Developer Blogs
This is a blog for all the cool, but minor, things that your creators do for you.
[ Am | Council | Cwc | Developers | Fluffos | Forn | General | Guilds | Klatch | Learning | Liaison | Mudlib | Playerkillers | Playtesters | Quiz | Ram | Special | Sur | Underworld | Waterways | Web ]
| A Fresh Coat Of Pain, posted on Sat Aug 9 08:48:33 2025 | | Posted by: Kadath | | Category: Guilds | A new assassin-only command called "coat" has been added. It can be learned at 75 levels of covert.items.poisons and can be learned from a teacher at each of the four specialisations' headquarters. The command allows assassins to coat a suitable weapon with a new type of substance called a blade coating. Coatings have a wide variety of effects and many of them will require some experimentation to discover.
Use "help coat" for the basics of the command. Applicator clothing is available to purchase from guild shops for each spec, and some specialisations with more of a focus on applied pharmacology may also sell a limited selection of coatings or reagents.
Here are a couple of pointers to get you started:
- Neighbours and passers-by of a workshop on northeast Endless Street have noticed some strange comings-and-goings, followed by a sudden lack thereof.
- An important document found in the aforementioned workshop has been carefully copied and archived in the library of the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Assassins.
- A particular member of the Assassins' Guild may have been involved with the events at the workshop. Working out who it is and paying them a visit might help to uncover some more secrets around blade coatings.
And a couple of pre-emptive FAQs:
Q: How many coatings are there? Where do I find out what they all do?
A: I don't want to ruin the clandestine nature of the guild's laboratory-based processes. I believe that the flow of information around coatings and their associated ingredients should be guided by guild administration and player interaction.
Q: Why is <particular coating> OP/Useless/Both? When are you going to fix this?
A: I've done my best to balance the effects of each coating to make each of them valuable for a given situation, rather than just really good all the time in every scenario. The playtesters have put a lot of hard work into ensuring the balance is in a good spot, but there's always the chance that things take on a life of their own when released to the whole playerbase. For that reason, all the coatings functionality does come with the caveat that I fully intend to adjust any coatings that are significantly over- or under- performing or creating an especially negative experience.
Q: Why don't some of the coatings apply their effects during backstabs or specials, are you stupid?
A: Stupidity is in the eye of the beholder. But in all seriousness, there's a technical, a gameplay, and a narrative reason for this. The technical reason is that it's difficult and messy to make multiple special modifiers to attacks all trigger together in combat without something going wrong. The gameplay reason is that I want to establish how the addition of coatings affects game balance BEFORE trying to make them trigger on backstabs, etc. (already powerful commands in their own right). The narrative reason is that coatings work best when used to strike precise areas and that's at odds with the nature of frenzied backstabbing and other big attacks that sacrifice accuracy for power. |
| Archives |
Subscribe to this blog through RSS
Back to
list of blogs.
