Help me with weapon suggestion guide

[rabid_schnauzer]

Okay, after spending way too much time on the Battledome Chat in the past few months, I realized that a question that comes up at least hourly is "what weapons should I get?" or "what weapon should I get for under <X amount of neopoints>".

Now doubtless, everyone here is familiar with the IDB and knows how to look through the weapon spotlight feature and make reasonable choices. And the slower pace and lack of character limit mean that myself and other battledome veterans can ask for specifics and tailor advice to specific pets and circumstances.

But on the BD Chat, realtime answers are a necessity and there is rarely the time or character space to go into full detail. Furthermore many neopians don't want to visit offsite links out of paranoia about cookie grabbers or unsafe content.

Since I wanted to be helpful (as encouraging new battledomers is the single best way to preserve the long term value of my weapon investments) and since I quickly got tired of typing the same answers, I wrote up a quick list of generally decent weapons and their current rough prices and just pasted it onto the chat board where the question was asked.

After some prompting I finally moved it to a pet page where others can link. Here's the petpage:

http://petpages.neopets.com/~DemoiselleRogue

But I want some help polishing it, so I'm asking people here

Is anything currently in the wrong price category? (I plan on updating roughly monthly)

Is there anything I should add?

Are there any weapons I should delete?

Should I break the lists up differently? Keep in mind that I would like the lists to be cut and pastable in 400 character chunks for quick reference and people to lazy to visit a petpage.

And are there any horrible typos or spelling errors? Oh heck I know there are, how about I just ask WHERE they are?

Thanks in advance.[/size]

[Q77]

Looks pretty good to me. Run it through a ms word spell check (or firefox spellcheck) to get rid of 85% of typos. but from the looks of it, you spent quite a bit of time on the petpage and I'd have to look really hard to find a significant mistake.

I don't think the 10mil+ section is necessary and perhaps you should also include the effects of sink+burrow (for battlers to consider when deciding what to get) and also specify hot items. For example, downsize!, GHS and honey potion. Otherwise your short guide is quite good and only requires some aesthetic polishing

EDIT-oh and forgot to say, you should join the econotorium^_^

[__kit]

Nice List, I don't get it everyone says BD'rs are selfish...When they do things like this?

[rabid_schnauzer]

Q77 Wrote:Looks pretty good to me. Run it through a ms word spell check (or firefox spellcheck) to get rid of 85% of typos. but from the looks of it, you spent quite a bit of time on the petpage and I'd have to look really hard to find a significant mistake.

Already ran it through spelltjeck. That always misses a few words which are "spelled" correctly, butte aren't the weirds I in tented too right.

There no substitute for a bunch of message board regulars to nitpick grammar and content. Well at least not short of paying a professional editor, but I'm not doing that here.

Quote:I don't think the 10mil+ section is necessary

It originally read, "If you have this much to spend, just give me your neopoints and I'll buy you a set with them " But then I realized that although newer battlers might not buy such weapons for years, they may very well have them used against them tomorrow, so having a list of some things to expect is still probably worthwhile. Furthermore I have had at least one person ask me for reasonable alterantives to using dual PCCs in his set. He was very happy to find out about the existance of Trusty hand Cannon and Runed Maractite Bow.

Quote: and perhaps you should also include the effects of sink+burrow (for battlers to consider when deciding what to get) and also specify hot items. For example, downsize!, GHS and honey potion. Otherwise your short guide is quite good and only requires some aesthetic polishing.

Sink and Burrow I don't know about- that seems beyond the scope of the list. Maybe a short q & a in the FAQ at the bottom.

Really hot or highly recommended items will probably get listed in a different color font once I can decide which ones those are.

And as for aesthitics, my html is weak and that guide was thrown together (out of existing notes) in about an hour. I'll work on making it look pretty once I'm sure I've made it useful.

Quote:EDIT-oh and forgot to say, you should join the econotorium^_^

my user profile, private groups Wrote:You applied to join this group: 01-04-2007, 03:36 AM

Graphite: Fixed

[Cranberry]

I love editing! I edited Sirhatter's Food Club guide, and your petpage is way shorter, so this should be a breeze. I'll just list corrected sentences here, with what I did and why in parentheses.

Feel free to link here as a brief answer to the question, "What weapon should I get?"
(Made it a little clearer, and fixed the comma/capitalization/missing quotation mark.)

