a problem with the new resting...

[Chongo]

I'm pretty sure there is a cap set Sky.

[Odranoela]

Perhaps this will cause greater impact on the people above level 20 and for the older players, that worked hard this might seem unfair.
However, I think that now, a large group of people that got there too fast recently and were taking things on an insane pace wil have opportunity to calm down and remember what RP is.
Or else why would they be creating new characters to get more in-touch with RP?

[Dezza]

Personally I think this new system for resting is awesome and well past due. Before some people bake me on the coals listen to the reasoning why.

1/ Finally Mages and Clerics are brought a peg back into line with the fighter & rogue classes. The ability of a mage and cleric with extended buffs to move through area after area killing massive amounts of opponents before stopping to rest is just not feasibly possible for the fighter and rogue classes. Believe me..I have seen this happen on many occassions both as a player and as a GM over the last few years. Where fighters have to stand toe to toe with multiple opponents, mages can kill in seconds and move on to another area again and again. Finally this limitation stops then from doing this.

2/ Layonara has never been portrayed as a magic rich world. This limitation means more reliance on scrolls, more reliance on drop items etc instead of people having copious amounts of this stuff stored in their inventories lagging the server they are actually using it! Great..another problem solved.

3/ Consider a 20th level fighter...he is experienced, he has to be to get to his level. When he rests he tends to his equipment, fixes dents in armour, fixes padding, takes out nicks in his weapon, plans his next moves etc, etc. The more experienced he is the more he plans and prepares cause he knows the dangers he must be prepared to face. Consider a mage at the same level, the weariness they would feel having cast so much magic, drawn so much on the weave, reached into the fabric of the world and drawn forth powers to shape and craft into their spells. Not to mention the tireless hours to memories spells in the early hours of each morning. They too need time and rest to recuperate. The more powerful the spells the more time they need. Now consider the 10th level mage/ 10th level fighter..he has to deal with both his spells and tend to his equipment. His time is taken up in both pursuits..really he should probably take even longer to prepare.

No I am sorry but I believe this system is awesome and a huge benefit to Layonara.

[Meizter]

3/ Consider a 20th level fighter...he is experienced, he has to be to get to his level. When he rests he tends to his equipment, fixes dents in armour, fixes padding, takes out nicks in his weapon, plans his next moves etc, etc. The more experienced he is the more he plans and prepares cause he knows the dangers he must be prepared to face. Consider a mage at the same level, the weariness they would feel having cast so much magic, drawn so much on the weave, reached into the fabric of the world and drawn forth powers to shape and craft into their spells. Not to mention the tireless hours to memories spells in the early hours of each morning. They too need time and rest to recuperate. The more powerful the spells the more time they need. Now consider the 10th level mage/ 10th level fighter..he has to deal with both his spells and tend to his equipment. His time is taken up in both pursuits..really he should probably take even longer to prepare.

I see you other points Dezza, but this one eludes me.

If a fighter needs more time to fix his gear, mages are exhausted beyond belief by the vast magical powers they have expended then would it in fact not be the other way around with rest.

The actual resting would be longer i.e. the time you are waiting after pressing your rest button, and not the time between rests. In fact would this not mean that if mages are really exhausted by their arcane arts they would need to rest more often to be able to keep up. Of course you should be limited in your resting in some way though.

I was just curious as I don't see this point as an argument for longer times between rests.

Of course this is a balancing issue and I fully acknowledge that and understand the thoughts behind (or at least I think so )

EDIT: Removed a dumb statement.

[Dorganath]

Conversely, Layonara could de-nerf the level caps they put on every spell, and therefore make more than about , say , three useful again.

The "nerfing" of a lot of spells was mostly the product of people who would use one or a combination of a few spells in their default configurations as an "I win" button, and then proceeded to abuse the heck out of them, ignoring our requests to show some good judgment and to not continue with such tactics.

Remember that Bioware built NWN centered around the FR setting, an inherently "high magic" environment where +7 armors, bracers and weapons drop with regularity.  The creatures, spells, weapons and really all the equipment in the game were designed and balanced around that concept.  Layonara is not the same.  Unfortunately, Layonara was first built and balanced when NWN had a level cap of 20 levels. When the expansions came out and epic levels became available, things had to stretch, but game play over level 20 was more of an add-on than a smooth progression. One thing we wanted to try and do with V3 was to rebalance everything on a 1-40 level scale, and yes, that would mean more meaningful spell duration/effect progression through all 40 levels and not just 1-20, but time and resources made that prohibitive.

