Timequake Powers - Brainstorming!

Estarra

Once again, I'm reaching out to you guys to brainstorm the research project powers! Below is a summary of what's being discussed currently based on some ideas from @Lycidas. I'm not necessarily on board with everything below but think it's a good place for brainstorming. I ask that we not get off track by focusing on other aspects of Timequakes; rather, we need to finalize power ideas ASAP and I want to give everyone an opportunity for input.

Nature Research Project (past anomaly type)

• Power 1: Teleport to Open Time Rifts, long wait
• Power 2: X/13 village influence buff, passive, x = floor(CR/2) minimum 1
• Power 3: Eating herbs heals h/m/e (like sparkleberries), 5 archpower per month
• Power 4: Faster cure recovery for 3 hours, 10 archpower/month, can turn on and off at will (so don't have to be 3 hour stretch but can break it up)
• Power 5: Nurturing Nature - Cause the area you are in to regenrate any missing plants to five, apply the effects of Nature Growth and the watering can. Activate for 10 archpower. While this could technically encourage strip harvesting by allowing the negation of the negative effects, it is also there for those that are seeking damage control instead of having to rummage around to try and replant it themselves, which is limited to only a few people, taking the strain off Druids/Wiccans.

Knowledge Research Project (future anomaly type)

• Power 1: Less mana cost in time rifts
• Power 2: 3/13 mana generation, passive, no archpower needed
• Power 3: Elemental/Ethereal essence value is doubled, 5 archpower/month
• Power 4: 25% exp/essence buff for 3 hours, 5 archpower/month, can turn on and off at will (so don't have to be 3 hour stretch but can break it up)
• Power 5: Keen Knowledge - Gain the effects of aetherial quickening as well as the ability to travel to any permanent milestone within the basin. Activate for 10 archpower, duration lasts until logout. Combines ring of aetheric quickening and compass of true direction to offer utility to those that seek it, without outright altering how PK functions.

Death Research Project (desolate anomaly type)

• Power 1: Universal damage buff in time rifts, 10/10
• Power 2: Universal damage buff, 3/10, passive, no archpower needed
• Power 3: Faster insanity recovery, stacks with artifacts, 5 archpower/month
• Power 4: 5% Crit boost for 1 hour, 5 archpower/month, can turn on and off at will (so don't have to be 3 hour stretch but can break it up)
• Power 5:  Defy Death -Upon the next time you would be slain, you are instead placed within stasis for five seconds. You cannot take any action, nor can you be effected by aggressive actions. During this time you can choose to teleport to the Portal of Fate or be revived at 50% vitals and no defenses. Activate for 10 archpower, defense until death, cooldown of a game month when the effect triggers. Grants the user an arguably better version of vitae so that they can choose to use that time to stay or get out of dodge. Cooldown is meant to be long so that this doesn't just become a way to grief raiding. The half vitals enforces the choice of standing your ground with the possibility of it being quickly used against you.

Beauty Research Project (immaculate anonaly type)

• Power 1: Faster anomaly harvesting in time rifts, 25%
• Power 2: Increased valuation when creating crafted items, passive, no archpower needed, or "Improved Crafting: Possibly more charges on magicscrolls, more poisons extracted/potions amalgamated/charges given per power in enchanting/etc
• Power 3: Increased trading power with aethertraders, 5 archpower/month
• Power 4: Ability to convert up to 10 archpower per month to enchantment charges (1 archpower=10 charges), must specify enchanted item, cannot go over max charges of that item
• Power 5: Beauteous Bounty -  Gain the effects of Endowment of the Arts, selecting a trade skill you have access to. This trade is not apart of skillflexing and requires this power to change or enable the tradeskill. Activate for 10 archpower for a duration of 24 hours and requires 10 archpower afterwards to upkeep before this power goes dormant. Changing the tradeskill costs 5 archpower and does not extend the duration of the activation.