Weapon prices are not entirely current, as they shift constantly with the market
(Took off the "s" in "weapons;" got rid of second "weapon prices" as it was redundant.)

(List last updated Jan 8, 2007.)
(Period must go inside parentheses in this insance.)

Decent Weapons under 50,000np (prices not 100% current)
(Space between "np" and the parentheses.)

(Although you really shouldn't need my advice if you are able to buy these, if you are just looking: yes people really do have these, and people really do pay that much for them.)
(Capitalized the first word; added a colon, a comma, and a period.)

Questions I don't want to be asked, so I'm answering them now:
(No capital letter needed on that "so.")

For weapon stats I recommend that you consult the In-Depth Battlepedia neopets fansite (IDB for short).
(The parenthetical explanation belongs in that sentence, so the period should go after the parentheses.)

I also recommend that you maintain a list of exactly what your own weapons do for times IDB crashes, and I further recommend that you test your weapons yourself, as IDB stats are not always 100% accurate.
(Changed "that site" to "IDB" to make it clearer, and added a comma to break up a run-on sentence.)

I think including enough sample sets to cover all those possibilities well would make this page too long and complex to serve as a quick reference guide.
(Don't start a sentence with "and"! I know, I do it all the time. It doesn't work well there, though.)

A. xCombat's petpage has a list of commonly used weapon abreviations.
(Added a period.)

That's all I got from one quick read-through, but that should be all the biggish stuff. Just go through and make sure you've capitalized each of the words in the weapon names; I didn't bother correcting those in this post. And I'd change "weapons stats" to "weapon stats" in every instance because it just reads better to me (try saying both out loud).

Now for non-grammar stuff. It's a nice little petpage. One suggestion: after each weapon's name, put in parentheses what it does -- I don't mean all the icon types/amounts or anything like that, just (healer) or (dual-duty) or (stealer). Then when people read your answer at the bottom about set structure, they can quickly glance back up and find out which weapons are attackers and which are bombs or whatever.

[rabid_schnauzer]

Thanks a lot Cran-B. I incorporated many of your suggestions, willfully ignored a few (proper grammar is what the publisher's style guide says it is ) and then I went and wrote I whole bunch more mistakes.

[Cranberry]

Haha, yes, you did.

I really think you should fix that very first sentence, though. If you're going to ignore the capital letter on "what" (which I often do myself, in board posts and whatnot, anyway), at least put the closing quotation mark in.

[rabid_schnauzer]

Fixed. Finished the weapon categories, please let me know if I got any of them wrong, the html tags are starting to get blurry right now.

Next project is to mark some in red as "hot" weapons. Not entirely sure which yet, so open to suggestions.

[Cranberry]

It's looking good. I like how you have the weapon's type in green. I was looking through the lists trying to decide what was "hot," but if it were up to me, it would end up being a sea of red. Golden Compass came to mind first, though; that one seems really popular.

Now let's just hope people actually use this. We have a weapon advice thread on the BD board at PPT, and I did two posts there with a lot of info on good weapons, the useful faerie abilities, strength boosts, stuff like that. No matter how many times I point to it in a thread, people ignore it. Everyone seems to want personalized advice, even when they're obviously just another 35-booster with the same budget as everyone else I've helped, and they should know by now what I'm going to suggest.

[rabid_schnauzer]

Okay, I want some opinions on which species weapons to include:

Initially I wasn't going to include species weapons, because they have narrow applicibility. But then I realized that some of the species freezers and healers are cheap enough that morphing and getting the weapon is far cheaper than getting the non-species alternative, so I included the cheaper species healers and freezers (and Kaylas Magic Hat too) on the list. Of course I also left out a number of the species healers, as they are usually many many times the combined cost of Morph+Healer for Kacheek, Elephante or Gelert. BUT some people don't want to morph their pets, and a number of the expensive species healers are still better than nonspecies alternatives (Maybe I'm just sore that BoHD prices have nearly doubled in the month since I sold mine) and in a couple cases, a species with a somehwat pricey healer also has another great species weapon (Lenny)

So should I include all percentage species healers or not?

[rabbanmad]

I use a blumaroo health potion because i love blumaroos, and because is cheaper than the bag of healing dust, and because is pretty cheap to morph into a blumaroo when i want.
So that is a yes if you ask me