New Seafaring Artefact

Kenway

While I'm somewhat new to seafaring I have a basic understanding of and a ton of love for ships and sailing. I'm currently saving for a ship of my own so at the moment I move between captaining and crewing a few ships I have access to. This brings up the issue of SPPs which I think is an awesome system and I kinda wish class skills were kinda like this so there'd be more variety within each of them but that's not the point. The point is, changing them between crewing, captaining with a crew, and captaining solo is kind of a hassle. Not so much that I can't or won't do it, but enough that I see an opportunity for something that, if I had the funds and the ship, I would absolutely buy.

An Illuminated Crew Manifest - 1000cr
When placed on a ship, allows the owner to specialize in any Seafaring skill. Provided they are docked in a harbour (not natural harbours). Alternatively, once per month, the owner may allow a single one of his crew the use of this artefact. MANIFEST SPECIALISE IN <spec> to specialise and MANIFEST ALLOW <person> to give them that month's use.

The idea here is to take away the hassle of sailing to somewhere potentially completely the opposite direction of your end destination to respec. So you just enter your cabin while docked at a port, unspecialise and the specialise again in whatever you need. The only at man made harbour thing is to try and stop a ship fleeing from pirates etc to suddenly turn around with maxed out weapons spec or <insert example where this would not be desirable>. I originally had the crew member thing as additionally but that seemed like it might lead to people just ignoring the actual specialists and finding someone with a manifest. So allowing someone to use it will cost you your use of it for that month to try and make it less likely for that to happen. Even if the crew member use was dropped (at which point changing it to like 800cr would be better) I still think it'd be a useful and popular artefact.

I'd of course be interested in the thoughts of the more seasoned sailors.

Tharvis

this'd be extremely handy, but I would suggest having to have it signed by the actual tutors beforehand and only useable by the owner. As part of learning seafaring is in my opinion reaching those tutors, even if it is just once

Shirszae

This would take a bit away from the idea of having a competent crew, since you could just lolspecialize in whatever you need without actually bothering to look for someone else who might already be specialized. 

Jonathin

no

Synbios

Shirszae said:

This would take a bit away from the idea of having a competent crew, since you could just lolspecialize in whatever you need without actually bothering to look for someone else who might already be specialized. 

@Shirszae: Wouldn't limiting usage of the artefact to once an Achaean month be already a sufficient limiting factor?

Also, what if there just aren't enough people about due to low population hours to reliably look for x specialist?

Sena

I think this could only be acceptable if it was so heavily restricted that you probably wouldn't want it anyways. It should definitely not be as good as actually visiting the specialists.

My thoughts: Instead of allowing complete respecialisation into whatever you want, it could let you save 1 or 2 configurations. So you can have a solo setup and a more specialised one that you can switch between, and if you want anything else you'll need to visit the specialists as usual. It could also have a delay on respecialising (so you choose the saved configuration you want, and maybe half an hour later it actually changes your specialisations), and I don't think it should be usable more than once per Achaean year.

Alternatively, it could have drawbacks like not allowing you to use all of your SPPs (limiting you to half of your maximum SPPs without visiting a specialist, for example), or only allowing you to specialise in one thing (so you could switch to 5 in weapons and 0 in everything else if you really need a weapon specialist), or not allowing you to reach rank 5 without visiting a specialist.

Synbios said:

Wouldn't limiting usage of the artefact to once an Achaean month be already a sufficient limiting factor?

Once per Achaean month isn't nearly limiting enough, unless it has some severe drawbacks.

Taraus

Kenway said:

The idea here is to take away the hassle of sailing to somewhere potentially completely the opposite direction of your end destination to respec.

This sentence is slightly... escaping me, maybe? Specs don't have anything to do with an end destination, unless I'm missing the point.

I think, if any secondary method of learning specs is introduced, it should be something closer to the way learning from other players works, with some built in limitations there, too ~ like, you can only learn the specialisation from someone who's rank 5.