Fire Horns current status: useable at only 2 tiles. easily breakable even upon first use. extremely low damage rate. trapped containers: not sure if this is bugged or not, but shouldnt upon explosion everyone with in a tile radius be damaged?
Firehorn damage is based on total number and level of all four barding skills. GM all four and the damage is the best it will be and any more than a two tile range could be quite nasty. Not to say I'm not in favor of testing some viable changes to them, just putting that out there. Trapped containers I feel should damage anyone in the area of the sprung trap. I'm actually quite in favor of the prior era mechanics of any hard container being able to be trapped and anyone nearby when it's opened dies for the most part. I do feel the trapped containers should be much more volatile and far less trivial. As it stands, you can only trap lockable containers and the only way I've seen people die from it is because they had high enough LP to break into it. Boo. In fact, the entire premise that you can use/access anything inside a locked/trapped container is silly to me as well, while I'm on the topic. As it pertains to treasure maps particular, a fun game we would play in the guild has been popping the chest on guildmates via telekinisis or other, to watch the deathlols. I miss this greatly.
What era was this? I didn't know these traps ever had an area effect. And as I mentioned in IRC, area effect of traps will kill people in town, constantly. You think it's annoying when a thief stealths up to you and tries to steal 15 mandrake, wait until it's just "oops you're dead".
Yeah I don't recall there ever being trap splash damage. Maybe waaay back in beta. I often wonder why magic trap even exists considering it can't possibly do any damage to a monster, and it does 1-5dmg to a player, what was the point before people started using it as para-escape?
I think the devs were just guessing about what people would want to do in the game. They spent a ton of time designing things people would never in practice actually do (poisoning a cake?!), but I guess they didn't know that at the time. Maybe Magic Trap was intended to be used on your house door, back before lockdowns and all of that? BTW - are you sure it can't damage monsters? I think it should, since some of them can open doors. This would be a super cool (but admittedly, kinda useless) change to make.
A lot of the spells are carried over from the single player Ultimas as well. So it could be there simply because 'it's Ultima'.
I dunno, I could have sworn my son and I both died to the same trapped crate on UOSA the first week we were there. Only one of us sprung it but we were both standing there and died. I could be mistaken, it was a long time back. I'm more confident that treasure map traps did area damage to all, but honestly have nothing to back that up. From a logical perspective, an explosion that can kill a person opening a container should at least have some area damage on anyone within the same range.
On UOSA, they initially had the purple potion chaining (which was eliminated in 1998, I think), so you might have gotten bit by a chopped box that had a handful of purples in it. There's a lot of things that would make sense from a "realistic" perspective, but would have horrible consequences if applied in game. This is one such instance, IMO.
i vaguely remembered trapped containers doing an aoe effect as well hence the reason why I mentioned it. Perhaps not a lethal dose to all those standing around, but it did still do some noticeable damage. the range on fire horns if anything should atleast be a 5 tile distance... 2 tiles is obscene as most players have a tendency to run away even in a fight.
You mean like people would have to learn to not just open any random container without walking away and using a simply low-level spell like Telekinesis?
Snapdragon's response is actually one I did not think about. What I was thinking about was stealthing, or walking up to someone, dropping a trapped chest or two on the ground, and axing/opening the chest(s). It's basically an instakill for anyone, anywhere, any time. And with the super short action delay here, it could be done in a very short amount of time. I can think of three ways to virtually insta-kill someone right now, in town, which means snapdragon probably already has 10 in mind. If this was possible in-era, I think it's be something to be very careful about implementing. But as far as I know, it would be a customization to the shard, and one that would have serious repercussions. People go nuts about naked bank thieves stealing their 15 Mandrake Root. Imagine if they instead can flat-out kill you in about 1 second. It gets really fun if they have an alt casting Wall of Stone or Energy Field at the doors to the healer. Or have a looting char nearby. I mean, you could kill ancient wyrms and bosses with this. Drop 15 chests next to them with a stealthed char, have an alt just out of their LOS Telekinesis them one by one. There are a TON of things to think about with a change like this, and most would greatly change the dynamics of the game.
Multiclient. Have one char stealth up to the victim, and suicide by opening the chest. 2nd char loots. Can even do fly-by's. Wait on the road between tailor and blacksmith and wait for crafters collecting BoD's. Blow them up when they run past you.
I like the idea, I would love to steal 1 of your trapped pouches, get 20 guildmates together, and turn you red. Or insta-PK people with stun-punch + chop a box. But I think it's just too much, would cause too many problems.
I personally do not feel the mechnics should allow for murder counts from <10dmg. I've honestly never seen or heard of people getting counts from the damage from a trapped pouch. I'm fairly sure it could be implemented without such exploits being left in.
