Test Update 09/12/2017 - Patch Notes and Discussion

Discussion in 'Test Update Notes and Bug Roundup' started by EQ Dev, Sep 12, 2017.

  1. Ethereal Augur

    I do know what a bug is, great reply. I'm not contending it was a bug, I'm contending (I think I've said this about 10 times in this thread, reading comprehension must be extremely low in this population) that they should be going out of their way to let players know it was a bug. Real money is being forked out for this. How is this concept hard to grasp? Thanks for the irrelevant reply though. People are STILL buying this and they aren't saying anything. Are you guys really that dense and accepting that you are defending this?
  2. Riou EQResource

    For a tank it is no more then gaining like 200ish displayed AC (left column)
  3. Ethereal Augur

    I agree, and I had no issue paying money for this feature either.
  4. Borias New Member

    Clarissa's post on page five about the QM and VP changes has a lot to say, she is definitely the person that the Cleric community needs to get behind when addressing this current change to the AA's that have been so useful in so many situations. I agree with her that the change seems rather drastic, and my solution would be to un-link the timers and make VP only usable if the Cleric is below 20% mana.
    Metanis likes this.
  5. Duhbeast Augur

    Please just let them do their jobs m8's. Beasts rolling into this thread like...
    [IMG]
  6. fransisco Augur

    It was obviously a bug. If someone bought an item simply to take advantage of a bug - to bad, buyer beware.
  7. Phrovo1 Augur

    so glad I'm finally going to be able to get GBA!
  8. Ethereal Augur

    This isn't Ebay or some shady used car salesman. Buyer beware? This has to be the best reply yet. Keep em coming though.
  9. Smokezz The Bane Crew


    God, make a petition and ask for a refund. It was a bug and you know it.
    Sheex and fransisco like this.
  10. fransisco Augur

    This

    At this point, he is just being defensive because its forum warz....
  11. Khat_Nip Meow

    The text when you try to summon a mount in an indoor zone is, "You cannot summon a mount here".
    It's not "You can't summon that type of mount here" or "That mount does not meet the requirements of being able to be summoned indoors".
    The fact that you could summon the bear indoors should have been an indication that something about it was amiss.

    The cooldown for the Gyrospire Relocation Device is, after many many years, being addressed and that went on a LOT longer than that bear mount.
    Sheex likes this.
  12. Sheex Goodnight, Springton. There will be no encores.

    Or, if the rear end hurt is *this* strong, and they won't refund it, contest the credit card charge for the station cash purchase. Will his account get suspended/locked/banned/whatever? Probably. But at least he wouldn't be out "a lot" of money he paid for a pixelated bear mount that only works outdoors.

    Crying about something so trivial and clearly not intended in the middle of a huge patch with a lot of significant game changes is unlikely to garner much community support.

    But...come on guys! How dare you monsters not console him for being victimized by false advertising on the magical bear ride that denied a decade plus of an otherwise consistent game mechanic!
  13. Sindaiann Augur

    Has anyone actually tried to ride a bear inside their house?

    Wouldn't be so successful. Then again doubt many people try to ride a bear outside either.

    If someone does please post a video lol
  14. nantalbus Elder


    and it seems you didn't read my post. its been SOP for daybreak and SOE before them to not post about 90% of bugs before you see something in a patch. The only real time you see a derv posting bout fixing a bug in a non patch post before a patch is live is if a player post on these boards bout the bug.

    In fact I don't know of any game company that dose let people know before a patch that said bug is going be fixed.
  15. Kamor Lorekeeper

