I miss the times I had back on OSI being out at Terrathan Keep and farming the Warriors to get magic weapons. This place was so busy at all times, including early mornings. My brother worked second shift and would get home and people would be there all night through the morning. Murderers rolled around here trying to get your bags of magic weaps you'd been farming from the Warriors and blues would ban together and help each other when the reds came. You also had theives out trying to steal your runes and weaps all the time, as well as griefers trying to trap you into Avengers and Matriarchs. I really hope we can get this onto the server, it would be nice to have a hot spot where a lot of people hunted and there was constant action. This would boost pvp for everyone and also get more people mingling in the game. Heck you'd learn really fast who you could trust and who you couldn't. I go out farming and barely see any one, with a central spot like this people could go there with risks involved or sit at their quiet farm spot and not be bothered. I have been unable to find documented proof from this era, but I took the time to research many sites and I have quoted quite a bit of the finds I found pertaining to this same discussion. I found this, which was apparently quoted from Stratics in 1999. Quoted from: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/archive/index.php/t-67090.html Quoted from various sites.
Even if this change is made, I am not sure it would really turn Terathan Keep into a hotspot, for a few reasons. One is that terathan avengers and drones make life difficult and annoying down there. Two is that you're probably only doubling (maybe tripling) the rate of magic weapon drops, versus other monsters. For example, Elder Gazers drop 1 to 4 magic items, of which around 25% (estimate) are weapons. Three is that magic weapons of good mods are darn hard to find on this shard. And thus most of the money in farming is from the gold, and to a lesser extent platinum, that the monster drops. For accuracy and nostalgia purposes, it seems like a good, fun change to make. But for a profit-maximizing farmer, it probably won't change someone's habits much. It would just add a slight bit more revenue to the people who like to farm there already.
This wasn't just down in the keep. This was all around the keep, they were spawned all over. I remember multiple Avenger spawns outside and all the way in the SW corner a Matriarch would spawn. Drones and Warriors roamed all over, including all over the roofs and in the rooms. To get down into the keep from the outside was damn near a death sentence unless someone was camping the room right outside of the Ladder room. But maybe you're right........ it would be nice for nostalgia though. I'd definitely go there to hunt, and it gives players that don't want to play mages better chances at magic weaps I'd assume. Heck one of the first thing I did on this server was run from Papua to TK to try to train on some Drones and Warriors. The second I saw they didn't drop magic weaps each kill I was gone and have never been back.
Also, its worth noting that 16 years on into a game, people have found niches -- places they like to hunt, activities they like to do, etc... the landscape of players freely exploring a world they still don't fully know is unfortunately long gone, and as a side effect of that, chances of seeing people out at low-to-mid level spawn tends to be slimmer. Its more of a function of that familiarity with the game that most of us have that leads to that scarcity. Don't take that as a poo-poo'ing of the suggestion -- I'm all for more varied hunting spots available, and more accessibility for various template types -- but I don't know that this would have the effect of attraction that you think it would.
My question is if this is needed or even advisable? Unless it is something truly remarkable, there is little market for the glut of magic weapons we have here now. I'm sure we all played back in the day, would you have ever imagined buying garden variety vanqs for less that 5k back then? Powers for 2k? Unable to make a buck on force unless you are practically giving them away? I love finding magic weapons as much as the next guy, but don't we all have crates full of them already that we will never use nor ever really be worth the hassle of trying to sell in the market as is? I think turning on the tap, especially with low end critters like tera warriors which you can practically kill naked with a dagger would just further depress an already deeply depressed market.
Up top outside of Terathan keep was full of Terathan Warriors and was a good spot to get Magic Weapons. Every single one of them had a magic of some sort on them.
I don't see why it wouldn't be advisable? It's another spot to hunt giving more variety. Hunting Warriors was never really easy, you had Avengers and Matriarchs in the same area. If people are leaving their current hunting grounds to hunt the Warriors it would be no different. I mean, right now people are hunting stronger mobs that drop 2-6 magic items a kill, so you have to kill 2-6 Terathan Warriors for the same thing but less gold. It just gives someone who is just looking for weapons that they can't find anyone selling another avenue to do so. It's not like they are dropping mass amounts of gold, they drop 50-150 gold a kill. They also never dropped armor, so this is purely for weapons. and it is era accurate so it should be here. This wasn't game breaking, which is all the more reason to have it implemented. I'd like to know where these less then 5k vanqs are because every vendor I've found that actually has either stocked seem to sell them for 10-20k for Vanqs. Powers are all different, I've seen them from 999-5k. I have seen some that are lower but they are just vanq with absolutely no other stats involved.
