Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

I was under the impression that SOE was working with EQResource.. Is it not possible to get their maps?

I'd really like to have the opt-in mechanism change or ammended.

Just looking at my 79 necro, I am seeing:

• close to 200 AA's going to be spent in Innate stats and resists that are completely useless to the char for quite a few levels to come.
• Approximately 100 AA's in utilities that aren't going to be used by me: Summon corpse alternates, MGB, damageless snares, Dire charm, Bind wound line, Bandolier and potion belt line, Innate see invis, mental fortitude, packrat, whisperwind and some have hastenings to go with them
• Two long lines that I never planned to use, because of high cost / low reward: mastery of the past, persistent casting
• Blood magic + hastening - since I hardly run outof mana, I don't see the use of it
• Deathly pact and flesh to bone (I took F2B for fun factor already, wish I could undo)
• pet heals. Make very little use of them for the time being

I can't say how many this will be, but I'm guessing close to 500 that I don't want or don't want yet. Is it possible to give us the amount of aa's we're entitled to and let us spend it ourselves? If this takes a little more work to implement, then at least there's the opt-in already so we can wait for it. There should be some reusable code from the Mayong server back in the day that temporarily allows a char to circumvent the AA cap...

Sure classes have diffrent ranges of MAX AA but pretending Bsts need all 10k AA to be viable is silly. At 6.5k you should be basically maxed on DPS and very close to maxed on most defensive AAs as well. Much of that 10k total is fluff. Yes I have a beast lord and he is Just past 6K(with lots wasted on fluff when he was max AA in SOD). I've done the math, have you?

Did you do it alone? How many hours did you play each day? Do you have wife and Kids? Do you have a job? These affect the argument. Its not laziness, its called life and not being a professional gamer. I guess the question is... how would you get new players and old players to return...? what would you do that would help alleviate the gap that they have and the stumbling block that is there for players who will have to solo till post level 85 before they can find people to group with? What is your suggestion?

You can choose not to take the bonus until later. In doing so you can grind out AAs using the bonus and then take the AA gift for free fluff once you have used up the bonus. Obviously It would be optimal for use to spend how we want but to do that is complicated and would force them to open up the unused AA cap which opens up exploits. One method might be to tie AAs to achievement (quest) rewards to be cashed in when ever you want but You could only have up 10 of those. and it would add more work on their end.

Yeah Piestro kind cleared that one up for me when he said the lawyers wouldn't even support the argument that it was their intellectual property under the EULA, which had seemed to cover them on the issue. I thought the map sites were having to break SOE's copyrighted intellectual property rules to get the data to use for their own purposes - which like you say can include making money via advertising.
Under different circumstances in the past SOE had used to take a very dim view of sites using their materials / in game items for their own profits.

I can mez 6 at a time with stare/wave. I can use my AE flash mez (Perilous Disorentation) to do unlimited, however it only lasts a few seconds AND every mob over 1 has a chance of draining more mana. But to actually mez, I can only do 6 with one cast. (Now I can hold 12 or 18 but I have to group them in clusters of 6 and spread them out so that the ae doesn't overlap.)

This still doesn't address the basic question of why the Number of Counters is being set at a target of 4-6 mobs.

While the other anti-mass swarming changes are set much higher.
Beams are set at 12 for example.

Other classes pull more than 4-6 mobs at once kiting. Druids, Necros, Wizards, all do
6-10 mobs at a time.

I'd feel a lot more confident about target goal of 8 mobs

Reducing AA costs is essentially the hybrid model you are proposing. Making older abilities cost 1 point while retaining the exp curve is still giving them away, its just granting them in the order and time of your choosing. You can very quickly get to the running start and still have lots of curve left.

This is exactly my point. Granting by making the AA ridiculously cheap instead of just handing them out allows people to choose whether they want things like the Tradeskill AA or not. On the point of the xp bonus curve, if the idea of this whole thing is to reduce the time it takes to level to current content (which includes AA), then the bonus and the reduced costs continue to further that goal.

It's true that the first 30 levels of Combat Agility offer better returns than the last 20, but there is still a difference in power between a tank with CA 30 and a tank with CA 50. If you want to tank current content, I'm guessing 30 isn't going to cut it (though I am not a tank so tell me if I am wrong). From a monk perspective, if you stopped AAing at Underfoot, your dps in the newer expansions would be laughable.

Right, I guess I'll have to check when that bonus wears off.

Like I said, Mayong had that in place (it was a 51/50 server, chars were born at level 51 with 50 aa's to spend). If there were exploits back then, you'd have quite a good history of them and can code for it. I'd rather wait 2 more months for a good solution then having AA's jammed down my throat that mean absolutely nothing to me. I already shudder at the thought that bind affinitity is gonna autogranted in a few years...Whoever thought up that AA should've gotten a cup of coffee first.

