This text assumes that you know what BatMUD is and you are already playing or are planning to create a character.
There aren't that many newbie mages around in BatMUD. Most mages are at the maximum guild level (35, character level 50 or above). In fact, given the "reinc" system in BatMUD, starting out as a mage could be considered "a bad idea". In the very least, it's considered challenging. Reincarnation allows a player to choose the best character type and class for a given amount of experience. Mages with relatively little experience are rather fragile and weak characters and are probably not optimal for generating experience points and gold.
I chose a different path. In fact, I have never reinced. I started out as a human with a magical/good/non-religious background and it hasn't been boring and it hasn't been too difficult. Humans are "well-rounded", so although as a race they not be ideal as "party blasters", I suspect that they work better than average for playing solo. I often get my best experience rates (experience gained per minute) playing solo. If I had chosen to be a duck or a drow, I would have less hit points and poor constitution and strength, making solo fighting a much riskier proposition.
That's all the advice I'm going to give on background and career choices. I have only second-hand experience on other types of characters, so you shouldn't rely on anything I said above. Make your own choices. (You can always reinc, if you feel you made a big mistake.)
Do you always use walk-throughs when playing adventure games? If you do, then read on. If you don't, you might want to consider wether you want to find out things for yourself or spoil all the fun by read this article. Knowing myself, I would have read this and probably not regretted it.
I'm not going to tell you where to go and what to kill. That's a part of the game you can read about elsewhere and I'm not about to to spoil all the exploration and discovery for you.
You get some skills and spells because of your magical background. Learning to maximize these is essential for your initial survival.
You also get free food and equipment from Damogran. The amount of equipment is limited for each boot and reduces as you near level 30. When you reach level 30, you no longer get equipment, but you can store items in chests as soon as you have one. If you manage to find an item of great value, it may be worth chesting it much before you reach level 30. Moving from level 29 to 30 is a big step, since you essential lose the ability to try out equipment for free. Ideally, you should have a room, chest, door and/or guards in place well before taking on level 30. As a last resort, you can get a cheap 2-slot chest for about 20-25k and bury it in the ground somewhere. This is the cheapest way to store donated items for future use. You can't give or drop donated items, so as long as you remain a mage, you can't repair them as they are used. Plan ahead for harsh times.
As of summer 2003, the explore system in BatMUD was revised, so that a lot more experience is awarded for exploring new rooms. In fact, my recommendation after this tune is to make good use of the invisibility spell and explore as much of the Bat world map as you dare relatively early in the game.
Given the "personal exp tune" that was implemented a bit later in 2003, good knowledge of a large number of areas will be very useful when it's more difficult to make good experience just by exploring.
You start getting free levels after level 10. The first five can only be used for racial guilds. These guilds provide race-related skills and spells. Humans get fire building, bargaining, ceremony and first aid, to mention a few of the most useful ones.
After level 15, your "real" free levels start. These are used in various guilds. Joining a guild costs a free level, so think carefully before you choose. This guide assumes you chose the Mage guild (conveniently located in the SE quadrant of BC). You can join as many guilds are you wish, but this will spread out your free levels rather thin and by the time you reach the crucial level 29-30-31 "age", you may regret having chosen more than one guild. I have one psionicist level and life would have been easier without it. However, spending only one level on another guild didn't ruin my game, so I stuck with it and persevered. Later on levels become very costly in experience and your guild level is more important than your character level in determining your power.
Level 29 is crucial because after that you can't get donations from Damogran, so it's much more expensive to experiment with equipment. Level 30 is crucial because some locations impose a level limit and do not allow you in, if you are over level 30. If you like those locations, spend some time maxing your skills and spells at level 30.
After level 30, I started moving on a lot faster. Locations tend to have exp amount limits, so the level you have isn't a problem anymore. With more guild levels, you can study more powerful spells. Your intelligence usually also improves, which means you get more spell points and you recover spell points much faster. All in all, as you progress in levels, your exp rate will go up, which in turn makes you able to advance faster. Once past level 30, don't hold back too much, but do max out spells that you really use, since no one will want you, if you can't cast reliably in a party.
At some point, you will have to specialize in a specific type of magic. Most mage types offer rather similar attack spells and the main difference is that some monsters may be more resistant to one type of magic than another. Your first specialization allows you to study spells of that type with minimum cost. The second specialization is already a lot more expensive and the ones after that get really expensive.
