A Complete Rebalance - A Comprehensive Conversation

Over the decades Faldon has evolved into something that we have made work and enjoyed in different ways. This latest round of updates has brought back a lot of folks, which has been amazing to see. Unfortunately, a balance hasn't happened in a long time, factors have shifted the meta some, but many skills and classes are left useless. I understand the current meta fairly well and would like to propose a comprehensive discussion on how to balance and make most skills, classes, and help the economy move along.

Skills

Alchemy: Alchemy is largely useless due to the fact that it's cheaper to buy potions than it is to buy or collect the materials necessary.

-Raise the cost of potions by a factor of 4x
-Lower the cost of buying materials necessary to make potions by 80%(Phoenix Feathers, Purple Dandelions, Moon Flowers)
-Raise the amount of Purple Dandelions and Moon Flowers per spawn in the wild - each stack could be 2-3x the amount

Currently you can set an "amount" to craft in the alchemy box, that amount is 10. Most people when raising the skill just set a click macro, and make them for an infinite amount of time. You should be able to set that amount to craft to whatever number you like. There's no reason to have a that limitation in there.

Animal Lore:
Animal lore has little to no use, at high levels it's possible to see other players stats, but that's relatively useless. This skill should be used to go hand in hand with Animal Taming and fishing. Here's how it could be done with minimal impact.

-Your lore level effects the rate at which your pets gain experience - at skill level 200, your pets receive a 200% experience buff
-Reduced feeding at level 200 lore your animal could require 50% less food.
-Improve your likelihood of catching schools of fish while fishing and catching rare loot

Animal Taming: Animal taming is one of the few skills that is still useful. From camping to controlling x number of summons, it's a very necessary skill. Some changes could be made to make it more functional.

-Ghost through your own pets. Depending on the situation, you can get stuck behind your pets with no way to escape (zones that dont allow teleport or town portals)
-Citizens pets go straight to the zoo upon crash or relog assuming they have enough zoo space
-Zoo space should be 2x the amount. 8 is too low, higher level pets can be used in different situations and it makes sense to be able to have multiple types of high level pets.

Archery Archery is mostly fine as it is, one thing that is silly is you can have infinite arrows equipped. Your quiver can literally hold 8 million arrows.  This should be adjusted based on your archery skill level, skill level 1 should allow you to hold 1000 arrows, skill level 200 should allow you to hold 20k arrows. Like all weapon skills, it takes forever to raise. Most weapon skills should raise at a factor of 3-4x faster. It takes around a 6 weeks of constantly firing arrows to achieve level 200, this doesn't make any sense with the amount that is gained from it.

Axes: Not much to add here, other than it takes too long to raise. It should raise at a factor of 3-4x faster.

Berserker: Nothing to add here, Zerk is still one of the most useful skills in the game.

Blacksmith: Blacksmithing is entirely irrelevant. The cost of goods to make things / items you can make are a terrible value. Messing with these values or adding items to the crafting list will screw with the economy. The most useful thing blacksmithing could do is repair items.

-At level 1 blacksmithing repairing an item makes it lose max durability at the current rate of repair
-At level 200 blacksmithing your item loses 1 max durability
-Make it cost a large amount of materials to repair things, making mining more necessary
-Remove tinker from the game. Make it necessary to repair your items with blacksmithing
-Change it so the limit of crafting items can be any number, current limitation is 10
-Make blacksmith hammers indestructible, or make a quest that has a reward of a indestructible blacksmith hammer

Carpentry: Carpentry is useless. Books are the only useful item you can make with carpentry, but due to the fact that books don't stack, its completely not plausible to craft books for raising scribe. It's logistical nightmare.

-Make books stackable, this alone would make the skill viable.
-Add new types of arrows

Cooking: Cooking is useless because of the amount of Apple pies that were duped. It's very expensive and time consuming to make them and there are 10's of millions of them available. Making cooking useful is a 2 pronged approach.

