Test Update 02/10/16

Issue is you don't do this on all live patches. You do that during Beta where they can physically change the game everyday to apply the proper changes. Even test does absolutely nothing as it is only patched once or twice a month and 0 feedback gets taken into consideration.

Developers need to open the Beta server to apply all of the proposed changes, grant the players access to it and actually get relevant data on the changes so they can be implemented in workable ways.

The way they are doing things currently is just pissing off the player base. Even if all of these changes make the game 10 times better, its not worth pissing off your entire player base for half a year. Everyone knows things do not get removed from Test patch notes, if its on there its live next week. That causes the freak out factor every 2-3 weeks. Beta solves a lot of that and allows players to get more involved in the process.

Usually when a change goes through Test without any change, it shows that they've already decided on it, and are just testing it to make sure it doesn't break the game. Thus, the Test server isn't for giving your thoughts on balance. It's about finding bugs. And indeed, we see that there are a lot of bugs, starting with whatever changes they made to Test causing the server to not be available. That's why they put it on Test.

Whether the server is called Beta or Test is irrelevant; what matters is whether or not they listen to feedback. Players had access to Beta for TBM; see how that turned out. Contrast this with the 2014 pet mitigation nerf - they had a dedicated thread for feedback and did multiple tuning passes until things were working properly. That was on Test server, and only the final result made it to Live. They don't have to push everything from Test to Live; they're actively choosing to push things to Live and ignore feedback. They'd still do that if players had access to Beta.

Half the time they don't even consult with us or fix bugs that we report. I do wish they had more people working on this game but you know the old saying about wishing in one hand and pooping in the other.

The only pure Tank in the game is a War,,,, Sk’s and Pallies are only half a War. Giving them the same mitigation as a War, i.e (same Defensive Proficiency), is saying in effect that you are now 100% (in respect to sustained mitigation) a war, with half the abilities of ether a Clr or a Necro.
So ether way you slice it, whether by arguing who has discs + AA’s vs. disc + spells + AA’s is all in the weeds of the discussion.
Here are two solutions to this test server patch. One is to give the Knights a Defensive Proficiency similar to the War, only at half of the effectiveness. Because, they are only half a War… So War gets 30% mitigation on melee attacks and 15% chance to block incoming attacks from Defensive Proficiency (unchanged), and Knights get it at a reduced rate of 15% mitigation on melee attacks and 7% chance to block incoming attacks from Defensive Proficiency.
Or second, provide the War with a patch to upgrade Defensive Proficiency that mitigates at a rate of 60% and chance to block incoming attacks at a rate of 30%. This would balance the Core class or Parent class vs. the Half class or child class interdependency. And avoid a Half class from causing the Core class to become defunct. This however would create numerous additional problems with, what would soon to be out dated mitigation Discs/AA’s, i.e. (Last Stand).
I would recommend the first solution in this case.

I have no opinion on the 2HD Proficiency. Let them eat cake !!!

Y/T

A war

For the jan patch, no one mentioned the progression HAs being broken on test for the week before it went live. Live players posted about them being broken about 4 hours after the patch. At best, Test is now just a patch stability verification platform. Its old role of having a population of players that could find bugs by playing in content normally has clearly been forsaken by all parties involved.

In that patch, the bugged dicho rewards that were reported went live (and required some emergency downtime!). But the dbstring errors I reported were fixed! Small victories of not having EVERY bug on test go live?

With how well raid changes have gone since beta. I'm fully expecting Wither & Decay to respawn infinitely, and Enslaver of Souls to spam Mortal Decay for the whole fight once this patch goes live. And a bunch of ballista to be hanging around the Stem the Tide arena, because why not?

Hating on the necro nerfs. Here's why:

Mana burn? Ok. i get it. To be honest the ability is sort of cheesy and sort of slaps a serious necro in the face cuz it removes a bit of skill from the game. But dont remove it's benefits entirely from our DoTs. Reducing the benefit is the logical route to go. Honestly you're killing us in both the group and raid areas by doing this.

Swarm pets? Please. Ur killing me here! Our swarms add greatly to group utility as well as adding a nice steady stream of dps. Ur removing MB dps and swarm dps from our group abilities? Terrible choice in my opinion. What group will want a necro now? Just as importantly, the fun i once had pulling and using swarms as a means of crowd control for bit is now greatly reduced. I play games to have fun. You are taking my fun away.

Flesh to Poison will no longer fire GoDR? So u want to further reduce our burst abilities? MB AND FTP?

Honestly I dont get it. You are making our group play less effective. You are making our raid play less effective. Im purposely being redundant here. Nerf the group and raid play. Nerf the fun had by peeps who pay $ to play Everquest.

