If the limit is due to being a player rather than a mob repairer, how about having the "mend skill points from the player" added to a repairer's repair skill level? I am not sure how repairers work, but the player's mend skill should affect the outcome.

If repairer is based on level, then, mend skill should bump the level up a bit. A shopkeeper should be able to repair a wider variety of stuff when the master mender (player with mend skill) comes for repair. Knowledge adds.

If repairer is based on cost, then it should bump the cost up. If a repairer can only repair items with costs lower than the max specified, this max should increase when the player with mend skills comes for repair.

Else for the worst, the master bender will be able to lower the repair bills depending on his skill level.

This way, we won't break the game by having players being able to "mend" non-common stuff. Menders with superb mend will feel useful when it comes to non-common stuff. They have an "edge" over other classes when it comes to repair even if it is done over the shop/smith.

Of course, the normal mend lag will be implemented for this to work. The mender can either repair like other classes without lag, or they can repair with mend skill inside the shop with the above advantage but with mend lag.

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Gulca stops following you.

The message is misleading, you can't mend magical items. It's a worthless skill and should be revamped into something that's useful like a skill to reduce frag damage to equipment, as barbs take a lot of it. Or just change mend to let you mend some kinds of magical items, like anything made from leather hide or scale.

Thats exactly my point - superb mend should at least give you an opportunity to mend magic items - and if you get +mends it should increase the likelihood of actual success.

Right now its prett worthless

Yeah, the mend skill is ugly now, since barbs can actually use a lot of decent gear---but it is hard to deal with. Maybe the way it can be improved is mending in your own forge giving you better success rates and a reasonable rate of mending magical objects. This is a hard thing to balance. Maybe we can add a cost to mending associated with the use of "tools" so it balances with repairing items normally. Mend is certainly on the list to fix, unfortunately it just isn't that high of a priority right now.

Don't tell me how to do it; it sickens me.

mend great.orb.wizardry
You don't have a proper component for that.

Just an idea.

Maybe the component isnt such a bad idea - different Blacksmiths load different tools which allow you to mend certain lvls of items - so say Sanction Smith Loads a Hammer that lets you mend Five 'Level 5 magical items' before it decays, and Drac tower Smith Loads some tongs that lets you mend Five 'Level 2 magical items'. It means I couldnt sit there and mend every item in my clan, but I could at least mend a few things as a benefit of doing those zones - mob forges wouldnt become useless, but it would still allow barbs to get some high level use out of mend.

And maybe having Tongs and Hammer and Anvil from some other Smith + clan forge + a certain amount of money gives you a chance to mend elite gear like an orb or something :)

(double post removed)

I like the component idea. It's pretty obvious why mend must have some sort of limit--repair costs is one of the few, desperately needed coin sinks that slow the inevitable mudflation that takes hold as each wipe progresses (further screwing new players who start later in the wipe). If barbs could repair too many big ticket items, then they'd be doing everyone else's repair work on all the costly stuff.

I've only dabbled in barbs, and never really had the patience to get mend up too high, but what's the main appeal of it, convenience (mid zone repairs or not having to travel to a good shop) or just cash saving? Since I'm half-guessing about what people like and find useful about mend, please forgive me if something I suggest is in complete contrast with the spirit of the skill, but why not associate a greater cost, in time and resources, with using the skill.

I remember there was a cooldown associated with repairing specific items and, if I remember correctly, and overall cooldown once you've repaired a bunch of them, so we could begin by increasing the cooldown to be a bit more noticeable, based on the repair difficulty and maybe size and value (some associated utility value, not the lore coin cost). That way, barbs could still train effectively on junk gear, and maybe even do their own entire basic set while they're still leveling up, but they wouldn't have enough time to do multiple sets of good gear for themselves and their clan, even if they constantly repaired during their 4-5 hours of zoning.

On the other side of things, repairs could require components in the form of raw materials, based on the material composition of the item (leather/cloth patches and thread for leather/cloth items, appropriate metal ingots for the various metals, dead kittens for organic materials, etc). Most of these could be sold in shops, especially the basic ones so that people can train, with perhaps some better or more obscure materials (mithril ingots, mirrors, etc) sold in out of the way/hidden shops (think in terms of CK component shop) or available only from mobs. The costs should be appropriately low, so that maybe a mender in training has to sink a decent amount of coins into his hobby, but a skilled mender should be saving himself a lot of repair costs even with the costs of materials. If further balancing is needed, we could always require spell components for magical items, or put in an automatic increase in cooldown time associated with the Magic flag.