-Nerf apple pies. Make them heal like 15 hp
-Buff starberry pies, make them heal 60 hp and 2/3x as fast to craft.
-Remove the limitation of 10 to cook at a time, make that any number
-Lower the cost of flower and sugar by 80% to make it more viable to make starberry pies.
-Make an NPC carry starberries.

Elemental Magics: Your magic skill level currently allows you to cast spells and contributes to your magery skill. Mages are insanely underpowered compared to warriors. One factor that could help buff mages is to make skill levels affect damage.

Level 200 Elemental magic could give you a damage buff of 50% for elemental magic spells.

Enchanting: This skills is unfinished, but is relatively useless. Most people use it to add an enchantment because it improves attack speed. I think a much better use for this would be to add or remove prefixes and suffixes I could draw up a full table for this if you were interested in taking this route. As a general outline:

-Higher level of enchanting allows you to enchant with higher tier pre/suff
-Costs increase significantly with higher pre/suff
-Still some chance of failing at any level of enchanting
-Some chance of destroying the base item as a result of fails
-Some chance of decreasing the durability of an item as a result

Farming Farming takes a ton of work and doesn't yield much. Seeds are expensive compared to what you harvest, and it raises extremely slow. It also only raises to like 40 or something if I recall.

-Raise the skill itself much, much faster at a factor of ~10x its current rate
-Increase the harvest yields by up to 20x based on your skill level
-Make it much require less tending based on your skill level, at level 200 you shouldn't have to tend to it at all.

Fencing: Raising fencing is too slow, it should be increased by the same factor as all other weapon skills. 3-4x

Fishing: Fishing raises extremely slow and doesn't net much.

-Raise the number of fish caught in a school
-Make the skill go up at a rate of 2x faster
-Raise the number of fish in a grid sector
-Raise the speed at which the grid sector refreshes with fish
-Add god tier spell books to the loot table for fishing at a pretty rare chance. (sub .003%)
-Have it effected by your animal lore level

Goldsmithing: Goldsmithing, like blacksmithing is basically useless. But if you applied the same rules as blacksmithing and made it necessary for repairs, it could be useful for repairing jewelry.

-At level 1 goldsmithing repairing an item makes it lose max durability at the current rate of repair
-At level 200 goldsmithing your item loses 1 max durability
-Make it cost a large amount of materials to repair things, making mining more necessary
-Remove Nodlaf from the game. Make it necessary to repair your jewelry with goldsmithing
-Make all jewelry slots lose dura, currently only the first slot loses durability
-Change it so the limit of crafting items can be any number, current limitation is 10
-Make goldsmith hammers indestructible, or make a quest that has a reward of a indestructible goldsmith hammer

Healing: Healing is totally useless. There's scenario where you would actually use this skill in gameplay. It could be changed to be more of a buff like Beserker to be useful though.

-When you activate the heal skill (think a mode like going zerk but healing), it automatically heals members of your party or pets if you have above 60% health for x amount of time
-Amount of health it takes from you is less based on the level of your skill, at max it could heal at 4:1
-Increase the frequency at which you heal your party members or pets based on your skill level

Lumberjacking: Lumberjacking would be more useful if new arrows and stacking books were added to carpentry. Also adding Spell books like fishing would be great.

-Add 2x the amount of logs to trees
-Make trees refresh at a rate of 2x faster
-Add god tier spell books at a very low drop rate to the loot table, at a very low rate

Maces: Maces raise too slow, they should raise at the same buff rate as the other weapons skills.

Magery: I'm fine with the state of magery, although with the current stat rate magic raises, the 200 mana point bonus you get may be too much. Currently most chars it doesnt make sense to put any points into INT except for to equip items or read spells. This could be nerfed to .5 mana points per skill. I also think the magery skill title should be available.

Mana Thief: Mana Thief is basically only useful for raising mage skills, I think it should work more like a debuff you cast on an opponent, that vamps you some mana periodically.

Martial Arts: I've always thought the martial arts skill is very underutilized. I think this skill could be reworked to add a new "Monk" class entirely to the game.

