Test Update 02/09/2021 - Patch Notes and Discussions

Discussion in 'Test Update Notes and Bug Roundup' started by EQ Dev, Feb 9, 2021.

  1. Covennx Augur



    45 coin per heroic
    4 heroic missions
    4 runs in 24 hours
    180 per mission cycle
    720 coin per 24 hours if you run missions every 6 hours.

    18 augs needed on average for most people,
    3 will be drop, tradeskill, nathsar diamond, so 15 dropped/vendor augs needed.
    8000 coin needed for 15 augs.
    So 178 individual missions or 44.5 mission cycles or 11 days of doing missions 6 hours on the hour.

    Or spend 2 days XPing (which you are going to need to do anyways) to get the aug drops and be done worrying about them.

    I know which I picked.
    Lorai, WeezFv and Sancus like this.
  2. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    When you have to repeat the same missions over and over, 125 coins should always be the answer. Just let us get an aug per run like in RoS. It's like you're still punishing players for Cactusgate. Stop it, you're stretching grind as "content" and it's stupid.
    Lorai, Swiss and Metanis like this.
  3. Beimeith Lord of the Game


    A) You're being disingenuous by ignoring the fact that 6 people in the group get currency. Regardless of whether all 6 need them or not, that is still how much is earned. Likewise, unless someone is soloing the aug dropper (and 99.9% of people aren't) they're going to have to share those drops as well.


    B) No one is getting 15 augs in 2 days camping the named. That might have been possible when the bonus named spawn was active and you funneled all the augs to 1 character, but Joe Casual who only has 1 hour to play with his pick up group isn't doing that.

    C) If these augs were so lucrative for the botters to sell loot rights too, they would already have been doing it. They aren't being changed to be tradable. They're only being changed to sell back. Nothing has prevented the botters from selling loot rights from day 1 aside from the fact the drop rate sucks and they can absolutely make more money elsewhere.
  4. Beimeith Lord of the Game


    What possible reason is there to have them NOT be sellable if they also remove them from dropping? (I'm all for them removing them from dropping and just increasing the currency on the missions btw, but I also think it's stupid for them not to be able to be sold back).

    If the augs cannot be sold back, that makes every one MORE valuable in terms of rarity. So why doesn't your 40+ botter ALREADY have them on lockdown?
    Angahran likes this.
  5. Sancus Augur

    That six people in the group can earn currency is a thing, but it isn't that relevant from the decision making perspective of an individual player.

    I don't particularly care if augs that are dropped have sell back values. That said, Type 5 augs were pretty much the only part of itemization outside of raids where players weren't better off boxing and funneling gear to their mains rather than grouping with others. There are very few groups of six camping the named that drop Type 5 augs. In most cases it's people boxing looking to outfit their mains, and in some cases a group of two or three people.

    I have no issue with boxers, but I don't think grouping with other players should slow you down. That isn't the case with currency, because it isn't tradeable. People were rewarded for forming full groups and tackling challenging content; the people who did that finished first. People who could box the missions had it easier in the sense that they didn't have to wait for groups, but they at least had to run the same number of missions as everyone else to finish gearing their mains.

    If you can consistently form perfect groups, missions are not an inefficient way to get Type 5 augs. However, for most of the player base running missions is quite hard. Killing a T1 named is not. Therefore the current system encourages a lot of rational people to make the decision not to group with others and to instead box these named, creating the bottleneck we run into now and devaluing missions.

    Again, this is mostly unrelated to whether augs sell back for currency or not. I think having a way to acquire some of the Type 5's outside of missions is okay, but I think missions should be much more rewarding currency wise than they currently are to compensate for the increased difficulty. In general I wish mission currency was used more heavily as an alternate way to acquire things, because this is a social game and as an individual player you should gain rewards more quickly/efficiently by grouping with other real people.
    WeezFv, German, Ssdar and 1 other person like this.
  6. kizant Augur

    Here's one more point of data. I ran this test on Test/Live. It's the same 260 spell casts of Ethereal Brand and Restless Ice Comet. Then I hit all the normal Wizard burns that don't have counters and added Twincast/Intensity. We always have 100% crit rate during burn. You can see the parse on Test did around 12% less damage overall but some of that due to Arcane Fusion procing more. But focusing solely on the procs that are impacted the went from 172m damage to 89m damage. 83m less from the Live parse still comes to about 12% less so I think that did account for the majority of the difference.