Only asking this out of total interest as I am UK based and have no knowledge of US law- But if it came to a court action over who owned something how the heck would they decide it with no central register. I mean if something got leaked onto the net like recently happened with an authors script then technically 1000 people could step forward and say "I wrote that". I know in days long past there used to be an old trick that was used in UK (maybe elsewhere as well) of mailing a registered letter to your self containing your work and not opening it. That way there was a record of that item at the post office and it was date stamped - but I don't think they even accept that now over here.

I think this is a great suggestion. Without MC working as before, SKs who continue to want to swarm for exp will be able to do so, but at much smaller numbers. 100+ mobs will be asking for trip to your bind point, but 20'ish light blues will still be doable... every 5 minutes.

Considering that mages / wizards are being OK'd to take out 12 current level mobs at a time, I don't think 20 light blues is so much to let go. And, I know this is supposed to be about server stability, but if 20'ish mob pulls are bogging down the servers, then we really need new servers.

No, it's not. Epic only lasts about 1.6 minutes out of 5 minutes. We don't kill a swarm in 1.6 minutes and we don't have any way, other than mortal coil, to sustain that kind of healing for the other 3 minutes. All of our other clickys and abilities are either too weak (anguish bp 10% melee tap) or on too long a timer (leechcurse disc 40s dur/50m recast). Mortal Coil is absolutely necessary to do the kind of swarming we are talking about. The reason we are willing to let Mortal Coil go is that none of the SK mains give a crap about MC or swarming. None of us consider it a core ability of our class, a tank. Mortal Coil was a fun and challenging toy for a week but it has long since mattered in any significant way to non PLers.

If the problem is truly CPU intensive nature of the calculations then it stands to reason that this is probably important in other aspects of the system processing than just mass killing of mobs. Like raids where lots of mobs need to be kited.

Here's a solution you should try... When all the mobs in a small area (bunched up mobs) are pathing to a single target treat them as a single entity. Do a single pathing calculation then move everything in the close range going to the same location/target at the same time.

Aside from the anti-swarming there's of course also other ways to lessen PLs that are done by large ammounts of kills. There's a few examples in game:
- TSS charm. Spend a few hours running around the serpent's spine (or pick up an extra set as you level your main) and get your lvl 1 alt to 20-ish within a minute
- Task Adds, Repo being the most prominent one
- Repeatable kill 10 rat quests with a faction component (TBS's "Kill a few", SoF ladies of the light, OGH/OGV)
- Collections

You can give these a significant boost, especially the taskadd variant and perhaps introduce an exp penalty for killing x amount of mobs within a time frame if difference between highest and lowest char in group is > 7 (worked for LDoNs). This would keep the PL market alive for those that rely on it (and perhaps make PLing less boring even), reduce server load and enhance the experience for those who focus on the Quest part of EverQuest.

You're assuming a flat terrain with no obstacles and entities at equal runspeed, while adding another complexity to the algorithm, which is to determine the entities that form a group and the accounting that goes with it.

Piestro, you just made the point as to why the change itself makes the skill useless. The amount of humanoids is tiny.

I don't believe the purpose of this whole exercise is to reduce the time it takes to level and AA to current content but reduce the time it takes for a new/returning player to level and AA to current content.

To make choices pertaining to which AA's one should purchase you need a current knowledge of what you will be facing in current content. This means the player needs to be current and is main changing or level an alt, OR getting some valid advice from someone who is already in current content. The problem is for the new/returning player is that most advice is... shall we say... deficient. Even if a new/returning player does actually get some good advice they also get quite a bit of bad advice along with it and are in no position to judge what is good and what is bad.

Force feeding new/returning players AA's is a lot better than leaving them to fend for themselves and learn the hard way that the person who was nice to them, spent time telling them what they needed to get done, even though well meaning, was full of crap. Yes, they will get AA's they don't need, but they will also get ones they do.

Yes and no.
In some respects I can see your meaning. If you read the last paragraph you will see that it would still have more incentive to group as kills would be faster and more XP would be gained in same amount of time; theoretically with chain pulls dealing with 1 mob at a time, nonstop.
Oh, logic about dodging? How many would just fire anything at their targets if a friend was engaging them point blank in melee combat? You would take more careful less risky shots, to avoid hurting your friends, which would ultimately be less powerful hits(except on occasion, where the opportunity presented itself, granted. As long as you understand those would be few and far between). When there would be no obstacle like that in the way, IE snare kiting or roots, you could fire to your hearts content, which would result in overall more damage to your target. Even if your target tries to dodge, they have about 1-2 seconds max to dodge from the moment the projectile leaves the bow (if you consider max of 375 feet archery range for EQ. ( 125 from arrows, and 250 max for bows = 375 feet). Pretty sure that's gonna be all but impossible to dodge, maybe 1 in 50 will dodge it entirely, most will move enough so if the archery always hits the exact spot firing for, it'll be about up to 8 inches off the mark. There is the factor to determine actual damage per hit.
This is just an example, however I think you might be able to see my point.