Default Erudite SK faction with Temple of Life
 

On EQ Live and on the Al'Kabor Project, the default faction con is Dubious. However, on P99 it's threatening.

Very frustrating, since I planned out getting a SK newbie non-KOS to all by the Circle of Three, testing it out on EverQuest and Al'Kabor. I went to turn in bone chips to Lashun Novashine and was chased to the zone.

I'll likely change my race to human, but go Innoruuk, since I really don't dig Bertox that much. I wouldn't if this faction issue wasn't an issue.

Any chance of it being adjusted?

Getting the starting faction right is a complicated fix. Race, class and deity are all factors.

You would need to roll up a bunch of different toons and sample their factions to work out exactly how much bearing each variable should factor into your overall starting faction.

A starting point might be to see the difference between an erudite agnostic wizard and a human agnostic wizard to see how strong the modifier is for race. You could then see the difference between a cazic and agnostic toon to see the modifier for that (keeping race and class constant). This information is like then let you isolate a ball park figure for the modifier for being an SK.

With these values isolated an accurate faction fix can be made, and it would impact all characters that are either erudite, shadow knight and/or cazic Thule.

Erudite necro/sk should have a tough time making it off the island as Qeynos is going to hate them. Did this on live. Gather shadows almost never wanted to last long enough for an unsowed CT pal to run through.

I snuck an ERU/SHD off of Odus on Live. I don't remember it being that bad. Maybe I was just too fastidious with my spell skills and didn't have too much trouble with dropped invis.

That's probably it. I had a policy of maxing all my spell skills every level. I joked a lot with my shadowknight guildmates (underlings, really) that I had divination maxed first at level 9.

Watching them fizzle feign death over and over was really funny to me. I think I converted a lot of them to caring about their spell skills after that.

I was around and worked on this for the launch of P1999 Blue and you hit the nail on the head. There is like hundreds (?) of factions in the game and for each one you need to decide a default value for every race, class, and deity. It was a super laborious job and really we had no way to tell whether or it was perfectly accurate to classic.

It wasn't a perfect system, but unfortunately the goal was to make something that resembled classic to the best of our ability since there was no hard data available. We had certain strange examples to try and guide us: ie. certain deities were non-kos in Kael, in the Hole, in Sol A etc. But other than that we just tried to make evil characters feel hated in good cities, and in good guilds of neutral cities.

I have discovered you can check the starting/actual faction of a character on live.

There is even a command to output your factions to a textfile: /output faction (filepath/name).

Obviously, this assumes starting factions have not been tweaked since the vanilla-velious period, which isn't wholly correct.

That said, I'm pretty sure we could output every combination of race/class/deity's starting factions and run a script that derives each race/class/deity modifier for each faction!

for reference priests of life should start at dubious (-425).

Okay!

I decided to really take the initiative. As well as checking the correct starting faction for an Erudite SK of CT considering Priests of Life (-425), I took the time to look at a few different starting factions in respect to Priests of Life and from them derive the appropriate race/class/deity mods for OP.

The method was simple: create a bunch of characters on live test server and use their faction standing tool to see what that characters default faction was with priests of life. From there look at the differences and find a zero point to work out what the modifiers were.

Here we go:


Starting faction for Priests of Life
Erudite Shadowknight Cazic Thule -425

Erudite Cleric Cazic Thule -225

Troll Shadowknight Cazic Thule -1250

Troll Shadowknight Innoruuk -1250

Human shadowknight Innoruuk -400

Human Cleric Innoruuk -200

Human Cleric Life 100

Human Warrior Life 100

Human Warrior Agnostic 0 Here is our zero point! From here we can deduct what the modifiers are!

Differences observed in starting factions
Shadowknight is 200 lower than cleric.

Cazic and Innoruuk are equal.

Troll is 825 lower than Erudite.

Troll is 850 lower than human.

Erudite is 25 lower than human.

Cazic / Inny are 300 lower than life.

Warrior is equal to cleric.

Agnostic is 100 below life.

Starting faction modifiers by race, deity and class for Priests of Life.
Erudite -25
(Troll -850)
Cazic (and Inny) -200
(life +100)
(human, agnostic, cleric, warrior, +/- 0)
Shadowknight -200

Now that live has a factions tab, this should really be looked at for every race/class combo. This is probably the most incorrect part of p99 (which rightly so without the factions tab you basically have to guess.)

Each quest should be looked at too IMO, but that might be asking too much.

Ewwww ... you went on live.

http://i.imgur.com/alAx0zM.gif

Thanks for taking one for the team ;)