Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Goblins and Trolls

Goblins:

Not much to tell here. Chainmail is the "favored" armor, they still have their bombs that they get every 10 levels or so.  I might slip in parry at somepoint since it makes sense they'd be a somewhat defensive fighter, but at the moment they don't have it.  Currently they do have sneak since they are so small. SURPRISE! BOMBS! being the idea behind that.

Trolls:

Trolls aren't a terribly complicated class.  Berserk, Pummel, 2 handed weapons in 1 hand and off the charts strength.  I'm not sure how to exactly describe the method I did for stat layouts and how much bonus each race gets from how many points in what stat, and how that progresses from low to high, but initially it involved 7 levels.  Very Bad, Bad, Weak, Average, Better than Average, Good, Better than Good.  I had based a lot of these off of various stats I saw in logs I found across the internet with a little guestimation.  Each rating had values (-4,-3,-2,-1,1,2,3)  and each class had ratings assigned to each of their stats based on what they were good in.  Take for example, a tamian:

Strength: Good (2)
Constitution: Bad (-3)
Agility: Good (2)
Dexterity: Good (2)
Intelligence: Better than Average (1)
Wisdom: Better than Average (1)

Total: 5

Tamians were designed to be versatile and able to do just about anything, but not be overly excellent in any one thing.

Then I came to Dwarves and realized, when I compared it to my Dwarf Paladin's stats, that "Better than Good" strenght wouldn't cut it.  So I made "Super" and having taken another look, I went back and adjusted some of the other races to have the Super trait, like Elves with Intelligence and Halflings with dexterity.  Then I got to chaos, and Trolls and realized, the highest possible bonus for a 20 str on super, doesn't even come close to the original DFC bonuses.  So I created Super.ii.  Which, after calculating it out, STILL didn't come close.  So I created Super.iii which finally seems to have hit the mark.  I couldn't remember for sure what armor they used before, possibly chainmail, but I upped them to plate.  The changes to Berserk should make it a much more useful skill and a little more viable for hunting.



 Just a side note, each of these "levels" are at equal increments between each other, so there is a uniformity to it and super.ii and super.iii actually have two of these increments between each of them so I suppose technically they should be super, super.iii, super.v.  I'll lay out the mechanics of it after I'm done with all the race/class posts.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Priests

The final class for the Good realm, Priests have had some slight changes.  I had a good friend in high school who played a priest (Dominic) but as it has been so long he no longer has logs of spells and some details.  So with that I had to make spell lists based on memory.  A single offensive spell casting list, the traditional group shields, level 4 self shields , light/bless/holywarrior etc.  If I recall resurrections Healing, resurrection and cures/remove curses were in seperate lists, 2 or 3.  This is the same for all the healing classes.   In DFC they could wear plate armor and cast through it with divine spells.  I am not entirely sure of how viable that is in comparison to the healer necros and orcs.  I've lowered their "Favored armor" down to leather.  I'll get into more detail about how armor changes will work in another post as it will be quite detailed.  From a physical combat standpoint, and there is a likelyhood that these might be removed, they will also have pummel and parry.  I included parry because they are essentially a defensive class, and pummel because of the crushing weapons nature of the class.  But as this may be too much, either or both may be removed.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Craftsmen

With craftsmen I didn't do a whole lot of changing anything, the only really unique battle skills/items are parry, which is kind of one dimensional, and their golems.  Most of the work done with crafties was consolidating item/weapon/armor creation lists.  If I recall, before, there were lists for each type of armor, maybe more than one for weapons too, I cannot remember.  The updated version is based on tiers of 10 levels.  Each tier (ex level 1-10) deals with one specific type of item (ex boots,gloves,leggings, helm, shirt etc)  Within those 10 levels are where the difference in material lies, cloth, leather, studded, chain, plate.   There are also a cloth and leather cloak mixed in as well.  Weapons follow a similar patter.  Crushing, Slashing, Thrusting, Ranged, Shield etc.  Right now I have all of the armor enchantments and weapon infusions in their own lists, but at sometime int he future I'll probably split them off to be specific to craftsman/goblins/demons.  I suspect it would be too easy to get full set of gear that has resistance to everything on it if all realms had access to all protections. Walls and Catapults/Ammo are currently equal for all realms.  The slight differences each realm had in DFC were good in theory but, particularly with walls, I don't think it panned out terribly even.  There is nothing saying I can't change that back though, and it isn't out of the realm of possibility.  I did level a crafty to around high-30s and had GM for awhile, so I remember how stupidly hard to get some rather inconsequential components for enchantments and such were.  With that in mind some of the lower required components will obviously be much more available, while the components for the higher level items will be fittingly rare.  In particular, I'm tossing around the idea of having a temporary bonding enchantment.  It would last for some amount of releases of the character, and would require a rather large number of rare items.  Keep in mind that that is just an idea and may never actually be implemented.  Finally, I remember wearing plate as a craftie on DFC, goblins having chain, but chain sucked so they often wore studded leather, and CoX being Studded/BH being leather.  I've bumped crafty favored armor down to chain though.  It seemed more fitting.  If you're constructing things on the battlefield, you're going to want a little more flexibility than plate would offer, plus too many plate wearers can just get silly.