Given the high cost and relatively low benefits, you should probably only specialize in one type of magic.
Your background gives you three attack spells: Magic Missile (magical), Lightning Bolt (electrical) and Acid Arrow (acid). LB is twice as powerful as MM and AA is twice as powerful as LB. Your skill in these spells is considered "background bonus" and is added to your guild studies. This means that if you have 25% acid arrow, you only need to study 75% more to get 100% on acid arrow. Given that acid arrow is your most powerful spell and will be so for a very long time to come, choosing acid as your first (and only) specialization makes a lot of sense. You'll practically never used magic missile or lightning bolt later on, as they do relatively little damage given the spell point cost and time to cast.
To specialize, find the specialization room. To train and study, go east from the entrance to the guild and "ask about specialization". Ask wizard about xxxx will not work - the syntax is rather specific and irritating. "ask about acid" is all I ever need. :) You have to ask again every day and then follow the instructions, but you only get the instructions once per day, so make a command alias for entering your portal as soon as you get the instructions. I hope I didn't spoil too much giving this info, but it tends to be an FAQ at the mage guild and frustrates a lot of people... (My mistake was of typing "ask wizard about acid", which doesn't work...)
Most skills and spells are pretty obvious, so I'll try to discuss the more subtle aspects.
Floating Disc
This allows you to carry around a lot of loot. Spellcasting slows down a lot, if you carry too much weight. The solution is to either drop all your non-equipped stuff (use the built-in command aliases dn and ga) or to put extra stuff onto a floating disc. Unfortunately floating disc is primarily a civilized spell and isn't taught at the mage guild (you can improve it later by joining conjurers). For this reason, you only get 20% of it and the discs you make expire rather quickly. In many cases it makes more sense to quickly run to a shop and frequently sell the loot. On the other hand, if you need to collect a lot of items that other players have left around (as not valuable enough to carry around and sell), you can carry a lot more by maintaining a floating disc.
The ceremony skill can make floating discs last a lot longer. If you have the skill and you need a disc that stays around for a while, use ceremony before you cast a floatind disc spell. Mine goes from 3 cm to 10 cm - disc height tells you how soon it's going to expire.
Mirror Image
What a useless spell, you may think. Mirror images vanish as soon as you move and it takes a very long time to create them. In practice though, this is an extremely useful spell for solo fighting against non-aggressive monsters. Go into the room and create the mirror images before you start fighting anything that is likely to cause you more than a little damage. You'll regenerate spell and hit points while you cast the spell. The alternative would be to use "Heal Self" after battle to get back into shape. You'll usually end up using more time and spell points to heal the damage than you would spend on creating the mirror images.
You get 4-8 mirror images if you cast this spell on yourself and 2-4 mirror images when it is cast on another character. Casting mirror image at others is only marginally useful, but do it if you have plenty of spell points and time (you can start doing it while your tank is considering a monster - you can always cancel the spell, if you don't need it).
Invisibility
You can sneak up on aggressive monsters (of low enough level) while you are invisible. This also means that they are much less likely to ambush you. Given how dangerous some of the swamp/forest/sea creatures in BatMUD are, it's an excellent idea to travel as invisible. The downside is that you can't receive tells while you are invisible (so don't irritate your friends by sending them tells when they really can't talk back to you as long as you are invisible).
Pre-battle, this spell sometimes allows you to conceal casting aggressive spells (again, this works better on lower level monsters). Try going invisible before casting an offensive spell against a monster that doesn't like offensive spells. Note that invisibility fades each time you complete (or fail) a spell or skill, so do this after you use consider on a monster and redo invisibility before casting another offensive spell, if your first big spell fails.
Against aggressive monsters, you only get that first chance. Once your first spell hits or fails, you are in battle and the opponent will see you even if you flee and redo your invisibility. Don't waste your first spell by trying to cast something that's very likely to fail. (See "Attack Spells" for more information.) If things turn bad, the wise choice may be to flee and only return when monster you aggravated has been killed or the MUD has been rebooted.
One disadvantage of invisibility can be that other players can't usually see you. More than once, I'm already there next to a monster with a nice set of mirror images cast (costing over 100 sp usually) and a midbie/highbie walks in and kills the enemy. There's no way to know that I'm there already casting an acid ray or waiting to regerate those 10 spell points that I need to be sure to finish off the enemy. (Ideally the room description would say that "Someone seems to be casting a spell" when you enter a room where an invisible mage is casting.)
