February 2016 Patch Preview

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by Roshen, Feb 4, 2016.

  1. Gnomeland Augur


    That's a 30% DPS difference without the Warrior using http://spells.eqresource.com/spells.php?id=41088&source=test - ie the way it was before the Warrior changes in 2014.

    And while the ability to heal one self is nice, I'm pretty sure it doesn't make up for such a huge difference in damage take, as the main source of tank death in both groups and raids is a sudden run of bad rounds, which heals do not make up for.

    The fact of present day Everquest is that any group with a heal class benefits massively from using a Warrior over a Knight, and as the game was designed for such a set up, you'd be hard pressed to argue that it doesn't break the class system.
  2. Dre. Altoholic

    It seems the scope of the abilities relevant to your perspective is a moving target.
    Except the reality is - it doesn't. Knights can tank all group mobs and many raid bosses. So whatever amount of "better" Warriors tank at is less relevant than you claim knight healing to be, and it's about to narrow significantly.
  3. Gnomeland Augur


    We don't need to talk about the world after the new changes because the whole argument is about whether those changes are needed. But I'd take issue with the idea that "knights can tank all group mobs" makes it "fine" because you're not taking into account what sacrifices to content difficulty the developers had to make in order for that to be the case. That's my whole argument earlier. Yes, all content is capable of being done with a Knight as tank. And I'd add that all content is also capable of being done with a Monk as tank. But so what? It doesn't change the fact that Warriors vastly out tank Knights and Monks and that content that is challenging for those classes, become too easy with a Warrior.
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  4. Dre. Altoholic

    Fair points.
    I'm not sure that's really the case here. Defensive/LS line has had the same mitigation % for a very long time (higher than DP and doesn't stack)

    What's "new" would be things like NTTB (which I'll admit - rocks) or bulwark/brace (which are nice vs raid targets but not really the best vs group mobs, and loaded with stacking problems)
  5. Krazzi Elder

    You guys are assuming that it will work when they try to cut and paste, wouldnt be the first time they screwed that one up.

    Cut...
    Paste...
    LOADING PLEASE WAIT...
    Server erased.
  6. Gnomeland Augur

    No Time To Bleed on top of Last Stand basically trivializes group content as group content rares only hit in the 20,000 range, so:

    http://spells.eqresource.com/spells.php?id=49010&source=test

    +

    45% Last Stand

    Makes it, literally, not even hurt.

    But I wouldn't even need to go there as we're just talking about the straight 35%/50% reduction Warriors get, which remains the same however the amount of monsters and however hard they hit. This is what allows them to tank so well against whatever you put in front of them. The other abilities are just a bonus for when you need to go up a level further - ie a pull of five mobs, a rare that doubles its damage with an ability, etc. Those same encounters would destroy Knights because, even though they could deal with an average round, a bad round would kill them.

    The problem fundamentally comes down to the fact that heals - the Knight "advantage" - just do not deal very well with high physical damage. Heals allow a Knight to give his heal class a break, but at the cost of his own resources, which in the end, doesn't even result in a benefit for the group - since the Knight has to then sit and wait, instead of the heal class - unless they're able to replace the heal class with another DPS class. But that's only capable of being done on content you out level, which Everquest is trying to get people to get out of.

    Warriors being able to out tank Knights just by standing there with Defensive on is what required this change, as it's making Knights too little reward for effort.
  7. Dre. Altoholic

    I've died with LS+NTTB up plenty of times. Mitigating melee damage is not auto-win. The mobs which are actually difficult (to everyone) are usually the ones with spell damage or other abilities. Guess who handles those better?
    "High" is open for interpretation. The absolute hardest-hitting, pure-melee raid bosses? Sure.

    Almost everything else? Different story. Case in point: The frustration expressed with self-healing nerfs accompanying Guardian discipline, which is bleedingly close to LS in terms of raw mitigation.
    So now it's not just higher survivability, but not pushing buttons, too. Hard to make parity there when Warriors don't have buttons to push, and Knight buttons still work.
  8. Kobrah Augur

    I don't think the knight boost is an attempt to take anything from warriors tbh. Everyone always over reacts before changes are even put into game. All the warrior complaints out there, just curious how many have played the same roles as a knight trying to tank vs the same mobs? You'd find it frustrating I am sure. Spells getting interrupted = zero effectiveness against mobs. A lot of times you rely on your mitigation because an interrupted spell can be life or death. No one is taking boss tanking away from warriors, just trying to help out our knight friends when they may need to step in.
  9. Silv Augur

    EverQuest: One of the only places where class improvements and nerfs result in the same response from the playerbase.
    Vrinda and Krazzi like this.
  10. coloures~ New Member

