Playing a Cleric

(Shalla, 2003-03-09)  Cleric is my favorite class because I like numbers and I like making important decisions quickly. Clerics have to deal with an awful lot of numbers. An example...

  Your group consists of:
       [  958/1003 H      1/1    M   142/142 V] [50 WD] Jerra (Head of group)
       [  530/636  H      0/440  M    60/82  V] [49 Cl] Lythos
       [  798/853  H      4/366  M   122/122 V] [50 Ba] Coda
       [  420/890  H      1/1    M    92/102 V] [50 WD] Rakhon
       [   94/1426 H      1/1    M   102/102 V] [49 Sa] Juccil
  < 530hp 0m 60mv > st
  c heal, juccil

Granted, that is not much of a decision. When the tank is at 94 hp, you are supposed to cast heal. :P But if you like numbers, this is definately the class for you.

Index

 - Creating Your Cleric
 - Exping Your Cleric
 - Underrated Cleric Spells
 - Setting Up Aliases
 - Some Fancier Aliases
 - Bind Aliases To Hotkeys
 - Controlling Your Memorization List
 - Healing
 - Tips
 - Request For Comments

Comments

 - Lomax: Triggers For Failed Concentration
 - Saaraha: Prompt Display Options

Creating Your Cleric

Cleric or Dark Priest?

The classes are very similar. Clerics have bless and benediction, which help your group hit more in combat. Dark Priests have feeblemind, which makes an enemy easier to hit, and makes it hit you less, but it must be cast on each enemy individually, every fight. That is the main difference between the two classes. There is a minor difference in holy warrior vs. unholy warrior. Holy warrior has more protective value, as it gives major globe. It also includes a built-in mend and refresh, which is important when you're healing and every spell counts. Unholy warrior is more geared towards exping and doing damage. It has a larger hit/dam bonus than holy warrior, and it gives haste.

There are also some trivial, thematic differences. Dark Priests get remedy and revive instead of rejuvenate and mend, harm instead of spiritual hammer, and dark reverence instead of divine light. They look different, but they work exactly the same as the Cleric versions.

Choose a Race That Can Get 22 Wisdom

With 22 wisdom, at level 50, you will be able to memorize heal in one second. Anything less and it will take you 3 seconds, or worse. To get the 22 wis you need to be a good healer, there are only two choices: High Elf and Dwarf. For a Dark Priest, there is only one choice: Dwarf.

If you've already created your healer, and he isn't a High Elf or Dwarf, don't despair. :) You can always remort to Elouve or Lich. Or, if it's a Shadow Elf Dark Priest, you can take 1x remort bonuses. That will get you the 22 wis, as well as innate sneak indoors. Shadow Elves are pretty good Dark Priests at 1x. Humans are more of a challenge, as they can't get 22 wis without remorting twice.

Training Your Stats

Most people maximize constitution first. This is not 100% necessary; my Cleric is an Elouve; his max possible con is 17, and I chose to stop at 16 and save my points for other stuff. He does fine with his 16 con, but he died an awful lot until around level 45, and he needs to wear a ton of +hp eq to stay alive. Most Clerics will want at least 18 con, which is the max for a High Elf. For a Dwarf, you can choose. I think 22 con is a bit excessive; you can safely stop at 20 if there's other stuff you'd like to spend the points on. You could also stop a Dwarf at 18 con and do ok, but then you'll lose out on the benefits of choosing a Dwarf, and might as well just create a High Elf.

Once you've trained your con as high as you want to, you have options. You need to get 22 wisdom eventually, by the time you get your last training session at level 48. You will also want 19 intelligence on a High Elf, to be able to use the Orb of Winter. Dwarves can't do this; their max int is 17. On a Dwarf, 16 int is enough to wear all the good stuff except the Orb of Winter. You could also stop at 18 or 15, as there are several decent +1 int jewelry items that are good for Clerics, depending on how tight you are for training sessions.

