Any chance you could add Twitching Speed to the permanent buffs? ( Lizard Scale Plated Girdle ) haste clicky.
They should have never "backed down" the last time. Anyone with eyes can see that fade in it's current form is broken.
=) =/ I don’t really buy this as a bonus to skill based play. This seems more like a way of slowing down skillful players, and re-introducing the concept of the train for unskilled players. Pulling in modern EQ isn’t measured categorically, by success and failure, but on a spectrum, by speed. There’s still a benefit to being skilled and knowledgeable, both in general mechanics and specific zone layout. Having it exist on a spectrum serves to be more generally inclusive to more players. These changes do a lot to push things in the categorical direction. There’re a lot of odd implications of this as well. Are punts and other displacements considered flings? If not, necromancers and a few others are about to hop the queue on monks in terms of pulling tiers. If so, level capped roots, from experience, are pretty well garbage. This is something that’s served to make scintillating beam, the enchanter AA mez+root, extremely niche in most current content. Does fade somehow fail outright if a red con is on agro? If not, doesn’t that mean everyone gets an easymode social agro pull on named mobs with fade now? If instead it does, disabling fade entirely in the presence of named makes them all train generators. This feels a little like the one-off raid concept. Very few classes retain the ability to test out pulls around named and learn safely what can and can’t be done, making it harder by virtue of reducing a person’s ability to practice in an area. Diminishing the ability to acquire skill isn’t really the same thing as rewarding skill. I also don’t like reading the idea to make the fade cap Max level + 2, when yellow con goes to +3. That means /consider doesn’t give us sufficient information to make choices. In areas where the same name/body type has a small level range, it also makes experience based choices subordinate to the random number generator. I already dislike RNG-based see invis status, for making me sit and /con everything when moving a fragile character around. This diminishes the ability to plan the encounter, which is itself a skill. Based on how I feel about this, you can also infer I’m not a fan of a few classes getting an extra RNG-based arbitrary fail chance on their fade/“Press to not die” ability. The fact that pulling has gotten steadily easier for more classes was something we sort of thought was intentional. Considering it explicitly locks people out of content by virtue of not having one more required class added on to a group, which many people struggle to put together in the first place. This may destroy a few long standing group compositions if it was based on one of the pullers more impacted by this change This also seems like it’ll further bias groups in favor of the big-tank setup. As I mentioned, speed is one of the biggest determinants of puller power, and being able to grab 4 mobs and kill them all with zero time in between for pulls already makes non-puller groups pretty dominant—this is only emphasized in the lower tiers of content where you suggest you’re leaving these abilities intact. Generally slowing the speed of pulling will make it harder for pull oriented groups to compete, at least without continuing to up NPC dps output to the point that melee are getting instagibbed and weak tanks are even weaker. None of this even touches on the raid game… silent casting, fade and feign death are really the only agro tools in the game that actually do the job of managing agro from the DPS point of view. I guess that’s one way to make monk feign death utility valuable again, as even with buffs to jolt type abilities, most DPS will only manage agro by sitting on their hands. I don’t generally like when the changes seem to point towards less time actually playing your character, which these agro management changes seem to be doing. Slowing down pulling is the same deal, based on how lull splitting, snare+egress splitting, and snare+feign splitting has been in the past. A good sized nerf to resource management for a few classes makes it a bit of a trifecta in the “Do less things” department.
Really? Well, guess I won't tank heroic adventures with my friends who are 105 if I can't fling. /shrug
Well done, DBG... each time I come back to give this game another chance, you just give me extra reasons to quit. Please leave Fling and Fade alone. They do not need changing in any way, shape, or form. If you've got coders at a loose end, why not look at adding new things to the game, rather than wrecking old established ones? I'm not even particularly interested in the clicky change - it's no great hardship to click down a row of buttons on a hotbar every so often, and as you mentioned in the OP, we use them as junk buffs to help with dispelling mobs, so will continue to click them anyway.
I agree with much of what you had to say, but disagree with the speed part. Even in the old days, a skilled puller kept the group constantly killing. They just spent more time pulling and less fighting. That could slow down groups a little bit if they're relying on a monk (or other puller) for dps.
OK a few notes here. 1) This change is going to make pulling EASIER not HARDER for the pull classes. If you know how agro works on mobs....imagine this. You want to pull 1 mob away from 50 others. The other 50 mobs will drop agro when you hit a key, but the 1 mob WON'T drop agro. Use what you know about assist agro to exploit this to easiest pulling of all time. 2) The 30 foot agro thing does NOT effect whether or not fade works (i.e. you drop agro). It effects whether or not the INVIS portion works (whether or not you are invis afterwards). This means tie fade + invis pot together and you have the exact same effect you had before. Biggest issue for bards is it will reduce our effective re-use of fade to that of group invis OR it will make us buy invis pots for close range splitting. 3) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE consider a change to how fade works on mobs over the limit. It shouldn't drop your agro to ZERO when you hit fade...I get that. It SHOULD drop your agro considerably (to 1 preferable). Think making fade the rogues evade on mobs above the level limit. This would allow it to still be useful in raid encounters to drop agro during tank swaps/overagro/etc. If you do 3 that would still mean the end of fade/rest for melee classes so you should take that into consideration when doing class balance. Additionally, it would remove the ability to fade off rampage if you get it... Additionally....changes to the fling is going to have a LOT of negative effects. LOTS of positioning is accomplished by these means. Also...how does this effect abilities like lure of the siren song? Its mainly used to bunch mobs for aoe mez and what not... Make sure you want those consequences to be included before you make these changes. ~MrGPAC
I like this patch although I'd prefer if Fade faded from all classes except pulling classes (see what I did there?). Theres been far too much of "well this class has this" and gets it over the years. Classes should remain unique and a lot of abilities shouldnt be shared with others like they are now.
