Asherons Call: (Somewhat Belated) Q&A

vanyaul asks: (about /allegiance ban) Why can they not attach the ban to the persons who is banned [as opposed to the allegiance object?]
srand: vanyaul: Because then you could only ban single characters from your allegiance, not accounts, and only characters who were online at the time.

illusion24 asks: Are slayer properties tied to our skills? With the magic of hecatombs and the assault orb, I know that my 335 base life resulted in a 17% damage increase. Is it a flat 17% for all mages, or does that number vary based on our skills?
srand: The effect of a slayer property is tied both to your skill and to the particular weapon.
A slayer weapon has a maximum damage multiplier that it applies to the right type of creature. What percentage of that multiplier *you* see, however, depends on your skill with that weapon.

Televangelist asks: (about the power of the rewards to the Palenqual Weapons quest with regards to the quest difficulty).
srand: We regard this quest as a mid-to-high level quest. The basics are mid level, and some of the rubble bits are in higher level dungeons. Of course, since the rubble is tradeable, you don't need to be high level to get your hands on those bits, and that influences the final rewards.
I know that there is currently a dearth of high+ level quest rewards, but as we continue to add new quests and revise existing quests, many of those gaps will be filled in.

Televangelist asks: Please make Isparian weapons buffable. This would bring them completely in-line with the game's current state.
srand: We do have some changes to the Isparians in mind. Not for the May update, obviously, but perhaps within the next few months.

Brandun (amongst others) asks: (about Behdo Yii refusal to give anything other than experience for Olthoi Pincers)
srand: Indeed, there does seem to be a problem here. This change is not intentional, and we will be investigating and getting this fixed ASAP.

AxeWieldingManiac asks: It seems that each time AC is tweaked, things are gained and things are lost. I'd venture to say that many of the lost things were not really taken into consideration when the change was made. Still, we all adjust and keep playing with changes ever being made for good, bad, or neutral.
The reason I even thought about this was because of a vassal I picked up a few months ago. A vassal of the rarest kind - a true newbie to AC. Not only that, but he was a true newbie that wanted to explore and do low level quests. He wouldn't even let me buff him because he wanted to be self-sufficient and cared nothing for powerleveling. I could tell he was just raring for more exploration but didn't know where to head, so I handed him an M note from Sawato and told him to find his way there so he could get the most out of cashing it in, explaining to him how any other vendor than the one listed would give him less than face value. He was blown away by having me hand him that much money (not much for most of us, but I remember feeling the exact same way back at level 14 when I was new), thanked me, asked me where Sawato was on the map, and hurried off.
srand: Actually, it's something we thought about quite a bit. In the end, however, we decided that the convenience of stackable notes was a worthwhile goal, especially if the change to buyback rates could be worked in to the ongoing story.
After all, what sense does it makes that these supposedly united Isparians will exchange notes with the Lugians and Tumeroks, even, but won't give you full value for a note you bought next door?
You can still send a vassal off to Sawato with an M note as a mini-quest, if you like. I understand that it doesn't feel quite the same to you, but I imagine that your vassal will still get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Flesh_Wound asks: Has anyone seen Zairente since the patch? I've been roaming the 60-80 dires for a couple of hours now, and I haven't seen a glimpse of him or a humming crystal portal.
srand: Since the mage armor quest is aimed at characters below 60, we moved Zairente into a more level-appropriate area. Try looking in the 40-60 areas.

Bongobong_V asks: Auroric Runic Helm cast Mark of the Priestess on you, surpassing Beast Murmur
The first one is +10 life while the second one is +10 creat (from the leggings)
Although it gives +10 to both when you watch the skill tab. Just Beast Murmur don't appear anymore in the "Active Spells" tab.
srand: There is an issue with both Mark of the Priestess and Blessing of the Priestess which is causing some odd behavior, including these spells stacking when they aren't supposed to stack. This will be fixed.

Televangalist asks: Srand, to clarify: You're supposed to get +10 life *and* +10 creature, right? Your post kind of confused me into thinking that we're supposed to just get one or the other.
srand: If I am understanding your question, Televangelist: When wearing the helm and the leggings, you should get +10 to life and +10 to creature, but the +10 life should not stack with other life cantrips.

miRC.32 asks: We all know how Minors drop like mad, thats cool. On the other hand, Majors are VERY hard to find. Could the creation of Moderate cantrips be added? They would have a drop that is less then minors yet, more then majors.
Orion: Just echoing a former post here. We made the decision to reserve moderates for quest items.

