Solo Enhancements

[tegstewart]

I run a local server for solo PVE, and a few years back I played around adding enhancements to make soloing more enjoyable and diverse. It was very basic when I started, but since coming back to DAOC recently I thought I could do a lot more. This past week I've been burning the candle at both ends and really fleshing it out.

It's now become a base spell line for all classes with several useful spells and six powerful brand new pets intended to simulate having a groupmate. The new pets are:
A warrior with a high block rate and taunt styles.
A reaper, whose melee attack damages everything around them.
A skirmisher with high damage attacks that apply bleeds, stuns, and debuffs.
A healer, who applies baseline buffs and casts healing spells, but cannot fight in melee.
A friar, whose melee attack procs an AOE heal. Best used by taunting and de-taunting to spread the damage around.
A warmage, who casts an AOE DD that is also an AOE heal, and has detaunt styles.

Each pet is visually distinct and has its own niche. Where practical I set them up to use multiple attack animations. All the melee pets bar the skirmisher have a ranged taunt so they can be used to pull. I've tried to maintain balanced gameplay and to keep an incentive for end game progression while retaining unique class traits. For example, the healer casts the cleric spec shield rather than a standard baseline shield, so the champion shield buff stacks with it, and none of the other pets use buffs so self-buffing classes still retain their uniqueness.

This was tested and designed for level 50 content, but I've added lower rank pets with scaled down spells as well.

Changing existing items in the DB was kept to a minimum to prevent causing problems with other custom content, though the npc style rate was turned up to 99% since most of the pets rely heavily on styles.

I've also included scripts to increase the level of standard pets, and everything needed to add Sniperwolf's excellent custom teleporters.

This is intended strictly for solo pve. While the new pets can be used responsibly with two players by not stacking pets with healing spells, it would be game breaking in competitive multi player because of some of the hacks I needed to get around pet restrictions on group spells.

Hopefully somebody else will get some enjoyment from this.

http://www.filedropper.com/soloenhancementszip

[Graveen]

Excellent !

We have a similar concept on Storm (not so advanced than your own) called Mercenaries where you can hire a mercenary for various tasks, he comes in healer/tank/caster.

But a 8-man is a nice addition

I think it could go in GSS if you want to make a pull request on github

[tegstewart]

I stumbled across mention of mercenaries yesterday when searching the forums trying to puzzle something out.

I'm surprised by the numerous things added to Storm. I've seen a lot of talk of it being livelike, and that phrase reminds me of a lot of tedium playing live back in the pre-ToA days. As a result, I don't think I've ever really given it a fair shake.

Having tried it a little bit today, I think it's better described at better than livelike.

[Graveen]

Answered your PM before reading that post

Yes a lot of things were added to Storm. This is livelike regarding to the math, npc handling, database, frontiers, but it was also an playground server.

football like game, village system, mercenaries, market explorer, extended custom character settings, etc... are Storm features.

And Storm:D2 is also a totally different experience you should try

Not to mention Storm never got a wipe, so you can still play 10 years after, which is as far as i remember the shard with the longuest availability.