Exping Your Cleric

Avoid Soloing

Clerics can heal themselves and have a fairly decent offensive spell in spiritual hammer, so it is possible for them to solo exp. It is really a waste of time, though. You will get more exp faster by finding at least one hitter to group with. This changes at level 49, when you receive the powerful area spell 'wrath of god', which lets you get pretty nice exp soloing if you're careful with it. But for the majority of your Cleric's career, you should try grouping for exp.

Easiest At Low Levels

Everyone wants to group with Clerics, especially ones under level 20. Wimpy healing is still tons better than no healing, and the low-level Cleric doesn't take a large cut of the group exp. Don't waste this opportunity to get easy exp groups, as it is very hard to solo a Cleric until level 15 when you get spiritual hammer.

Use Mend, Not Heal

Until level 50, you will not be able to memorize heal in one second. It is better to use mend for your healing spell while exping, as it memorizes fast. This means less time wasted resting, and if you are fast enough, even some free time to cast some spiritual hammers and help with damage. It is a good idea to keep one or two heals in memory, in case something surprising comes up. Also, some hitter classes have special skills that cost movement points, and heal is convenient because it also refills moves. But in general, if you want the most exp fastest, you should be using mend.

Be Careful Spamming Commands

When exping any class, you want to have your next command typed and sent to the mud before the previous one's lag has run out. That way you will have no idle time when action is available to you, but the mud is waiting for you to choose what to do. Clerics must be careful with this, since they are doing two things at once. An example: you are exping somewhere, and helping with the damage to speed things up. The tank is low on hp, so you spam a heal, then a nuke, and sit back and watch...

Never Spam After A Heal

But you lose concentration on your heal, the nuke goes through, and now you are lagged for over a round and can't heal again. You can spam a heal after a nuke if you want, or another nuke after a nuke if you are sure you can go all those rounds without needing to heal. But never spam anything after a heal if the heal is urgent. Watch to see that it succeeds before doing anything else.

Wait A Full Round Before Spamming

Except for some quirkly spells like word of recall, all spells have between one and two rounds of lag. You can wait a full round after seeing the success message on your last spell before sending your next spell to the mud. It will still get there ahead of time, and you won't waste time being idle, and you'll be a full round more responsive than if you'd spammed immediately after seeing a success message.

Underrated Cleric Spells

When you are healing for a group on a run, the Cleric stuff is pretty simple. Doing three things at once when you need to isn't easy, but it's pretty much the same stuff: heal, divine light, maybe blind or remove para. But for exping, there are some fun, underrated spells out there.

Sleep

This spell only works on low- and some mid-level mobs, but it knocks them completely out of combat. It also bashes them just like the warrior bash skill, and the first hit that wakes them up does extra damage. Also, a sleeping mob can be backstabbed, even if it is "aware" from a previous backstab. If you have really good timing, a Cleric and two rogues can do backstab/sleep/backstab and inflict major damage in the first two rounds of combat.

Spirit Ward

Unlike a Necromancer's ward undead spell, spirit ward will only delay, if you are lucky, aggressive undead from attacking you. Also, it is self-only. But it has something ward undead doesn't: it gives you damage reduction from all physical hits from undead, similar to the sanctuary spell. If you are soloing undead for exp, this is a good spell to try.

Blindness

This spell decreases enemy hitroll and armor, and also prevents a mob from bashing. While exping, this is important, because it means the hitter you are grouped with can swap more +hit and +av equipment for +dam equipment. More damage faster equals more exp. Casting blind also gives you something to do at the start of a fight, before the hitter has taken enough damage that you need to heal.

Feeblemind

Only Dark Priests get this; Clerics get bless and benediction instead. Feeblemind is an insanely good spell, as it stacks with blind, is more powerful than blind, and it works on mobs like trees and ghosts that can't be blinded because they don't use eyes to see.

