Electrifier

[Kane0]

I think the problem isn't recharging items so much as it is overcharging them. Just stop the electrifier from being able to charge an item beyond its normal maximum.

[sphinx]

Looks like driller already capped it at 50. That should be good. I think you also get less charges for higher lvl items....only tested 5 times but seems like enough to me.

[driller]

I haven't changed it yet.

[sphinx]

Ah maybe I didnt feed mine enough.

[Wing--Zero]

Well since we were in the talks of things being cheezy on the BlackRose post...I was gonna make this one last point but, I think this would be the most appropriate place to do so. If you ask me I think the quality of PvP and the PvM dynamic has changed completly due to these items being in the game. The Recharge ability of the Electrifier is a bit insane to say the least. What issue everyone is tip toeing around is the fact that not only can you use the Electrifier to add 250 to rings but, it also does the exact same to wands you craft and it also keeps your Rods of Ressurection at 50 charges vs the 10 charges the wand starts out with allowing. So you may use this item unlimited times per day and add them to your wands you craft to raise them from the 33-50 charges you get when you craft them to 250 uses. Meaning once you craft a rod of any level 4 spell and below all you have to do is pop a item in the electrifier and charge it once and you have 250 uses out of it!! Than there is no need for crafters to make another set or wand for a LONG time.

The most cheezy thing to me in fights is when people start to read heal scrolls and use rods of resurrection with 50 charges on it. I think that not only destroys the life of PvP but, also to be honest....It steals away one of the things from the Cleric for PvM to raise with resurrection. The Rod seemed like it was intended to only have 10 uses when designed. It was just by chance players learned that if you take a really good item put it into to the rod that you could get 40 extra charges to it. Me personally I think the Rod of Ressurection should be capped to 10 like it was intended. So there not as powerful. I also think if you want the problem solved remove the electrifier completely but, 10 charges would be a good middle ground!

I think that is a perfect idea to add a little of a nerf to something that is obviously overpowered. Since everyone wants to bring up the 10 time stop scrolls in merchants lets also get to the heart of the matter on the problem with scrolls ....Make it so YOU CANNOT CRAFT SCROLLS IN THE ARENA!! That is what has created this overpowered scroll use from EVERYONE. If you do these 3 things than PvP will eventually start to level out again.

again those would be:

1) Make it so the Electrifier is gone or has only 10-5 charges than dissapears

2) Make the Rod of Resurrection only able to raise 10 times than its gone and cant be charged or make it a 1-2 uses per day item.

3) Make it so people can no longer Mass Produce Scrolls in the Arena. So that way you have to spend time resting and waiting for the 2 hour period before you can cast anymore b/c the Arena bypasses this wait period so you can just keep making scrolls left and right.

[Yunim]

Nerfing the rod will just mean that players use Resurrection scrolls instead. The rod is a quality of life item more than anything else.

[Sorcy Sid]

Nerfing the rod will just mean that players use Resurrection scrolls instead. The rod is a quality of life item more than anything else.

True. Both also cost gold to achieve. The only big difference is after ten scrolls you may have to put another ten in a Qslot.

[The Flying Rodent]

What issue everyone is tip toeing around is the fact that not only can you use the Electrifier to add 250 to rings but, it also does the exact same to wands you craft and it also keeps your Rods of Ressurection at 50 charges vs the 10 charges the wand starts out with allowing. So you may use this item unlimited times per day and add them to your wands you craft to raise them from the 33-50 charges you get when you craft them to 250 uses. Meaning once you craft a rod of any level 4 spell and below all you have to do is pop a item in the electrifier and charge it once and you have 250 uses out of it!! Than there is no need for crafters to make another set or wand for a LONG time.

These are the uses for the electrifier that Yunim and I brought up earlier yes. At present, it’s only necessary for UMD users to have 1 wand/rod of each spell type that they keep eternally charged, which means that there isn’t much business for Cleric magic wand/scroll crafters.

