When is Identify not an Indentify?

[Tarax the Terrible]

I never realised there were different levels of magical identify.
Some guilds not as good as others.

Was pleased when I found someone to identify something for me..
The information was totally generic and disappointing.
"This has been enchanted to strike deadly blows on its enemies."
Short and sweet..
Later found out might have been their identify that sucked...

The masses would LOOOOVVEE to have some way to get stuff identified aside from going to the lucky guilds.
Would that not be a good way to encourage your average player to explore more?
After all not everyone has friends in the right guilds, nor are some of those very information sharing like or friendly to outsiders.

[petros]

It's a delicate balance between making things available to everyone and also giving people something special when they are in a guild. Should magic be cheap and easily identified? If the answer is yes, then we should just have items or npcs that will identify items for you.

I believe, however, that magic should be powerful, rare, and a bit mysterious. I don't know which item you found that couldn't be identified well, but chances are that it was made that way to keep it mysterious. Most powerful magical items should never be completely identified by even the most powerful of players because powerful artifacts are the stuff of legends, created by legendary wizards and sorcerers, or even Gods of the past. I think it is cool if you need to work together with other people in the Realms to discover things like this through experimentation, rather than just walking up to an npc and paying for it to be identified.

[Tarax the Terrible]

You make good points and I agree the balance here is delicate.
Magic is rare and powerful, so are we the players. Hehe

But more seriously, identify is a utility spell, the people in the lucky guilds are getting a whole lot else besides.
So eating into the specialness of having that ability isn't a major balance concern in my eyes.
That is not to say it should be cheap and easy, 5 plats per go in sparkle etc..

Looking into this I found out that there is an identify scroll in the realms as a rare treasure from one of the more challenging/deadly foes.
But that unless you have high magic skills you can't use it.
That is disappointing that if I was ever lucky enough to get it I would not be able to use it myself.

I think there is room for a few more options for people trying to identify things.
Like making such a scroll powerful enough to be used by anyone would be a start...

[Bromen]

get the scroll T and I'll use it for ya!

-B