CyranosCottage asks: [regarding ACPL:] Whats the price of the rooms?
Orion: I believe it is listed on the site, that the rooms are coming in a discounted rate of $100 at the Sheraton.
I think if you shop around a bit you might find some lower too.

ipeacefrog asks: Is the Tumerok Board w/Nail still available in game?
Been looking for one. It's listed in Maggie's site and at least one person claims to have one.
Orion: When creatures were rebalanced and given new weaponry to fit with the areas in which they live they also retired some of their old weapons or, in the case of the lugians, they were upgraded to a point that would be unbalancing should a player get hold of them. Another consideration is that the more civilized races are using more civilized tools now.
Drudges are still part of that vast population of crude implement using creature populace that the drudge baord with nail fits, and the weapons themselves fit the creature difficulty are so they were not removed.

Sgian_Dubh asks: [regarding the Mage Armour Upgrade:] I imbued all 4 parts of the armor making them no-drop. That is fine, only problem is, I had to use my second portal gem to get back to Knorr after retreiving the helm. Now, as I came to the quest conclusion in the forge room, I had the misfortune to die, leaving me waiting 3 days to get 2 more gems and in the meantime I have to carry this unusable armor around. does the timer *really* need to be 3 days?
Orion: There actually is another way to get in, provided you spoke to someone on your arrival and you piece together that Olcris is a Greedy Gus.

Yrsa asks: It seems that the new exarch armor only has a 315 base war requirement, not specialized war. The old WMA came in two flavors, one for trained and the other specialized war. This an error or as designed?
Orion: The Armor having a different emblem, it's in the lore.

Yrsa asks: Not to mention, that's *not* the emblem of the seaborn empire on the front. :P
Orion: The Armor not being a war magic spec, alluded to in the lore. (Not a bug)

illusion24 asks: There actually is a bug with the new exarch. If you have the helmet equipped (+10 to life), and you equip[ the leggings, it says that beast murmur (+10 critter) overrides the spell from the helmet. But, it doesn't, and you still get +10 to both.
Orion: The weird display of Beast Murmur and Mark of the Priestess, bug.

Circeus suggests: [many things, in his Soapbox]
srand: In some ways, I'd be very interested to see Circeus go up against our client code.
I'm afraid I'd know who would win, though.
Well, let me qualify that -- I know who would win after we told Circeus that we couldn't give him the time to rewrite the client because there were tasks with higher priority that we needed done NOW. And there's already a line of vengeful programmers here waiting for their chance to eviscerate the client code if that ever becomes an option. So ...

Seregil asks: What goes into the decision making process to decide when changing an item whether or not to update the items already in the game? The old Soul Staff is basically worthless except for a house decoration.
srand: There are a number of factors that go into that decisions. The biggest two are:
1) Is the updated item going to have higher requirements than the old item, especially wield requirements?
and
2) Is the old item involved in a lot of craft and NPC interactions?
If we want to add higher requirements to an item, we generally want to make a whole new object for the new item and not change the old object at all. We do *not* want to cause the situation where you were hunting with your X the day before the update, and then you log in the day after and you can no longer use your X. This is even more important if we add a wield requirement, since we have no way to force you to unwield an item that you do not qualify to wield if the restrictions change while you are offline.
On the other hand, if we create a new object for the updated item, that means we have to duplicate all the craft and NPC interactions, and that can be an awful lot of tedious and error-prone work. In rare cases it's not even possible -- when we upgraded the Ash Tooth Dagger (I believe), we could not make a new object for this item because it was used to purchase houses, and houses cannot support more than one trophy purchase item. So if we made a new object we either had to leave a way to get the old daggers in the game (so that people could still purchase houses), or switch all the houses to the new daggers and clearly tell everyone that their old, saved daggers were now useless for buying houses.
In the case of the Soul Staff, there were no NPC or craft interactions to cause problems, and we wanted to bring the staff up to a 250 wield req level, so we created a new object for the updated item and left the old object alone.