    On Test Server:
    [IMG]

    On Live:
    [IMG]
    Ulrin, Kelset, Lophophora and 4 others like this.
  7. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    If people are boxing and only outfitting their mains and not their entire box crew, that's their right, but I'd question why they're doing that vs outfitting everyone. Surely their box group would be more effective if they were all fully geared, which would, again, be faster to do with missions. And before you say it, yes, I know the missions are difficult and not everyone can box them.

    I already acknowledged that if you ONLY funnel items to 1 character, it can be faster than missions. My point is this has always been true and allowing the augs to be sold back DOES NOT CHANGE THIS.

    Agreed, the currency system as it exists today has been grossly distorted from the original idea.
    Without giving a dissertation on the history of EQ's alternate currencies, suffice it to say that the system has been getting worse over time, not better.


    Agreed, but that isn't really what the current discussion is about. Even you appear to acknowledge that the RvR of missions vs named is unaffected by allowing them to be sold back.

    I'm more than willing to have a discussion about the RvR balance, but that is a different discussion than what we're talking about here, which is people getting hysterical and making wild accusations that have no real basis in fact. (Specifically, that botters are suddenly going to monopolize all aug camps just because the augs can be sold back, vs directly selling them like they ALREADY CAN, BUT AREN'T).
  8. Dre. Altoholic

    Re: Epic changes.

    Look, I get it. You're trying to make them 'work as intended'. Here's the thing.

    20 years ago, Epic quests were a fantastic idea with terrible inconsistency of implementation. It's been great to see these iconic quests get some love over the years to help level out the effort/reward ratio. It's great to see them getting some love again. And let me be very clear here - most of the changes listed in the 1st post are mostly good.

    But this noise:

    Your head is in the wrong place. Pull it out, along with these changes.

    Re spawn chances and spawn times. Here's some better numbers: 25% or higher chance. 27-30 minute pop.

    That's plenty enough RNG in to hose some unfortunate fool for the OG lulz without adding insult to injury for every other player actually willing to waste their time on these for a shiny ornament, or grief and trample each other for the 10 minutes these items are actually relevant on prog servers.
    scaethach, WeezFv, Herf and 1 other person like this.
  9. Ibadan Kun'Tirel Augur

    It would be nice to see mages/wizards/etc get some love since our dps is going to get effectively reduced as a result of proc changes. Perhaps an increase innate boost to proc damage multipliers, triple cast, or some other boost. Spell damage being affected by H-stats, etc? Just throwing out ideas here....
  10. Jumbur Improved Familiar


    I don't think we should get "triple cast", as that would probably just add extra serverload again. But they could bump up our crit chance and crit damage multiplier. I wouldn't complain if they made heroic-int affect spell-crits in some way. :)

    Or they could just bump up the base damage a little.

    I would personally prefer fewer bigger numbers in my combat spam, rather than tens of smaller numbers. ;)

    They might also need to rethink swarmpets a little(now they they are looking into lag-problems), perhaps double the dps and hitpoints of each swarmpet, and halve the amount of swarmpets you can summon?

    They could also change familiars into a client-side graphic-effect. It is ages since familiars could be killed/buffed anyway, no reason to let the server handle them.
  11. Derka Power Ranger

    An AA to have a % chance that a single proc could do double base damage doesn't sound bad.
    Ulrin, Ibadan Kun'Tirel and Sissruukk like this.
  12. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    Make Heroic Int have a increased Crit Spell Dmg modifier. 1% every 100 hInt. Same with Heroic Wis having an increased Heal Crit modifier. Make heroics actually increase player power for casters/priests.

    An AA to increase the impact of Spell Damage / Heal Amount from gear. An AA to increase the chance for Clairvoyance to trigger.

    Also just a base increase of most of the core nukes for casters across the board would help.

    These would be ways to add to caster DPS to offset these sympathetic changes.
    Lorai, Ulrin and Ibadan Kun'Tirel like this.
  13. Metanis Bad Company

    Swarm pets are one of the worst ideas ever implemented in the raid game. In fact, pets of any kind frequently cause more trouble than they're worth. The first event of any evening is filled with calls for people to turn off their *())&()*)& pet taunt. And then the doppleganger pets totally pooch the dragon's positioning. And if you're shrunk like you're supposed to be, then the stupid warders are always blocking your view. Finally, when it's burn time watch your fps drop into the single digits as your view of the target is completely occluded by pets of every size, shape, and flavor. So many pets the server doesn't even bother to calculate their damage so it was all wasted pixels anyway! Just ban pets entirely from all 54 person encounters.
    WeezFv and Moege like this.
  14. kizant Augur

    I'm not against making hint/hwis useful but that's not a solution because it's not a "caster" problem. It's mostly just a Wizard nerf. If lag did get fixed bsts and mage pet dps would increase naturally and offset their losses. Other casters are minimally impacted or currently OP like druids and necros.
    WeezFv and Ulrin like this.
  15. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    What they should do is change twincast from literally casting a second spell to being a multiplier like it is for DoTs. Make it simply a x2 at the end of the damage calculation and cut the number of spells being cast in half.

