Test Update 03/07/2023 - Patch Notes and Discussions

But 99,000 divided by 33,000 is still 3, before and after the 90,000 base class is still the same 3 times as powerful as the 30,000 with a 10% increase to each.

The context of my post was Allayna saying hybrids double dip. If two players do 90k dps, but one does it purely with spells and the other does 45k spell and 45k melee its still the same gain.

I guess though your math is saying some classes have more dps than others so any % gain is a bad thing? Thats kind of antithetical to the whole idea of progressing.

My point was that if there is disparity before the 10%, from a pure mathematical perspective, a 10% increase to both widens the distance between them as a result.

Just based on a 10 minute parse comparing live Svann to test Svann there was 3.3% gain. That was with aria, warmarch, 4 dots, and self buffed with aas and disc. No other buffs since buff window was cleared when I did the copy. Meleeing a 120 dummy

Incorrect. It was a spell that summoned an invisible pet on every melee swing/spell cast, that ran a complicated script that checked multiple requirements (very slow performance wise) to determine if it would actually trigger the damage spell.

Incorrect. When it was an activated ability it was not checked on every melee swing/spell cast. It was only triggered once every 15ish? seconds, and even then, only if you were hitting the button as soon as it refreshed, which many players did not do because it wasn't great damage. It was an absolute performance loss when it was changed to a proc.

It has nothing to with whether it is triggered from a spell or a melee hit. The performance problem is a factor of two things: 1) the complicated script that needed to run to determine whether the damage should actually apply, and 2) how often that script was being triggered.

This change eliminates that entirely by just making it a focus effect that is cached. No, it is not a silver bullet that will fix all lag everywhere, but reducing the number of procs, which are a major source of lag, is always a step in the right direction.

No it benefits them exactly the same. If pallys got 10% only for their melee while wizards got 10% for everything they do it would benefit the pally far less.

edit: after thinking about it Im guessing you were just playing a joke. Haha yea you got me. Since pallies mostly just take a beating it wont help them much will it?

Can we get rid of auras in the traditional sense and make them more like shaman "aura"...since we're getting rid of invisible pets.

That is still an aura just behaves different than the other ones as the invisible pet part is still there.

I would consider it a bug, and that it should be posted in the test bug thread. The reward should be equal for all; if they chose the wrong melee SPA, then it's a bug that needs to be fixed.

This is incorrect on two counts. First off, the virtual pet summon had a 10s cooldown (data is in Lucy, you can look it up for yourself), so even in the passive system the banestrike status couldn't be checked more than once every 10s. Banestrike damage couldn't be applied more than once every 45s, because that was the shortest interval if you had max'ed the AA. The logic wasn't going to "check multiple requirements" for calculating the damage while it was still on those timers. Second, it has to run the "complicated script" to check to hit on every swing or cast even if there was no eligible banestrike bonus. The small incremental performance hit of adding the banestrike check to that logic was more than offset by reducing the 31 different banestrike spells in the active system down to one in the passive system. I didn't design this system, Prathun did, so you could always ask him. Oh wait...

And who was pressing the button?? Answer: only melee were pressing the button, because casters said it did nothing for them. It worked on DD only, the inclusion of DoTs and nukes didn't happen until the passive system was implemented, which was nearly SIX YEARS after the banestrike button was first introduced. Interesting fact: if you go back and read all the announcements for RoF, and in particular read the patch notes from when RoF first went live, the word "banestrike" is never mentioned. All any of it says is that the then-new "skill slayer" achievements can unlock some special AAs, without any explanation of what they'll do or how it works. For the first year, players didn't seem to care one whit about how it worked, all of the forum threads focused on where to go to kill the most X mobs the fastest. (We're now coming full circle on that one.) If the passive system was such a big performance loss, we would have been having this discussion when it launched back in 2018, I think.

I fully agree. If you go back and look at my first post in this thread, you'll see me say "It had to be done." My issue isn't about eliminating the passive system, it's with the fact that what they have now is essentially a no-op, so why bother with it at all? I'm not nearly as min/max obsessed as some people who post here, and I'm not going to rush around and kill tens of thousands of greys just to complete the Slayer. I let them unlock naturally as my team progresses. I do think that level of obsession is going to create its own side-effect problems, and early evidence of that is already coming in. I can only imagine what is going to happen when this change is discovered on the TLP side.

Slayer raids and complaints of zone disruption.

Beimeith is not incorrect. Please stop posting false information.