Word of Recall
Casting this spells turns automatical teleportation on and off. What happens is that when you use "wimpy" and you run away, you will sometimes end up teleporting to your starting location. This is expensive in terms of spell points, but a lot safer than simply running in a random direction, since it gets you somewhere where you can regenerate safely. The nice thing is that this spell will also work when you are stunned. It's a real life-saver.
Trick: wimpy very high and attack a monster. You are quite likely to teleport to your starting location (use "start here" to set the location) without getting any damage. Your spell points may go negative, but this is a lot safer than using "teleport with error". Since your spell points can go negative, you can also do this when you don't have enough points to cast a real teleportation spell.
Heal Self
This spell seems obvious enough. You cast it and you get a bit of health back. It's a way to convert spell points to hit points.The interesting part is that the conversion factor is not a very good one. As mentioned above, it's a better idea to prevent getting damaged in the first place by using a) mirror image and b) invisibility (to initiate attack against aggressive monsters).
There is however one small, maybe less obvious use for this spell. Normally you would not cast healing spells in battle, as it is much better to cause damage than to undo it. Assume you have to pass a "brown pudding" and it is blocking your way. In the same room with you, you have a couple of black puddings. The problem with black puddings is that they hate offensive spells and if they attack you, you have no chance whatsoever. The usual solution is to use "no skills", meaning you can't perform any offensive spells and tanks can not use any offensive skills. Of course you start out with the usual mirror images and you may even be able to cast offensive spells on the enemy by going invisible (haven't tried this, might work for invisible tanks too), but if you need to stand there fighting for a while, you should remember that you can use healing spells without aggravating any monsters. So feel free to stand next to another player (a newbie tank, maybe) and share the hits while you heal yourself. As long as the opponent isn't too bad, you can stand there until your spell points run out.
Heavy Weight
The primary use for this spell would be in a party. If a tank that is standing in front of gets banished, you will end up in the front row of the party and start taking hits. If the leader of the party gets banished, the whole party may get very, very disorganized and plyers easily get killed. So, if you know an enemy is going to cast a banishing spell, heavy weight your front row players, so that they stay there and protect you. You rarely need this spell, so it's just too easy to forget that it exists when you actually do need it.
Floating
Unless you can swim (say, you are a duck), you'll find floating ability very useful. It's a good idea to cast floating if you are going to travel around a bit. If you go anywhere near deep water, you should have this cast, as a few missteps can kill you. I was once in a party where one of the casters got killed simply because the leader stepped into water a few times too many (by accident, of course).
Teleport With Error
This spell is downright deadly (to you), if you can't fly. IMHO, floating should prevent you from taking too much damage when you land from your teleport, but I haven't noticed any difference. After getting killed twice, I decided it was better to use other methods of transportation (word of recall being a safe alternative). If you are a duck, you will glide down, so you can use this spell without problems. Don't worry, you'll eventually get teleport without error and relocate.
Moon Sense
You don't need this spell. Let me know if there's a use for it. Spell point cost varies with time - it's much easier to just check the current cost with something like "grep cost help spell acid arrow" command-aliased. As cost goes down, reliability often seems to go down as well. More expensive spells seem to be more reliable. Correct me if I'm wrong...
Mana Control (Automatic Skill)
You will fail spells often.Train this skill and you'll save a lot of spell points. Unsubtle, but this is important enough, so I wanted to mention it even though it's pretty obvious...
Quick Chant (Automatic Skill)
This skill is essential during battle. For each battle round, you or your tank will get damage and this is the way to reduce that time. Combined with the "Quick Lips" boon, you can become a really powerful mage.
At random times you will either "cast with haste" or "with greater haste". What this means is that you'll manage to cast two or three rounds worth of spells in one round. Read about attack spells to learn how this affects you in battle.
Casting mirror image is a great way to enhance your quick chant skill beyond the guild training maximum. This is because each time the game tries to use the skill, there's a chance that you'll become better at it. By the time the training maximum was at 30%, I had quick chant at over 50% because I had cast mirror image so many times (and mirror image is such a long spell that you are very likely get a cast with haste or greater haste with it).
