Here are just some more ideas that I would like to see added to AO. Since I have been playing I have watched this game change alot, some for the better, some for the worse, I hope (humbly) that these ideas may if at least spark the interest of the designers.

First the simple ones:

Add commands shortcuts for secondary weapon (off hand) special attacks. This would make multi-wield worth doing. As it stands (and I play a dual-pistol soldier, dual crstal NT, and dual 1he enf) you only use dual wield because you like the way it looks or to get a buffing item on (and in this case you use the lowest ql you can get that has a buff worth using). Give us a reason to spend the IP there.

Please remove the NODROP on some items. Not all, but on some, if you want items to continue to be rare then tag them UNIQUE. This way people can still trade some items (like bracers and cars), yet they can not horde them.

Though this will not be popular, to cut down on the camping of certain items, aside from the unique tag, tag items in a way that there is a timer before you can loot a second of the same item. (ie 1 person can not loot the same items more then once in 6hrs or something, depending on the spawn time of the mob.)

Revamp full auto, make it a skill worth using, either increase the ammount of minimum damage that it does, so that it does not hit for 0 or 1 round, doing less then a normal shot, or try something different and make it area effect.

Now for the painfull suggestion, that I know has the least chance of success but would cause me to send FC flowers if they got it right: Completely revamp and restat the mobs.
I can accept that when I meet an Vetern Soldier for example, that he can be specialized. Ie doesnt have IP wasted on map nav and varius trade skills, this guys is a hard and fast soldier. fine. I can even accept that a mob may not have IP caps, again fine. However there is no exscuse for meeting a mob that is my level and having him easily be 3x or more the stats I have. So that debuffs and such do nothing, while he can change chain cast (say a trader mob) debuffs and such to the point that I am worse then when I was level 1.
Not only would this massively affact pvm, but it would allow an easier balancing of the game. The npc's were made harder to be challenging to people that were OE to the brim, (that cant be done now) do to this, pvp got all wacked, and had to be nerfed. If a overall rebalance was done, this would all be cleared up. And a number of items would become usefull again, rather then having people grabbing the next flavor of the week weapon to use until it is determined to be too powerfull and is nerfed and we move on to the next flavor.

Please STOP being so secrative in how things are calculated. It does not add mystry to the game, it tells the player you (FC) have no idea what your doing. Tell us straight out, how may skill points of Initiative affect our weapon speeds (this is an example). Tell us how many points of evades and armor affect damage. Instead of having the player guessing.

Please give MOB (NPCs) variable dmg or take away their ability to crit. It is frustrating to no end when a mob hits me for 500 500 500 500 500 500 1000 crit 500 500 500. while I am stuck hiting from 49 600 200 1600 crit 20. it is just a real pain.

If (and it appears this is the case) different weapons have different recharges with their special attacks, make that part of their in game stats. I should not have to look into an out of game DB to find this.

Please make some trade skill items more viable. It is one this to say (hey you can make armor now) and then use one item that is majorly expensive, but then on top of that to make it so that yet another item is need and it is so rare that it makes the skill almost pointless. Make the materials for rare armor rare, not the item to make the armor. On that note, how about some material to make existing armor types, Ie plasteel, metaplast, leather.
Be nice to make heated plasteel from plasteel and a hotstone or something like that. Maybe this way you can add some item types that can only be made (ie like the dragon flesh) but maybe diffent types of plasteels or something, like adding a notum fragment into it to come up with somehting along the lines of the borg armor.

ok well this is getting long so I will leave it at that for now. Tell me what you think, hopefully some will agree to this at least in part.



Etrigan, (another god of the mind)