Setting Up Aliases

Clerics MUST Use Aliases

Clerics have a reptuation for being very hard to play. This is only true if you don't have a good setup with your aliases and hotkeys. If you want to make a cleric, you must set up aliases. Otherwise, you will work twice as hard as I do and still be slower. You'll hate playing your cleric, and everyone else will hate your cleric too, because he'll screw up more and kill them.

In fairness, I know one cleric who doesn't use aliases, and he does pretty well. He also types insanely fast. But, I type insanely fast too, and I still love my aliases! If you are going to do the same thing 10,000+ times, you might as well make it easier on yourself.

I use zMUD, and these are my important settings. None of it is very complicated. I've vistted friends and set up their zMUD with all the aliases and hotkeys I need in under 10 minutes. Something similar should be available in any client.

#var tank ellyn

That would be if Ellyn is tanking. I change this one a lot, whenever I join a new group, or the group changes tanks. And I forget sometimes, and then people die. But this is an important one, as all the the other ones use it. It saves me from typing the tank's name over and over again, and possibly making typos.

If you are soloing or tanking yourself, you can set this variable to either "self", "me", or your character's name.

#var heal mend
#var bigheal heal

I have two sets of heal aliases and hotkeys, one for using "heal" and one for using "bigheal". Most of the time, now that my cleric is level 50, they are both set to "heal" as I only memorize heals. But from levels 30 through 49, you will want to use both heals and mends, and it helps to have a hotkey for each. Before level 30, you might set them to rejuv and mend, and so on.

#alias ii {c @heal, @tank}
#alias hh {c @bigheal, @tank}
#alias iii {stand;ii}
#alias hhh {stand;hh}

These are the ones I actually type all the time. At least they were, until I set up hotkeys. But I like setting up my aliases first, then choosing hotkeys for them later. I chose these, "hh" and "ii", because I can hit them with my right hand very fast, and then hit Enter.

#alias vv {c div li}
#alias vvv {stand;vv}

Same stuff as above, but for divine light, the Cleric area mini-heal. If you have a Dark Priest, you'll want to cast dark reverence instead. The spell does the same thing, only it's purple and black, not white and blue. :)

#alias gg {group}

Clerics type group a lot. Most of the time, I don't even assist. I just cast heal, rest, memorize, and check group immediately, and then again at the end of every round. If I have time, I finish memorizing. If not, and I see the tank has low hps, I use "hhh" to stand and cast heal.

#var nuke {sp h}
#alias 88 {c @nuke,}

Clerics need to nuke too, and this is just a generally useful alias for any casting class. I set "nuke" to whatever spell I'm doing damage with, and then type "88 whatever" to target whatever, or just "88" itself once i'm in combat and have a default target.

#alias oo {assist @tank}
#alias ooo {stand;oo}

More generic stuff. Clerics do a lot of assisting, and like everything else, the faster you can do it, the better.

#alias bb {c blindness,}
... etc., etc. ...

I have simple things like this for most of my spells. There's also "hw" for "c holy warrior," and probably half a dozen others.

#alias memm {rest;mem}
#alias bmem {disengage;rest;mem}

These are just nice aliases to have for any casting class. Although resting and memorizing is sort of easy, "r" then "m", I do it so much that I made aliases for it.

#trigger {^Your studies are complete.} {stand}

Another one everyone should have. You want to stand as soon as possible, so if you need to cast a heal, you can do it with one command, not two. Even commands like "stand" and "eat" that have no lag take up a small amount of time, since you're only allowed 4 commands per second. Standing will slow you down by 1/4 of a second, or 1/12 of a combat round, which is enough to make you miss a heal if you're unlucky. So do it ahead of time if you can.

Some Fancier Aliases

I have two ways of making a casting alias. "hh" always heals the tank; I have no choice on it. "bb" is different. I have to type in the keyword for what I want to blind. That is fine for offensive spells, but what if I wanted to do "hh kasryn" to heal Kasryn because he needs it, even though Ellyn is tanking? I can't do that without changing hh to be like bb. And I don't want to do that; I don't want to be typing the tank's name 1,000 times. Plus, I can't bind hh to a hotkey if it needs arguments.