On TLP I would think its ot a disruption at all, wouldn't people already be killing in these zones normally? I would suggest for TLP this is a benefit as you don't have to go back to grey cons to get slayer, but instead can benefit while you level normally.

Seems to me that this will cause more lag as there will be boatloads of people swarming old zones to get the new bonus. I imagine they might already do this, but if it isn't working this way now, please limit the amount of resources old zones can consume.

Tell me you don't know much about spells without telling me you don't know much about spells.

I'll grant you that I don't know the exact order of operations in how timers are checked, but given how several other parts of the combat system evaluate effects in order it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it did all of the requirement checks first and only at the end decided "oh there's a timer, better not execute".

I could be wrong about that, but that said, even when there is a timer the game still has to evaluate the timer, which means some aspect of it is being checked every swing/cast, even if the execution is being halted immediately before anything else.

I don't know why you keep repeating this because it's not correct. They didn't "reduce the 31 different banestrike spells down to one". It still is 31 different damage spells, except on Test where it isn't. Which spell is cast is determined by the script that runs which checks your level and launches a different spell. Having 1 spell or 31 spells or 31000 spells makes no difference in performance if you're just using a select case on the character's level.

The resource intensive part is comparing the race of the target against the list of races you were flagged for.

It was not made by Prathun. Also, I have talked to him since he left EQ, he is regularly active on Discord. I'm not sure why you think no one can talk to him, he didn't die or anything and he's really nice and usually willing to chat.

I don't know wtf you're talking about here. It wasn't just melee who used it, I had a hotkey with /alt activate for banestrike because I was a tryhard in those days. It's a fact that many players didn't bother with it because it wasn't very good, but it was never "only melee" like you keep implying.

It never "worked on DD only." It was always a spell that summoned the invisible pet that ran the script and cast the damage spell if the requirements were met. The only difference between the original version and the version on live was the original version used to be manually triggered via an AA and the current live version is a proc.

The new version is an actual change in how it functions which cuts out the complicated bits.

It's literally no different than any time something good is added to the game. The fact that players are excited / interested enough to go out and do old content they didn't bother with before is a benefit, not a negative. That fact that you, personally, don't care about it is only relevant to you.

Edit: As far as TLPs go, they can only get the first rank (2%) until GoD unlocks, at which point they can get 4%. They can't get the 7/10% ranks until Veil of Alaris iirc.

It's not a big deal.

Incorrect, grouped works, but not raid (at least for the table-flipper containers in Shards Landing)

I think what they are saying is they are double dipping as they are getting an increase to heals as well as DPS spells/melee.

I'm happier to see my beast getting improvement to her pet heal than her DPS.

I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but anyway...

The original active version had 2 AAs, one called Banestrike and one called Hastened Banestrike. The former was granted automatically the same as always, by completing your first Slayer achievement. It had 31 levels. That determined which level of the spell was invoked. It only got checked upon use of a melee weapon, a ranged weapon or a DD spell. So yes, it "worked on DD only". It worked like that for six years. The second AA was passive, and had three levels, which got ticked when each of the Slayer tiers was completed, just as now. Those three levels would reduce the recast timer from 60/55/50/45s, hence the name.

When the mechanic was converted to all passive, the 31 levels of Banestrike went away, and only the unlock of the first level remained. The Hastened Banestrike levels were folded in, becoming levels 2-4 of Banestrike, just as in the new system. The actual damage was calculated separately, because it was no longer just DD, it was being applied to DoTs and nukes for casters. The new system doesn't actually change anything about how the AA works, it's simply replacing a formulaic damage calculation based on player level with a flat %. By doing this it eliminates the need for a proc, and I think we all understand that part. What remains unexplained is the statement in the patch notes that it will now apply to "healing", which has never been done before, and no further details have been provided. I'm rather curious to know how that will be implemented if it isn't going to use a proc.

As for in-game application melee vs. caster, YMMV. In the original active system, max damage at player level 100 and AA level 31 was 32500 once every 60s. In my group this was deemed inconsequential in RoF content, either group or raid. Nobody was interested in grinding Slayer to reduce the recast by 25%. Where it did have some utility was as an aggro tool. That was melee-only, casters never want aggro. When the all-passive system first rolled out, there were immediate complaints about how there was no way to turn it off. Experienced casters were gaining aggro on raids with no idea how it was happening. Devs quickly responded to a separate complaint about how it broke root and treated that as a bug (more like a mea culpa) with a hotfix, but the issue of no longer having any player agency was ignored. People had to adjust their techniques as necessary.

