints on items? fishing rod/ quill are these useless ?
nightvision seems useless? does it affect hit chance or targeting distance?
depends on the orb. you can find blank orbs across your adventures. these do nothing. Runes are the same way. You can craft orbs with wand of transfer, or enchant them with the enchanting skill(classless).
Orb of hp and orb of mana increase the respective value by 10% (this is in the manual). Orb of power is currently seemingly useless, due to a bug? There was some posts regarding a larger issue this is related to, in which + AS enchantments in the offhand slot don't affect damage.

tints can stack. If a mob is bleeding from barbed, it can also be poisoned from a venomous weapon. Only one tint per weapon. However, two venomous weapons would be redundant, if that's what you mean by stack.

+ AS (+2 for example) increases the base damage you deal and also increases your attack strength. When you melee attack any mob, if your AS doesn't break an enemy's defense you will do significantly less damage. Not sure on the math though. I believe AS just increases base damage for spells. I dont think spells care about enemy defense, unsure if AS plays a role in breaking enemy MR.

Tints do affect necromancy spells. Having used a vampyric staff on a necromancer build I was able to "steal" life from targets just fine. While it's secondhand info, I understand Assailant was also getting life from spellcasting with a vampyric necro melee weapon.

I had always understood boss mobs to give more exp, and they also drop an unidentified item. There is an auxbox script to see how much exp you recieve from each kill if you care to set it up. There is a thread for it, don't recall where but I'm pretty sure its been stickied.

large mobs, or 2x2s are a variant boss, as are hybrids (two different colors present on their avatar/appearance). They give more exp and seemingly have better loot quality. I say seemingly because I haven't had the auxbox set up in years, so I don't know empirically.

tints affect items in different ways. for example rare, prized, and wounderous are tints on food. Wounderous fish heal more than prized or rare but don't make other types of fish useless. Adamatium fishing rods can be used to fish in lava and receive dragonscale boots (allows you to walk on lava without damage) but don't make regular or superior rods useless. If you've seen blackrock/ebony tools in the crystal coin shops, those are unbreakable. In a way these make some tools obsolete but you must have mastered a few skills before making them, and they come with a hefty price. These are endgame items, plenty of players don't even bother to make these. Anyone who is afk all day probably has a full set haha.

Nightvision, or NV, is a quality of life stat anymore. Before lighting got changed, without NV or a lightsource a majority of your screen would be black outside at night or in caves/dungeons. Now the game is a little more forgiving, dunno if that was intentional though. I personally still use it quite often. I can't be assed to change around brightness settings or whatever the hell so I can see without it, so I wear an artifact with NV on it. NV was pretty necessary for rouges, since they can't have any gold armor or active light sources when they try to hide. NV bestowed the boon of vision while being able to backstab and loot chests unnoticed.
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Assailant
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Re: The newbie experience

Post by Assailant »

https://euotopia.com/manual/index.php/Necromancer
Wielding hexblade weapons also allows necromancer to cast spells without penalty instead of using a staff, and provide the similar benefits (quicker casting times, weapon tint effects, etc).
Basically hexblade is a better staff for necros unless you feel the need for MR cleave (staff 100 special move) or running a druid dual class.
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eggmceye
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Re: The newbie experience

Post by eggmceye »

I am
* grateful for enthusiastic new players!
* having fun working out these answers: I often have to look thru data files & src code to figure out answers

When I read thread title "the newbie experience" I was sort of expecting a review on how good/bad newbie island and the whole onboarding thing was.

Q: what is the defense formula?
A: the questsion should be - how TF does combat even work? I did write up a page on it in 2004, but since then it has been reworked a dozen times. I can't find any in-depth doc or post on how it works. I should just post the relevant source code and you can figure it out yourself

Q: what does a magic orb do? (increase mana regen? how much is it worth it?)
A: you mean the orb of mana? it gives you+10% of your base mana - you can see this by toggling the equipping of it and seeing your Mana go up & down

Q: how does +2 affect things? like staff vs sword changing spells is it just +2 dmg a hit?
A: sort of part of the howTFcombat question. I checked the manual and sadly its explanation "Also known as weapons of slaying, these weapons have a bonus to damage, and the chance to actually penetrate enemy armour. " is half right and half uselss. They add damage (but it is not simply+2, it is scaled to weapon speed) plus increase AS, which is its own can of worms (see, again, howTFcombat )

Q:staff does what for casting? like hard values
A: for sorc, magery and druid spells only: mana is 75% of what it would normally be, casting cooloff is rewritten using this formula:

Code: Select all

gc_casting_cooloff = (gc_casting_cooloff - 1000) / 2.25 + 1000;
where gc_casting_cooloff is the default spell cooloff (as defined in spells.txt) in ms

Q: do boss mobs give give more exp?
A: 2x xp

Q: what do large mobs do? just more hp? more exp?
A: 3x xp, but their stats are scaled using a 'proprietary algorithm' LAUGHING OUT LOUD LIKE A MORON

Q: tints on items? fishing rod/ quill are these useless ?
A: blackrock tools are unbreakable, addy rod works in lava, that's about it

Q most guard quests are go kill X at Y. this lead us to diving WAY too deep into dungeons when often the X was on floor 1 or 2 hidden.
A I think people thes days are used to being hand held by quest pointers, auto-routing, etc

Q nightvision seems useless? does it affect hit chance or targeting distance?
A affects tiles drawn on screen, visual only, does not affect target distance or hit chance. possibly interesting idea to make it do something numerical

Q:faveoux share kills for quests. we found a lot of early game quests had this issue when doing a party. only the person who got the kill got credit. faveoux was a major for this we had a group of 3 so had to kill him 3 times.
A:That's annoying for you: I thought I fixed this but obviously not - probably only still an annoyance for grey bar quest targets, of which there are not many left: just foveaux and maybe 1 or 2 more. Most quest targets 'always spawn' with red/evil hp bars.

Q:early pets need hp buff so they are viable perhaps hpMax += player taming lvl - taming lvl requirement
A:everyone has an opinion on pets: mine is they need completely reworking but who has the time/enthusiasm? On the alpha server pets have been testing a rework where they are all scaled to the tamer's level: https://forums.swut.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4153

Q: different type of arrows / ranged as a class
A: not the first person to ask for that

Q: make some deaths public just a fun little "player died to cursed res scroll" types
A: or when a player type /delete DELETE

Q: rogue quests for lord byron advisers not showing in quest log
A: bugs thread over there https://forums.swut.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5455 , also those quests needs massively reworking (I hate quests)
Chedich
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Re: The newbie experience

Post by Chedich »

eggmceye wrote: Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:47 am Q: what is the defense formula?
A: the questsion should be - how TF does combat even work? I did write up a page on it in 2004, but since then it has been reworked a dozen times. I can't find any in-depth doc or post on how it works. I should just post the relevant source code and you can figure it out yourself
Regardiging combat/damage, you did post the following back in 2015, which I think is fairly detailed.
https://forums.swut.net/viewtopic.php?f ... 26&p=88878
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eggmceye
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Re: The newbie experience

Post by eggmceye »

I'd forgotten about that ... after quick scan of it, I note:
i) the 10k MR immunity rule is now deleted
ii) there is no discussion of how weapon speed and/or 2handedness affects base damage
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