It may not be a game breaker Azaazel, but sometime, I believe during the Renaissance era, this was changed on OSI shards. I remember this feature during the tail end of T2A when I started playing, but later sometime in Ren it was no longer the case. That and it would be fairly pointless. A critter in the terathan warrior class is going to drop utter garbage to MAYBE force if you are lucky, a range of weapons that already no one uses and there is no demand for. You were right about there being some challenge in hunting tera warriors because of their proximity to the avengers and matriarchs, but because of that difficulty, only the most seasoned and hardened hunters would hunt there and why would they when they could be hunting dread spiders, or elder gazers, or dragons, or executioners or lich lords, or any number of mobs that will pay far more gold and significantly better drops for much less risk? I will give you a tentative point on era accuracy, but I am almost certain this was changed at some point. It just isn't needed here and would accomplish little to nothing.
They actually dropped Force more then anything and other weapons from durable all the way to supremely vanq, so they were not worthless items. I believe it was changed when AoS was rolled out, but I'm not 100% certain, I quit before AoS and then came back later during AoS. To be quite honest if it's not a huge coding job I see no reason for it to not be put it in. It's a waste land up top, no one hunts there, what a waste of a good area. People will hunt there period, I can't see people not hunting there. It was the hottest spot in UO during this time no matter what server I played. Like I said earlier in this post, one of the first spots I checked was TK to see if this was in. I didn't even have my character fully trained and I was running through dodging deadly stuff just so I could get some weaps for my character and the Warriors could always GM any of your melee skills due to their high tactics. People used to train there all the time. For Archers, it was one of the top spots to go. On another note not everyone wants to or does use a Bard, Tamer or Mage, so why do we have to keep the melee or hybrid from getting some goods. Maybe some players just want to use their melee character for pvp and pvm without having to waste their time making a farming character. During this time there were some Bards and Tamers but they were the minority. Maybe if people didn't have to PvM with their Bards they'd be able to fight back just like we did in the old days. Maybe I'm just speaking for the minority, but for me it would be nice to see this put in. Thanks,
You are right about Tera keep back in the day. I GM'ed my archery there standing on the ledge or in the middle of that fountain/pond thing outside the keep flinging pointy sticks at avengers. However that was the old days under a different set of rules. Multiple accounts were not as common, multi-clienting other than dual-boxing was rather uncommon, and macroing could get you banned. There isn't nearly as much need for critters to train on here like there was back in the day on OSI. Not when you can macro a pair of dexxers by yourself in 2 days. I do hunt TK on occasion but mostly just for something different to do, and incidentally dexxers are my thing, my tamer bard rarely gets touched, so I get ya there. While you might have scored a vanq back then off a warrior, I have noticed that magic drops tend to run differently here and something that low on the food chain stands as much of a chance at dropping a weapon better than force as getting a plat off a mongbat. There are a lot of things that work differently here than back when on OSI. There an NPC noble might have a vanq in his pack, I used to snoop them with my thief to see who had what and entice them out of town (back when entice actually enticed) to kill them. Town crates spawned semi-rares like crazy, barrels in Shame had bone containers, Spectral Armors always dropped magic swords, etc and so on. I'm willing to chalk this up as just another one of those differences.
Well I appreciate your responses and I agree it is not the old days. It was fun debating it, but I stand firm on wanting to see it implemented if it's not too much work. There can never be enough options for farming in my opinion and I don't see this ruining anything on the server, including the economy. I've gotten two vanqs (one supremely) off of regular Rat men, so I'd be happy with a small chance to get a good weapon if that was the case.
Nothing should be, simply on the merit of era-accuracy. The desire to spread the spawns around and mix things up for variety is a good one. There's a hefty imbalance in item availability due to totally crazy drop rates in the past. Once the CUB thing gets implemented, hopefully that will clean things up a bit. I would love to see more efforts towards enabling warriors to get along in an advanced AI landscape where monsters are healing themselves between swings and Mind Blast/Flame Strike graping you all over the field. I've said it a few times already but perhaps an AoS style buff to crafted armors, for PvM only, would be good. Anyway, nothing wrong with idea flow but changing up TK in such a way seems like a negligible change that shouldn't be a problem somewhere down the line.