Spell Power
Each level of spell is roughly twice as powerful as the one before it, but the spell point cost doesn't double and the casting time certainly doesn't double, so as you gain more powerful spells, you'll use the earlier ones less and less often. Unless you have the experience points to spare, I wouldn't waste too much effort on learning "disruption" and "acid wind" type spells anywhere close to 100%. Once past level 30, go for more levels and spend the experience on more powerful stuff.
Casting Time
Looking at the attack spells, the "time to cast" is a bit misleading. For instance, disruption and magic missile officially take one round to cast, but you need one round to input the spell and then it takes another to hit, so the effective duration is two rounds. Unfortunately the first "round to cast" can not be hastened and the remaining single round can not be reduced either, so it will always take you two rounds to do this trivial spell.
Looking at the next level, acid wind will normally take a total of three rounds (1+2) and can be reduced to just one round (1+1 cast with haste) if you are lucky. As your skill in quick chant improves, you'll get this more and more often.
Next up, acid arrow and acid ray both require (1+3) rounds to cast, but with a lucky "greater haste", you can manage to cast these spells in the same time as a single disruption spell (1+1 greater haste) and quite often in just three rounds (1 + 1 + 1 cast with haste or 1 + 1 cast with haste + 1).
The quick lips boon works just like quick chant and it adds to quick chant. I only have a tiny amount of this boon and it's kind of useful. It's hard to say if this is better than having a tiny amount of more wisdom or more intelligence. For maximum power, you'll want to both a lot of QC and QL.
The main danger with long spells is that something may interrupt you or you may have to flee before the spell completes. Sometimes you (or your tank) takes too much damage, so that you simply can't stay around for three rounds.
Note that if you solo or you are a party leader, you should always combine your movement and cast into a single line, before re-entering a battle. This eliminates the initial one round and with a lucky quick chant, you may be able to cast an acid ray in just one round!
Save Throws
Damage spells usually have a save throw. This means that if you initially have a chance of 25% of succeeding a spell (say, you know acid arrow to 25%), there's a 75% chance you'll get to "throw dice again". If the second time succeeds, the spell causes half damage. You could consider the save throw to be "partial success". Other than the condition the enemy is in, there's no way to know if you got a save throw or not. As a rule of thumb, you can calculate that your chance of doing any damage with a spell: if your skill at a spell is X%, then you will hit X+(1-X)*X percent of the time. So, 25% would be .25 + (1-0.25)*0.25 = 43.75%. Around 40% is realistic with your 25% bonus of acid arrow, but almost half of those hits are only equal to a highly successful acid wind!
Use "show spells statistics" to see how you are doing and compare that to the formula above.
Maximizing Damage per Time
Let's assign very rough power levels to spells (these are the ones I have right now):
1
Disruption
2
Acid Wind
4
Acid Arrow
8
Acid Ray
4
Acid Rain (area)
The numbers do not represent actual hit points. In reality, the power ratios are not exactly 1:2. Remember that a save throw success will only give you 50% damage.
Since acid rain only does the same amount of damage as acid arrow, but does it for every monster and non-party player in the room, you have to have at least two targets before it does equal to or more damage than an acid ray. On the other hand, acid rain is nearly three times more expensive than a single acid arrow and takes one round more than an acid ray, so in general you will usually want to have at least three targets before it makes sense to use the area spell. By the time you get your first area spell, your acid arrow spell is likely to be quite good and will usually not result in a save throw.
If you have the time and there are plenty of opponents, use area spells. Otherwise, you should concentrate on eliminating a single enemy as quickly as possible. This will minimize the damage your party will take.
Near-death monsters are much more likely to score critical hits on you, so you want to get past that phase as quickly as possible. The implications are twofold:
First, you want to avoid damaging monsters to near-death condition. Instead, you want to kill them quickly. You may know that a "not in good shape" monster of some type will only require a good acid wind to kill, but what if you happen to get a save throw or that monster is slightly bigger than usual and you end up with a "near death" monster? Watch out... It's better to overkill than to try to save a few spell points.
Second, you want to avoid total overkill too. If you know that a disruption spell is likely to kill a monster from near death state, then you don't want to use an acid arrow, since it's going to take much longer and for each round it takes, you take damage. You could risk using disruption (if you know it really well), but an acid wind level spell is probably safest, since even a save throw success will suffice and it will cover a slight mis-calculation of enemy hit points.
