FoF Nr. 097

PLEASE NOTE: The Five on Friday archives are not updated with each patch. Please take older documents with a grain of salt, as they may be inaccurate.

February 22, 2008

"While Discorded, do your skills gain as if you were your actual skill level or the level that your skill drops to?"

Your Discorded skill level is used to calculate your skill gain chance - so for difficulty-based skills, you can gain skill by using abilities or spells that would normally be too easy. This isn't capped at all. There's an explanation of difficulty-based skills here - keep in mind that moderately difficult (50% success rate or so) abilities have the best chance to earn you skill gains.

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"How do you recharge the Jacob's Pickaxe when it says Uses Remaining : 0?"

Wait! It recharges uses over time - one charge every 5 minutes. You don't have to be logged in to recharge it, although it may take a few minutes to "catch up." (It also will only recharge to its max of 20 charges.)

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"Are there tameables that have skills that don't appear on the Animal Lore gump? If so, which ones are they and what skills do they have that we can't see? Any chance you guys can add these skills to the Animal Lore gump?"

Leurocian says,

"Yes - Parry and Lumberjacking immediately come to mind. It would be nice at some point to revamp the Animal Lore gump to include more information. No promises!"

(The fact that there can be "invisible" skills is why it's impossible to calculate the barding difficulty by hand, and why Animal Lore does it for you. We don't have a convenient way to look up every possible critter, but revamping the gump has gone on my Nag List :) )

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"How, exactly, does the talisman bonus % to success and exceptional work?"

It's additive - so if you have a 50% chance of success (or exceptional) and put on a +25% talisman, you'd have a 75% chance of success (or exceptional.)

The altered percentage should be displayed in the crafting menu - however, if you are looking at an item's page and you add or remove a talisman, you will have to refresh the page (by going back to the main menu or closing/reopening the window) in order to see the change.

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"Where are the other Town Halls going to be this year?"

I'll have specific dates and locations as we get confirmation, but here's the broad overview:

• Jacksonville, FL - next weekend
• Rockville, MD - May 10
• San Diego, CA - summer
• Seattle, WA - later summer
• Austin, TX - fall
• Chicago, IL - winter

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Playguide Update Roundup:

Got the equipment info in slightly better shape, and I'm working my way through old publish notes - slowly, but surely!

Item Properties: Rewrote the Mana and Life Leech bits several times - they may even be accurate now.

Runic Properties: Edited explanatory text to match new intensity changes.

Shields: Brought back this page, added strength requirement, and rewrote the text to be accurate post-AoS.

Armor: Added SE and Elven base armor set details. (Note - haven't added the new helms yet.)

Artifacts: Redesigned page to accomodate future updates - if you haven't seen the artifact screenshot submission request, go check it out!

Siege Perilous: Added Siege Blessing info

Damage Types: Added a brief note on direct damage.

Skill and Stat Caps: Added individual stat caps.

Necromancy: Clarified Vampiric Embrace life drain, added correct duration and damage for Poison Strike.

Ninjitsu: Added melee-only restriction to Ki Attack.

Spellweaving: Corrected Word of Death's damage type.

Bushido: Added Honorable Execution not applying to PvP and weapon skill bonus for Evasion duration.

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What's To Come:

I've got a list of confirmed bug fixes for the next publish back from QA - we're still a couple weeks out from getting it to test, but here's what's done so far:

   Weapons should no longer lose properties when runic- or exceptionally-crafted. This should apply to everything, including ML recipe weapons
   ML recipe bows will be able to be exceptionally crafted and get the Arms Lore bonus as well
   Greater Dragons will give scales and barbed leather
   Armor that doesn't have a meditation penalty - like leather armor - won't lose properties when runic-crafted
   Runic-crafted elven armor won't roll Night Sight as a property
   Parasitic, Darkglow, and Invisibility potions can be placed into kegs 

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Jacksonville Town Hall

The Jacksonville Town Hall is next weekend! If you haven't RSVPed yet, now would be an excellent time to do so.

For our mid-Atlantic players, the May Town Hall meeting is also posted - you can get details on the Town Hall page and RSVP for that one as well. If you're in the neighborhood, don't miss out!

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Next week's Five on Friday will probably be on Thursday, as I'm flying to Jacksonville Friday night. Have a good week, folks!

-- Jeremy