    ...and then you say...
    ...kek. do u even raid, bro?

    fairly currently geared and knowledgeable dru and shm can pretty easily MH in *most* group content; BiS-geared priests of any persuasion can easily handle healing any group content in the game.

    incidentally, the preceding statement remains perfectly true with a few substitutions:

    fairly currently geared and knowledgeable pal and shd can pretty easily MT in *most* group content; BiS-geared tanks of any persuasion can easily handle tanking any group content in the game.

    but raiding ? please do attempt a raid nite without "X clerics"; "replace" them with X dru and shm and tell me how great your raid nite goes.

    i don't mean to sound flippant, but if you feel like your knight is unable to tank in group content, you should probably seek t upgrade your gear or learn more about how to play the class fro more knowledgeable representatives thereof.

    on the other hand, if you feel that knights should be interchangeable with war on raid-level MTing, then you're just being dishonest with your absurd contention that dru and shm healing upgrades have made them commensurable to clerics (viz. on raids). some classes are simply irreplaceable for certain in-game content.
  11. Gnomeland Augur


    Every expansion, Shamans and Druids get closer to Clerics in raw heals, recent examples being the rain spell they added to Shamans. They're not necessarily there yet, but it's only a matter of time. Many guilds still raid with X Clerics simply because they have them, and not because they are incapable of replacing many of those with other classes.

    By contrast, the tank situation is simple math: prior to the changes on Test, Warriors >>> Knights due to the interaction of 2-3 abilities that everyone knows. Till those abilities were added, Knights were in fact gaining ground on Warriors and were increasingly used for main tanks. Elidroth, in 2014, removed all that progress and put Warriors back beyond the reach of Knights. Now he's left Everquest, and developers are again putting Knights within reach.

    And finally, I don't need your ridiculous "suggestions" as they show a complete failure to understand the game and its issues.
  12. Gnomeland Augur

    I don't know, but... Is it the class that has the highest effective health in the game?

    After all, the main difficulty with spell damage, in the first place, is bad rounds of spell + melee hits, and being able to reduce that melee, and have higher health to handle the spells, is what allows you to survive.

    Have you ever played a group Knight against current content? I'm pretty sure you haven't. Because you would not be saying that the only cases where Warriors out tank Knights is hard raids, had you done so.
  13. coloures~ New Member

    ..again followed up with...


    NotLikeThis

    you're a trove.

    i don't play shm and understand that at the very least they can spam their group heal, but the contention that druids even remotely approach the HPS potential of a cleric is completely preposterous and could only be offered by someone who has absolutely no understanding whatsoever of how the classes' heals are delineated and timered.

    to wit: the druid fast (0.5s) heals (-ation ST heals) all share a timer; the druid can have *one* of them up at any given time. CLR fast remedies (i.e., RoF+) do not share a timer; the CLR gets 2 0.5s heals.

    in addition to the fast heals, the druid has two other lines of ST heals: the adrenaline line (long recast), and the crappy standard vida line. so a druid's heal multibind will have all of 3 spells, two of which have a long recast, forcing reliance on the slow, 3.75s-base-cast-time vida heal.

    clerics, of course, have enough variably-timered heal spells that raid clerics don't even have their slowbie 3.75s-base heals memmed on the spell bar. in other words, the heal that druids have to rely on most when spamming has a property -- a 3.75s base cast time -- that clerics consider so undesirable they don't even use their heal with the same property.

    and what about multitarget direct heals ? regarding druids' bnb group heal line, prefixed luna-, the spells in the line share a timer and have a fairly heavy recast time; druids *cannot* spam group heals (tho it is my understanding that shm can do).

    how about clr ? they have three lines of group direct heals (not that all are equally preferred, of course) and a splash heal. the heal most comparable to the druid's group heal (i.e., same cast time and similar heal amout) has no (or GCD) recast time; it can be spammed...and it is the worst group-heal option for the cleric! the second non-splash option is essentially a copy of the previous, except it casts a little faster and has a cure component. like the prior, it can be spammed. the third option is a quicker, slightly weaker group heal (with some recast) that can be used if you don't have time to wait 4.5s minus boots focus adjustment -- dru, needless to say, have no options for such a quicker group heal and their luna group heal carries a 50% longer recast time than the cleric quick group heal.

    dru do have survival. survival is pretty dope, ok. but it's more of an oh-sh~t heal than a way to keep the group healthy with group-heal spam; dru are simply incapable of the latter.

