Excelsior

I'm still relatively new, so sorry if this is in the wrong place. Anyway, I was talking with some people the other night, and we came up with some ideas that might make UOEX more fun. Read over them, see if you like them, and if you don't, maybe there's a way we can improve the ideas. Either way, with luck the GMs will take notice and maybe some of them will get implemented.

New uses for skills!

Item Identification: This skill would give a character a base "Luck" value, much like resisting spells gives you a base "resistance" value. For example, 300 luck with GM Item ID. If you had a suit with a higher luck value than that, your higher value would replace the value Item ID did. So, 300 from Item ID + 350 from the suit would =350, not 650.

Forensic Evaluation: Much like inscription helps mages do damage, perhaps Forensic Evaluation would help a necromancer deal more damage with those spells. Since a forensics expert knows about death, and necromancy also deals with death, this would make sense. Maybe Pain Spike, etc could do 10% more damage, or the animate dead pets could have better stats?

Herding With herding, why not be able to use this skill to summon your living pets to you? While crystal summoning balls are an option, I've been told that having to carry around 6 of them can be a chore (not to mention confusing in the heat of battle!). Perhaps to avoid replacing the balls or the stones, herding could only summon bonded, living pets. Unbonded pets would need the crystal, and dead pets need to be summoned using the stone. Other suggestions that I received were: herding increases pet movement speed so that they can actually keep up with you while you run, and legendary (get those powerscroll bags ready!) herding gives you an extra taming slot, for a total of 7 with the donation reward. Maybe herding shouldnt be able to do ALL of those things, but I see a lot of potential with this skill!

Taste Identification I look at this skill and I think about Arms Lore. Taste ID should enhance the results of cooking. Now, I'm not sure if there are any new cooking spells on UOEX, but if not, this would be a good time to put some in! Taste ID could impart temporary buffs onto food that is cooked by GM chefs. For example, if a chef with Taste ID creates bread, the bread could have up to double its HP regeneration effect. Special recipes could give temporary skill ups. Maybe a special type of meal that instills clarity to the consumer, giving them extra magery, spell damage, etc?

Begging Now this is a fun one. What I suggest is giving begging a passive effect not dissimilar from the Honor virtue. Say you're fighting a dragon and you just got flamestruck one too many times. If you had GM begging and you fell below, say, 10% of your max HP, you would have a chance to automatically "plead for your life." If this happened, for the next few seconds your character would turn yellow, i.e invincible (also cowardly! This part wasn't my idea, but I loved it). Now here's where we differ from Honor. Your period of cowardice could last, say, 5-10 seconds. If you did anything other than move during that period, you would automatically lose your status. The monster was nice enough to let you live, the least you could do is properly run away, right? Perhaps during this period of cowardice, all skills could be unusable--you'd get the system message "you are too scared to use skills right now" or something!

Well those are the ideas a few of us had. Someone mentioned +Colibri had his own ideas for these skills, but just in case he or another administrator were looking for ideas, here they are! If you don't like them, then come up with your own way to make the skills better, and lets hear them too!

i see potential in that begging stuff

as for forensic evaluation: spiritspeak already does this. (its what its for, beside draining corpses)
herding: we have pet shrinking here so they go in backpack as an ethereal statue and unzip on Dclick

Since I plan to make a new champ (basically there will be a few in the world) for newbies, those could drop these special scrolls (just 1 scroll per champ let's say, or maybe just 50% chance of 1 scroll dropping... so that these things are rare). Skills are supposed to be a lot harder than what we got here, so at least with these custom skills we can make them hard to raise.


Item Ident for Luck, yea that's good... so if you arent wearing anything, it would come from your skill.
I'm thinking: 0-100 skill: 0-100 luck. 100-120 skill: 100-200 luck. Something along those lines.
Just took a look at the code and it's a very easy thing to do. (Just got to edit the Luck property on PlayerMobile).

Herding, i guess i can just scale it so that at 120 herding it would be as hard as it's now at 100. So by the new system if you had 100 herding, it would be as if right now you had 83,3 skill.

Forensics, i agree with Alewar.

Begging is a good idea, not sure about coding complexity tho... Well you'd get that "you need to wait a while before using another skill", and that could go on for 30-60 seconds (a big penalty, not just 10 seconds). It would be possible to use it only once every X minutes (5-10 or 15 i guess), so it would take a very long time to get to GM (begging at NPCs i guess would only take you till 50).

My idea for Hiding is: right now if you're in battle or something is chasing you, you can't hide. All i'd upgrade is that at 120 skill there would be 60% chance that you would be able to hide. (also for example, at 103 skill it would be 9% that you'd successfully hide).

I just had an idea for forensic evaluation that would give it a useful niche.

Forensic Evaluation Using this skill increases the amount of gold you get when you [claim a corpse. The reasoning behind this is that when you claim a corpse, you turn it in for a reward. It wouldnt have to be big, maybe a 10-25% increase in the total number of gold. Alternately, instead of gold, Forensic evaluation would allow you to receive an item in addition to/instead of the gold. High end DNA for bio pets, maybe. If a champ died and did not drop a scroll, a GM/Legendary Forensics user could [claim the corpse and have one more shot at getting one (based on his luck--forensics just gives him another chance). This would make forensics a great skill for everyone to have at champ spawns for upper-level players, but also a skill for newbies who need extra cash.

What do you think?

Another thought for begging, that would be considerably simpler, would be to improve players interactions with NPC vendors (not the player owned ones).

For example, GM begging would allow you to sell items to the NPCs for the same price as it would be to buy said item from it.
Right now a ball of yarns sells for 9gp, and is purchased at 18gp. With GM begging you could sell it for 18gp. This would also give you a way to train the skill, other than almost dieing every 15 minutes.

Laguna, about forensics, yes that might work. Actually i would make it so that, if claiming something brings 100gp now, you would only get 750gp with no skill. GM skill would be 125gp, and with legendary you could get 150. Something along those lines.

Well i'm not going to start with this yet, soon tho i like the ideas.

if claiming something brings 100gp now, you would only get 750gp with no skill.

Sir, i would like to sign up for that deal.