If your goal is to chase off one of the most hardcore player bases (that would be necros) from EQ....you are well on your way to being successful in doing just that

Snap out of it devs!

that is not correct; phalanx of one was an innate passive AA of 10 ranks that provided an innate SPA-168 boost of 1% per rank.

phalanx (i.e., innate SPA-168 mitigation) and effectual SPA-168 mitigation were never intended to stack, even tho they did; in the very description of the phalanx of one AA, it was claimed that the innate mitigative effects of the AA would not stack with defensive discs.

when it was determined via simple maxhit comparison that phalanx did, indeed, stack with LS, the AA was phased out in favour of the DP stance.

indeed -- as should have been expected by anyone who is familiar with the history and mechanical implementation of SPA 168, which was my original point

Guess Necro club tried to withhold payment from him then, pay up and he might revert the changes .

Yes increase warrior mitigation even more resulting in yet harder hitting mobs with more HP....great plan.

Anyone else having trouble with reapplying the perma buffs? Had a dozen or more on and I decided to click them off and rearrange them, now I've only got 6.

My legend grows.

It proves exactly what I stated. The calculation moves in descending order rather than mitigating damage from the base hits at all times. If they just did a straight % mitigation from the base, it would look a lot differently. This is why Gnomeland thinks "it doesn't fully stack" or whatever nonsense he said.
Just doing some rounding:
15666x.27 = 11436
11436x .90 = 10292

Doing it straight mitigation would look like:
15666 x .60 = 9400 OR
15666 x .63 (because we know 168 is DI only) = 9869.

These numbers are much different. This is why somebody like Gnomeland would think they "don't stack" but clearly they're stacking 100% correctly.

I'm also fairly positive that 168 always gets calculated first. And if that's the case, your mantle/carapace/repel/skin/etc will be mitigating less damage per hit, allowing each of them to last longer so you can sustain optimal mitigation longer than a warrior can.

It's hard to test with specifically 162 because warrior's don't have any lower damage cap ability using it. NTTB/PDH has fairly large damage caps. BFI is proc based and hard to track.

However, we had a new handy ability using SpA 450/1/2. That buff - when mitigating nukes, dots, and melee damage - normally lasts 40 or so seconds on raids with a damage total of 638000, give or take. If it were being calculated first, there's no feasible way it would last that long while running LS/prof. All raid mob hits are exceeding 11k melee damage, 6k spell damage, and there's no min for the DoT.

Under LS/SB raid mob average hit is around 20-24k with larger hits in the mid to upper 30k range so that means mob average hits are ranging from 40k-60k. There's no way Dicho would be lasting the 40 or so seconds I see it lasting under those conditions if it were calculated first. You're talking 16-24k each hit it would mitigate. Dicho should only be lasting 20-25 seconds, tops. And that's just raw melee damage. Throw in spell damage and you're looking at a disc that theoretically will last maybe 15 seconds. But it doesn't.

For this reason, your SPA 162 abilities (I believe) will last longer than what you see them lasting now and therefore becoming even more valuable. By just giving knights proficiency, devs have indirectly inflated the value of every single mitigation ability knights have.

All I have to say is manaburn which is entirely on the modern developers for being absurdly broken and over powered yet it remains. And rather than addressing that massive mistake alone we are going to adjust it just for dots and then nerf two other things about necros at the same time. Breaking the class in the process, reducing necro sustain below wizards or lowering it to the point that necros only serve a purpose when fights last over 5 minutes when 99% of the game is under that does exactly that break the class.

It looks from their recent changes that they are trying to make archtypes generally interchangeable while still having differences between the classes. However with the recent changes to mages and if these necro nerfs go live there is no interchangability among caster dps in any setting. You take a wizard over any one else in groups and raids for burst or sustained until your full. And only if you can't find anymore of them or you have enough dps check wiggle room do you consider a mage or necro. Never in the history of everquest has that been the case so unless you have 100's of people waiting for a game like that all it will do is chase off or piss off the 100's who have been paying the play the game that was for the past 16 years.

I think I've changed my mind about Manaburn. Maybe it isn't so bad that we provide ADPS if it's going to give us entertaining threads like this.

Still waiting for any sort of Dev response on why the GoDR and Swarm changes are being implemented. Seems like it might be important to justify, given the overwhelmingly negative feedback (even amongst non-necros) that these changes are getting.

Using your own numbers, you realize the SK 35% 162 ability is only 980k right?

So if your 638k ability is lasting 40s the SK disc, by your numbers, would only last vs the same mob around 60s. And only be up once every 15m.

Changes of this magnitude should never just show up as bullets in the patch notes. Still waiting for a justification for the rain nerfs though

Sadly sir, I think the opposite here. You weren't mentioned until like page 13 or 14!

I'm surprised there isn't a 30 page necro thread in the Vet forum already about these changes.