We can make a hybrid alias that combines the best of both worlds:

#alias unblind {#if {%1} {c restore sight, %1} {c restore sight, @tank}}

This "unblind" thing is a lot like my "bb" that casts blindness. But if I type "unblind" all by itself, it defaults to the tank. It only targets if I specifically give it a target. All the healing spells can be redefined this way, if you can figure out how to do it in your client. For example, instead of the simple "hh" above, we could have,

#alias hh {#if {%1} {c @bigheal, %1} {c @bigheal, @tank}}

Then I can still type "hh" by itself to heal Ellyn, the tank, but if Kasryn needs a heal, I only have to type "hh kasryn", not "c heal, kasryn".

Bind Aliases To Hotkeys

I always call them hotkeys, but most clients, including zMUD call them macros. Weird, since the zMUD command to create one is #KEY. I don't enter them with the #KEY command; it is too much of a pain. I just go into the 'macro keys' section, click 'New', press the key I want, and type the alias I want the key to use in the bottom.

Example Hotkeys

You should set your hotkeys up in a way that makes sense to you. But here's a list of mine, so you can get an idea how it works. There is nothing special about these, though. I threw them together as I learned to play my cleric, and if I cared to redo my whole setup from scratch, I might change them around a bit.

My Cleric Hotkeys
KeyAliasDescription
F5vv (casts divine light)
F6hh (casts @bigheal on tank)
F7ii (casts @heal on tank)
F888 (casts @nuke on default target)
F9oo (assists tank)
F10sp (not an alias, just the "spells" command)
F11bmem (disengage, rest, mem)
F12memm (rest, mem)

I can press all of these with my right hand. While I'm memorizing, I have my right hand over these keys, and my left hand is ready to hit Shift. This is because I have a second set of hotkeys to match the first set, if I'm holding Shift while I hit one. For all the healing and assisting ones, Shift makes me stand before doing the normal thing, like SHIFT-F5 is "vvv", which is stand and cast divine light. For the non-healing ones, Shift makes me do some variant of the key. SHIFT-F10 is "sp p" instead of "sp", and SHIFT-F12 makes me do a plain "mem" without resting first.

How I Actually Use Them

SHIFT-F8 is "gg" for "group". I keep my middle finger on F8, and my index finger on F6 or F7, depending on which heal I want. When I'm assisting, my index finger is heal, and my middle finger is nuke. I do that until I'm low on spells, then hit F11 to memorize, then SHIFT-F8 or F10 or both, depending on how much information I feel like taking in. When I'm not assisting, it's the same setup except I press Shift on all of them. I sit there memorizing, and SHIFT-F8 lets me check group, and SHIFT-F6 or F7 makes me stand and heal. Then I hit F12 off the end of my keyboard to get back to memorizing.

Forget You Just Read That

I explained how I use hotkeys, so you can see how easy they make things. Just press one button, and you instantly do what typing 10 to 20 characters would've done. That's all I want you to learn from this: make hotkeys, they rock. Don't copy my setup; make one that makes sense to you.

Controlling Your Memorization List

Understand Your Memorization Order

There are two ways a spell can get added to your memorization list. When you cast a spell, it is added to the bottom of the list, so you normally get spells back in the same order you cast them. But when you explicitly add a spell to your list with "memorize", it goes right at the top, in case you want it immediately.

For the full details on this, read HELP SPELLS in the game, and experiment with typing "spells progress" which shows the full order of your memorization list, not just the summary that "spells" gives you. But there are basically two ways to take advantage of it.

Forget Big Spells After Casting

If a single big spell is clogging up your memorization, you can just forget the spell and add it back to your list when the emergency is over. The sooner you do this the better. If you hesitate on canceling the spell, you will lose the time you spent half-memorizing it. I do this with holy warrior a lot. Every time I cast it in a long fight, I forget it immediately after, and don't add it back until I'm sure I can handle memorizing it without running out of heals.

