Diabolical Wrote:I just think it should be exactly like sphere PvP. Default basic, sphere PvP, I don't care about the WoP spam, make people make macros with them, instead of having a command to spam. Also allow razor to detect hidden spells. I personally think that will make it a lot better.
[SIZE="3"]Did you know that our PvP is actually pretty much a "balancement" of the normal basic sphere PvP? How come? Read below:[/SIZE]
Well normal basic sphere pvp (except for a few changes like supremely accurate weapons and stuff) were what people were fighting with at No vus Opiate. It was all good at first, most people enjoyed it. It was easy to learn, you could see when others were casting spells just by looking at them (since most people did not use any spam, or a spam that could be see-through). Everything was pretty much basic, just like basic sphere is. You see a flamestrike, you hit your greater heal button. Flamestrike scrolls took 30 mana and no life always, so you could only cast three flamestrikes before you were completely out of mana. 4 flamestrike scrolls and a lightning scroll if you had a full mana pool and also used a total mana potion during the dump. People hardly ever did that tho because if they failed they had no mana left, and died. Duels took ages due to that everybody saw what the others were casting. I remember MegaDeth, Paul, Shivan, Girth and a couple of others duelling for HOURS at the duel pits because of the slow PvP. Good people had a real hard time killing each other, and I seriously mean that it took hours.
So what did we do when we noticed that everybody was learning how to heal? They learned how to use combined greater heal potions, greater heal scrolls, and greater heal spell. Duels started to be all about who ran out of mana first, because it was so easy to survive dumps. So we decided to implement something that became our "signature" since then. XUO scrolls. By risking loosing a couple of hitpoints while casting a spell you were able to cast even more flamestrikes, however if you were dumb and used them in a bad way you would go down to so low HP that if your dump failed, or if the other guy attacked back, you would get killed by mearly a lightning in your head.
We also noticed that total manas made it too easy. People could fu-ck up and yet get "back on track" by just drinking a mana potion that gave them 40 mana, so we decided to remove total manas and only keep small manas, that gave you 20 mana, so that the room for fu-ckups "shrunk" a lot.
We also noticed that greater heal scrolls back at No-vus were way too overpowered. They only took 11 mana most of the time and you could scroll up to full HP with good timing in almost as much time as it would take to cast ONE flamestrike scroll, so even if you were down to 22 hp you could scroll up real high in HP before the flamestrike the other guy was casting even hit, and that surely pissed people off after a while. So we decided to increase the mana waste of greater heal scrolls A LOT, so that they would ONLY be used in emergancies, and not EVERYTIME you had to heal. If you still decided to use them everytime you had to heal, then you'd run out of mana after casting three of them in a row pretty much, and there after die pretty fast most likely.
We also noticed how people got bored since the duels took ages. They started to try and make spams to stop people from seeing what they were casting. After a while most people realized that whisper could not be "seen through" by UO Assist, so they started using a whisper spam instead. That was an undetectable spam at THAT POINT, since nobody hardly knew about injection and how it could see through it. Anyways, 1v1 duels got a lot more fun for people, and we noticed this. It became harder, more of a challange, but also more fun because it is no fun if everybody can see exactly everything you are casting. People had to learn how to "read their oponents", instead of just looking at what they were casting. The old whisper spam was useless again since everybody knew about injection and how to see through it, so we decided to add an undetectable spam at the RunUO version of XUO since we COULD do it at RunUO, and since everybody wanted it.
Do you see where I'm coming from? This shard is developed from basic sphere, over MANY years has it grown and been "balanced" by these things in order to make the PvP even more fun for players, after they realized just how easy it was to survive with the "basic sphere".
Now on the other hand we have a bunch of NEW players, who weren't with us for all those years. These people are new to this PvP and there for thinks it is REAL HARD and unbalanced. They think they die way too easy and that everybody is just spamming, and I can see why, I believe that its easy to get that first impression. However if they would look "behind" that fasade they'd see that all we did was to balance basic sphere into something better, at least for our players. I just hope that most players here will learn to appreciate this change as well, once they have practiced for a while and seen how this can be a good thing, instead of a bad thing. :]
Regards,
Hate