With the exception of the fling nerf, most of these changes don't add challenge to pulling, they just restrict who can do it. The majority of the nerf lies with the fling change, as that was the one method you could argue was too easy. The % chance for fade to fail doesn't make it harder, it just means you eat more deaths when your fade decides to fail. If a coin has a 3% chance to explode when you flip it, it doesn't make the act of flipping a coin any harder, it just means you'll need some extra coins. The level limits don't make it harder, it just means if you need fade to pull something above your fade level you can't do it and you need to find a different class. The 30ft invis restriction on fade does very little, as you rarely use fade from that range anyway. Moreover, based on how it's described, only the invis won't work from that range, the fade still will. Meaning you can just immediately invis yourself after the fade with another means and be ok 99% of the time, as mobs only check proximity aggro every several seconds. This is just speculation of course, how it functions in game is still up for testing. So I suppose I'm arguing semantics slightly. But I don't see these changes as making pulling any more skillful (again, with the exception of the fling change). It's just going to make who can pull where more restrictive, which I honestly don't see as a good thing in a game with a dwindling population. If they hated fling pulling that much, they could have nerfed that on its own. I don't see the need for the rest of these changes. Ultimately, my disgust with these changes is that it's time that could have been spent on something else. At best, people are indifferent to the changes, and at worst people are very upset. I really don't care that much about these changes, I don't even play a pulling class these days. I just think if you're going to dedicate the apparently precious code time to something, it should be something more enjoyable.
A welcome back to the game present for my bard. Too bad this wasn't announced 2 days earlier before I bought a long subscription, at least until I see what they did exactly *Maybe we could revisit Taunt for tanks so it is ineffective for mobs +2 lvls, and heals for healers so they don't work 50% of the time and not at all if fighting a named. Add an element of surprise to everyone!
Is the intent to require FD pullers and mezzers of level 106+ mob camps? It seems lots of zones have many mobs immune to snare and root.
Permabuffs, yay Level cap to fling effects is understandable as CC abilities tend to be level-capped. However, these fade changes are monumentally shortsighted, knee-jerk overnerfs of the type that I'd hoped this team had evolved beyond. Seriously, guys. Pulling tools have been designed for 15 years around these abilities working the way they do regardless of whatever you want to dream up they were 'intended' to do. Changes like what you have proposed for fade are the kind that drive away longstanding players. Lay off the retronerfs.
If the fling nerf was to stop cherry picking names, why is it now going to work on blue mobs only? Wouldn't level+2 accomplish the same thing here? That way we could keep that miniscule raid utility of helping to position trash mobs. I truely don't think someone sat at a meeting saying, you know what guys SK's and Monks need a little less raid utility.
Isn't it amazing how the team today knows *exactly* what the team 10-15 years ago "intended" them to be when they were implemented? Must be nice to take 0 accountability for nerfs in the name of good intentions
Have you all worked through the impact this will have on the raiding scene on the TLP's? I'm sure this accomplishes what you want in the current live game, but worried it will break pulling in some unintended ways on older expansions. For instance, in TSS, the level cap is 75 but much of the trash in both Frostcrypt and Ashengate is 81-82, making it now impossible for even bards to fade off the trash.
While what I believe the intent is to make pulling more difficult with the fade / punting changes, as someone who plays a pulling class I would prefer this change not go forward. But, I am competent enough and have enough skill that I can adjust. My real concern, that I did not see anyone mention was the unintended consequence of the fade changes and how they will affect raids. Currently all DPS classes have a fade and use them not to pull, but on raids to drop agro, or drop rampage. I have personally used successfully clicked fade at the end of weapon shield, passing agro to either the next person voiding, or a tank, and lived. In this case, I do not want to completely drop agro, just get to the bottom of the agro list, rather then stay on top with the next in line fighting my accumulated agro for agro. With this proposed change, this will no longer be a viable tactic, since in most cases, the raid boss is more then 5 levels higher them me. A lot of raids are currently designed with this functionality of the fade. Allowing a class to fade stuff that is only 2 to 5 levels above your own, means that for most raids fade will not work against raid bosses, and if a player ends up on ramp they will die, rather then be able to fade it off to the next player on the list, hopefully a designated rampage tank, or knight of some sort. My recommendation is this, if the mob is above the 2 or 5 level limit of the avatar using that ability, then have them go to the bottom of the agro list, but not off the agro. This will still accommodate increasing difficulty for pulling, while not breaking the ability of player lowering themselves on the agro list against a boss mob.
I was trying to formulate a point around why this felt dishonest to me, but this link pretty much says it: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-signs-someone-is-lying-2014-4#4-they-repeat-words-or-phrases-4