Simply de-nerfing spells will not really solve any problems by itself. It will in fact make more that need to be re-balanced on a large scale. That right there is a huge effort and one we simply don't have time to address.  A few specific spells, perhaps, but certainly we won't be reverting to Bioware defaults on all or even most spells. Even if you take the level progression caps out of the picture, a lot of Bioware's default spells were still either overpowered for Layonara or simply don't fit right.

And yeah, I realize that this is, in part, a few bad apples, who for the most part don't even play here anymore, spoiling it for the rest.  There's not much more I can say about that really.

De-nerfing wouldn't really address the issue here anyway, and would be a lot more complex than finding a slightly different progression to the rest timer, since it seems the primary complaint about it is that the spell durations don't mesh well with the rest timers.  To me (and yep, I play a multi-classed caster), this is of lesser concern, and people will learn to adapt to longer timers.  Perhaps they won't stay this long (and that will depend on good information and feedback from actual game-play), but my guess is that they'll still be elongated with some level dependence factor.

[LynnJuniper]

Well thanks Dorg, I understand what you're saying about the difference between NWN centering around FR and NWN centering around Layonara. I also understand what you're saying about the lack of time and resources and that truthfully is a bit of a shame. I guess the comment just sprung from seeing (and using myself) the same three-six spells because nothing else seems to do any good, what with either everything having such a high reflex or fort save (and rightfully so, because its needed to balance other things). But that takes this thread way off track, so no need to address this comment any further here

[Skywatcher]

I'm pretty sure there is a cap set Sky.

I don't think so or at least if there is the cap is above 28 minutes as I spoke to one level 28 character that said the rest timer was 28 min for them.  Since 20th level is where spells stop increasinr in number it just seems a good compromise to cap at 20 but that's up to the team.  I just brought it up because if the issue is causing major bummers for some players then maybe it could be moderated where it makes sense.  I mean up to 20th level (20 min) I think all of the benefits listed in this post take place.  After that I can see that it is effectively a penalty for leveling higher and I don't think that was the intent.

[LynnJuniper]

Ozy wasn't completley certain but he said his resting cap was 36 when he tried to in passing before a quest.

[Chongo]

You'd have to hear it from the script side, but I thought a cap was set at 30.  I could be feeding you misinformation though, sorry.

[Dorganath]

There is currently no cap. Above 10th level it's 1 minute/level.

[jrizz]

well one thing to look at here is that the new drops for fighters will make it less necessary for casters to use up a lot of spells to buff them. It will take a fully cooperative group where the fighter types only ask for the buffs they absolutely need. The new items are giving SR (some of them over 25), resistances to many different damage types, freedom, and many others I am sure I should not say here. So the fighter types can help the casters by letting them know they dont need some buffs. This will give the casters more slots for battle spells, personal buffs, and other things needed.

This new update and the changes in them was thought out holistically and must be thought of in that way. If you take one item like the rest timer out of the context of the other changes then it may not make sense. But if you keep in mind the big picture you will see how it is all meant to work together.

[Nyralotep]

Take it all in context.  In Beta 4 resting was *much* different, you could actually rest in full plate back then and I don't think there was a timer either as I remember.  People bristled about those changes too.  We'll adapt and soon enough it'll be normal.

[Chongo]

well one thing to look at here is that the new drops for fighters will make it less necessary for casters to use up a lot of spells to buff them. It will take a fully cooperative group where the fighter types only ask for the buffs they absolutely need. The new items are giving SR (some of them over 25), resistances to many different damage types, freedom, and many others I am sure I should not say here.

mmm... I wouldn't mislead this one too much.  Immunities are extremely rare and are pretty much unchanged from the old drops (maybe one additional item with freedom).  SR of 26, or 32 for that matter, on a level 30 item equates to nothing more then a perk in low level areas.

The major changes on items is a very slight bump in AC in each bracket for the epic items due to balance issues, and a few minor perks here and there.  I am still wildly dependant upon casters with my character... so I guess you shouldn't get your hopes up.