Don't hang around, if the enemy is near death or in bad shape and there's a chance a critical hit could kill you. Get out and heal yourself, then go back. You take a few hits going in and out and it's certainly not good for your "exp rate", but if you want to kill the monster, it's better to do it slow and not die doing it. A 1k monster can sometimes "crit you" about 300 points in one round, if angry enough.
First Strike
Battle time should always be minimized. That way you (or your tank) takes less damage than in prolonged battle. For this reason, the first strike spell before the enemy is aggravated should be as powerful as possible. If you have to choose between a spell that you know at 80% and 40%, you can probably go with the 40% spell, since if it fails, you get to try again or if you get a save throw, you do the same damage you would have done with the 80% spell. If the choice is between an 80% and 20% spell, it's usually just a waste of spell points to use the stronger spell, since nearly 50% of the hits will be save throws and equal in damage to the weaker, but more reliable spell. Do the math and then decide what to use.
In battle, you also have to make choices, but the balance usually shifts towards using more reliable spells, since their casting time may be shorter (you get interrupted less often) and the penalty for failing a spell is much greater than before battle. Before battle, all you lose are the spell points that mana control couldn't save for you and possibly the spell points you need for going invisible again, if you need to conceal your offensive spell. In battle, a failed spell will mean that the rounds of battle that were spent casting the spell lost and all the damage you took and all the lost mirror images was a total waste.
Targeting and Scanning
You can cast spells without target. Just leave out the "at" and the name of the monster. You'll probably have two sets of command aliases: one for targeted spells and one for casting without target. You have to be fighting a monster for untargeted spells to work (fortunately mana control takes over, if you typo or cast without target when the target is dead).
Scan your enemies and target your spells so that if you have multiple enemies, you kill as quickly as possible. That way you minimize the number of opponents per round and thus the number of hits you take. In a situation where one monster is in excellent health and the other is near death, you should always target the one who is near death, since otherwise you may end up with two monsters that are near death and a prolonged battle.
Fighting two 1k monsters can be up to four times harder than fighting just one, because they do twice the damage and need twice the amount of hits to kill. By killing one quickly, half the battle is fought at 4x difficulty, while half of it is fought at 1x difficulty, averaging to a difficulty of only 3x. Similarly, two tanks standing side by side are 4x as powerful as just one. Since as a mage you will usually stand behind a tank, your hit point recovery rate is pretty much equal to that of just a single tank. Fortunately (at least in theory), mages can cause damage a lot faster than tanks (especially with good quick chanting and reliable spells).
Casters tend to use +INT, +WIS and +SPR equipment. Why? Because that way you minimize the amount of time you have to spend regenerating spell points. In most cases spell points are the limiting factor in your game. For each "tick", you get a random amount of spell points back, except when you are in battle (you don't seem to regenerate spell or hit points while in battle). The spell point recovery rate is relative to your maximum spell points, so you want to maximize your spell points (maximize intelligence and wisdom). SPR equipment makes you recover these spell points at a better rate.
Most people want to gain experience fast, to get to study and train stuff and make levels. (Some people just like the challenge of making difficult kills, but that's usually very bad for your "exp rate".) Obviously you can get the same exp rate by killing two 1k monsters in two minutes as by killing a 2k monster in two minutes or one 4k monster in four minutes. But...you also spend spell points doing these things and if you spend spell points faster than you can regenerate them, you will have to sit and wait until you regenerate.
This means you want to use your spell points wisely. To do this, calculate the total amount of spell points that you normally use for a certain monster divide the experience you get by that number. Remember to consider both protective spells like mirror image and the healing spells you need too. If a 2k monster will require 90% of the spell points and time needed for a 1.5k monster, it's better to kill 2k monsters, if you can find them. But then, you might find that a 800 exp point monster can be killed with a single spell or at least without need for protection, so you can get an even better exp/sp ratio by killing those. Boring, but efficient.
Going Solo
You want to keep your hit points as close to maximum as you can while you are fighting big monsters. For this reason, start out with bigger things. Instead of wasting sp on healing yourself to full health, you can then move on to smaller (safer) things to kill until you run out of spell points. You can then let your hit and spell points regenerate side by side. What you want to maximize here is the use your meager hit point recovery rate. If you have maximum hit points while you are waiting for spell points to regenerate and you had them because you used spell points to heal yourself, those spell points were wasted.