Between the minor coin costs and the greater cooldown time in usage, mend could be very useful without having a major impact on repair shops and coin sinks, and with the associated cost of training, it would hopefully discourage people from training/leveling/botting "trash menders" as a means of saving money. Since the big clans have their own in house smiths anyway, I think the mud can handle barbs with a fairly powerful mend skill, without having to worry about them becoming mend-whores for their clan.

Yeah compos, tools, materials are all cool ideas. Hard work though.

Remember compos are associated with a sphere which magical items do not have. Also there is no tiering to magical items as of yet and we haven't made materials yet. Maybe we would make mend usable on non-magic gear. You would have to load materials--the same as the material of the object that you would want to repair. Maybe all barbable items would be made !magic as appropriate. This way barbs could repair most of their own set, but have difficult repairing sets for their entire clan.

Anyway, mend certainly needs a long look, but I can't guess when this would happen.

Don't tell me how to do it; it sickens me.

If you added a !Barbarian flag to Barb magic items, so that we can mend them at least then that would be cool. Would give barbs a reason to skill mend.

Oh, I definitely realize that the component idea would be a huge project, and staff time is limited (and selfishly, I'd rather see that time devoted to putting some new life into druids, especially since now we're pretty much behind shamans in every category but area, area refresh/fly, and having word of recall!)

Making materials load would be a pain, but why not just incorporate the majority of materials into shops (after all, the idea is to put in a small coin sink). As for components, I realize that it would mean putting some sort of magical value on individual magical items, which would be a huge project, but it could be slightly simplified by simply making mend only use alteration and enchantment comps (that is, after all, what makes magical items magic.) Another way to simplify the implementation is to take whatever is used to judge difficulty of repair now (whether its some hidden value, or some formula based on item stats, I don't know), and simply use that as the basis for how many components are needed, if the item has the Magic flag.

The material could be made magical by enchanting. Make it such that only 1 in say 3 or 5 tries creates a magical material which is 'good enough' to mend a magical item. And the only way to find out would be an expensive lore scroll. Or make the enchanting work only as component casting and make the required component an expensive shop item. Just some ideas which might work within the present system and which maybe wouldn't require too much programming.

Did you bump your head or something? What happened to all your arguments that druids are fine when I was complaining about them?

Drakantus, thank you for proving to everyone that you're the troll around here. By the way, I find it incredibly amusing that you've developed such a grudge against me (its just sad, by the way, that you have to ignore the sarcasm in that sig of yours just to get your daily dose of self-esteem) just because I usually disagree with you. One would hope that you simply use Arctic as a means of venting those anti-social tendencies so that they don't affect the poor bastards around you irl.

My arguments were that druids weren't "broken," that they didn't require your WoW inspired idea of a radical shift in gear, and they didn't need to be basically warriors, but with magic instead of hitting and bashing.

Let me put it another way that even a simple-minded troll can understand: Are warriors broken? You seem to love them, so you'd probably say no. Now imagine someone put in a class that does everything a warrior does, takes away, say, kick and track, and adds some DK style buff and finess spells, and some basic healing spells. Does that mean that the warrior class was always broken to begin with, or that it needs to be turned into something more in the style of mages or thieves?

(regarding Drakantus)
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Let me get this straight.

Druids were fine in your opinion. Shamans were added. You see Shamans as a superior class over Druids in almost every way, so you want to buff Druids.

Is that correct?

Question. If Druids were fine, and Shamans are superior to Druids, doesn't that indicate that Shamans are overpowered? Wouldn't it be easier to nerf Shamans a bit, rather than buffing Druids?

Shrug, sure, why not. And in fact, I've seen first hand several times this wipe that the imms did precisely that, albeit rather quietly.

You're also making a fallacious logical jump here, by implying that if anybody who likes the idea of any change, in general, must automatically agree with your ideas of change, or your criteria for deciding whether or not change is needed. I think a lot of little tweaks for druids would be very fun, such as giving them a means for enchanting arrows, as had been suggested when scouts were first implemented. That does not, however, mean that druid's aren't fun, as it is.

To once again fall into using similes, think of it as Soul Caliber. Very fun game, not what I would consider broken at all. I also enjoyed playing the sequels, and appreciated many of the updates and changes to the game, but that doesn't change the fact that I still think the first was a solid game, or keep me from going back and playing it sometimes for its own unique style. And it certainly doesn't mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that I'm somehow expected to agree with the guy who wants to make a sequel in the style of Halo.