Ally

Posted on UOHerald.com

FoF: Finding Fatalities
Jeremy Dalberg
09 Nov 2007 21:07:00

In this week's Five on Friday, get some tips on digging your corpse out of a heap of daemons, find out the whole story on equipment damage, and more.

November 9, 2007

"How do I find my corpse when it's buried under a horde of daemons?"

This has come up a bunch in the past week, and I am reminded that not all of the tricks to this sort of thing are obvious. So, I present Finding That Which Is Hidden, vol. XVI, Corpses:

In the 2D client:

• First of all, the whole process is made vastly easier if you're in a guild. If you're not, but can afford it, consider creating a guild solely for this purpose.
• Go into Options, then Macros, and make a new macro for "All Names." (Fig. 1)
• Go to the area where your corpse should lie, and start hitting your All Names macro. Your corpse name will be blue if unguilded, green if guilded. (Unless you died in a heap of your guildmates, this is why being guilded makes it easier - most corpse names will be blue or gray, and green stands out.) (Also note this is super handy if you need to loot a corpse behind a wall and can't be bothered to turn on Circle of Transparency.)
• Double click on your corpse name to loot it. (Fig. 2)
• If your corpse has decayed to bones, this trick won't work. You'll have to use Object Handles (Ctrl-Shift) and hunt through them. This is not ideal, so try to get back to your corpse quickly. If you're having trouble getting the right handles to pop up, try moving half a screen or so away from where you think your corpse is. (Fig. 3)

In the KR client:

• Open the World Map (by clicking on the little box at the top of the minimap.) (Fig. 4)
• Click Map Options, and make sure that Corpse has an waypoint icon set on the World Map, the minimap, and in-game. (Fig. 5)
• Use the icons to navigate to the spot where your corpse lies. If you have the in-game waypoint set, there will be a particle effect over your actual corpse. (Fig. 6)
• In options, set the Object Handles filter to "Corpses Only." Then hit Ctrl-Shift. This will pop up object handles ONLY for corpses. (Fig. 7)
• As in 2D, the process is harder when your corpse has decayed - it doesn't count as a corpse anymore for purposes of the object handles filter. You'll have to set it to a general filter and poke through all of the handles.

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Follow up on last week's question on Large Iron Smith BODs.

So, as I suspected, people promptly produced convincing amounts of data that suggested there was, in fact, a bug. Wilki went over the code again with an even finer-tooth comb and... well, let's just say that parentheses can be important.

Wilki went ahead and fixed the bug. Now, the rewards for Iron LBODs aren't top-end (although Prospector's Hammers and Gargoyle Pickaxes can be handy when mining for colored ore,) but making sure they actually spawn in something approximating the correct numbers is important to the balance of the system as a whole. (Getting many, many more colored larges than colored smalls to fill them? Not helpful for anyone, really.)

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Equipment Damage, Self Repair, and You:

We posted the "short version" of how Self Repair works a few weeks ago, and it brought up some more questions. On doing some research, we found out that there was an error in our initial answer (although the actual answer to the question is fundamentally correct.) So, in the interests of clarity, here's a much longer explanation of equipment damage and Self Repair:

First off, weapons:

• When you hit something, the weapon has a 5% chance to take a point of damage.
• If you parry with a weapon (no shield equipped), there is a 5% chance it will take a point of damage.

  • If you parry against a mace weapon, your weapon has a 75% chance to take that point of damage.

Next, armor:

• You get hit (by any source - weapon, spell, whatever) and you roll to see which bit of armor is affected, out of the following armor slots:

  • head
  • neck
  • chest
  • back (cape, quiver)
  • dress (sash, etc - the over-chest slot)
  • arms
  • hands
  • skirt (kilt, apron, etc - the over-legs slot)
  • legs

• If there's no item in that slot, or the item isn't one that has durability points, nothing happens
• If there is a damagable item in the slot, there's a second roll to see if it takes damage

  • Normally, it's a 20% chance
  • If you got hit with a mace weapon, it's a 75% chance.

Last, shields:

• If you successfully parry a blow, your shield has a 20% chance to take a point of damage.
• Unless, as above, you've parried a mace - then it's a 75% chance.

Self Repair:

• When an item takes damage, as determined by the above logic, the SR property adds durability equal to its intensity (so SR 1 would add one point, SR 5 would add 5 points.)
• It then sets a timer, and SR doesn't go off again on that item for 60 seconds, even if the item gets damaged again. (This was the bit that was wrong in our prior answer - it's per minute, not per second.)

So, our prior answer about equipment not tending to get damaged faster than SR 5 can handle it is still more or less true (except in specific cases, like standing in pools of acid or walls of fire.) Hopefully the detailed explanation will help everyone judge when to favor SR over other properties on their gear.

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"Why does Begging only reduce Karma some of the time? And why does it reduce it even before I pick who I'm going to beg from?"
Begging only reduces your Karma to a certain point - if you are at the second "positive" tier or above, Begging will lower your Karma. (See here for the Fame/Karma chart.) So using Begging will lower you from "Kind" to "Fair", but if you're "Fair" or lower, it won't affect you at all.

As for the second part of the question, that's actually a bug, and Draconi fixed it, as well as adding the nuance that a failed attempt lowers your Karma less than a successful attempt.

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"What's the deal with the special weapons dropping off of event monsters?"
There are a couple of event-specific or otherwise interesting items dropping off of various critters in this event. Here's a quick rundown:

Cursed Doom Artifacts: Many of the more powerful invading daemons carry cursed versions of Doom artifacts. (Being cursed, they can't be insured and will drop to your corpse if you die. However, they are substantially more common than the uncursed versions.)

Daemon Weapons: Light Daemons, Void Daemons, and Berserker Daemons all have a small chance to drop their signature weapons, the Staff of Pyros, the Vorpal Blade, and the Berserker's Scythe. Check out the Halloween Event Page for details.

Ancient Weapons: Berserker Daemons are extraordinarily powerful, and can only be defeated by artifacts of equal might - ordinary attacks only do 5% of their normal damage. The invading armies may carry weapons that can defeat them - Power, Vanquishing, and even Mystic weapons. These throwbacks to ancient magic have the following properties:

"The Power, Vanquishing, and Mystic weapons cut directly through the Berserker’s magical shielding to deal a certain percentage of the damage you would’ve done normally to it. Power does the least percentage, and Mystics do the highest. The damage numbers you see when dealing damage to Berserkers is the 5% mentioned above, and doesn't include the extra damage the magical weapon has included as well. " - Draconi

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To the barricades!


- Jeremy

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Ally

Follow-up from Wilki about the BOD question posted on this thread in U.Hall

Comment:

So.. we can now get less colored LBODs? Because Iron is now an option past GM? I am reading this correctly? This was the fix? Why not remove the option to get iron armor SBODs instead? (Getting more worthless iron larges on top of the already over abundant weapon smalls(larges) that cost too much to fill and give us more Prospector's Hammers and Gargoyle Pickaxes, that of course can be handy when mining for colored ore, than we could possibly use? Not helpful for anyone, really.)

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Yes. There were some missing parens that caused the "should this BOD be colored?" statement to always be true, regardless of the random roll. It was clearly not intended to work that way.

I wasn't trying to "fix" the entire system, which I think we can all agree needs a complete overhaul to make it more rewarding; rather the feedback from last week's FoF made me go back and look again, and that's when I noticed the order of operations was wrong for that particular statement.

I could increase the GM bonus to get colored BODs, both for small and large BODs. What do you think?

John "Wilki" Wilkinson, UO Designer - Electronic Arts - www.uo.com

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