Test Update 09/10/2019 - Patch Notes and Discussions

Discussion in 'Test Update Notes and Bug Roundup' started by EQ Dev, Sep 9, 2019.

  1. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    This is why I can't stand these devs. Over reaction to everything that they perceive as an advantage to players while never or taking months to years to fix anything detrimental to players.

    You know, I'm failing to see the problem with your character advancement in an RPG giving you tangible advantages. Swarming is not a current content problem. Its something possible through THE DEVS OVER INFLATION OF GEAR STATS. If mudflation wasn't an issue, neither would swarming.

    The amount of content they make that forces you to have a solid group to do the content (or if non-raiders, a very good/balanced group) is already too high, because of some insane idea they need to "challenge" us (as if its ever a real challenge, either its hard and we do it the minimal amount or its easy and we do it often, there is no middle ground because of the reality of the mechanics of this game).

    Personally, I like doing the same stuff over and over. I raid the same raids for a year. I do the same exp spots all year (or two). I like working on things I missed here and there. Making us do 1/2 the damage to non-targeted mobs on a multi pull (you know, negating all those AA they gave us for doing more damage on riposte), for no other reason than to slow down experience is absurd, because you're making us take longer to do trivial stuff.

    I don't care about the less exp per unit time, I care about making it take twice as long to go do some old mission.

    Stop wasting our TIME. If the exp for GMM is too great, cut the exp on the mobs. Or just make the stupid mobs the same as in the static zone and then do something about the bunching stuff up.

    This doesn't stop AE groups in ST instances (or anywhere else that the mechanics work). It doesn't stop any knight from swarming (there is a survivability curve where once you reach the asymptote, its just a matter of time to kill them all), just wastes more of our time.

    The bolded is my big gripe to be honest. So now I have to take twice as long to go do an LDoN for an alt? I need to take twice as long to do a TDS HA for an alt? Just because the devs hate the fact two classes can solo a mission they made too easy?

    And every other class can duo/molo the thing anyway, and at least most of those classes do so much more dps that they relied less on riposte damage than knights did.
  2. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    It used to work, for sure. I need to test before just accepting that statement, but will try and find the time.

    If it doesn't work, not only do they need to refund the AA, they need to up the healing on all our hott heal effects =P
  3. Xanathol Augur

    Holyforge / Pureforge:
    Slot 2: Increase Chance to Crippling Blow by (20, 25, 30, 40 respectively)

    Paladin: Valorous Rage - decrease weapon delay (10-19%, respectively)
  4. Warpeace Augur



    SK still do how much more dps then a Paladin? Start another thread maybe about cripple and hundred hands. However SK are not hurting one bit ion the DPS category.
    Allayna, Koryu, Duder and 1 other person like this.
  5. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    Wizzy Cyromancy - Can we get this changed to a Depth of Darkhollos AA instead of a Serpent Spine AA please. Back then there were a lot of gating mobs and changing this to a proc off of Cyromancy is removing a the ability for 2 expansions to stop mobs from gating.
  6. kizant Augur

    Just some estimates for anyone interested. Factoring in the decrease in proc rate with the 100% crit rate.

    1. Standard group situation while you have no ADPS there's no real change. A Skyfire might average 50 less damage per nuke but not enough to notice.
    2. Same situation but with max luck and good spell damage. The reverse ends up being true. You might get an extra 60 damage on your Skyfire cast but not enough to notice.
    3. If you do a Wizard only burn you start to see some increase for a short period of time. Expect to see around 0.04% DPS increase for that 60 seconds or so.
    4. On a raid burn it's a little better. With full ADPS and auras and everything. Expect about 0.048% DPS increase for that 60 seconds or so.
    5. Average DPS for an entire raid will probably go up around 0.03% for how our raids usually go. It depends how much time you take to complete events and could be closer to 0.02% for most people.

    The big negative though is that since the proc rate is so low you more often than not won't see a gain and may see decreases more often if you look at individual parses. Although, on average it's still better overall by a tiny bit..
    Xurn and Sancus like this.
  7. Brohg Augur

    I was confused for a moment, but I think I figured it out - you're confused: the Warrior class AA "War Cry" is:

    War Cry IX WAR/254
    1: Increase Chance to Resist Silence Effects by 5%
    2: Increase Chance to Resist Type 191 Effects (that's melee silence) by 5%
    3: Increase Chance to Resist Fear Spell by 100%


    it's not the level 50 Berserker combat ability (which has been superseded these 15 years by higher level versions):

    War Cry BER/50 380
    2: Decrease Weapon Delay by 4.5%
    11: Increase ATK by 20

    Warriors get no HHE.