    This would also allow for them to add a "triple cast" by making it a x3 instead of a x2, etc.

    A crit chance boost would be nice, considering that Wizards are the LOWEST crit chance caster at 50% vs every other silk and priest class having 57%. Likewise with crit damage where Wizards have 340 and every other silk and priest class has 355%.
    Ulrin, Yinla, Angahran and 3 others like this.
  16. Sancus Augur

    This is going to reduce Mage burst DPS more than it'll reduce the total volume of spell casts in a raid. It's definitely much more impactful for Wizards, but it's pretty unsubstantiated to conclude that pet DPS will increase enough to offset it.

    Remember that pets were missing more than half their swings in raid instances back in TDS when lag wasn't perceptible in terms of script lag or spell casting. Even low amounts of lag have a substantial impact on pet melee rates.
    Ulrin and Ibadan Kun'Tirel like this.
  17. kizant Augur

    Right. So, even fixing small amounts of lag would benefit pet DPS. Looking at the worst case in some of my parses I see the mage pet go from 9% of DPS without much lag on a Zlandicar burn to as low as 1.5% with lots of lag. So, a worst case difference of 7.5%.

    If considering this how I did my wizard post above, I see you guys doing around 12% to 15% of your DPS from the newer procs and you have around an 85% twincast rate like I do. It's fair to say you guys would lose 5% to 6% from the proc change? Then say a raid with average lag your pet is probably losing 4% to 5% which would go away? That may not make up the entire difference but it's a decent chunk of it. Right?
  18. Sancus Augur

    As far as analyzing pet DPS, there are two problems. First, procs from triggered spells do not account for nearly a large enough portion of total spell volume in raids to have a very large impact on lag. It is much more likely you might see pets average 1% more of our DPS or something (that's obviously a guess, but the point we're not getting a 4 to 5% increase in our overall DPS from this change). Secondly, degradation in pet DPS is not linear with lag; if you could quantify lag, the relationship between pet dps and lag looks much more like exponential decay. That means a small reduction in lag, if things are already very laggy, yields a very small net gain.

    Beyond that, though, you can make the same argument that anyone with a GCD would gain more from a large reduction in lag than they're losing from this change. That doesn't change that classes are losing DPS as a result of a fix that doesn't have class balance justifications. It's perfectly reasonable for classes affected to ask for compensation in other areas, especially if additional changes come that further reduce total proc volume in raids (which are likely necessary to make a dent in the amount of lag we currently have).

    Edit: Just to be clear, I completely agree that Wizards are disproportionately impacted by this change, and they also were in a worse spot than Mages prior to it. To the extent other things (H-Stats, Nuke Base Damage, or whatever else) are adjusted, Wizards absolutely should get a larger adjustment. I just want to clarify that it definitely is a nerf to other casters too, just to a lesser extent.
    WeezFv, Ulrin and Ibadan Kun'Tirel like this.
  19. kizant Augur

    I never said that this change alone would fix the lag. I said that "If lag did get fixed" implying that if/when they manage to solve the problem for good that some classes like mages and beasts would see the biggest improvement from the lack of lag. I think everyone does acknowledge that pet classes suffer the most from lag so it makes sense that they would benefit the most from getting it fixed. And then that could offset or partially offset this one specific change and possibly even make it a worthwhile trade? Whereas, as a Wizard, if I got to choose, I'd prefer to keep the lag because on average it doesn't hurt me as much as this specific change does.

    Yeah, I agree and I'm not against making hint/hwis useful for everyone or addressing each class specifically based on how much they're impacted. But I'd also want to take into account the current state of each class. Wizards being in a bad spot and getting the worst of the nerf is a bigger issue imo than say some other classes that may already be too strong getting a small nerf and then buff to compensate that just makes them even more op.
    Ulrin likes this.
  20. Frosty79 New Member

    I think everyone's been overlooking something here. A while back there was a nerf to melee classes when they changed how ripostes were checked, that change was to improve lag and server stability just like this one is supposedly. Funny thing is though that from my perspective server lag and instability got worse after that change. I suspect it was really done so that Daybreak could save a little money on running the game by removing system resources/hardware from the equation and this change is no different. There was never any compensation for those who's DPS got nerfed before and there won't be this time, and the issue will just get worse anyway when they penny pinch again. I call foul.
    WeezFv and Metanis like this.