A few modifications to the mining changes

Elizabeth Gold

Grandmaster
For those who are unaware of the change: Mining ore now has a chance to spawn an ore elemental, which was implemented to discourage bots from ruining the ingot market.

Anyway, overall I think most players like this change.
  • Retired miners are picking up their pickaxes again.
  • Existing miners welcome the variation.
  • Anti-bot supporters rejoice.
  • @eppy and the other admins who got tierd of social inspection

Now in order to deal with elementals, a lot of us miners had to adapt their templates. Before discussing that, I'd like to review the most common setups:

Craft miner:
Most mining templates pair up with crafting skills. This is due to the organic development where a player wants to be blacksmith and picks up mining to be self sufficient and recycle goods. At one point they pick up tinkering to make their own tools. There is also a lot of synergy with carpentry which leads to fitting in tailoring for BODS as well.
Core skills: Mining, Blacksmith, Tinkering
Optional skills: Carpentry, Tailoring, Magery, Musicianship
Filler skills: Meditation, Inscription, Alchemy, Bowcraft

Pure miner:
This template is mostly used by players who focus on mining as a source of income. Their main defence exists of hiding and recalling. This template is very suitable for recall/gate mining as it leaves enough room to pick up meditation. Most of these templates fill their skills up blacksmith and tailor but for the sole puprose of collecting BODS.
Core skills: Mining, Hiding, Magery
Optional skills: Meditation
Filler skills: Blacksmith, Tailoring, Evaluate Intelligence

Now let's review the adaptions needed for dealing with elementals:
  • Hiding: while it still offers some protection against players, you will get revealed by the elementals and instantly attacked. Meaning you can't hide again. Since it's unpredictive when an elemental appears, this skills becomes a lot less reliable. (-100 skillpoints)
  • Combat skills: When an elemental appears, you'll find yourself often overburdend with ore. It's easier to pick up a weaponskill. While archery, fencing, swordfighting and macing offer you something offencive, you still need a second skill (tactics) to make it viable. (+200 skillpoints)
  • Magery skills: While magery is already present in most templates, you'll want evaluate intelligence and meditation to make it a viable option. You'll need a defence option as well, so eighter you pick wrestling or anatomy in combination with evaluate intellige. (+300 skillpoints)
  • Healing skills: If you went for combat skills, you'll need healing and anatomy. With magery, you are better off with using healing spells. (+200 skillpoints)
Conclusion: you need to free up room for 200-400 skills points. If you are a craft miner, you are royaly screwed. A pure miner can work around that but it's still a third of a miners template without getting any synergies (unlike lumberjackers). A few idea's to give miners more options:
  • At 100 mining skill, you get a 40% damage bonus on earth/metal elementals, so we can save 100 skillpoints with tactics/evalint.
  • At 100 tinker skill, you can bond with a golum and resurrect it, so crafter templates can still function. Perhaps upgrade the golums using various resources (crafter/miner meta?).
  • Encourage the use of pack animals (vet/animallore template for ressing), by giving packanimals a pack bonus. Perhaps introduce a new pack animals that have a mining requirement (crafter/miner meta?).
This would make the following templates still viable and convert into new ones:
  • Crafter Miner -> Golum Miner (mining, tinkering, magery)
  • Pure miner ->
    • Combat miner (mining, weaponskill, healing, anatomy)
    • Mage miner (mining, wrestling, magery, meditation)
  • *New* Pack miner (mining, animal lore, vetrinary, magery)
That concludes the template issues / suggestions.

Regarding the earth elementals themselves
  • Disable paragons: Please we can adapt to deal with earth elementals, with paragons we spend more time PVMing than mining. This is kinda overkill for an anti botting mechanism.
  • Loot revisement: I'm pulling A LOT of valorite out of their corpses. Up to ten times what i would normally get out of a valorite node. Kinda beats the purpose of exploring new veins for valorite.
  • A few mining themed rares would be most welcome, just like fishermen have. (and in all fairness, give the lumberjacking something too :))
  • Spawn cooldown: Sometimes you spawn several elements at once. An internal cooldown might be welcome to avoid this (unless you like october to be THE motm drop month).
 