    all of this is to say nothing of battle rez, of which dru and shm are only capable with an item that takes quite a bit of time (or a large-ish group of players willing to farm a boring shroud raid) to get and is still severely inferior to clr battle rez in terms of recast delay..

    no, druids don't come anywhere near clerics in healing potential, and that's how it should be.

    you can make all the uninformed noises you want about dru being commensurable to clr in healing potential, and about that particular homogenisation of utility being the intent of the developers, but it's clear that druids, at least -- and i wld expect the same goes for shm, but unlike you i will refrain from offering my opinion on classes i do not know well -- are certainly not progressing towards raid-utility parity with clr.

    with what's on test, knights are not only "approaching" raid-utility parity with war, they have utterly surpassed it by now being able to perform any tanking job at parity with a war; the notion that the comparative difference between dru and clr heals is a valid metaphor for the comparative difference between war and new-knight tanking is obscenely ridiculous.
  14. Gnomeland Augur


    Knights are in no way > Warriors on raids even now. Warriors are still the best; the distance is simply closer, which is the way it's been for Druids and Shamans. I admit that Druids are not necessarily at the level of Shamans at the present but certainly, they've improved their actual standing to Clerics since the old days of Everquest. You keep talking about Clerics' ability to keep their groups healed - and sure, that's been a Cleric advantage forever - but forget that there was a time when a Druid couldn't even keep a single tank healed.
  15. Jaerlyn Augur

    On the druids / shamans vs clerics (as they pertain to raids) issue. It's not a question of druids or shamans being point for point equal to clerics.

    It's about the fact that you can add in a few more druids or shamans, and be ok without clerics.

    Before this patch, you simply -couldn't- just 'add a couple more knights' and be ok without wars.

    The arguments are a bit different.
    Warpeace likes this.
  16. Sslestack New Member

    I'm not surprised about the MB nerf. The rest of the necrom. changes are ridiculous. Not only will this hurt our raid dps and our group dps but we also will have to choose between using our 1 avg. dmg swarm pet in group for dps or saving it for crowd control. And this leaves us what tools to dps mobs that die in 30 seconds? Normal dots? no; swift dots ? no cause the agro from them has become ridiculous every time there's no real tank in group. Nukes? Um our nukes are on par for dmg.with shaman nukes.
    To say nothing about having to arrive at a whole new setup for how to dps in groups and in raids for a class that's already plenty complicated.

    Is this all part of your vision for driving EQ into the ground cause you're making alot of members of this class wonder if they have a necro future?
    Utaerx likes this.
  17. Imak Augur

    Are these collection sets slated to be fixed with this upcoming patch? Or, are they on the maybe someday list?

    Medal from the Living (Sul Vius: Demiplane of Decay)
    ---> One of these items appears on occasion within the mission loot chest. None of the DemiDecay instances include any "shining points of light" screen splash indicating ground spawns have appeared, and having killed gobs of trash mobs within the instances I have yet to turn up a single mob-dropped piece. Sources indicate these items drop readily from mobs in Arx Mentis. Last year's expansion says Hi.

    An Ounce of Fetid Flesh (Crypt of Sul)
    ---> As above, none of the Sul instances include any "shining points of light" screen splash indicating ground spawns have appeared. On the rarest of occasions, a piece might drop from mobs in the instanced zones. A previous patch claimed to have addressed the rarity issue, but it still seems as borked as it ever was.
  18. kookoo Augur

    shaman got 2 group heals
    lv 102 krasir's recourse ( 24 sec refresh ) http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spell.html?spell=44237

    lv 103 historian intervention ( 3min refresh ) ---->> 90 sec once maxed from aa.
    http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spell.html?spell=44280


    druid lv 105 group heal 12 sec refresh ( 6 sec once maxed with aa )
    http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spell.html?spell=43914
  19. Jondalar Augur

    I can spam my group heal? Awesome. Please show me how. Looking up spell info isn't hard folks.
  20. p2aa Augur

    Clerics have np to beat druids and shamans on heal spells, their multibind allows them to destroy druid and shaman parse (if we use people of the same skill around).
    You can't raid with no cleric too, because druid / shaman only won't be able to keep MT up in raids, also you forget the big amount of utility clerics add (Shining, DI, Ward of Surety etc) to the tanks that would miss there. A raid going without DI alone would get your tanks in danger so much. So no you cannot raid without clerics too.
    But druids / shamans don't complain and don't ask to get the same heal power.
    Which is not the case for tanks classes. A whinning community of Knights complained downplaying their real power, giving in their reasoning warrior ability that are completly irrelevant (some abilities that refresh every 20 min or that makes you take more dmg versus raid bosses) in the subject, and get the devs ears.