[crossfire] Wraith changes

[Anton Oussik]

On 20/12/05, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
> Anton Oussik wrote:
>
> > Also, although restoration -100 means they do not heal naturaly very
> > well, they still do heal over time. The wraith I left overnight had
> > 14/22 health, and in the morning it was fully healed.
>
>   random thought then - if you're a low level wraith and get beat up (say down
> to 1-2 hp), is your only real hope then healing devices (potions, staves,
> spells)?

First I'd like to note that the third version of the patch makes
wraith not heal at all by sensing for a wraith in do_some_living in
player.c. Restoration -100 was a bit of a hack, and is no longer
needed (and is therefore also removed from latest patch).

Actually wraith scaled up life stealing works remarkably well. Perhaps
too well and needs scaling down. The reason I scaled it up in the
first place was that it did not work at all at low levels as after
reducing the damage done by it in the code, as done for all other
players, the resulting damage was always 0 at low levels. However,
scaled up, it quite easily kills through goblins at level 1, and
enables the player to run through a goblin infested room by level 3,
which I think a player should not be able to do until level 10-15.

What I could do with no difficulty is to make the wraiths eat until
they reach, say, level 15, and only then give them the feeding skill.
The current patch currenly does that to old wraiths - it treats them
as if patch was not there until they try eating, and when they eat, it
senses for an old wraith and converts them to a new wraith, after
which they behave like new wraith.

Another thing that could be done is to reduce the feding speed. What
is the proper way of reducing weapon speed of a skill? I looked around
briefly, but could not find it.

>   If so, I wonder if it may be nice to give starting wraiths some like a staff
> of minor healing just so they can use it to get enough hp to go kill wimpy
> things.

As it stands now, a newborn wraith at 0hp can quite happily clear a
room of kobolds and come out with full hp. I feel it is too powerful,
so perhaps doing both, scaling down the feeding speed (probably about
5-10fold), and also not giving the wraith the skill until they reach
level 15 would be appropriate to balance the race.