Firecrest

Grandmaster
I like to see improvements to the golem additional damage to monsters maybe upgradeable., bond able or event just a little easier to craft.

Barding for beetles would be welcomed so our beetles could help in the fight a little more effectively.

Paragon and timers I agree with.

Less loot, I do not see a need for more "rares" snakes give maybe 10 frost that is fine.

The beetle and golem aspect is something that would be a game improvement even with out the anti macro part. Golem exsist and they are not used. That seems like a waste to me. They do not need to solo dragons and the arch demon but they need to follow with recalls, kill at least earth eles and be more economical if lost.

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Channel 34

Apprentice
Thank you guys for this. I love having the Eles pop up. Makes it more entertaining. A couple of individual points of interest. I am not sure we ought to lose the paragons, it adds more spice, or adjust the timers, I think it is a good balance, but you can actually pop an ele on back to back swings of the pickaxe, so I made a UOS hotkey to kill my mining macro in UO Steam and apply a bandageself command through the in-game macros so it only takes single keystroke, if you aren't rolling with a build that can take them, you can always run or auto recall out. but make the loot, and yes, the loot is a tad OP, more appropriate. Maybe have them carry more ore variety, make it more of the lower end/popular i.e. shadow, bronze, gold, and lower it to max 25, that is the amount of ore that you would get from an Ele anyway, Giving it in ingots is ok, but maybe make it ore instead? the paragons can have more ingots/higher ranked ores.

I like the idea of crafter/miner rares. Stuff like rare gems and minerals, geodes, "hidden caches" (small collectible chests similar to the small metal ones that have a THunter rewards/loot, time capsule contents like old "rare" tool kits, "family" portraits/paintings, a stash of treasure maps, heirlooms, stuff like that.)

As far as the Miner Meta. I want to RP a craftmaster. A ridable Clydesdale pack-horse would fit the bill. You can have "relics" like a mining cart that is additional storage which is pulled behind the horse, another could be a portable mini forge/anvil farrier kit for on the go smelting/BSing, if you make one of the relics "extra" packs and/or horse barding you'd have a BUNCH of customers in the RP community (myself included) that are clamoring for a better RP mount. I would also suggest, in regards to the template stuff, that if you have a Clydesdale, it'll hold 500/750/1000/1600 or such based on level, if you add the extra packs, it gives you another 250-500 stones, the mining cart adds 750-1000, and if you have Animal Lore you gain an extra 5% of the horses BASE capacity for every 20 real points (Jack of all trades does not apply) for a TOTAL bonus of 30% if you take it to legendary. I could go on.. but as it is, if I get half of what I posted, I would be emotionally obligated to make a hefty donation :)
 
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Elizabeth Gold

Grandmaster
Ok time for an update:

Elemental loot:
  • ingot drop: iron or 40-80ish valorite or 40-80ish agapite. So agapite also seems to be dropping, not sure why but at least it will stop valorite inflation a bit.
  • rare drops: maybe they have been added or were always there and we haven't seen em yet; but yesterday I found a bountiful harvest perk on an elemental. Seems very appropriate to me. So there is still hope you can loot a deco item one day, or a rare mining tool (like orcish pickaxe).
Paragons are stil spawning, so a little template revision:
  • Mage-miner is not a viable template. Run out of mana too fast and can't keep up with their health regen using mana efficient spells (fireball / harm). Eventually I can kill em using several summons, but it takes me longer to kill a paragon than to clear an entire mine. Maybe with the mage talisman this would be managable, but I shouldn't make so many PVM investments into a miner so I'm abandoning my template:
    120 Mining
    100 Magery
    100 Evaluate Intelligence
    100 Meditation
    100 Wrestling
    100 Hiding
    100 Blacksmith
  • Tamer-miner is certainly not a viable template. Keeping packanimals alive with vetrinary isn't an issue when fighing off elementals. The downside is that they deal very little damage. I've trained 5 packhorses up to GM wrestle/anatomy/tactics and the damage output becomes acceptable. Unfortunatly PK'ers/Griefers/Castermobs can really ruin your day and eventually your packhorses require continuous training to make up for ressurected skill loss.Also it's freaking hard to get bandages in on 5 packhorses, especially when mobs are running away. Once you struck a paragon, you better be carrying 100 bandages and go watch a youtube video or something - this takes AGES. My template:
    120 Mining
    100 Magery
    100 Meditation
    100 Vetrinary
    100 Animal Lore
    100 Hiding
    100 Blacksmith
  • Tamer/Mage-miner (to be tested): haven't tried it yet. Basicly combining both templates above into a PVM template. I'm very reluctant to give up blacksmith/hiding, but maybe I should move on and accept that mining is PVM now.
    120 Mining
    100 Magery
    100 Evaluate Intelligence
    100 Meditation
    100 Wrestling
    100 Animal Lore
    100 Vetrinary
  • Warrior-miner (o be tested): also haven't tried it yet but I'm willing to give this a try next. Now that we got useless agapite dropping, I might as well use it to have a miner in plate armor with a slayer weapon. That should be sufficient to deal with paragons. The only downside I see is weight and mana regen, which are both very needed for miners and will kill valorite mining all together:
    120 Mining
    100 Swordmenship
    100 Tactics
    100 Anatomy
    100 Healing
    200 Hiding/Blacksmith/ or perhaps Parry/Magery/Resist (because fuck it, might as well go full PVM)
 