Push Important Spells To The Top

You can also type "forget 3 heal" followed immediately by "mem 3 heal". This will move those 3 heals to the top of your memorization list. Make sure not to do this with too many heals, as then you might purge ones that are already memorized and waste time. But if you are nearly out of heals, it's safe to do 3 or 4. You can make a fancy alias for this. Mine is called "prim":

#alias prim {f %0;m %0}

Conveniently, "forget" and "memorize" take exactly the same arguments, so this is very simple and flexible. "prim heal" will do "f heal;m heal". "prim 3 div li" will do "f 3 div li;mem 3 div li". Nice stuff.

Healing

There's no one right way to heal for every situation, but there is a fairly short list of "right ways to heal", and you usually do one and stick with it, unless the situation changes.

It's Easier Than It Sounds!

After reading this section, one of my friends told me he was never going to make a cleric. :P The healing tactics here are easy to do; it just takes a lot of words to explain them. Don't let a few big paragraphs scare you off. Just read them once, slowly, and if you don't "get it", come back and read it again after you've been playing your Cleric for a while.

Heal While Re-Memming Other Spells

This is the main healing tactic, what I am doing 90% of the time. Besides being a healer, you are probably also maintaining 2 or 3 holy warriors on group members, and occasionally casting something like mass bless or restore sight. While your group is fighting, you just sit out the fight and memorize. Type 'group' every round, and if you need to heal, stand and heal, then rest and get back to memorizing. If someone's holy warrior runs out, stand and cast that. See the section above on Controlling Your Memorization List and do that stuff too. If you manage to rememorize all your spells while keeping up on the heals, then you can assist and help with damage.

Decide To Heal The Round Before

This is a modification to other tactics, particularly the previous one. If you type 'group' at the top of each round, you have less than one round to decide whether to heal or not, and you can lag. Or even if you don't lag, it is just very nerve-wracking, especially after doing it for several hours. What I do is start every fight doing that, but after a few rounds, I get an idea in my head how much damage the mob does per round. Like say, about 500 damage on a bad round. And I want the tank over 200 hp at all times. Then I check 'group' every round, and if it's below 700, I decide to heal at the top of the next round. I don't even look when that happens; I wait until the next round, stand, and heal right off. This works great and gives you a full round to recast the heal in case you hit the wrong button, lag, or lose concentration.

If that sounds like too much math to hold in your head, make the decision to heal on the next round when you see the tank near half his max hp. I've tried this when I was tired, and it seems to work well, and safely. But it's sloppier than the above method, so don't count on it.

Another benefit of this is that it lets you heal 2 rounds in a row in an emergency. Heal has slightly less than 2 rounds of lag, so if you typically cast heals right at the top of a round, you are free to heal 2 rounds in a row when you need to, or follow a heal with a divine on the next round, or follow a divine with a heal, without leaving the timing to chance.

Spam-Memorizing Heals

This is simple, and it works, but it is very boring and one-dimensional, and you can usually be more efficient if you do something that requires a bit more tought. How it works is: you heal, rest, memorize, stand, heal, repeat. You don't even need to check 'group' for hps. This is not a bad tactic in an emergency, if you are fighting 5 mobs or something, and once 1 or 2 are dead the pace will slow down. But in general, if your fight needs this much healing to stay alive, it is too risky and what you need is more healers.

Spam Heals Without Re-Memming

You can't keep this up of course, but you usually don't need to. If there's a fluke or emergency and you need extra healing for a few rounds, you can just keep casting with no delays. I sometimes do this while fighting a large quantity of small mobs, until the first couple are dead. If you do this, don't check 'group' in between your heals — just spam them. If you have time to read 'group', you have time to memorize. And if you're doing this, you don't have that time.

Healing With Mend

Unlike heal, mend has limits. You have to experiment to find the right time to mend. Start at something like "the tank has 640 hp, my mends do about 300, I'll heal whenever I see 340 or below." If that gets you into some risky situations, or of the mends never put the tank near max hp, heal sooner, like at 360. If that gets you a lot of wasted mends that put the tank at max hp, and the danger is low, back down a bit, try 330 or 320. If you have heal, always keep at least two in memory, in case you hit an emergency.