    And "cripple" is loose language. Warriors have a couple, like, 2tick melee debuffs for our target (so, one mob at a time, and under half uptime on that one mob) that you may be talking about? I really don't know what you could mean for Paladins. On the flip side Dire Coarctation (née Strangulation) is a decent debuff if you cared enough to use it, can put it on every mob you see, full uptime. ~2/3 the power of the druid ones.
    Tucoh likes this.
  8. Azmadius Journeyman

    - Druid - Refunded all ranks of Advanced Tracking and increased the base tracking skill cap for druids for levels 65+.


    Will there be any differences with it done this way vs current live? Its kinda vague.
  9. josh Augur

    Your riposte chance was never 40%. This was a bug that i pointed out in another thread. for the past couple months, every riposte, regardless of whether the mob struck through your defenses, was being reported as a success. You would get a success message, and a failure message. This is not changing our riposte rate at all, it's just a fix to an error in the messaging that was screwing with parsers

    This was pointed out by someone else, but, it either never worked, or healing adept didn't work with tot spells. They use the same spell effect, and that effect would not stack with itself since they are both aa's. So, either at some point they managed to make healing adept work with our tot heals and therefore, completely invalidated glorious reflection, which is a huge buff, or, glorious reflection never did anything. those are really the only two options. Either way, we were never nerfed so there is no reason to compensate us.
  10. josh Augur


    The miscommunication on cripple is because he is talking about crippling blow, not the debuff cripple
  11. Dzarn Developer

    Story Time!

    Characters who have claimed veteran AAs will remain flagged as having claimed them, but access to the abilities is now limited by expansion on TLP servers.

    Characters flagged as having claimed veteran AAs will have access to as many of the abilities as their account age and server expansion allow for.
    Ex: Transferring from a TLP server that is at an early expansion to a live server will allow use of all veteran AAs that the account age qualifies the character for.


    This change was primarily an optimization to reduce processing on melee hits due to our increasingly strained zone performance.

    Previously we checked each potential defensive skill (each of which carries a performance impact) prior to (the less computationally expensive) hit/miss check.

    The team feels that the benefits of our zones running even a tiny bit better outweighed concerns over riposte damage being reduced for either PCs or NPCs.


    Translocational Anchor given its: long reuse, relatively short duration, and very niche role, fell into a category of abilities for which I am more embarrassed for having added upgrades to it as opposed to consolidating it earlier.

    When starting this year's AA review I've made an effort to identify ability lines that were, non-functional (PAL: Glorious Reflection), unnecessary (ALL: Identify), or niche to the point where their activation seemingly doesn't warrent the screen space for a hotbutton (CLR/PAL: Reflect, WIZ: Translocational Anchor).

    As a 'general' rule, 'most' NPCs no longer cast the gate spell in 'modern' content.
    Given that this ability line released in Depths of Darkhollow and was upgraded in The Broken Mirror (primarily because of the Plane of Hate revamp potentially having gating NPCs) the majority of the content where it would be intentionally activated on an NPC at low enough health to gate seemed small enough to where it felt appropriate to migrate the gate-suppression functionality to something passive.


    As mentioned, to my knowledge, there are only two cases where the spell Identify plays a meaningful role: 'The Creator' mission in Dragons of Norrath and finding the recipe for the Rusted Locket for the 'Piecing Together History' achievement.

    In the first case, the mission grants an item with identify to ensure it can be completed.

    In the second case, I suspect most people will be capable of finding the recipe to open the locket with the aid of friends or the internet.

    If there are any other cases where removing this AA will have a negative impact on gameplay, please let us know.


    As are we, for everyone who didn't. Trivial math suggests that each lifetime membership costs us money over the lifetime of the product.

    So, given the adage I've picked up from several community managers I have worked with that states, 'There is no better indicator for long term retention than someone ranting on the forums', I offer you thanks on behalf of the team for your continued support.


    Generally, if an AA ability precludes the need for a spell line that is in active development, I see that as a 'problem'.

    This relates to the change made to Call to Corpse which was initially implemented using a very long recast to balance the fact that it replaced the need to cast Conjure Corpse, which would have required a reagent.
    Given the time frame that Call to Corpse was created, it was probably intended to allow the necromancer to recover their own body which would contain the reagents required to use their summon corpse spell.
    Now that items are no longer left on player corpses and the ability was capped at level 105 it made sense to modify that line to be a 'convenience button' to save having to scribe a spell, something I am generally in favor of changing 'spell preclusion' AA lines into.

    Given that Summon Remains is effectively a variation on Summon Corpse, it seemed appropriate to assign it a cost comparable to the spell or the price of a guild lobby corpse summon stone.
    Additionally, given the 70% reagent conversation granted by Embalmer's Efficiency, I suspect the change won't break the bank.