-If no weapons are equipped, martial arts acts as a damage multiplier
-%damage works with bare hands
-Bracelets or Prayer beads can be equipped in weapon slots
-A flying kick can start combat if your foe is within x amount of distance if no weapon or shield is equipped, x improves as your skill improves

Mining: Mining raises slow due to the nodes being limited and the rate they refresh at being slow. This is supplemented with a NPC that sells ores, but that should be removed and the problems with the skill should be fixed. Currently the nodes refresh at a rate of roughly 24 hours, this means only one person can mine them once a day. If the changes are also made to blacksmithing and goldsmithing, mining would be vital.

-Raise the amount of ores on nodes by 5-10x
-Speed up the rate at which nodes refresh by 5-10x
-Add god tier spell books to the loot table for mining
-Add an indestructible pickaxe or add a quest to make an indestructible pickaxe, the fact that these lose dura is kind of silly.
-Make different pickaxes that mine more or faster.
-Increase the damage on pickaxes or make pickaxes that also do damage so you can mine in the hell mines without having pets, currently there's monsters down there that will kill you if you don't have pets.
-Remove NPC that sells ores
-Remove NPC that sells gems
-Remove gems from the loot table on monsters

Necromancy: Like elemental magic, Your magic skill level currently allows you to cast spells and contributes to your magery skill. Mages are insanely underpowered compared to warriors. One factor that could help buff mages is to make skill levels affect damage.

Level 200 Necromancy could give you a damage buff of 50% for Necromancy spells.

Pick Pocketing Personally, I kinda hate that pickpocketing is even in the game. But if it is in the game, it should have to be its own religion or something. I think originally the idea was that Paladin was one of the stronger religions so people would join it, making pickpocketing less relevant. I think this should be flipped. In order to pickpocket and perform dastardly deeds you have to be forgo the benefits of the other religions. In other words, you can't be in a religion and pickpocket.

-Increase the amount pickpocketed from stacks
-Can't be in a religion and pickpocket

Stealth: Stealth is kind of useful in theory, but is rarely used in game play. A buff could make it more useful or even a completely different class, similar to my suggestion for Martial Arts, but more akin to a state like Berserker.

-When stealthed, your first attack will automatically crit
-You can't stealth for x amount of time after doing damage, x goes down as your skill level increases
-You heal faster while stealthed (200% multiplier at max stealth)
-You move faster while stealthed (Similar rate to Zerk)
-You lose all mana and don't regen while stealthed

Tactics: Tactics is mostly fine, but should raise much faster (5-10x) when you're using two handed weapons. Currently it raises so slow if you're not using a shield.

Telekinesis: Telekinesis is fine for what it is, but should raise at a faster rate. 2-3x faster would be fine.

Thaumaturgy: See other mage class suggestions, a simple healing buff based on skill level would be great. Like a 50% bonus at max thaum.

Trading: Raising trading is completely useless. But, there could be a benefit to make it worth it.

- +1 Bank slot per 5 points in trading
- Raise much, much faster. At a rate of 10-20x faster than it does currently. It's impossible to raise without botting as it is.

Wizardry See other mage class suggestions, a simple damage buff based on skill level would suffice.

Stats

Stats are funky, and don't always make sense. Some stats should be changed to make them more usefull.

Strength: Leave it alone, it does enough

Defense: Defense is not useful enough, it should act as strength does with a shield equipped though effectively an armor rating multiplier for the shield itself. This would effectively make a tank class more viable.

Agility: Should be nerfed slightly, with 2500 possible it is a little over powered. Maybe every 100 points of AGI does the same thing as 70 does now.

Intelligence: Intelligence is mostly not necessary because of the magery skill and 2500 magic being possible now. You'd rather have magic and the stats elsewhere. Nerfing the magery bonus would help, but adding a damage buff to spells when staffs are equipped would be good. Also, making high INT necessary for things like crafting skills would make sense. More likely to succeed scribing with max intelligence, More likely to succeed when blacksmithing etc.

