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Jakkal and I had a random discussion on IRC about rogue pickpocketing, and some ideas to improve it over LiveVG. These are general ideas that we thought sounded good and were potentially doable in the Emu.


Pick Pocketing targets:
PP used to be usable on all mobs, but was changed to humanoids only. The problem with this is the fairly low number of humanoid mobs to use. 51+ has very few.

It'd be nice if friendly/neutral NPCs were also targets for pick pocketing, such as those in towns. Perhaps if you fail, you get a faction hit. Could also have the NPCs turn hostile for a while so the rogue has to leave town till they cool down.


+Pickpocket gear:
Rogue specific stealth gear could also have +pickpocket stat, which would help with the above target change, so less chance of faction hits from failing. Pickpocket gear was very rare in live.


Minigame?
It'd be interesting if we could get a minigame of some sort working to make PP more than 'click button, pray to RNG'. I don't know much of how the client/server communications work, or how much flexibility there is, but if we could use the fishing mechanics for PP, then it adds some player skill in.

Perhaps a progress bar starts at 50%, and slowly lowers over time. If it reaches 0% then the rogue is found out and NPC attacks. Rate could be determined by player/NPC level difference and stealth/pickpocket gear. To increase the bar, player would need to find which direction increases the bar, and mash that until it changes (or if we can think up someway to make the way fishing directions work in context). Getting 100% would be an instant success. Possibly a time aspect as well, and the higher % you ended up at would increase the value of the reward. Something like over 50% to get ok stuff, 75% for good, 90% for excellent.

If we were able to make the pickpocketing more of a player skill based, then the in combat finisher "Plunder" would just give trash/cash loot and poison components (and some damage would be nice), where the out of combat would give the better rewards.


Poison Recipes:
It used to be that poisons were crafted by the rogues. Recipes were bought and the components acquired through PP. Would be very nice to go back to that.

Another idea we had was to have the trainers only supply basic recipes, and gather the more advanced ones from around the world. The trainer could for example have a hint that a certain NPC is known to have advanced poisons, and the player could pick pocket the recipe from them. Another reason for +Pickpocket gear, since the best recipes would be from rogue masters or such.

We also talked about getting rid of Plunder, or making it so Plunder had a greater damage component so it was worth using. Most rogues just sorta hit it whenever, because it wasn't really good for anything unless you just needed more lint for whatever reason.

Another thing I intend to do is go back to the old buff system, where weapon poison was a buff and you didn't use up a poison vial everytime it procced. That was a boneheaded move by SOE and ridiculous.

Also, we don't have any information on how the old rogue poisons worked, and I don't think we have most of the components either. But I can recreate them if we can find the information. If not, then I intend to redo it from scratch. We still have the output, since that wasn't really changed much.

I would like to do something about getting rid of advanced vs normal stuff, like you could have a bag full of doubles with advanced and with normal versions. I'm kind of leaning that you can get normal versions from regular rogue trainers, but once you learned Advanced, that's all you could make. Kind of like when you learn a higher level ability, or like "Superior" version of buffs. Let me be clear that learning advanced stuff would take extra effort on the part of the rogue. So it's not like they can just buy it and have superior "Advanced" poison stuff. The rogue would have to /earn/ it somehow.

I don't think Fun With Lint should be stupidly rare either, that's just a necessary part of the rogue. So I think they should get that fairly easy and fairly early, but there should be other things we add that encourages a rogue to be daring and try to pickpocket dangerous mobs.

Really love the ideas regarding the overhaul of some of skills. Looking forward to it!

If we do make these changes to pickpocket, so it's more of a minigame, then we need to reward the rogues with more of the lint and whatever else they might loot for their poison components. I say this mostly because we used to spend hours just farming enough lint for raids or even just soloing. We need to make sure that the time spent on the minigame is rewarding the same amount of lint as if you were just pickpocketing through mobs.

Only thing I like about pick pocking was finding the book called Fun with Lint and all the stuff can make from it
had like tons of lint bandages used too even had a aug in my gear to help when using them so could heal back
1000 hp's if I get into trouble. The one day the bandages came in good use too and went through like 2 stacks
was keeping up Dirkin from Damage guild I was in, played my rogue Syrruss and kept him up during a fight with
a black dragon after the healer and rest of the party died and we duel killed it.

But did find mobs I could get my skill of PP up but to the life of me I forget the name of the place now, will
come to me few days from now too. Also if you knew the 55 rogue named Shivvery he had a macro that could
PP at the same time while attack mobs too came in handy when in the Warehouse odd mobs there too and in
P O T A was the short for for it, but if your sneaking skill was high enough could sneak on either side and PP
the mobs there most were 50 to 55 I think but don't quote me on it.

Brad (55 Cleric)