The tank's max hp doesn't matter so much if there's only mend to do the healing. If you're able to always keep the tank above 300 hp, and even then mend is usually not hitting his max, he has too much hp and should trade some of it off for something else.

Heal While Assisting And Nuking

I covered a lot of this in Exping Your Cleric, in the section about spamming nukes and heals.

If you have a sure-fire keyword that will never hit the wrong thing, the best way to assist is with a nuke. It gets you right into combat doing damage, although it does have slightly more lag than the assist command, so watch out. Always check 'group' and see if a heal is necessary before joining combat. I like to type out my nuke while I'm memorizing, hit my hotkey to check 'group', and if the group hps are fine, hit Enter as soon as my stand trigger goes off.

If assisting with a nuke isn't safe, assist the biggest hitter in the group, not the tank. Sometimes (too often) the tank and some of the hitters are all fighting different things. You want to help whichever mob is dying first die sooner. Less mobs means you can heal less and nuke more, etc.

The nice thing about assisting is that you get the tank's hps in your prompt, and don't have to waste commands on 'group' and waste time staring at it and thinking. You need all the help you can get, since you are now doing two things at once. And remember to disengage before you run out of heals! You should have at least 2 left when you disengage. Count them.

Coordinate With Other Clerics

Nothing is more annoying than two Clerics healing on the same round. That is, until it happens 2 rounds later when you try again. And then again 2 rounds after that! If you have 2 clerics healing, chances are the tank needs a heal every round. So decide ahead of time, when you screw up and both heal the same round, who will immediately spam the next heal, and who will wait until one round after that heal goes off to get back on schedule. And don't check 'group' and skip your turn if it isn't necessary. Usually, it just throws the whole system off. If your turn comes up and heal isn't necessary, cast a divine or heal one of the hitters.

It usually takes 2 divine lights to heal the group after a firestorm, as at least one person will fail the save. One healer should always cast divine after a firestorm. The other can choose to heal the tank if he really needs it, or fix up the group with a second divine. But make sure the guy who doesn't have a choice knows it. Double-healing the tank after a firestorm, and skipping divine for one or two rounds, could kill your entire group.

Tips

Don't take this stuff too seriously. The Healing section above is based on dozens, maybe hundreds, of hours of playtime. This stuff here is just something I do and like, or tried a few times and worked well.

Read This Again, Later

If you don't have a Cleric yet, this is a lot of information to absorb. So go make a Cleric ;) and try some of this out, and come back and double-check the article after you've tried some of the stuff yourself.

I Don't Use Triggers

I have a few stand triggers, and some triggers that count my active spells and gold splitting. I have zero triggers that have anything to do with healing. You are much better off with hotkeys. Triggers will not make you faster, since all the important spells have at least one round of lag: plenty of time to hit a hotkey, read some stuff, and hit another hotkey. If you're simply addicted to triggers, you can always experiment, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Spam Triggers Kill People

Don't make junk triggers that spam the room with stuff like "emote is ready to go!" and "emote needs X seconds to mem!". You only get 4 commands per second; that stuff does slow down your healing. Also, it is just plain distracting in a big group. Spam gives other clerics less time to read 'group' and make good decisions before the info scrolls off the screen. If you want to make spam triggers for fun, make a way to shut them off. Like, you could shove them all in their own folder called Spam, and make an alias that disables the folder. And try to get your friends to do the same thing. Fun is fine, until it starts getting people killed.

Hotkeys Don't Clear Your Input!

I love hotkeys, because I can be typing something for group-say, and hit SHIFT-F8 at the same time to check 'group', and hit more keys to stand and heal and memorize again, and my half-typed group-say is still sitting there. It works even better for combat commands. You can type out a command you know you'll need in a few seconds, like an assist or a nuke, and leave it sitting in your input bar while you use hotkeys to heal and memorize. Doing two things at once is fun and impressive. This may be zMUD-only, though.