Side note:  I've finished my final program for the class I am in 5 days earlier than the due date.  All I have left to do is study for the quiz and final exam and I'll be done and begin working on programming this again instead of sitting around and making these posts while I take breaks from programming my assignments for class.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Rogues Kobolds and Imps

Well...Honestly there isn't really much to say here.  I had a heck of a time tailoring the algorithm for backstab and it gets rather complicated, mixing between percept, weapon skill, backstab skill etc.  It is drastically different from basic damage calculation to say the least.

 Weapon type being used might factor in, but at the moment it doesn't....

Well, that was informative.  See everyone tomorrow for  Craftsmen!

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Wizards

Wizards presented a real problem.  I knew exactly where their points were, but I never had a great understanding of how tap factored in to damage done so I had to completely rework it myself through testing.  In fact, tap, backstab and berserk were probably the three skills i spent the most time working on when figuring out the balance between everything.  What I came up with was a multiplier effect.  Base 200 damage with 100 tap is 400 damage, base 100 damage with 200 tap is 300 etc with max tap being your tap skill * 2 (200% in tap, 400 max).  This may sound like its more costly on power, but I should point out again, every realm will have some form of power ward/rune/glyph to counter it.  The other problem was spells.  Wizards have a TON of spells and I had a list of none of them.  I did have a 45ish wizards in DFC, so I could vaguely recall some, but a lot of it I had to make up.  This did give me a chance to balance things out between the tappers though.  I remade the spell lists to have similar spells at similar levels across classes.  I also worked in the remaining wards for good realm (Lethargy, power, anti scry, magic, combat) all at level two except for power (4).

Edit:  Thanks to an anonymous tipster, that is, anonymous because I have no idea who he was in game, I snagged the old help file that had a rudementary list of spells in the game prior to many of the updates.  It is definitely going to help iron things out.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Rangers

Rangers are the first class with spells that I don't have enough experience with to remember their spell lists in good detail so it was interesting trying to recreate them.  Pretty much everything else is the same.  Ranged, Volley, track, etc, and I think I got the points setup right.  As for the spells, I remembered pets, some basic "nature lore" type stuff, which would be personal buffs and self heals and glyphs as alarms.  Rangers are also the beneficiaries of the balancing effects.  One of the big things that chaos had over everyone was wards, ogres had good reason for the power ward, with their lower overall power capabilities, but frankly, giving them to a single realm was really tipping the balance, at least if Chaos ever rallied in numbers.  I didn't want to put all of the wards in one place, and it just seemed natural to put healing and refresh "glyphs" with Ranger's already having the alarm glyphs.  Additional note, Ogre wards are still better than the other two realms versions and Ogres/Necros/Wizards all have same power regeneration capabilities.

Tomorrow: Wizards

Cyra vs My Darkness Falls Remake

I knew this time would come so I figured I'd make the post now while its fresh.  Someone who frequents the Cyra forums has found this blog and informed Cyra about it.  I'm actually surprised that it has taken this long as I the first chunk of work I did was for about 2 weeks back in January, then put on hiatus until now, with a few bits here and there.  Anyway, I have no connection to Cyra or what Vassi and Rashka are doing.  Their project has little if anything to do with mine, nor was it really a motivation either.  Last fall I did have a bit of a longing to play the game, went looking and noticed Cyra seemed inactive.  I tried a few other MUDs but like most former DFCers was disappointed.  Eventually it all passed and I went back to other endeavors.  In late December and early January I began playing the Magestorm remake, this is what inspired me to start this project.  I saw the amazing job Sorien did/was doing and realized that I could do the same with DFC.  Not only would it indulge my desire to play again, but it would also be a fantastic project that I could point towards for prospective employers.  Originally it was just a secret between myself, Niteninja and Masterpuppet and one or two Strike Force (SF) members in Magestorm.  At some point one of the SF guys told someone else about it, I can't remember who, but he didn't know I wanted it as a secret, and the word spread through the people who played Magestorm that loved DFC as well.  After that it wasn't really necessary to keep it secret, so I began infrequent posts on this blog which I had normally used for other things.  That is the story of things.

I know that some people have emailed me or replied to my posts mentioning Cyra, but anything that happens to Cyra has no bearing on my remake just as it had nothing to do with my motivation to begin.  I wish Vassi and Rashka well in their attempt.  Even if theirs goes up first and is wildly popular, which would be kinda neat, I'll still keep up with this because its something I want to do, to show that I can do it.  I guess the entire point of this post is, I don't want people to lump the two games in as competing, or as if I did this because Cyra had not released yet. I did it because it was something I wanted to do for fun.  I'm not really too familiar with how Cyra has progressed or anything about it, but I'm sure the two of them have put a great deal of work and effort into it and look forward to seeing the fruits of their labor.