    - Shaman - Fleeting Spirit has been changed to now double the effectiveness of 5-10 heal over time and 5-10 damage over time spells rather than 10-20 of either. Reduced the duration of the ability for damage over time spells to 2 minutes and heal over time spells to 4 minutes.
    I can't think of a single time I used Fleeting Spirit for the extra healing. This was our only real burn, outside of Glyph and Veteran AA. Please make it a fixed number of casts for DoT's.
    - Shaman - Extended Spirit of the Puma will no longer extend the duration of Roar of the Lion.
    Based on some group mob parsing this is about 50% loss in dps from Lion. Personally I'd have rather had the buff changed rather than the duration. If it's not too late... please adjust. The overall DPS loss is because previously we could pre apply Lion, now the timing has to be much tighter. If it's going to be reduced this much, can you change stacking issues so we can keep up regen?
    - Shaman - Refunded Paralytic Spores and Paralytic Spray. Changed Spiritual Rebuke to be a knock back that triggers a root effect (similar to Paralytic Spray) and added additional ranks.
    Druid spell unchanged. From a practical standpoint we can now root more mobs per hour....but there isn't a backup ae root for resists or other failures. I'll miss the blur from Rebuke. Seems like a totally unnecessary change.
  16. Gnomeland Augur


    I don't think you understood all that I said. Customer feedback obviously matters in business, but I am confident that the most common and important customer feedback that the developers get are not "I am quitting because of these nerfs." Had that been the case, there is no way they would still be doing them after 20 years.

    Look at World of Warcraft, a game that introduces massive nerfs and class changes almost every other update, yet was and remains the best selling MMORPG in the industry. Blizzard ignores practically all of the player complaints on forums and never backs off changes because of quit threats. Are you going to say, Blizzard doesn't know what they're doing and that their business team should be fired? I imagine not.

    Developers know much better than players what the business consequences of their actions are, because they've done them countless times and they have business analysis teams dedicated to studying the effects on player population, subscriptions, etc. - data that none of us have. They know, from this analysis, that these types of changes are more or less safe to do. You can guess as to why that is, but I'll give you my theory.

    With any game, people quit when they're no longer having fun, and for the vast majority of players in Everquest, that fun does not depend on balance changes. Most of the player base doesn't care whether they do 10% less DPS today than they did yesterday, as long as the overall experience of playing the game is still enjoyable. It's always a small minority of players who care enough to do the math and who push their classes to the limits. The rest are content just sitting there on a time lock progression server fooling around like it's 1999.

    I've known a lot of these people over the years. When you talk about balance changes to them, they either go "wait, how does that affect me again?" or "who cares? this game needs more challenges." Or in many cases, "well, I'll be playing my other characters then." They might get annoyed at losing an ability, doing less damage, or taking more damage, but it's not the end of the world for them and it certainly doesn't cause them to quit. It's just not that significant, and developers are smart enough to space out these changes, that they get used to it before the next set of changes, so it never becomes significant.

    So what would cause people like this to quit? When it's permanent, it's usually life. People get older, they get married, they have families, they have less time, they quit. That, you cannot do much about. But most of the time, there's the subscribe and cancel cycle, where people play a new expansion for a couple of months, then they get bored and quit until the next expansion. Thus, besides the progression servers, the most important task for the developers is to develop expansions, and to give people as much of a reason as they can to come back.

    To do so, expansions today are designed to offer massive increases in power. To compensate for this massive increase, developers then often nerf classes before a new expansion release, so that they don't get out of hand. The nerfs are usually much less significant than the increases that come with the expansion, and in any case, people who quit until the expansion, won't experience them, since they'll be coming back to a new expansion and all the new that comes with it. They won't even remember what they lost.

    Could this cycle be done better? Perhaps, but no one can see the future, and the emphasis on massive increases in power, each expansion, makes it very difficult not to create balance problems down the line, which then have to be fixed with nerfs. Take the Dichotomic line of spells introduced two expansions ago, as an example - this was a massive, game changing increase in power for most classes, and while they seemed exciting at the time, in order to balance their existence, many nerfs, including to the spells themselves, had to be made later down the line.

