1) There is a priest in Illuma. So no, no plans for another one.

2) Self-repair would be nice. IMO it would be best implemented as a trade skill. Depending on the material class you'd need different tools to do so, as well as materials with which to do it.

Trade skills are something I've wanted for some time. I want client GUI for these trade skills. Once the updated client is finished, adding flexible GUI to the client should be pretty easy. But my new client will come after I get the dungeon generator in a good place.

In the meantime we could use /commands for trade skills. Might be something I take a crack at fairly soon, since we've discussed alchemy a bit recently.

3) I have no opinion here. Would be easy enough to implement, though. Currently, you deal anywhere between 70 and 100% of your "max hit".

As we discussed in-game, with the upcoming changes to quality/condition repairing items in the field is a fairly high priority. I just implemented portable anvils on my local server.

Currently you must place an anvil on the ground, drop a damaged item on it, mark a nugget, and apply the anvil. This will repair it to its full condition and destroy the nugget.

My intent going forward is to replace tin nuggets with iron nuggets. All metal items are some variant of iron (even IRL steel is just iron with some impurities). Higher iron nugget tiers will repair items by different amounts.

I also intend to add more objects of type NUGGET. These will include "leather scraps", "cloth scraps", and more to encompass all material classes because it's tough to repair a cloth shirt with a piece of iron.

While I think it would make sense to require different anvil types for different materials (tanning rack, loom, etc.) I think for simplicity's sake (and because we have no active artists) all items will be repaired with anvils. Anvils will be able to be purchased by players for some yet-undecided price and will likely deteriorate after each use.

Feedback before I continue down this path?

Also maybe each anvil is 1g or 5g and has 10 uses or something. Not sure though what this should look like....need some more input from others.

And maybe repairing is a skill that can be leveled up as its used, helping the chances of repair with each level...like 0.5% more each level or however you already code things like this.

I see what you mean Dolfo. However, the idea is to not need to travel anywhere to fixed anvils....unless maybe there are anvils throughout the game and dungeons where it is closer than running back to town.

Bit of an issue - with all possible materials that equipment can be made of, I would need 8 different sets of 3 sizes of "nuggets" to allow repairs of all equipment. We don't have the graphics for this - I've scoured our official and unofficial repositories and can only repurpose existing items to use as scrap materials, but it's not quite convincing.

There's also the matter that we'd have to rebalance values of all these materials based on (a) how common equipment of such materials are and (b) how rare the raw materials are. I think nuggets alone work fine for this, but adding more materials would be quite an undertaking.

I think for now it might be best to just allow nuggets to repair anything. Eventually we can get our hands on graphics for other materials and balance prices based on real-world use cases (i.e. the arbitrary value players assign to the ability to repair in the field).

I think crafting and repairing are getting mixed together in methodologies.

As far as crafting goes, let's say you have a recipe to make a rare artifact and it requires dozens of different ingredients it can be viable to do if a player aims to collect them and can store them in their apt until they craft it.

On the other hand for repairing if you need to carry dozens or materials plus an anvil it just isn't practical. The more materials that are required the more likely you're to run out of one and if your gear has a bias to one material same ones will always run out assuming equal drop rates for all of them. Probably the most practical solution is to have a dismantling skill where you can break down items into materials (e.g. metal scraps, leather scraps etc) where ideally you have no more than 5 categories and these scraps in turn are material used to repair. This also means that the junk that is thrown away (I personally return them to sender i.e. stuff them in a corpse!) can be recycled.

As a side note I think repairing in the field doesn't have a huge value for me. Item con reductions only affect % defence and weapon dps. As defence has diminishing returns that prevents you going over 100% protections then it means losses at first are also very minimal so a 10% loss in item con will likely only reduce defence by 1-2%. For weapons it's a bigger issue as it can reduce dps by 10-20% as it is directly proportional although in that scenario I simply carry multiple weapons so for example my warrior carries 8 top tier melee weapons and when one starts taking damage I simply switch it out.

Another change I've made is altering the quality range from 80-87 to (IIRC) 40-80 (normally in increments of 5 IIRC).  Permanent item damage will probably need to be adjusted from this, as well as monster stats since you'll be dealing/resisting roughly half the damage until you get better-constructed items. So when your item deteriorates to the point of potentially permanent damage, you will have already experienced a significant reduction in its performance. This makes in-the-field repairs much more practical.

This won't affect many unique items because historically mappers have largely ignored Q/C (because it's always been inconsequential). I would like to adjust these uniques to follow suit but that'll take some work.

Ultimately the goal here is to have a diverse enough item pool that HLP's need not rely on unique artifacts, and may rarely even find a random drop that's close to, if not better than the best-in-slot unique. There's a delicate balance to be met between unique and non-unique items. I've seen extremes of too many uniques => most are garbage, and not enough uniques => they're only for the elite players.

This is one big advantage to having a separate temporary server with cutting-edge changes - If we botch the game balance, it's much easier to fine-tune it on a server that's been online for a few months rather than a server that's been online for 12 years.

As far as carrying 8 top-tier melee weapons - that's MUDflation that's inevitable when you've got players playing the game for 12 years with no mechanism by which to lose their items.

Regarding craft vs repair and carrying materials - I think that's another reason why using 1 consumable (nuggets) for every item is better. Maybe someday it'll be some magic object instead of nuggets.