Lycidas

So, I've decided that since there was some pushback on my Nature idea, I have come up with another possible candidate:

Power 5: Nurturing Nature 2.0 - All active commodity generation is doubled from commodity quests, passive. Upon activation of this project, all tithes from villages and aether bubbles are also doubled (commodities and conquest power).Activate for 10 archpower for a duration of 24 hours and requires 10 archpower afterwards to upkeep before this power goes dormant.

This is just another idea rather than the Miracle-Gro™ that is currently posted. Personally, I think this will do better as a whole since guards are now quite costly. Being able to flick this power on can grant you to deploy more guards, or just get a nice storage of conquest pool.

EDIT: "All active commodity generation is doubled from commodity quests." means - If you turn in a cow corpse, you get 2 leather/meat instead of just 1. This can help with those like @Kistan that literally gather their commodities to use rather than purchase for a store. It also aides in the scarcity craze that seems to be floating through heads as well.

Keahi

For Nature 5, what about something like kiakoda's drums? 10 archpower, 1x/month, 60s channel to trueground an entire area. Same restrictions as trueground (can't break melds/illusions/etc). Can't be used in org territrory.

For Beauty 2, can it be "improved crafting" that at least increases decay time or some other quality for those trades that don't have valuation? More charges on magicscrolls, more poisons extracted/potions amalgamated/charges given per power in enchanting/etc?

For Beauty 4, maybe instead of making charges, you can 'supercharge' an item to either boost it's max charges by 25% (affects cube capacity if used on one, still needs to be charged like normal) or reduces charge consumption by 25% if it has a regulator attached (every 4th use is free). Would wear off after, say, an IG year or so.

Or supercharge could just be a buff like the other level 4s, 3 hours a month, non consecutive, that reduces charge usage by 25% a month.

Both of those seem a bit more Knowledge to me, though...

Lycidas

@Keahi, my original idea had Beauty 2 doing that, granting all creations with the Beauteous Workings from Beauty Seal, stacking with it too. Guess it didn't go through. As for your Beauty 4, I think they already said no to bypassing normal limits of items.

Estarra

We really haven't said no to anything!

Lycidas

Cool, I can be wrong! Can we update Beauty 2 then to reflect the suggestions?

Estarra

Put it in bold.

Lycidas

Went ahead and bolded the earlier ideas that I think would go better than the current versions that are in place.

Estarra said:

Beauty Research Project (immaculate anonaly type)

• Power 1: Faster anomaly harvesting in time rifts, 25%
• Power 2: Increased valuation when creating crafted items, passive, no archpower needed,
• Power 3: Chance to double the yield of a Poisons, Alchemy, Bookbinding, Enchantment craft, 25% 5 archpower/month
  
• Power 4: Grant the ability to toggle "failures" (ie Jewelers always produce salt/sulphur, Alchemist sugar, Forging/Cooking mercury etc). 10 archpower for 1 hour.
  
• Power 5: Beauteous Bounty -  Gain the effects of Endowment of the Arts, selecting a trade skill you have access to. This trade is not apart of skillflexing and requires this power to change or enable the tradeskill. Activate for 10 archpower for a duration of 24 hours and requires 10 archpower afterwards to upkeep before this power goes dormant. Changing the tradeskill costs 5 archpower and does not extend the duration of the activation.

While increased trading power sounds nice to synergize with the new aethertrader system, people are already maxing out their trades and the increase would go to waste. I don't see anybody being thrilled about having a dud power between 2 and 4. I moved the suggested Beauty 2 to Beauty 3, giving it a good percentage chance and a power cost to access it, rather than letting it be a passive. Altered Beauty 4 to be one of my original suggestions that fixes a lot of the problems people are facing and is honestly a fair cost and length.

Saran

Posted in the previous thread, so again. 

Changing the level 5 powers so that they instead are 10 archpower to create a domoth'bix for the relevant domoth would provide a fairly consistent bonus across the board. 1 month decay timer that can be extended by 1 for another 10 archpower (so it doesn't just decay on you)

Mobility is always nice and it's relatively simple to tune the utility of it up and down based on the difficulty of researching and maintaining projects.