Assuming you were banged up a bit and you are lacking a few hit points after the last battle, you may be tempted to heal yourself to maximum condition right away. Tempting, but wasteful. Leave a bit of room for healing, if you aren't moving in dangerous territory. Once you find your next foe, you'll probably cast a mirror image spell. Mirror images don't last forever, but there's usually enough time to cast heal self just after them and before you attack. The advantage here is that since mirror images take so long, you might get a lucky "heal all" from another player somewhere or you might simply regenerate the missing hit points naturally.
Ticking Efficiently
When you go into battle, you stop "ticking" more spell points and hit points. For this reason, if you run out of spell points, don't stand there waiting for more - run away. This also means that you might as well not wear your +spr gear, if you are going to fight front line, since it doesn't do you any good and will just get damaged. Other caster gear with +int and +wis will on the other hand enhance the effects of your spells, so you might want to wear them, if you need them.
You can even juggle two sets of armour: one for spell point regeneration and the other for actual protection. You can't swap armour while in battle, so you have to do it before the fight starts or you have to run away to change. Make command aliases to make the changes fast and convenient.
Once out of battle, you will get a "partial tick". I'm not sure how this is calculated, but in general you will only receive a small part of the spell and hit points that you would get if you had not been fighting.
If you kill a monster with a single spell, it doesn't count as battle and you will get a full tick worth of spell points. Because of this, if you can kill a monster with a single spell, you should seriously consider doing it. Battle is always dangerous in any case and should be avoided, if possible.
Once you do run out of spell points (and almost everyone does), it's better to regenerate to close to maximum spell points than to regenerate just enough to fight another monster. This minimizes the number of "partial ticks" that you get per monster.
Reagents
Poor quality reagents will increase the cost of casting a spell. Reagents are cheap enough so that you shouldn't need to use poor reagents. Standard quality reagents work well and have no penalty. Most "highbie" mages tend to consider "power" reagents the only option. Given the amount of money I make playing as a solo mage, they are not cost-effective. If I used them for regular solo exping, I would be losing money.
Both small and large reagent bags can be chested. Small bags are a hassle and do not hold very many reagents, so if you can afford it, buy two large reagent bags. Use one to stock up on reagents when you find a good deal on the exchange or buy directly from a merchant and carry the other one with you with only a "reasonable" number of reagents to minimize your equipment weight.
You can carry about 20 reagents in your inventory even if you don't have a bag. If you are low on cash or playing without your equipment (say, during certain events or against certain monsters), just buy the reagents into your inventory.
I wrote a spreadsheet that uses the theories above to analyze how the attacks work in practice. You'll need a spreadsheet program that reads these files to use. The spreadsheets are only an approximation, but they can help you decide which spells to train etc.
- attack.xl (Excel)
- attack.slk (SYLK)
Wands are not terribly cost-efficient, but they could allow you to extend your capabilities beyond their normal limits. The big advantage is that zapping a wand takes one round, regardless of spell. So, you can create a wand with a fairly powerful spell and cause nearly immediate damage. You might want to zap a wand in a pinch, if you notice that a monster is near death and things are likely to get ugly.
If you are playing solo or you are partying without a healer, you could create a mirror image wand. This allows you to immediately create new mirror images even in the heat of battle. If your tank is stunned, the mirror images might save a life. This also allows you to do multiple attacks on a big monster without too much fear of getting killed. The first round of mirror images would be cast normally and once the monster is "aggro", you would use a wand. Expensive, but if you want to do that kill, it may get the job done.
The problem with wands is their cost and instability. If you get too many wands into the same room, they will all blow up. If a wand drops onto the ground from a floating disc, it will blow up, etc. The way wands are tuned in BatMUD, nearly no one uses them. Maybe mages are already too powerful, so this aspect of the game has been toned down. It's unfortunate, as I think that wands can and should spice up game play.
To make a wand, you need a wand of nothing. The best source for these is newbie mines, so check the stores close to that location. Once you have made a wand, it will only have a few charges. Scrolls of charging seem to go for 5k at BC and only give you one more charge on the wand, so if you made the wand yourself, it is far cheaper to just make another one.
Note: the following is just how I wish things were, not how they are. Sort of like an "ideas-wanted" article.
