Test Update 4/12/2022 - Patch Notes and Discussions

Played Everquest on and off since -99, and currently having a blast on your progression servers. First Agnarr, then Mangler and now Mischief.

I am dissapointed that you consider changing release date "close" up to next expansion. Omens of war is one of the best expansions imo (Epic 2.0s, lvls, progression) and some of us have to plan ahead for time off to be able to progress and have fun with the guild. Several of my friends and I already scheduled time off to play (Vacation, work schedule etc.) with limited possibility of reschedule due to certifications that needs alot of preplanning.

Accendo told me to express my concerns here, so I am. Dive into the lands of Norrath with your best friends having a blast knocking out those kickass expansions from back in the day, is the best game experience to date.- Even if you go on with the release date changes this time around, I really want to encourage you to make these as stable as possible in the future.

Laws
E'CI-AB-Bristlebane-Agnarr-Mangler-Mischief

Not necessarily. Iksar have no way to get magic weapons early on and are of course KOS everywhere so can't easily shop elsewhere or do quest turnins. There are mobs in Swamp of No Hope that require magic weapons (the tadpole things) and it sucks when you're working on a quest and one starts beating on you.

Lvl 20 MIGHT work, but even then weapons options are limited. I think a better option is to ensure that magic weapons now drop pretty much everywhere, and frequently.

- 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.

Any Dev can answer is this going to further limit Headshot capability?
Because I can HS Wyvern, Lycanthropes, Fire Lords in Plane of Fire, etc. I assume anything Bipedal a head atop their shoulders usually could be HS. This looks to put each of those things in their own category. This definitions makes it look like literally only player character models.

In Magic: the Gathering, creatures can have multiple types. So you can end up with a Zombie Fish, a Human Soldier, etc. Such a system here would be handy to facilitate headshot with Centaurs (I mean cmon) and giants.

Gosh I wish we operated under M:tG rules. Things sure would make more sense. I have a bear tribal EDH deck and am oh-so-familiar with the compound creature types. Wolf bears, bear spirits, the famous Human Bear Druid (Werebear).

So, to my knowledge (from both documentation and super-secret behind-the-scenes sleuthing), the only compound body types we have are [body type]+No Corpse. We use these in situations such as when we don't want to clutter the ground with the corpses of raid adds. The lack of compound body types would also explain why a centaur is "magical" and not "human animal." Hope this helps illuminate the mysterious world of body types.

Given the theme of TOL shouldn't this all be marked as undead ? Vampires are undead are they not ?

The Greater Akhevan thing is a hold over of a body type from original Luclin and is confined to VT. Basically under the hood they are restricting what used to be a two body type system down to one, which is fine and makes things a lot more clear, though I like to think that some of the misclassified humanoids throughout the years add a lot of charm to the game (frogs in Time, gelatinous cubes, etc.).

Classifying Giants and certain magical creatures as not a subset of humanoids is a potentially big change for certain areas, expanding the definition of Summoned (Construct/Elemental) is a fairly decent buff to mages and druids over progression, and re-evaluating what is classified as Undead can make some drastic and unintended changes to zone or movement flow. For example, with Shades in ME/UP/KV now being undead (and in many cases See SOS) it makes crossing KV a lot more hazardous.

Additionally, this reductionist approach may have some major effects on certain banes in early expansions, though this isn't a particularly huge deal, Shissar (Emp) and Seru banes are in a way part of beating those bosses and without specific body types for those mobs, it might affect balance of those events. Other specific racial banes on weapons may need to be re-evaluated, as well as some spells and effects that target only one sub-type of enemies (charm ring for gnolls in TSS, etc.)

All in all I'm certainly always up for additional clarity in these things, but nuance may also be somewhat required to keep a lot of situations correctly balanced around these changes.

This change is fine, but please at the same time change An Audience With Brell's loot container to drop 4 items and 4 armor drops like all the other raids before it. It's a long shot, but it would be appreciated.