If it trends towards trivial it could be the equivalent of a prism, providing a selection of exits "tuned to the domoth" (Nature goes to naturey areas, Knowledge goes to Science! areas, etc)

As you move upward on the scale from "trivial" towards "difficult", you can then justify adding exits to aetherbubbles, and perhaps even having something in their bix rooms that can help you get to the relevant aetherbubble for a domoth claim more easily.

As a "nice to have" (for people without their orgbix) you could also consider having some form of avatar of the domoth which can, on command, teleport the player to their orgs planes with some thematic differentiation for each domoth type. (For seren going to etherwilde, beauty might take you to the spring section, death to the winter section, knowledge to the scrying pool, and nature to the gate maybe)

Exit overlap is likely but in each combination of three all should provide some value.

You could also just round it down to nature and effectively have the "grove of isolation" that the other games have, which i'd probably want to see difficult to get to places as the exits.

Saran

Unless there's already plans for it, dependent on difficulty again, you could also create functionality for the level 5's that lets people use archpower to access the ascendant powers for the projects respective domoth. Complete with daily maintenance, as well as potentially a scaling cost and maintenance to have access to a second, and then all three powers of the domoth.

Not useful to ascendants but in that case you could let them spend the archpower to instead negate the weight of 1/2/3 powers of those domoths.

Steingrim

Keahi said:

For Nature 5, what about something like kiakoda's drums? 10 archpower, 1x/month, 60s channel to trueground an entire area. Same restrictions as trueground (can't break melds/illusions/etc). Can't be used in org territrory.

Let's wait and see how the new melds work. I don't think this is going to be as useful.

Xenthos

A couple of thoughts:

* Nature

• - Have you considered a One with Nature like effect?  That's the racial power for Elfen/Faelings that gets buffed at demi+.  It doesn't have to even be an exact match, but some form of effect when in a natural area.  You could make that the level 4 power, and then the level 5 power makes every room in the area count as "natural" for a time (activating the power everywhere).
• - How does the "sparkleberry-like-effect" stack with the thing that already exists (Nature Domoth's crown blessing)?  Right now Chervil is blessed, so would eating a chervil provide 2x the healing effect to people with this?

* Knowledge

• - On the teleportation ability: Perhaps add the village entrances as well (ala the Tarot map card)?

* Death

• - The critical hit power is inconsistent; it claims both 1 hour and 3 hours.  Obviously 3 hours is better than 1!

* Beauty

• - Enchantment charges are not really a good power.  It costs me 0 gold to fill a 6,000 charge cube, just a bit of time.  Charges are dirt-cheap in the aetherplex too.
• - What if you could convert archpower to raw commodities of any type, so you could use it to create the stuff that is difficult to get from villages?  So you can create raw iron ore (and use that for the Angkrag quest, or for village comm quests, or whatever).  Or lumber, or vegetables, or fruit raw pieces that you would then have to take to a village and hand in.  I'd prefer that to enchantment charges, and it doesn't act as a "replacement" for a trade skill this way.
• - An extra tradeskill with an upkeep cost isn't very compelling to me, but maybe that's because I already have four tradeskills and there aren't really any others I "need" to keep active, so perhaps that is colouring my perspective.  I don't have a better idea for this though, and it may be a lot more tempting for people-who-are-not-me.

Deichtine

Power 4: Faster cure recovery for 3 hours, 10 archpower/month, can turn on and off at will (so don't have to be 3 hour stretch but can break it up)

This is going to break a lot of combat balance.

Lots of classes are built around the target being able to do a set level of curing on set balances.

Dys

I've been thinking the same. It would make it hard to set an appropriate afflicting rate for one on one unless it's really weak. It might be fine in groups.

Lycidas

Xenthos said:

A couple of thoughts:

* Nature

• - Have you considered a One with Nature like effect?  That's the racial power for Elfen/Faelings that gets buffed at demi+.  It doesn't have to even be an exact match, but some form of effect when in a natural area.  You could make that the level 4 power, and then the level 5 power makes every room in the area count as "natural" for a time (activating the power everywhere).
• - How does the "sparkleberry-like-effect" stack with the thing that already exists (Nature Domoth's crown blessing)?  Right now Chervil is blessed, so would eating a chervil provide 2x the healing effect to people with this?

