Gustball health

Since we cannot use a training dummy on a lot unless we are the owner, and this seems like it will never change, how about giving gustballs super high health like they had before so we can use them for training up some skills (I honestly don't know why this was changed in the first place)?

 

Hmmm...

It should change, and there should also be some usable public training targets and dummies (owned by NPCs so always accessible). But gustballs should pop easily, too. Everything should work as a new player would expect, and running into someone endlessly fighting a Gustball in the forest or in The Fall was kind of dumb as well. There is always the option of going out and finding monsters to fight in order to train, too.

 

It should change... but it doesn't.

 

There are some technical challenges, I think. They plan to do it eventually, I believe.

But I know they can put in always on NPC owned dummies, so they should do that in the meantime.

 

They should at least put practice targets outside of weapon shops instead of behind the counter.

 

There are public dummies. In ferigs battlecamp, one of the brittany areas, and in soltown

 

I bet if there were more and training halls or fields in cities like there were in U7/SI, they would be popular spots. Players would also set up duels there, and I still think it would be great to have a "friendly duel"/spar option that was non-fatal and would end automatically before a player was killed -- would allow for non-risk PvP that woul ease people into risk-based PvP, allow training with strangers, theatre RP PvP, and competitive dueling where players didn't have to res eachother at the end.

 

I certainly hope they plan to fix the training dummy problem. The gust ball always seems like a cheat from the start, but I get that people need to train. The training dummy made it official that "use training" doesn't have to be by real spell use. With that understanding, it is a reasonable request to boost the gust ball. However, like others said, fixing the training dummy is a much better option if it is possible as it just feels like something we are supposed to do instead of taking a sword to a leather ball.

 

It was changed because gustballs were never meant to be used for training, it was meant to be used for playing gustball, which was initially a great initiative by the players that the devs thought they'd help out with.

I don't think they considered that we might exploit it for training purposes

 

The real reason... it was being used to extend the range of chain lightning.

Drop gust ball. Back up. Chain lightning around corners. Or at the control points you would drop them outside of the control pad so your chain lightning would snag a warrior, bounce to the gust ball and reach the archers and mages.

Needs to stay one shot!

 

This is a much better reason than just being used as a portable training dummy.

 

They're both good reasons IMO If the devs really wanted to, they could continue use of the Gustball as a training dummy and just flag it so it didn't chain lightning, after all. But then they'd have to decide if they'd really want to do that.