classes rehabilitation

[bencha]

past the first levels, you only have 2 class that gives you an adventage : monk with meditation and priest with a wisdom bonus for payer casting.( maybe you can add evockers with their powerfull talisman)

past your first chars tests, you end up with dragon & fireborn -> monk, weapon user -> priest

so, we need to give other classes long term advantages to make them more attractive.

I suggest something like an 'attunment extention'
thief : bonus in find/disarm traps
barbarian : dam bonus (then you can imagine a barbarian fireborn )
warrior : wc bonus
alchemist : permament alchemy attunment
swashthing : missile weapon bonus
warlock : use magic item bonus (to add to cavesomething patch )
and maybe someone with +2 IP

... to be continued

[cavesomething]

I think the proper way to do this is through the skills system with an 'competence' value for many skills, altered by class. In this case then, all new players would start out with all skills, but some would be marked unknown. (flag unidentified can be used here.)

getting a scroll of a skill would give a chance to gain some competence in the skill, rather than the all or nothing thing currently. Each class would have a maximum competence, which would be set on choosing a class. in the class arch there would be the inital competence also.

Whenever experience is gained, this is multiplied by the competence, so skills which your class is competent in, can take forever to level up.

example, let's have the player be a barbarian, they may have a max competence in alchemy of 0.5 (say). It is initally unknown.

They find a scroll of alchemy, they read it and have a 36% success (rolled between 5 and 95, biased for high INT), they then learn the spell, and have a current competence of 36*0.5 = 18%.

They make a water of the wise, this would normally give 1000 exp, now it gives 1000*18% = 180

they get another scroll, have a 60% success (lucky roll)
they now have 18+(60*(.5-(18/100)) which is 37.2%

They make another water of the wise, this time they get 372 exp from it.

For an alchemist, their max competence may be 2, and they might start with 1.4 (say).

immediatly making a WotW will give 1400 exp.

they can get a scroll of alchemistry, and roll 40% (for example). they would then have 140+(40*(2-(140/100))= 164%

now a water of the wise will give 1640 exp.

In this case then, all classes /can/ do anything as before, but some are better than others at different skills, and choice of class should remain fairly meaningful for far longer.

the 'expmul' value was mostly intended to do this anyway, It needs relatively little modification, except to archetypes and a little bug checking to have this work on new players/servers.

For existing players/servers a patch to change it wouldn't be that hard to do technically, but it might meet some resistance

[bencha]

i haven't considered decreasing xp gained for char, but it is an idea.

i was thinking of a bonus like attunement, +2 in a skill. so then you can imagine a 'gloves of disarming traps' and so on...

the main problem is that the char class isn't stored in the player struct. so it has to deal with the arch and will be applied only at char class selection.

on http://crossfire.real-time.com/spells/magic.html you can read

Anyone except a cleric or priest attempting to cast a priest based spell (a prayer) will not receive a Wisdom bonus to successfully cast the spell (and has a high chance of fumbling the spell unless the caster has an unusally inherent high Wisdom).

but for now i found nothing in the code that confirms it. the cleric_chance array seems to apply to everyone - and may be renamed to praying_chance - and nothing distinguish a priest in the player struct.
so i'm no more sure the priest has a prayer casting bonus.

[Leaf]

the main problem is that the char class isn't stored in the player struct. so it has to deal with the arch and will be applied only at char class selection.

on http://crossfire.real-time.com/spells/magic.html you can read

Anyone except a cleric or priest attempting to cast a priest based spell (a prayer) will not receive a Wisdom bonus to successfully cast the spell (and has a high chance of fumbling the spell unless the caster has an unusally inherent high Wisdom).

but for now i found nothing in the code that confirms it. the cleric_chance array seems to apply to everyone - and may be renamed to praying_chance - and nothing distinguish a priest in the player struct.
so i'm no more sure the priest has a prayer casting bonus.

This information could be left over information that did apply before the race/class split many years ago. But, as you discovered, it's no longer the case.. ?

[bencha]

code source re-checked, I confirm priests have no wisdom bonus for prayer casting spells.

so, one of this messages file argument is no more pertinent : only non weapon users have a permanent advantage ( as monk ).
but it's still quite hard to start with a barbarian.