RIP Yelinak Newbie Zones

- - All creatures that are not humanoids or animals require a magical weapon to attack.

Those Decaying Skellies are going to have a field day on launch... and the Pixies, and the Bixies, and the plethora of other low level mobs that aren't Humanoid or Animal.

WTS level 1 summoned Mage dagger 1kr each

Are you referring to this post?

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...4-12-2022-patch-notes-and-discussions.282057/

*** NPCs ***

- All NPCs have had their 'body type' reviewed and potentially adjusted:
- - Removed the distinction between summoned elementals and other constructs, insects and other animals, lycanthropes and other humanoids, vampires and other undead, distinguished figures of the Ring of Scale or the Claws of Veeshan and other dragons, and distinguished figures of Kael Drakkel and other giants.
- - All creatures that are not humanoids or animals require a magical weapon to attack.
- - Creatures now uniformly belong to one of the following categories:
- - - Special damage targets - Greater Akheva, Draz Nurakk, and Zek.
- - - Animals - Non-magical living organisms, not plants, not quite humanoids.
- - - Construct/Elemental - Conjured, Elemental, or animated matter, including Clockworks.
- - - Dragons - Draconic creatures (Dragons, Drakes, Wurms, Wyverns). Excludes dinosaurs and Drakkin.
- - - Extraplanar - Death-Touching creature, typically the Avatar of a God.
- - - Giants - Large bipedal creatures descended from the creations of Rallos Zek.
- - - Humanoids - Living non-magical sentient bipedal organisms.
- - - Magical - Magical creatures and anything that does not fit into another category.
- - - Plants - Potentially sentient living photosynthetic or fungus-based non-animal organism.
- - - Undead - Deceased souls, optionally corporeal, distinct from animist spirits and other magical beings.

orc camps for the win.

Cracked staff is going to be the first raid loot

Man, decaying skellies are my preffered level 1-3 target for the bone chips, cloth drops, and occasional rusty or staff. Even as a wizard or mage, your dagger does a lot of your overall damage at level 1-2.

Someone please think of the necros.

I have doubts this will apply to newbie yard mobs. We'll see.

It is on test right now. Decaying Skellies are immune to non-magic weapons. As are the Pixies.

Hah! That'll need to be changed. Half the newbie mobs would be magic immune. Bonechips are going to go for like a krono haha ;-)

Edit: Actually, would probably have some bone chips going around fairly quickly so maybe not worth changing if it would take dev time. I guess it adds some challenge. Granted not a whole lot since you can just down the skellies with spells to get some chips ;-)'

Does anyone know what has driven this change? It seems like a lot of dev time was wasted spent on this.

that seems like an odd change since the first "magic weapon required" mob people used to meet was wisps and ghouls, skeletons, mummies and zombies could be killed by normal weapons just fine

There are certainly a ton of NPCs in the game, but if you export the table with NPC information, identify the unique types through filters, do a find/replace for the types you want to remove and consolidate, double-check your work by confirming through filters, and import it successfully on test environments, you're basically set.

A few minutes in a couple meetings to decide to implement, an hour or two to edit if they took their time. Maybe a few more if they made any mistakes, and less if they shortcut and ran queries to mass edit their test databases directly.

As for what drove the change? Likely QoL for them and the player. Does a cleric undead nuke work on this vampire? Now you don't have to wonder. The change gives several spells more functional use than previously. And it helps them not waste time with superfluous mob types that delay any new design.

they could have done that without making the game worse for new players and low levels in general

"I can't navigate through needing a magic weapon" is peak EQ brain. I love this change.

Just change the starter weapons to be magic.

THE whole point of EQ was that you needed to GET a magic weapon and it wasn't easy back then nor cheap

"Mage selling rusty weapons and cloth armor to desperate melees - 10p each"

The first change to improving a database is to streamline and remove superfluous types.

Call me crazy but I actually like this change, and I hope they do not backtrack on it. I think its good to see more consistency across npc types. It'll be a rough start for some, but what newbie yard has skeletons without also having rats, snakes, beetles, wolves, orcs, armadillos, skunks, etc? Melees will still find something to kill, and casters can nuke down decaying skeletons.

Although, RIP Field of Bone, Kurn's Tower, Unrest (lots of undead here already required magic but not all), Befallen.