Five on Friday - January 25, 2008
"Enhanced Bandages - do they help if you're already at your skill cap," redux:
Leurocian looked over this again, and it turns out while we were partly right, we were also definitely wrong:
"Using enhanced bandages - even if you’re at your healing cap - will affect the amount of hit points healed. Enhanced bandages essentially adds 10 to your healing skill for the purposes of calculating the amount of hit points healed."
What they do NOT do is improve your success chance (say, for resurrection, which is 64% at GM.) So if you're capped out, they do provide a benefit, but it's a very specific benefit.
(Note: if you're NOT at the cap, one other thing enhanced bandages can do is bump you up over the minimum skill requirements for curing poison (60) and resurrecting (80.) You'll have a pretty low success chance, and you won't be able to gain skill from those attempts, but you can try 'em.)
Thanks to Athos for very kindly pointing out that we'd overlooked something :)
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"What are the property and intensity ranges for runic saws and fletcher's tools??"
Well, this one's long overdue, isn't it? Here you go!
(Incidentally, I'm convinced that one of the reasons that the guide is so behind is that no one wanted to make all those fiddly little item graphics into transparent gifs. Oh, Fletcher's Tool, how I loathe thee!)
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"How are the various Chivalry spells' duration determined?"
There are three spells in Chivalry that have a variable duration - Enemy of One, Divine Fury, and Consecrate Weapon. Turns out they use very nearly the same formula. (Warning, math ahead!)
The base formula is as follows: duration in seconds = (square root(karma + 20000 + (Chivalry*100)) / divisor) The "divisor" part is the bit that varies from skill to skill - for EoO it is 1, for Divine Fury it is 10, and for Consecrate Weapon it is 20. "Karma" can be anything from -20000 to 20000. Chivalry can, obviously, be anything from 0 to 120. It's also all converted to an integer, so fractions are dropped.
As for the actual results, for people who don't want to play with spreadsheets:
Enemy of One: 109 seconds at -20000 karma, 178 seconds at 0 karma, 228 seconds at 20000 karma
Divine Fury: 10 seconds at -20000 karma, 17 seconds at 0 karma, 22 seconds at 20000 karma
Consecrate Weapon: 5 seconds at -20000 karma, 8 seconds at 0 karma, 11 seconds at 20000 karma
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"Does the Jack of All Trades bonus affect the parry/bushido relationship?"
First of all, a few explanations:
Jack of All Trades: a human racial bonus that gives humans a bit of skill (+20) in everything. (This ONLY serves as a minor chance to succeed at untrained skills - it doesn't affect a skill at all once you train it past 20.)
Bushido and Parry: Bushido gives a bonus to your chance to parry with weapons, but reduces your chance to parry with a shield.
What the question is really asking is, does that +20 Bushido from JoAT reduce my chance to parry with a shield? And the answer is no - the JoAT bushido has no effect on your ability to parry whatsoever. Leurocian was particularly thorough with this one - JoAT was specifically designed not to have that effect, and it says so in the code itself, the actual scripts don't use that modifier, plus Leurocian wrote a test script just to make sure, and, sure enough, JoAT does not reduce your parry chance with a shield.
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"When's the next patch, and what's going to be in it?"
We're looking tentatively at getting the next publish out to TC the first week in February - we've got a pretty solid handful of bug fixes planned for it (KR, 2D, and gameplay bugs) we're in the process of looking over the BOD bug fixes and runic intensity tweaks, and, of course, the next event will be included in this one.
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Jacksonville Town Hall
Remember, the first Town Hall of the new year will be March 1 in Jacksonville, FL at Dave and Busters. The RSVP page isn't updated yet, but you can get the address and time on our Town Hall page - we'd love to see you all there!
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Hope everyone had a lovely week - enjoy your weekend!
- Jeremy