    Every spell using SPA 329 (Mana Absorb % Damage) was modified to support a code change I made to give us more granularity.
    As mentioned:
    The percentage of damage absorbed as mana is now Base1/100, it was previously just Base1.
    Base2 is now a ratio of how many points of mana are drained per point of HP absorbed at 10,000 = 1.00 point of mana.
    AffectCap is now the maximum amount of damage that can be absorbed PER HIT.

    Along with those changes, SPA 521 (Endurance Absorb % Damage) was added and uses Base1, Base2, and AffectCap the same way.


    I have a suspicion that this may be the first time that Shield of Brilliance has ever been called 'useful', which makes terms like 'major nerf' seem like hyperbole.

    For some context, when reviewing the wizard ability Mirror Mirror it was found that, prior to this patch, the reflect SPA did not function at all outside of buffs (AAs and items were not checked).
    Not only that, I found that only the first buff with the reflect SPA in your buff list was checked.
    Ex: If you had 'Illusion Benefit Greater Jann' further up your buff list than 'Bounce' your chance to reflect was 5% and not 40%.
    I updated the logic for reflect so that it will now check your 'best' buff (highest Base1, highest Base2, then highest AffectCap) then, if that fails, it will check the sum Base1 value of your AAs as the chance to reflect (with the sum Base2 being the resist mod).
    Additional tangent: Since AA Effects do not have an AffectCap, the reflect SPA on AA abilities can only reflect the spell at 100% power at this time.

    As for Shield of Reverence and Shield of Brilliance, both of these abilities fell into the 'extremely niche' category where their usefulness doesn't seem to warrant hotbutton space; making them ideal candidates to change into passive abilities.

    Take for example the fact that there are only 1201 detrimental non-PC spells that can be reflected (vs 18207 non-PC spells that cannot be reflected.)
    Given that each ability had a relatively long reuse and short duration, I suspected that most people, even if they bothered to make a hotkey for this ability, aren't activating it consciously in any meaningful way.

    So the intent of the change is, these classes now have an AA line that offers slightly more benefit than an additional Hooded Scrykin Familiar buff without having to activate it.

    If there are examples where timed reflection of an NPC's spell has a realistic use case that outweighs the convenience of a lower percent chance passive ability, please let us know.


    I've debated whether there is value in trying to include 'why we did this' in patch notes.
    Most of the time I opt not to because of the difficulty in summarizing a long-form response like this one into something that can be digested in a patch note.
    Given more time, I suspect I would try to include more of the 'why' as I feel it helps contextualize changes for interested people.
    Unfortunately, it doesn't do anything to deter people whose pastime is arguing on the internet, as the 'why' often just becomes additional fodder for that segment of the audience to latch onto to start unproductive tangents.
    So, please avoid sidelining patch note discussions into pointless class warfare.


    There shouldn't be any change to how tracking functions due to this change.
    It was done as part of a larger effort to reduce the number of AA abilities that increase a class' skill caps.
    Nniki, Wulfhere, Duder and 10 others like this.
  12. Karhar Dream Crusher

    I welcome this change as a class that has had this ability i've had it hotkeyed infront of my face for years now and i use it a handful of times.
  13. Dahaman Augur


    Coirnav is the only server that gets ALL vet rewards removed and still costs the vet reward for the next 14 weeks. This is not fair. It would be fair to wait until after Coirnav hits DON to implement this.

    Coirnav was promised the same XP scheme as Phinny. This has been suffered thru, even when Mangler adjusted at the last minute to be a Phinny clone with +100% XP rate over Coirnav. That hurt. With this vet reward change, the covenant of the same XP scheme as Phinny will be broken. The fair thing would be to delay this implementation until after Coirnav reaches DON, allow the XP related vet rewards to continue in Gates, or to break the covenant and boost Coirnav's base XP rate (to match Mangler's maybe).

    Coirnav is already the least XP rate server by an egregiously large margin.

    Please don't kick us.
  14. ~Mills~ Augur

    I know this is your stance on the matter and that there is next to zero chance of you changing your mind but "this stance" still isn't applied to everything that started as a spell/disc. Many classes still retain solid AA versions of what were spells, with any improvements that came to be, while many others have had their AA lines gutted. With the sole reason not being the line you drew in the sand regarding "a spell in active development" but merely because of "when" you choose to apply the line in the sand. You also now heavily favor any class who lobbied for x, y or z out of no where because them not having it as a spell means you let them keep whatever it is while penalizing the original class that had something based on a spell. Its crazy to many.

    Class A has a spell or the general concept of a spell and successfully had it added as an AA for particular reasons. These AA lines often were the only means to have something addressed that was glaringly wrong with the spell be it cast time, recast time, resist checks, its power, counters, % chance, resist lines or just removing the need to have it in a spell gem to be used. Class A is now severely penalized because any improvement or growth they saw is completely stripped away.