Ideally, I think mages should be able to create wands without using a "wand of nothing" (just find a nice stick and make a wand). Of course the power of a wand and it's charge capasity should be relative to its quality, so a well-made wand or a "real wand" (bought from a store) should be better than just any stick.
We should also be able to charge up wands without scrolls of charging. This would give us something to do while sitting around a campfire waiting for tanks to heal. There are times when I have plenty of spell points and I have nothing to do. Charging up a wand while tanks rest would be nice. Cost might be maybe 3-4 times the cost of actually casting the spell, so that one charge of a 100 spell point spell would cost 300-400 points. (Cost could come down a bit as your wand charging skill increases.)
Enough about wands... I just wish they were a bit more useful and not that expensive. Right now they seem more of a curiosity than a real game feature. P.S. Now at level 51, money isn't as much of an issue and I always carry a mirror image wand and zap it at myself by reflex, if I run into trouble. It's better to spend about 400 gp on a single wand zap than to die and lose experience in the process. If you have wandmaking, never explore new places without a working wand of mirror image.
What a cool idea... Midbies and highbies helping newbies etc. Unfortunately the implementation is all wrong and in the end no one wants to do it and in the very least it doesn't serve its purpose at all, unless the players involved really are into role playing and take the apprenticeship seriously.
The master has to have max guild level. This means minimum level of 50, which means that these players usually have little or nothing to do with newbies.
In practice, the apprentice gets 10% off on experience cost for skills and spells, if the master is present in the room while the apprentice is studying. For the master, this means endless travel to the apprentice. This implies that the apprentice should only study with the master when there's enough experience to spend for this to make sense. Unfortunately running around with 100k-500k experience on is a bit unsafe for a newbie. If you get killed, you lose more than you would gain from the apprenticeship.
Finally, there are supposedly advantages when the master and apprentice are in the same party together. They get more exp or something like that. I'm apprenticed to someone, but as a newbie I haven't partied with my master, so I don't even know exactly how this work.
Oh, and the master gets a small prize (like 50k gold or something) when the apprentice "graduates". Ho-hum...big deal for someone at level 50 or beyond. Money isn't usually an issue.
Is any of this stuff documented anywhere? Doesn't seem to be...
Anyway, I'm going to go into "ideas-wanted" territory again. This is actually something I have discussed with a wizard, so maybe some day some of this might happen (right now it's just wishful thinking):
- Lower requirements for being a master. Being 10-15 levels ahead of the apprentice should be plenty.
- Give the train/study benefit a bit more easily. Say, training 10k with the master present would provide the 10% discount benefit for the next 90k of exp as well, making it possible to use less exp at a time without bothering the master too much.
- Provide real motivation for the master:
- For each apprentice that has been tutored (trained/studied with master) within a few days (or maybe up to a week, since there aren't all that many newbies around), add +1 wisdom to the master's stats for that day, up to a maximum of 3-5 points. (I think it only makes sense that you gain wisdom by having apprentices and by giving them guidance you gain better insight in your own knowledge as well.)
- Allow the apprentice to disband the relationship, if it isn't working, making it necessary to keep the apprentice happy. This should make masters compete with each other, since newbie mages are such a limited resource. The most friendly master would be the most likely to gain from the apprenticeship system.
I have now "graduated" from the Mage guild and can take apprentices. I'm willing to take some, but unfortunately I haven't been playing very regularly in the past few months. So, contact me if you need a "master", but don't expect too much from the deal.
Dryad's site has a pretty good list of +spr, +int, +wis items that a mage might have, including different levels. There's also a database of sales channel asking prices that you can consult to see what you can afford.
Early on though, you will probably have to do some solo fighting. Check the list of short blades at Dryad's site and get some from the shop (they are cheap) or from Damogran's. The idea is that by using short blades, your swordmanship skill will go far beyond the amount that it can be trained to. Later on you will be holding caster stuff instead of weapons, but if you solo (and especially early on), knowing how to use a short sword is a great benefit.
Mages travel light. Robes offer pretty good protection and are cheap and easy to find at Damogran's. Better armor that is not much heavier exists too. If you only play in parties, armor doesn't play much of a part in your game. But...as long as you can experiment with donated equipment, do so! The donaters love it when the shop is empty all the time, so they can donate more. Use the "eq" command to check what your protection levels are and which slots you have filled.