Please also consider expanding out what headshot and assassinate can hit as they are already niche abilities that are wonky to use (at least before where live servers are). Original assassinate made sense with how it was limited as it was nothing more then a complete gimmick with no actual real use and was added in Kunark when classes had tons of useless pointless flavor abilities.

I can say for sure being able to assassinate the fabled VT mobs would have been nice because every fight was 5-6 minutes of autoattacking and otherwise watching my merc cast heals on me.

maybe a few more "types" needs to be added to remove some of the issues instead of just "removing the distinction on magic/non-magic weapons? like humanoid hybrid or humanoid animal for centaurs and "lesser undead" which aren't magic requiring (for the low level zombies, mummies and decaying skeletons) and then "spice it up" with the normal "a skeleton" being magical" as well as the usual suspects like a ghoul and a wisp.

for your VT shade issue... make them "greater shades" ? and make a distinction between those and normal "undead" shades?

another thing... plants shouldn't they be under "non-magical" as way, as they are natural things? and not magical beings?

On thesteelwarrior way back, I remember a warrior mentioning as a newbie he had to do a quest to get magic boots, so he could complete another quest that required a greater drop from a willow wisp.
He had to kick it to death because it was the only magic item he had.

I think either making newbie weapons magic, or as others have suggested preventing low level mobs from the magic restriction would be good.

I was expecting there to be something about new Classic-era achievements in this patch. It's on the roadmap for April.

Dang so Mischief and Thornblade gonna miss the xp bonus from the memorial day event for OoW?

Well there already is (or was) damage modifiers in place by body types. Just like skin to vines turned an npc into a plant and slashing weapons do more damage to plants. Blunts to skeletons, etc.

Headshot and Decapitate need to not use "body type" and just have a flag added that can be 1 or 0. That would alleviate any past/future issues with the abilities and mob type designations. I'm not sure about any restrictions on Assassinate, but the same can be done there if needed. Finishing Blow could have one as well. Doing this will solve all sorts of past/present/future issues with the massive hits. For example: going back and completing the ranger epic 2.0 and the mob that needs to be held at a given %.. set so Assasinate, Headshot, Decapitate, and FB can't activate on them. There's other events where a significantly high hit will outright break the script. That becomes a bit "dangerous" when it comes to some raid events (where you do want these abilities to work) but can be addressed with a level range check or a max hit cap.

I'm not happy with the proposed schedule change for mischief/thornblade either.

My spouse and I made plans months ago around the posted schedule for that weekend involving her heading out of town for a workshop and me consuming ample amounts of coffee and pizza while playing EQ. The following weekend she'll be back around and I won't have the free time to play. I'm sure others have made similar plans. Many of us are old now and have families and actually plan things unlike 20 years ago when we just played whenever we wanted.

Losing the XP bonus long weekend (typical for Memorial Day weekend) turns the dagger even more.

If the concern is the login queue due to the new servers, perhaps you can level lock characters to 1 and launch those a week early so that the login queue / character creation is reduced on launch day. If not this year, maybe future years. People have long asked to be able to create characters early.

Did you add 12 new pet buff slots too (Bringing the total up to 97)?

I haven't been able to get enough buffs on my test-pet to tell for sure or not, but I'm pretty sure you did; confirmation would be nice this go-around to help custom UI authors bug-proof their content going forward.

I'm guessing based on the "You can't remove this effect." Spam I'm getting when clicking empty space that shouldn't exist in my custom window, which isn't occurring in my buff, song, or target windows from last months patch to those.

Consider my mind well messed with! Well played devs... well played.

Seems apparent to me that with Labor day weekend falling from 5/28-5/30, and probably an exp bonus weekend at that, they probably are worried that Mischief, which is very high population, is going to end up with login queues and angry players.

I think the fact that guards cannot kill invulnerable decaying skeletons is a late April Fool's joke. It is pretty funny.

I like the idea of the body type fix - makes things far more logical. But it may cause some unexpected effects for things that were tuned prior to the fix.

Any Devs able to confirm if this will negatively impact Headshot and other skills that relied on "humanoid" in order to work.