Stack 'Stand' Commands When Memorizing

If Kasryn needs holy warrior and I'm memorizing, I could do "st" then "hw kasryn". But if I type slow, the time in between "st" and "hw kasryn", I am doing nothing, and I'm certainly not memorizing. Instead, type "st;hw kasryn". Watch for the holy warrior to succeed, and recast it if it fails. Then rest and memorize.

Don't Overestimate Paralyze

Paralyze (and finger of death) will freeze a mob so it gets no actions and does no damage for a few rounds. This gives you some time off to memorize your heals back, if you need it. But once para wears off, it's back to 100% difficulty. Take advantage of the free time to mem, but don't expect para to make a mob do less damage and be less dangerous. It doesn't do that.

Heal Twice After a Bash

If the tank is near full hp when bashed, wait one round, then heal two rounds in a row. Bash lasts two rounds, and tanks can take a lot of damage while knocked down. If he isn't near full hp, heal once immediately, and spam the next one to go off as soon as possible. If the tank is bashed because he failed a bash vs. a mage and fell down, you might want to do a divine in place of one of those heals, as a firestorm might be coming.

Watch Out For Wardancers and Rogues

Wardancers get an insane number of attacks, and get riposted a lot. They also tend to go 100% damage eq and have very poor AV. An occasional divine might be enough to keep them safe, but not always; sometimes you need to toss them a heal. Against a mob with fireshield, it's even worse. Rogues aren't quite as death-happy as WDs, but you have to watch out on fireshield, as they take damage in huge bursts when they backstab and circle. You can't just say "oh, that guy looks like he'll need a heal in a minute or two."

Use the 'Glance' Command to Check Spell Status

A lot of important spells, you can see on someone by looking. But looking at someone spams the room with "HealerGuy looks at HitterGuy." Get 6 people in the group, and this gets ugly. The glance command will get you the same information without spamming the room, and it also won't spam you with equipment lists and other stuff you don't care about.

Remove Paralysis On the Leader Last

To remove paralysis after an area cage spell like carpet of goo, first type 'group'. Glance at everyone in reverse order, from the bottom up, and remove para on anyone who's caged. The leader will be last. If the leader tells you to remove para him first, don't listen. He should not be moving until the group is able to follow anyway.

Request For Comments

I welcome any comments, corrections, criticisms, and additions to the tips and tactics I've listed in this article. If you just want to say "hey that's great!" I'll tell you thanks for reading it... but I don't need to have two dozen hey-that's-greats at the end of the article. :) But anything I left out, or anything you'd like to add or correct, please let me know.

The best way to send this stuff to me is to log onto the mud and send mudmail to Shalla. You can also use email if you like, but please get in touch with me first, so I know to keep an eye out for the email.

Comment From Lomax

(Shalla, 2003-03-15)  Lomax suggests you make a trigger like this,

#trigger {You lost your concentration!} {!}

This will make you automatically recast a spell you lose concentration on, like a heal, using the mud's built-in "!" feature to repeat your last command. This is probably a good idea, but I have not done it myself, since I am sort of wary of triggers... But try it, you might like it!

The '!' sometimes has special meaning to zMUD, depending on the preferences you set in the "Script Parser" section. At least I think it does... the above trigger works for me, but not some of my friends. If it doesn't work for you, try this one,

#trigger {You lost your concentration!} {~!}

The '~' char in there will make sure zMUD sends the '!' to the mud, and doesn't try to do anything special with it.

Comment From Saaraha

(Shalla, 2003-03-15)  Saaraha suggests, especially to newbie clerics, that you remember to turn on the proper display options to see the tank's name and HPs in your prompt. I mentioned using this information in some of the stuff above, but I forgot to tell people how to turn it on! You do it like this,

display tn
display tc

There are more options besides those. Read "help display" in the game for the full list.