I now use two sets of equipment in three different configurations: INT/WIS/SPR armour with low protection, combat armour (samurai armour) with no INT/WIS/SPR properties, but with good protection and even a sword for one arm. The third set is a hybrid of the combat gear and magic gear: the point is that I'm playing solo, I can remove the magic stuff mid-battle (and thus minimize the chances of it getting damaged) and still be left with a working set of combat armour. EQSets or command aliases can be used to switch between sets.
1-slot chests tend to cost about 10-15k, 2-slotters 20-25k, 3-slotters 35-40k and a 5-slotter with a lock will cost about 120-130k. The optimal chest price/size seems to be around 2-3 slots and without a lock. Start out with a few of those. You'll probably have about 7 slots filled pretty soon. Use money on guards, maybe a good door, but primarily on high level guards, if you are worried about thieves.
Don't store stuff at the rent hall, unless you have something really valuable. It will just drain your purse. It's cheaper to bury a chest somewhere and hope no one finds it. No one probably will, since people usually don't go around looking for buried treasures. (They would, if there were more of those around.)
Some cities offer rental rooms with guards. These may be an excellent deal, especially if you aren't sure you want to play for very long. Besides, if you don't like the arrangement, you can always get your own room later, when you have more money.
For your own room, some chests, door and guards, you should have about 300k saved. With a rented city room, you can start out with a lot less, but if you play carefully without wasting your money, 300k by the time you reach level 29 shouldn't be a problem.
Speaking of money...don't waste it on anything you don't need. Take stuff you find to the stores and sell it. If too many of the same item are sold to a store, the price goes down, so while you are regenerating spell points, you might as well travel a bit and sell the stuff at a higher price. (Normally though you want to regenerate at a healing crystal in a place where a friendly ranger has just made a nice fire too!)
Late summer 2003 some significant changes to BatMUD were made. The number of experience points made from a monster became a "personal" thing, so that if you killed something for the first time, you would be awarded a bit more experience than usual and and if you killed similar things, the experience would start drop until after only a few monsters, you would get a lot less. In fact, so little that it was better to move on.
The experience gained would then start to creep up slowly until about a day later, you could go and kill a few more of the same monsters without being penalized too much. It was actually possible to make quite reasonable experience (up to 2k/min) as a solo mage by going around half a dozen places and limiting game play to just an hour or two each day.
I was really happy with this, as playing a few times a week at most and at most an hour or two at a time and still making progress in the game was exactly what I wanted. I actually have a LIFE outside Batmud, so playing for hours every day just to make a level or two each month didn't seem all that appealing.
Unfortunately it turns out that others were also "happy" with the new tune and were making more experience than ever. Namely solo tank (fighter) types were cleaning up big time and probably even more so than before the tune. Whereas my exp rate went from about 1.5k/min to about 2k/min, it seems tanks were able to double their rates or more.
Everyone was happy except the wizards, who now thought that the game was too easy.
So, they changed the tune and now experience doesn't go back up so easily and what you get from a monster was worth a lot less than before. My experience rate dropped to less than 1k/minute. Even the old 1.5k/minute was almost unbearably tedious for making levels beyond 50, so this practically put a stop to my gaming.
That's where we are now... I've stopped playing Batmud, but may check in every now and then to see if things have improved enough to make it worth my while again.
Hmmm... I hear you say that Batmud is a "multi-user" game and that you're supposed to form parties and kill monsters as groups? Sure, I've done that, but I don't play often enough to really have regular parties and if I only play for an hour or less at a time, it can be very disrupting to those great parties that last 3-4 hours. So, I don't usually try to find parties even though I tend to join them, if asked.
Also, even in this world of large corporations, I think there's room for lone wolves. Even oddball loners like wandering solo mages. I've heard that party exp is pretty much OK now, but I have yet to verify that. I know from experience that parties are usually not very interested in lowbie/newbie mages, so if you are reading this as a low level mage, you might want to rethink your career options: more than ever, newbies are supposed to be tanks in Batmud...anything else and it's next to impossible to make progress unless you have very kind highbie friends who give you a hand.
I also check the game newsgroups every now and then and notice that there's another "new tune" in town: backrow casters now get a lot more hits from spellcasting monsters. I'm not sure how this would affect me, but I know I would get killed more often than before. Not nice...yet another reason not to play anymore.
Special thanks to Thematic and Merja, who offered valuable insights earlier in my BatMudding career.