[jrizz]

Poop Chongo you shot my theory to heck. That is what I get for being a big thinker I see depth everywhere LOL.

[Pibemanden]

I would like to suggest something to help the multiclasses who suffer right now. All of these are build before this update and before people even began guessing this would happen, therefore they got above level 10 caster and thought, woho! I can stay buffed all day now. However with the new update they need more than 10 minutes of buffs to stay moving since most multiclass casters are highly dependant on being buffed at all times. I know Aragwen said that you can just save the buff for when you need it, this is very true as long as you have more class levels in the other class than the caster. However when you take ((many)) caster leves you will suffer in the ability to fight and therefore you will need your buffs to be there to keep you standing and happy, but if you thought that 10 levels of caster was enough, which it was back then, I think out of all fairness due to the new situation that you should be allowed a rebuild where you trade a feat for the extend feat so you can keep your buffs up. Storold, well he has extend and can cope with the new conditions quite well because his buffs fade so long after any other casters buffs that it doesn't really matter. However some might be suffering hard from not choosing to get their character the oppotunity to extend and are very bad off with this update, so I would really like if someone would grant them the chance to adapt their character to this rather than just sending the character out on a hard journey over the nex 1-3 levels which might be over the 20-21 bump.

[Dezza]

I see you other points Dezza, but this one eludes me.

If a fighter needs more time to fix his gear, mages are exhausted beyond belief by the vast magical powers they have expended then would it in fact not be the other way around with rest.

The actual resting would be longer i.e. the time you are waiting after pressing your rest button, and not the time between rests. In fact would this not mean that if mages are really exhausted by their arcane arts they would need to rest more often to be able to keep up. Of course you should be limited in your resting in some way though.

I was just curious as I don't see this point as an argument for longer times between rests.

Of course this is a balancing issue and I fully acknowledge that and understand the thoughts behind (or at least I think so )

hehe I was in a process of having an epiphany I just couldnt quite articulate!

This is a good fix as per what we can do of course with game mechanics as they are! I see your point but can only inversly explain it the way I did...if that makes sense

[Honora]

I do think 1 min/level after 20 is a bit punitive.

[Jilseponie Wyndon]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but with the current DnD rules, to rest and memorize spells should take 6 - 8 hours.  So if we take a high lvl caster, say 8 hours rest ... For them to wander into a battle prepared, fight, crawl to a hidey hole, rest/memorize and repeat this two more times .. thats a full day gone by.  Now to do this over and over ... it does not sound very realistic to me.  Granted, this is a game, but shouldn't there be a close representation between the two?  If I was to live by this pattern, I would wear myself out to the point of fatigue and in due course make a mistake to get myself killed. And yes, I am a caster myself, have a few rechargeable items, and have special abilities that need recharging.  This new system makes things closer to realistic and I will learn to do things better.  I think this will also cause others to hold back and discuss tactics instead of rushing blindly ahead into a situation that may make things worse by doing so.  I say Kudos for the new system.

[Eight-Bit]

Rogues have found a usefulness somewhere? Rue the day fools, Arkolio knew his time would come ....... eventually!!!!

I'm tired of hearing that. A Rogue has always been useful, people just haven't been playing them properly.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but with the current DnD rules, to rest and memorize spells should take 6 - 8 hours.  So if we take a high lvl caster, say 8 hours rest ... For them to wander into a battle prepared, fight, crawl to a hidey hole, rest/memorize and repeat this two more times .. thats a full day gone by.  Now to do this over and over ... it does not sound very realistic to me.  Granted, this is a game, but shouldn't there be a close representation between the two?  If I was to live by this pattern, I would wear myself out to the point of fatigue and in due course make a mistake to get myself killed. And yes, I am a caster myself, have a few rechargeable items, and have special abilities that need recharging.  This new system makes things closer to realistic and I will learn to do things better.  I think this will also cause others to hold back and discuss tactics instead of rushing blindly ahead into a situation that may make things worse by doing so.  I say Kudos for the new system.

I agree entirely. It adds a layer of tactics along with limiting the epileptic siezure trains heading into dungeons.

[LynnJuniper]

Alright, level 25 is when the last of a caster's spells maxes out (Correct me if I'm wrong) But It takes to level 25 to get Greater Magic Weapon to +5. Perhaps it should be considered to cap the resting time here as well; to give some sense of equality?