Stamina: Leave it alone, it does enough

Magic Should be nerfed slightly, with 2500 magic, it's almost unnecessary to have INT. Maybe change the rate of refresh from 40 magic = 1 mana refresh to 60 points of magic = 1 mana point refresh.

Items:

Item's largely need a refresh, there's a lot to go into here, but suffice to say there's only 1 item that makes sense for warriors (msword) and no items that make sense for mages.

1 Handed Items need to be looked at, mostly attack speed wise. Most are far slower than their 2 handed counterpart which makes no sense. 1 Handed item should be faster and have a tighter damage range. 2 Handed items should be slower, and have a much wider but higher damage range.

Shields should block a shit load. It seems silly to me that shields block less than armors, everyone one can wear an armor, but you forfeit the use of 2 handed weapons to use a shield. It should have a benefit of making you tanky enough for it to make sense.

Mage staffs and things like crystal dagger should add significantly more spell levels. +1 or +2 doesn't really do much. Those could be +10 and it still wouldn't make them as viable as warriors.

Mage Staffs should mostly be 1 handed and take the weapon slot so they can utilize a shield too. The better mage staffs make no sense because of the spell buffs you get from shields.

Prefixes and Suffixes

The stat cap raise and relative level of the population has rendered most Pre/suff combos relatively worthless. I made a post about this in the past, so I'll copy it here.

Current pre/suffs are based and balanced off a old stat cap that is no longer relevant making most items relatively worthless compared to the benefits you can achieve via leveling, so it got me thinking.

What if stat based Pre/sufs provided a % bonus of the stat they were giving instead of a flat amount and % based damage items provided a flat damage amount.

Let's say Tier 6 pre/suffs gave 1% of the stat they intended to buff, orc would give 25 str to a character with 2500 str and effectively increase their damage 1%. This makes a lot more sense, now an orc item might be useful.

The downside is what? A lower level character wouldn't get the benefit a higher level character would.

This is remedied by changing % based damage to a static amount of damage.

Let's say Dragon does a static 20 bonus damage to a monster that is affected by fire damage. This will have a lot more benefit for a low level character who has less strength. The higher-level character doesn't get as much of an advantage by having higher stats effectively multiplied by using piles of +20% damage.

This model would give more benefit to new players wishing to level, while rewarding players who have achieved higher levels with a use for their items & stats.

Events: On going events loot tables need significant reworks to become relevant and provide benefit for manual play. Strick no botting policies should be enforced on them. In summary, better rewards and less runs possible per day. People should be able to log in, do a few daily runs and get benefits. Not have to grind them out all day long.

But, if people do want to run them all day long, I think a persisting christmas style event that gives out mostly EXP could be the answer. I made a post about this previously ill also paste here.

1.) It should give mostly EXP rewards instead of items. I think if it gave some sort of tiered exp rewards it could be a lot of fun who want to play without bots.
Example Rewards
1M Exp - Fairly standard round
1 level - Dynamic exp enough to go up 1 level, hits maybe 25 times a day
10 level - Dynamic exp to up 10 levels, maybe hits once a day.

2.) Extremely rare item drops - Mix in rares that would come once every 10000 runs or something

3.) Bonus points for NGP, things like first kill or last kill should give you an extra point for NGP, makes getting there fast and hunting down the last monster worth while. Lots of people lazily get there and wait for others to do the work. Also they sit still when the last hard to find monster is creeping around, so those who hunt those things should be rewarded. Most kill points would also be good.

4.) If pets kill more than 50% of the monsters, no loot screen is provided. You shouldn't be able to do this event mostly with pets.

5.) Different sorts of monsters should be mixed, undead, fire/elect, complete resistances,  so you cant just stack one type of items to be effective.

6.) Leaderboard could be updated to include categories like most runs, damage done, ngp points earned, etc.

7.) no botting or using multiple chars allowed, if this is done punishments.

In closing, this is a hefty read. Congrats for making it to the end.