Hello all.

I've been reading the discussion on shadow step & gate over the past few
digests and thought I'd comment on this. First, if you're gonna assign
shadow step to a quick-key, BE CAREFUL... more than once I've hit it
accidentally and ended up in a bad bad bad situation. Oh, and for those
of you who haven't had the chance to experience it.. YES shadow step WILL
teleport you out over open water and dump you in the ocean. My last
experience with this sent me a good 50 or 60 yards out into the ocean, and
to make matters worse, it placed me on a SEA FLOOR. Talk about a panic
attack, you wouldn't believe how DEEP the ocean is in some places! I
didn't think I was gonna make it to the surface for a while there.
Needless to say, accidental ocean teleports have dumped me into icky
confrontations with sharks as well, not too much fun at early levels.

As for shadow step & gate combos. I typically have had zero success with
this, although last night my group of 5 got split up and hammered by a
bunch of bandits, and with 2 remaining comrades down to less than one
bubble each, I decided it was time to exit stage left... hit the shadow
step, got interrupted, hit it again and managed to cast.. bandits followed
and whooped on me some more, got another shadow step off, this time it
seems i only held the attention of the magic-user bandits, so I was able
to kick off a Gate before anything else could interrupt me. Needless to
say, I was outta breath. :) Shadow step is SO unpredictable that it
really doesn't make all the great of an escape tool.. ESPECIALLY if you
are in an area where you don't know your way around.. if you cast and
fail, especially more than once, your sense of direction and location or
often screwed and you'll have a REAL tough time finding your corpse. (I
made this mistake while being eaten alive by pirhanas in the river between
Toxxula Forest and Kerra Isle. A few shadow steps + that sickening yellow
fog + endless stretches of water in every direction.. lets just say I was
thankful for a weird corpse bug that tossed my (invisible to me) corpse on
the riverbank, so I was able to have someone else loot it for me.

Did I mention I love this game? :)

Laton - 11th level Wizard, Xegony