    So yeah, I stand by what I said about the threats to quit. They can't be believed, because anyone who cares that much about the power of their characters, will likely come back the moment the expansion releases and their characters get a massive power increase. People like that aren't ready to quit, no matter what they say, because they still care enough about the game to complain about balance changes online. It's the people who no longer care enough to do that, that developers need to worry about. It's those people who are the majority.
    kizant likes this.
  17. svann Augur

    Might have some trouble with that considering (iiuc) people were making many many purchases to try to win it. Not defending the whining, just sayin.
  18. Ladenfir New Member

    I have been for some time concerned about the future of the cleric class. I have been a cleric for 16 years and have watched classes take nerfs and I had wondered when will the nerf spotlight shine on the cleric. Now the day is here and the two best things to happen to clerics is being nerfed QM and smite.

    I want to briefly share what I have seen happen to clerics during my time investing in EQ. There was a time when players fought over clerics. A cleric always could snag a group immediately as they were in demand. But it is a dependent class that cannot travel anywhere without some support. Also some players found the class boring; the result a shortage of cleric mains.

    An answer to this was the mercenary. The consequence for clerics was no more high need in the group setting, something essential to complete needed tasks and content. So now the cleric only became coveted in raid settings.

    So the cry was heard I thought. With strengthening our heals and giving us smite and QM, we achieved a smidgen of independence with a personal mercenary by our side. Yes there is the bot answer, but that has changed the game from player interaction to individual play where players don't need anyone and ignore the call for group assistance.

    Clerics should be the master above and beyond all in one regard and that is healing. Yet can a cleric beat a SK on a parse now? The QM was special because we could help say a wizzy get back into the frey; the smite was special because clerics are sorely dps deficient. With it we could knock down a mob quickly when an add popped and still have turn undead at our disposal to deal with the other. Problematic for a soloing cleric, low dps plus time = mobs slowly overwhelming them. (referring to the desire of independence) NOT TO MENTION THE TWO AAS WILL NOW BE ONE! We already can take aggro away from a tank, now there will be no way divine peace or the tank will be able to pull a mob off a cleric. Reminds me of when holy ground came out, the mobs jumped all over the cleric due to the constant stuns and damage, they were on you soon as mez broke.

    Just so you know, due to the characteristics of the cleric class, its a dying class. Of the few remaining mains, guilds fight tooth and nail for them mostly due to their essentials in raid settings. I challenge anyone to find players switching to cleric as a main these days. Most create utility clerics for their group needs or an alt.

    The class has needed something to bring it appeal for a long time and your about to take the little light you have given them from past cries for help.
    Metanis, Lorai, Toxicaust and 3 others like this.
  19. Quixotic Journeyman

    So... you aren't contending it is a bug. Which means you bought it intentionally to take advantage of a bug.

    Intentionally using bugs or exploits is a bannable offense. They aren't going to ban people for it, because well... numbers.

    But to complain they didn't tell you they were removing the exploit you have been knowingly taking advantage of is just laughable.
  20. Password1234 Augur

    These monk changes are... confusing. Just recently, autoskill was added so that melee-oriented classes don't have to mindlessly spam so much. Now, stunning kick is gone and a weaker version of its effect added to something on flying kick's timer, which means that we can't use autoskill if we want to stun anything? Is this correct? So we'll have to either (1) never use autoskill, go back to mindlessly spamming 99% of the time on the off-chance that we want to stun something or (2) make hotkeys for turning autoskill off and on depending on the situation. I liked having a separate button for utilities because that makes sense to me.

    The change to Helix is also confusing. The other changes are their own thing, but I really don't understand why this AA has to be tied to a completely unrelated spell now. It's not like it's an ability that gets used all the time, it's a situational utility, and, again, it makes sense to have a separate button for it. But now we need a specific spell hate spell memorized all the time on the off-chance we want to slow an undead mob? This seems incredibly inconvenient and it doesn't make sense to me.

    There's lots of balance stuff in this patch that's whatever, I don't care, but there's stuff like this that comes completely out of left field. Have any devs commented on why these seemingly unrelated things were consolidated? Was the intent is making utilities less convenient and therefore used less often? Was this something that people were asking for? I don't mean this in a hostile "Verant is ruining EQ again" way, I just genuinely don't understand what would have prompted these changes or what their intended effect is.
    Grabatz likes this.