Tower of Pain

[Lauriert]

I know this is an incredibly original topic to discuss. But the tower of pain is terribly unbalanced. The only times to close it or keep it closed is when there is 0 evil activity. If there's even a little, the tower is just open by default. No point closing it.

For the evils, opening it could hardly be easier. There's what? 2 weak crusade guards and a cleric? To the average evil char, that's an absolute joke. Especially when you factor in curse and darkness. You may as well take out the resistance, they're worthless.

For the goods to close it, there's quite a lot of undead. An amount that usually necessitates either a party or a really big char who specializes in killing undead. But most of all, the banshee. Because of the banshee, the goods need access to some sort of magic damage or blessed weapon to even attempt the tower. In short, closing it is a lot of work. Too much work to justify doing it in times of any real conflict. Or if there's an evil char around to breathe on it.

This makes the tower of pain a useless objective and it means that in times of actual conflict, the Satho church will just passively have that EP boost, and if they don't, they'll just go take the 2 minutes it takes to open it.

Two possible solutions. Lower the amount of undead resistance to closing it, including taking out the banshee entirely so that the goods no longer need to have some way of hurting it to close the tower. Or, triple or even quadruple the amount of goodie npc's defending it.

Yes, I know some of the goodie guilds get told if it's under attack, but in 99% of cases all the guards will be dead and the tower opened before the goods have any chance to assemble a team, even if the players are online for it.

[Delia]

Best tweak for the tower is to forbid any change in status for a while after the tower has been toggled. This way, both goodies and evils can enjoy the favourable state for a while without the other party switching the tower the next possible second.

As for the undead loadout the tower enjoys...It kinda feels like it assumes a team has master shaos and taniel priests at all times which was a fact at one point in time.

Hmm...One idea for the good side forces could be to add a choice for main guilds and a small upkeep. Any main guild could choose to add guards to the tower and that way raise their banners against sathonys. All guilds paying and contributing would get alerts. It all would work well if we could just sidestep sathos getting all the tele items from the npc's somehow

[Melendil]

It'd be really interesting if the guilds could choose which side they were on. For most, this would be pretty safely assumed (e.g. Church of Taniel and Crusaders would want to keep it closed) but the Asrals might well support either state. They could maybe have a guild command to select their preference (support-open/support-closed/no-support, maybe as a sort of majority vote?) which determines when Asral clerics or maybe Asral warriors might be found defending the tower. The Satho's would get their undead hordes to balance out the fact that they typically have few friends, but the opposition side would at least be able to form a united front.

Could really open up some interesting guild diplomacy RP