* Knowledge

• - On the teleportation ability: Perhaps add the village entrances as well (ala the Tarot map card)?

* Death

• - The critical hit power is inconsistent; it claims both 1 hour and 3 hours.  Obviously 3 hours is better than 1!

* Beauty

• - Enchantment charges are not really a good power.  It costs me 0 gold to fill a 6,000 charge cube, just a bit of time.  Charges are dirt-cheap in the aetherplex too.
• - What if you could convert archpower to raw commodities of any type, so you could use it to create the stuff that is difficult to get from villages?  So you can create raw iron ore (and use that for the Angkrag quest, or for village comm quests, or whatever).  Or lumber, or vegetables, or fruit raw pieces that you would then have to take to a village and hand in.  I'd prefer that to enchantment charges, and it doesn't act as a "replacement" for a trade skill this way.
• - An extra tradeskill with an upkeep cost isn't very compelling to me, but maybe that's because I already have four tradeskills and there aren't really any others I "need" to keep active, so perhaps that is colouring my perspective.  I don't have a better idea for this though, and it may be a lot more tempting for people-who-are-not-me.

Nature - Not sure how I personally feel about just making it a regen effect and the level 5 power doing natural. Does that mean its natural terrtain (aka turns Faethorn back to natural forest if it was say, flooded) or making every room treated as natural, so any outdoors forest? My thought on the sparkleberry effect is just any and all herbs will apply sparkle assuming your sparkle balance is up.

Knowledge - I'd be down with adding villages to the Knowledge level 5.

Death - Pretty sure it is a typo and meant to be 3 hours as others have concluded.

Beauty - Not a fan personally of the archpower to charges, and do like the idea of just during archpower into raw commodities as well. Also, thank you for proving the point that not every power is desirable by all players, but can still be beneficial to people not yourself.

Deichtine

• Power 3: Eating herbs heals h/m/e (like sparkleberries), 5 archpower per month

This sounds a bit dodgy as well. Some classes are built around brute force mana/ego drain (Moondancers, Dreamweavers etc) and giving people an extra sparkleberry balance is going to hurt them.

Xenthos

I'm more thinking that it just flags the room as acting like it's a "natural" room (so if I was to go into, say, Nil, and activate the power-- every room in Nil now provides the benefit as if I was in a room that SURVEYS as "natural").  It should not change the terrain type, because that would impact combat balance, just basically saying "Any power that only functions in a Natural Environment will work in this area while the power is going."

Note that One With Nature is more than just a regen effect.  It's damage boost, damage resist, and regeneration which is active in "natural" terrain (so: it's active in rooms that are naturally beaches, swamps, deserts, valleys, mountains, etc-- also active in any room which has been terrained by Blacktalon or Hartstone).  The code to have something active only in "natural" areas exists, just wondering if we could leverage that for something here.

Lycidas

You know, that sounds good actually. Lemme scribble up what I think you're saying and see if we are on the same page?

Estarra said:

Nature Research Project (past anomaly type)

• Power 1: Teleport to Open Time Rifts, long wait
• Power 2: X/13 village influence buff, passive, x = floor(CR/2) minimum 1
• Power 3: Eating herbs heals h/m/e (like sparkleberries), 5 archpower per month
• Power 4: Grant a 1/8 universal damage buff and resistance, as well as a 1/8 health, mana, and ego regeneration while in a room that is natural
  
• Power 5: Natureborne - Force every room in the local area to become a natural version of itself. Activate for 10 archpower for the effect to last for 1 hour.
  

Xenthos

Yeah, something like that.  Though it would probably be a h/m/e regeneration instead of just health?

Lycidas

Edited to reflect your post.

Estarra

Would Natureborne really be desirable? Wouldn't it impact your guys as much as enemies?

Xenthos

You would be able to use it in PvE as well.  I kind of like that it would be something you would have to consider using in PvP; seems fitting for Nature to be encompassing in that respect.