Channel 34

Apprentice
I am running

Anat 50
Hiding GM
Lumberjacking 90+
Mining 105 (Looking for a 110)
Stealth GM
Swords GM
Tactics GM
The rest of the template is just gobbly-de-gook while I am waiting on getting the mining and jumberjacking to legendary

Point is, I roll with an earth shatter axe, Earth Eles are just about one hit. Paragons take a few more, but not overtly so. Once I have the PSs to take the mining and jacking to 120, I will be putting all the rest of the points into anatomy to maybe make it just a one hit Oneder. When they implement my points above, I will switch that anat to animal lore or split it, dunno yet. Have to see how I feel about it
 

oneSLOWex

Adept
I have: 120 mining, 120 blacksmith, 100 swords, 100 tactics, 100 med, 65 Magery(no fail recalls), 100 hiding. Carry 100 each recall reg, 10-15 each other reg, ele ban katana and about 10 heal pots. I recall mine with no animals. Regular elementals are no problem and paragons are manageable with the pots. I never run low on mana from recalling and really only heal when I'm done with a paragon. 100 med regains mana really fast. Oh and I run an orcish pick. I would prefer the paragons removed but they are not impossible. I think the ingots are awesome since we all had to change templates, plus just dealing with them in general. What I use won't mine if it's not hidden, so I have no problems spawning more than one at a time. It would be nice however to see some mining related rares though!


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The End

Master
Y'all are overthinking this they are earth eleys not valorite ones. My templates not even finished yet and they are about as irritating as a swamp rat. Do this and you'll be just fine.
Mage 100
Med 80
Tactics 100
Swords 100
Lumberjacking 120
Mining 120
Blacksmith 100

Gathering skills of 120 mining and lumberjack for the rare pixels. Magery to heal with cast reactive armor. Swords and lj for melee elements and snakes. Go buy earth shatter axes one hit eley dies. Earth shatter axes are like 1500gold for exceptional ones. One char full resource farm
 

sshhaawwnn

Master
I run a similar template, haven't gotten my 120 lj yet, only 115, but swords tact anat heal mine lj and hide, 1 hit snakes and eles, also do fairly well holding my own/laying down the trolls that mess with miners.
 

sshhaawwnn

Master
yeah, I'm only at 100 mine, The brother has the bs, really just made it to help him with ingots to get up there. then for galleon, now for cannon balls. I completely understand recalling to val tho.
 

Hexoplex

Grandmaster
Run mining on my Lumber Jack, just hold my ax while I mine with a shovel. If I pull up a elemental (even Paragon) I just let the auto attack drop them and bandage when needed. My beetle just stands there and watches me.

LJ - 120
Tact - 100
Sword - 100
Anat - 100
Heal - 100
Mining - 110
Think the last skill is either Resist or Hiding
 
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