Warriors and clerics

Today, I installed a bunch of changes to the game - the first major skill updates in quite some time. The overall additions were:

Potion throwing - mid level thief, increases chance of spells being cast when potions are thrown at mobs. This whole potions being thrown at mobs thing is pretty new in itself.

Potion bottling - allow conversion of liquid container brews into potions suitable for later use or throwing.

Iron claw - mid level warrior skill to lower the chance of disarm.

Revenge - seriously amped up berserk when one of your group members dies.

Protector - single target tanking, another group skill.

These skills took me on average about 4 hours each to build, test, and install. It's a pretty short period of time all things considered, but a couple of them were pretty simple to do as well. I've had single skills in the past that were substantially more complicated and time consuming to set up.

One of the comments I saw after all this was installed was along the lines of "I'm surprised that warriors don't have more attack skills", which is a valid complaint (of sorts.) Warriors really -don't- have a lot of single attack skills. One of the main reasons I haven't added more is that I didn't want to create a whole bunch of cookie cutter skills that are basically all the same stupid generic damage thing.

At the same time, mage has something similar to this: there are a number of damage spells, often the only difference between them being the damage type or mana/damage throws. Perhaps having a bunch of similar kinds of skills for warrior isn't really any different, and might make people happier. I'll have to think about that a bit more.

I always viewed mage and thief as being the 'standalone' classes, the ones best suited to soloing. Cleric and warrior have always struck me as being more group oriented. The available skills seem to reflect that, in that thief has basically no group skills and mage can cast spells on other people. Cleric and warrior are the glue that hold groups together, and a lot of the skills I've added for warrior reflect that.