Alaksanteri

For Chaos Research, it would be interesting to see berserker-like powers. Then for Knowledge research, powers that make it easier to explore or quest too.

Chaos :
-An ability that raises both universal equilibrium and balance agility buffs.
-The ability to assign a certain number of doppelgangers or shadows to oneself. They could be summoned to confuse (or dodge part of the damage) during combat or help with hunting, as possibilities.


(Posting that last bit in a more appropriate thread)

Lycidas

I'd prefer the Nurturing Nature 2.0 that I suggested, but the Natureborne isn't a bad suggestion either. I'd be fine with either one being used, but they both exceed my original Nurturing Nature.

Estarra

How would naturebornebe useful in PVE?

Here's an idea that's kind of out of the box:

Nature Power 5: Faenation, 10p to activate, every member of an org receives a fae follower (different look depending on org), can only have one. Fae will cure/heal occasionally its member, and/or do something else(?)

Xenthos

I kind of like a little curative thing.  Would it be killable like other ents in PvP?

Lycidas

Natureborne could be used in PvE simply by changing a bashing area into natural for the bonuses, kind of like a melder changing the terrain to get their buffs, just more universal in this case. The faenation idea is intriguing, but my senses are saying that Seren/Glom wouldn't be too pleased with places like Hallifax and Magnagora having a fae. We are known for experimentation and well, ruthless research in the same of science. Outside of the lore aspect and player reaction, the effect is solid, I would just make it not only bless the people currently online to make it enticing. If I happen to login two minutes after Xenthos pops the bonus, I'd be slightly miffed that I missed it otherwise.

Xenthos

Lycidas said:

Natureborne could be used in PvE simply by changing a bashing area into natural for the bonuses, kind of like a melder changing the terrain to get their buffs, just more universal in this case. The faenation idea is intriguing, but my senses are saying that Seren/Glom wouldn't be too pleased with places like Hallifax and Magnagora having a fae. We are known for experimentation and well, ruthless research in the same of science. Outside of the lore aspect and player reaction, the effect is solid, I would just make it not only bless the people currently online to make it enticing. If I happen to login two minutes after Xenthos pops the bonus, I'd be slightly miffed that I missed it otherwise.

You would fix that by having a tick every 5 minutes; if your fae died or you don't have it, one spawns for you on the tick while the power is active.  The "other orgs have fae following them" thing is a little trickier, but as long as it's not a Faethorn fae it's fine.  There are plenty of other fae that have been repurposed.  See: Kelpies, cookie critters, Icewynd larva, Frost Spite.

Estarra

Well, the "fae" would be loosely based on fae for cities, like a demonic slithe for mag or a celestial starfish for celest or a transluscent gembird for halli or a rainbow frog for glom. Could change the name away from fae, Naturethrall or Naturegift or something.

Lycidas

Don't think we need to change it from being a fae, I just didn't consider the examples that Xenthos brought up. I actually rather like the idea. Maybe have this fae be ordered to focus on one vital to heal and cure a random affliction a la allheale?

Saran

From new advice, given the intention is for it to be plausible for all orgs to maintain a full suite of level 5 projects, I'd reiterate a "grove of isolation" type power for nature. 

Give it exits to:

• Icewynd
• Tree of trees
• Faethorn
• Kiakodan reserve/Nature seal
• Tryko
• Mornhai
• Snow Valley/Tolborolla

Maybe a couple more places so that it's effectively a nature focused version of the prism and then add in functionality that let's people easily access their orgs connected planes. The ideal would be a few spread across the basin, ToT cause it's just thematically nice, Kiakodan reserve/Nature seal also means easy access to the wakabidrome and urtrap vendor, icewynd or Lirangha to give easy access to a higher level area.

Mobility is nice, especially as something that newer players can access.
There's an incentive for cities, in particular, to maintain it if you add the org plane stuff given I've seen comments about that still being a difficulty. (Also means if you've got a construct up just to provide access you could swap that to something else?)
It touches on some functionality from prism and the balloon without replacing them.