    Class B has no spell or anything remotely near the concept of the spell in their classes history. They lobbied after the fact for a copy of what class A had. The now keep all the bells and whistles they got over the years because of your stance of it not being "an active spell" for them. Or sometimes Class B had access to a unique click or proc from an item instead of a spell so again they get to keep their toy as it was. Meaning you can't "poach" from Aristo and spells but anything poached from Ngreth and items is fine as an AA.

    Frankly its rotten. I still await you applying this to hate AA, snare AA, root AA, slow AA, mezz AA, stun AA, charm AA, most casters burn AA, melee/tank discs that are often double/tripled/quadrupled in power via AA that cut their reuse, extend their duration and/or increase their base power so drastically from the original version that it totally negates any new "spell development" for them from Aristo. If he wanted to make a new version of Twisted Chance that lasted 60 seconds and removed 14 minutes of reuse he now can't. Which is after all the "reasons" we keep hearing about when others toys are taken away and yet you keep giving those things out to others. Seems a bit hypo..........
    Dzarn likes this.
  15. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    "Our programming and servers are terrible, so we're going to nerf you so that they run a tiny bit better."

    Really?

    Let's say we give you the benefit on the doubt on this, as opposed to conspiracy thinking about how this happens right after this GMM blowup, and this change will have a big impact on making that mission take longer, how about throwing us a freaking bone versus just nerfing us?

    How about adding an AA line to all classes with riposte, that increases the damage of riposte hits (by a flat amount so no whining about unintended dps burst increases, so just a damage bonus), that makes up for it?

    Players keep asking for new AA and you guys keep "consolidating", its like you're ignoring what people want. Here's a concept for you: reducing AA max from 32,000 to 31,500 is meaningless to anyone that looks at that number and goes, "its too much I can't do it, I'm not going to play this game". Continuously messing with people that already play is just going to cost you more players anyway.
  16. sojero One hit wonder


    I believe they are consolidating because they have limited space in the database for different AA lines and they are running out of that space. I remember a couple years ago them talking about that.
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  17. Brohg Augur

    I opine WIZ Ward of Destruction fits the category of embarassingly bad, superfluous buttons. I would, with true consideration and no sarcasm, prefer it deleted than fixed.
    kizant likes this.
  18. yepmetoo Abazzagorath

    That's at least more palatable, though they specifically said AA consolidation was to make it "easier" for new and returning players, when they first started.

    But also more confusing. Bandwidth, server space, etc, are so much cheaper and faster now. How is it possible that their server resources and database resources are getting stretched so badly? They need someone competent to clean up some of their code because they are doing something wrong, not just adding more to the database if this is a problem.

    This is also drop in the bucket for that issue.

    If processing is so bad, they need to be smarter about it. I get the spaghetti code problem, but this is the only game that runs worse as computers get better that I have come into contact with, that wasn't at some core effect issue like x286 vs x386 or whatever.

    Its like they are using an excel 95 type system, so bloated spreadsheets just get progressively slower and slower.

    Maybe come flat out and tell the players:

    These are the issues behind our server issues: 1,2,3,4,etc

    Then ask for suggestions. Like if NPC spell file (note the 18k+ spells) size is causing lag, why not batch?

    Sort zones into 10 different batches based off spell effects files used (just disable some in some zones if needed), so you're loading 150-200 spells instead of 18k. Just an example.
  19. Zanarnar Augur

    ehhhh....

    I assume a hit/miss check only involves the npc's attack and your ac values...

    Dodge, Parry/Block, Riposte are all likely more involved calculations involving your skill, the npc's weapon skill and attack, and what direction your being hit from (can't parry or riposte from behind!)

    So I can easily see the hit/miss check being a lot less expensive computationally then the rest. I agree, its going to have an effect on riposte rates and damage. How much? That depends on how much you get missed, and what your riposte rate is.

    Sadly I don't have any good log files to look at me tanking (had been using my pet as a tank for a while before I quit), but one I did find the npc attacked me 42 times, missing just 4 times. (9.5% miss) I riposted 9 of his attacks. (21% riposte), so if the misses were removed, I would have riposted 8 times instead. (This is a HORRIBLE useless dataset, sorry, hopefully someone with some real data can chime in)

    UPSIDE? This is going to happen to NPC's too, if you miss them, they don't get a chance to riposte you. I dunno, but if it lessens the load on the zone servers appreciably and doesn't hurt riposte dps too much, it might be worth while. (think about how many times you attack per second these days, added up its likely a significant chunk of the zones cpu load is handling combat. (I assume the other large use is pathing)
  20. kizant Augur

    For the sake of fairness and not cheating Mages out of what they deserve. If they're going to now have a Netherstep ability then shouldn't they also receive all the related spells that worked up to Netherstep? They should be given some version of Fade, Yonder, and Shadow Step. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk right?