Reducing the charges would make these characters more useful, as people instead would have to use multiple wands as each one ran out , and purchase / make resurrection scrolls as well. This would make Cleric item crafters more valued than they are now, which I don’t mind [heck, send me a PM, Jill can fix you up! ]

The most cheezy thing to me in fights is when people start to read heal scrolls and use rods of resurrection with 50 charges on it. I think that not only destroys the life of PvP but, also to be honest....It steals away one of the things from the Cleric for PvM to raise with resurrection. The Rod seemed like it was intended to only have 10 uses when designed. It was just by chance players learned that if you take a really good item put it into to the rod that you could get 40 extra charges to it. Me personally I think the Rod of Ressurection should be capped to 10 like it was intended. So there not as powerful. I also think if you want the problem solved remove the electrifier completely but, 10 charges would be a good middle ground!

I think this change will effectively remove the electrifier for what it is most used for now. At best, people will have multiple crafted wands all maxed at 10 charges that are kept topped up with an Electrifier, but definitely the 2-charge Rod will require people to use Ressurection scrolls instead.

But after that, think about it ... what’s to stop people from doing exactly the same thing in PvP and PvM with Resurrection scrolls as they did with the Resurrection rod? Clerics in PvP would still have little use unless people agreed to not using scrolls beforehand ... which doesn’t happen in no-holds-barred PvP (such as in Blackrose, or when people just want to flat out fight dirty).

Which is the 2nd point I alluded to: the root of the cheese is not the Electrifier. The problem is with Magic Items that cast Fixed Magnitude spells (I.e ones that don’t rely on Caster level for effectiveness). Which, again, include wands/scrolls/rods/etc. that cast spells like Heal, Resurrection, Word of Faith, Time Stop, Harm, basically any Minute or Hour/level buff, Summons, etc. This is not an issue specifically to do with Blackstone, but NWN in general.

The problem is 2 fold: these items firstly replace the need for a Caster of a certain type to be in a party (such as a cleric with Heal and Res spells), and then secondly drastically increase the limit on the amount of spells that can be cast in one sitting. This limit is not ‘X spells per day’ , but ‘X amount of items sitting in ones inventory ready to be used’, and the only factor that determines that is the patience of the person who has gathered them.

I don’t see these items being removed, because at this point they are endemic to the server and removing them would cause universal outrage. Additionally, removing access to the items without addressing the items themselves just puts MORE power in the hands of older players who had the opportunity to hoard them before the change, so I don’t see that happening either.

But regardless, if one ‘really’ wanted to balance things out in PvP and PvM by reducing the cheese, removing magic items that cast fixed magnitude spells would be a good start.

And the most obvious example of a magic item that causes balance problems in my eyes is:

I think that is a perfect idea to add a little of a nerf to something that is obviously overpowered. Since everyone wants to bring up the 10 time stop scrolls in merchants lets also get to the heart of the matter on the problem with scrolls ....Make it so YOU CANNOT CRAFT SCROLLS IN THE ARENA!! That is what has created this overpowered scroll use from EVERYONE. If you do these 3 things than PvP will eventually start to level out again.

My comment was intended to be a joke, as I thought it’d be comical to imagine several people fighting over the electrifier by ‘reading’ at each other.

That said, if you think the problem is specifically WHERE one can craft time stop scrolls, and not the fact that THEY JUST EXIST and can be used anywhere, let’s think about this scenario.

————————————————————————————————————————————

Imagine someone had the patience and diligence to craft 5 full inventory pages worth of time stop scrolls. We’re talking 60x 5 = 300 slots worth , or 3,000 scrolls.

Each scroll lasts about 6-9 seconds , depending on how far apart the user spaces each ‘reading session’.

Now imagine for whatever reason that they get into a beef with someone, and an arms race ensues resulting in someone hoarding this amount of scrolls, with the sole intent of winning at all costs.

If they manage to land the very first time stop scroll, how long can they realistically keep their opponent stun locked?

The answer is: 18,000-27,000 seconds, which is 300-450 minutes, or 5-7.5 hours. So about half a server reset worth of time.

————————————————————————————————————————————

Now let’s consider another scenario: Someone doesn’t have 5 pages worth of scrolls, but 5 pages worth of BAGS filled with scrolls. NOW we’re talking 350 x 15 x 5 = 26,250 scrolls.

I’ll let you do the calculation on this one, and then you can get back to me on whether you still don’t think it’s the scrolls themselves that are causing the cheese ...

[driller]

Requiring the PC recharging a spell to have that spell ready might be a solution.

In other words, you have a wand of resurrection you want recharged, then a Cleric would be needed to do it.

[The Flying Rodent]

Requiring the PC recharging a spell to have that spell ready might be a solution.