I have always considered the passive system to be a nuisance and am happy to see the back of it, regardless of what impact it might have on lag. Again, YMMV.

Lol. The banestrike change will barely alter the dynamics of TLP's because most players are searching for gear, levels, aa's, quest, or plat. Does anyone really believe that a mage box team will ditch the Efreeti camp to kill slugs, mosquitoes, etc in Freeport sewers for achievements, or a group will abandon the Fungi camp to kill raptors for a damage boost? No. You can pick any expansion, and the same players will stick to the most sought after camps.

Most farmers won't even complete their epic because it cuts into their krono income. I tried to complete the slayer achievements on a TLP once, and I realized very quickly that my time could have translated into a lot of gear, plat, and krono for far less traveling than I had spent chasing down Norrath's creatures. I also inspected a lot of player's achievements, and none of them were even close to mine.

I'll tell you what I also learned. A lot of mobs don't even spawn in Norrath until PoP+ launches, and a lot of the new current expansion mobs require a group to kill. I still have a spreadsheet of mobs where I separated each mob via spawn density. A lot of zones will have just a few mobs of a particular type spawning in them. Kill two mobs, wait 30 minutes for respawn, and kill two more. Most banestrike achievements are handed out via regular group play, and this trend will continue indefinitely.

A second interesting fact about slayers achievements is related to faction. Whether you're a good race or an evil race, you will have to be conscience of your faction hits throughout this journey unless you're a necro, sk, or shaman with sky ring. How many players can call upon a box or friends to help them kill 1000's of good or evil races? You just killed 5000 good frogs in Upper guk easily. Guess who isn't getting their elf mask without a major undead froggy grind? How many players can solo giants for the 5000 giant achievement? Will a cleric seriously wait until PoP drops before he goes back to farm 5000 giants without too many issues? Will a cleric even care to get it? Probably not.

Anyway, I will be farming the achievements because I enjoy the relaxing grind. Everyone will marvel at my +% increase in damage, even though they won't be bothered to put the effort into doing it themselves. All hail my +10% damage increase 15 expansions down the road on the latest tlp.

No, that's not how it worked. It was an activated AA. You pressed the button (or /alt act) and it cast spell 37668 which summons the invis pet which checks the requirements and if you meet them, it casts the appropriate version of the spell based on your level. I linked the spell history from EQ resource. The functionality of that spell hasn't changed since 2013 (as far back as EQ Resource's spell history goes, you can look at Lucy for farther back, though there isn't a need to).

The 31 damage spells are IDs 37669-37699 I included links there so you can see nothing about them changed that affects their damage. PLAYERS NEVER CAST THESE SPELLS DIRECTLY. Not then, not now, not ever.

Here is some random log from 2014. Look at the name of the spell being cast. It's "Banestrike" NOT "Banestrike I" or "Banestrike XXXI" just "Banestrike" aka spell 37668, which summons the pet.

[Sun Oct 26 17:05:37 2014] Periden begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:15:58 2014] Littlelegs begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:15:59 2014] Scropio begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:16:03 2014] Solo begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:16:05 2014] Elkar begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:20:34 2014] Raylenee begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:20:46 2014] Cereal begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:20:57 2014] Abzaru begins to cast a spell. <Banestrike>
[Sun Oct 26 17:21:06 2014] <Banestrike> (This is from a bard)
[Sun Oct 26 17:21:10 2014] You begin casting Banestrike.

It didn't "get checked upon use of a melee weapon". You pressed the button to cast the spell. It was changed in July 2018 to be a passive AA that procs spell 37688 and was checked on melee, ranged weapon and DDs. Players complained it didn't work on DoTs, so the literal next patch, August 2018 it was changed to also proc from DoTs. It still casts the same spell, 37688 that summons the pet that runs the script that casts one of the 31 damage spells. That has always been the way it worked. All that changed from the original version to the current version is how it is triggered. It used to be triggered via AA button press or /alt act, now it is triggered as a proc. On Test that all goes away.

The damage comes from the above listed 31 spells. IT STILL DOES and will continue to do so until the change on Test changes it. It has never been "calculated" in the way you are talking about. It's always been a DD that is triggered via script that does a flat amount of damage. It has never been "applied" to DD or DoTs or anything else. It's always been a DD that does flat damage.

No. This is wrong. The new system removes the proc, removes the summoned pet, removes the script that causes lag, and removes the need for the 31 DD spells that do the damage. It replaces them with a focus effect similar to the luminous ice aug, which is how/why it will work on healing too.