Solace MUD Official Forum

Solace Development => Ideas => Topic started by: Earwin on December 06, 2024, 10:44:13 pm



Title: Forms ergonomics
Post by: Earwin on December 06, 2024, 10:44:13 pm
Formed chars currently have to keep their food in inventory.
It makes sense you're not picking stuff up with your fangs, and not handling your bags, alright.
It doesn't make sense at all that you can't eat the brownie's leg you've just bitten off from his body.
Suggestion: allow some or all forms to eat crap from the ground.

Forms have very little in terms of communication.
Like, there's a subset of emotes still working, but they're undocumented, you have to manually go through each and every one of them and test if it works in form.
Suggestion: add a help file or a command/option that lists emotes allowed in form.
Plus, yelling. Animals can't yell coherent words, but they can be freaking loud. Birds in particular, canines and adjacent.
Suggestion: you should be able to howl or screech or whatever, and be heard across the area, maybe flyzone included.

Major forms are powerhouses alright, but minor ones are kind of... boring.
They are okay-ish in terms of damage output/defence, but they feel really really dumb. You can't do anything with them.
And if you have access to major ones, you never use your minors again. Never ever ever.
Suggestion: give hares ability to flee in direction like thieves, turtles the ability to waterbreathe, wolves/jackals/foxes ability to sniff things out (e.g. a notification when 'look'ing that something is in the room you can't see, but can smell; applies both to e.g. hide/invis and blindness / but not to astral/duo, as these are dimensional techniques), boars ability to dig up fekkin truffles with light healing properties. or anything else that's not kill/sleep/revert


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: deda on January 11, 2025, 03:26:46 pm
nice ideas


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: Earwin on January 12, 2025, 01:29:54 am
Let me amend "okay-ish damage output": at hero level frikkin' "fly" hawk does more damage than "offence" jackal.
I would expect their scaling formulas to be the other way around.


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: deda on January 15, 2025, 01:17:40 pm
you forget one thing: different forms have different damage types, ie some mobs have more resistances  to hawk's damage type while having less to jackal/fox's damage type.


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: Earwin on January 15, 2025, 02:27:27 pm
Nope, I didn't.
I compared damroll@hero, it's just plain higher for hawk over jackal.
Does somewhat fewer attacks, but still.
More or less the same dodge rate.


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: khiren on April 10, 2025, 02:35:13 pm
+1


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: Raider on November 05, 2025, 02:34:10 pm
- make dodge/number of attacks stats visible
- review str/dex/con stats. For example, druid wolf has 22 con, while alter bull has 20.
- more skills. Bite, claw, pounce, gore, trample, peck, roar, lacerate. Evade, block, disarm, debuff, lag/daze. Call minions, pack tactics, deathblows, sneak attacks. Endless opportunities for fun stuff here.
- review the DR scaling, like Earwin said, minor forms get irrelevant very quick. And major forms are obtained very late.
- allow to autosac corpses (autojunk?)
- more forms variety
- druids lack haste/sanc/surv instincts. So their forms are quite weak at hero - no defense, poor offense. Would be nice to have a form focused druid, who is similar to a fighter - stances, blockers, debuffs, lag/daze.


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: Boa on November 05, 2025, 03:46:13 pm
+1 to all of the ideas in this thread. I have a druid with a wolverine form and its just very bad at dodging - just deflecting blows with its face.
Also, I was always wondering - why animals selected for forms are kinda picked from a children zoo? hare? fox? wolverine? where is black panther? rhino? i want PTERODACTYL! (don't take it serious)


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: zondra on November 05, 2025, 04:12:56 pm
I think druids should have like a sanc light. The forms are unusable at hero rank.  Trans get to keep buffs and have alot more.   Plus slow haste soften blink etc.


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: Sirri on November 05, 2025, 06:00:21 pm
Alters are next in the roadmap after thieves (these objectively deserve priority).


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: zondra on November 05, 2025, 07:06:07 pm
I agree with thieves . One of my favorite classes


Title: Re: Forms ergonomics
Post by: zondra on November 06, 2025, 02:20:52 pm
Also minor auto learn ench damage..shouldn't they auto learn ench with staff