In other words, you have a wand of resurrection you want recharged, then a Cleric would be needed to do it.

I like this idea. People would then additionally use their party cleric for communal recharges as well as heals, which would further encourage people to group up.

[Cornflower]

Items that can be charged 250 heals and rez. No, it is not a quality of life, it is utterly broken.

Why do you want to play a game where you basically have no risk whatsoever? Is that even fun?

I was looking at the number of charges an item can hold. But really, the whole concept of recharging an item leads to imbalance.

I don't agree. It's a legal item regardless if it's a wand or a rechargable item. It's not something you hoard to exploit, it's more of a convenience or quality-of-life, same as regen. If you put max regen on every item you have, it still useless in a fight. It only gives you an easier heal between fights. Instead of carrying lots of potions, you can regain some HP between fights.

Also, if you charge a wand to max 250 charges, the level requirement rises rapidly, so you can't really abuse it.

The random property remover, that could be abused. But the recharger? Nah. Quality of life, not abuse.

No, I wasn't talking about 250 heals. Sorry if I was unclear. I was talking about wands with Bull's Strength, Protection against Alignment and all of those. If you can get a wand of Cat's Grace, the difference between 50 charges (which is what you get from my wizard) or 250 charges is only convenience. That was what I meant.

I really don't want a game with no risk. I had a ring of nine lives with 250 charges for a while. I agree that such an item should not exist. No argument with that. It would be better to go back to potions of heal and limit them to x% of your max HP, if you want the heal to be available outside of cleric casting.

I also don't want a game with 0 chance of success. That's why I occasionally ask for a lower AC on some bosses or stuff like that.

I also ran a PW for a couple of years, so I know the impossible task of trying to find the perfect balance. I think you're doing a great job in general, even if I sometimes argue the details.

[Alter Fritz]

It seems to me the real issue isn't the Electrifier, but a few items in the game that give full Heal.

Why not remove the abused item? Or make the item with the Heal spell disappear after 10 uses.

I see the Electrifier as a convenience, but can see how it can be abused(because of an item with Heal).

I feel like things are being changed because of items with Heal, instead of just removing the items with Heal.

Just my humble opinion.

[The Flying Rodent]

It seems to me the real issue isn't the Electrifier, but a few items in the game that give full Heal.

Why not remove the abused item? Or make the item with the Heal spell disappear after 10 uses.

I see the Electrifier as a convenience, but can see how it can be abused(because of an item with Heal).

I feel like things are being changed because of items with Heal, instead of just removing the items with Heal.

Just my humble opinion.

The Heal item with 250 charges on it that everybody has been talking about has been nerfed, and is now nowhere near as broken.

But that still leaves other items, and the spell itself. The trouble with the Heal Spell unfortunately , is that it is almost required to be kept at full strength in order to combat certain high level PvM enemies. Even in a large party of people. Nerfing Heal could make these enemies virtually unkillable, as parties struggle to stay alive long enough to kill them.

IIRC from an old thread, driller has nerfed Heal in the past, and a lot of people really disliked it, so it was changed back. Probably for the reason I stated above.

[Alter Fritz]

I'm not saying to nerf the Heal spell, I'm saying get rid of the items that keep causing the abuse(ring of heals or harp or whatever is causing this).

UMD is in the game for a reason. Use that skill if you want heals without a Healer class.

[The Flying Rodent]

I'm not saying to nerf the Heal spell, I'm saying get rid of the items that keep causing the abuse(ring of heals or harp or whatever is causing this).

UMD is in the game for a reason. Use that skill if you want heals without a Healer class.

Both of these items have effectively been removed, so that problem has been dealt with.

Which is why I find it odd that people keep returning to the argument of Healing magic items. They’re pretty much all gone now, so there’s not much else to say about them, lol.

But! You’re on a similar track to my point about Magic items that cast fixed magnitude spells. The root of the issue is not an Electrifier that can be used to charge fixed-magnitude-spell items (let’s call them FMS items for short); it’s that FMS items exist to begin with.

Rather than removing these types of items though, driller seems to be looking at changing how certain FMS items work in conjunction with the Electrifier (e.g the Res Rod requiring the spell Resurrection to be memorised before recharging the item, restricting that duty to Clerics with UMD), which I think is a much more positive approach!