PBAE spells on test now only hit a max of 30 mobs

And on the DIKUMud statement of mine, which is absolute fact can be evidenced from over a decade ago from interviews: https://www.engadget.com/2011-04-19-the-game-archaeologist-plays-with-muds-the-games.html among others - some others include direct references that can be seen easily by players like the generic "You may have ruined your lands, but you'll not ruin mine!" which is one of DIKUMud's default NPC aggro messages.

On zone crashes/player crashes on early Naggies - if you can actually deal with the terrible color selections in this geocities site from 2001, you can see it was a known issue that was STILL a worry to watch out for, https://www.geocities.ws/naeadilmistwolf/Lordnagafenguide.html

I pray for us to return to the days when those that don't know anything either a) hedge their statements appropriately with "I think..." or otherwise indefinites or b) learn to shut their gums when they don't know the topic. Sadly in this day and age of engagement being rewarded, it's unlikely to reverse any time soon until advertisers and other sources of monetization demand they're not associated with poor quality information pretending to be real data.

Everyone can think of examples of massive adds but no one ever gives actual hard numbers to support the claim that its over 30.

As far as raids go then the oposition to this nerf is just as much about the reduced ability to clear trash effeciently, but you are right - it seem noone actually went to count all the piggies (myself included).
I guess we will find out once the nerf goes live (and I have no doubt that it will).

It's really hard to argue that the original designers of the game intended for things like kiting (snare, fear, etc) to be a thing when they openly admit in >> interviews << things like the original design for bards was to be an "awful solo" class and exclusively a group-based class. The irony is the way they made the class resulted in one of the single most powerful solo classes in the game at the time. You gave them AE DoTs, snare, faster running abilities than anything else in the game and you're telling me they were actually designed to be terrible solo? Ok, yeah, you definitely knew what you were doing . And you're going to argue these guys DEFINITELY intended on kiting to be a thing? I have a bridge to sell you, great price, you interested?

Or how about the very same guy talking about having to split Guk in half and create two zones, keep mob polygons down, limit the mob types in zones all due to memory concerns in the game. Yeah, he definitely also intended for a class to pull unlimited amounts of mobs in a confined area, lock them down, and kill them all at once when he was designed basically all the original spells.

The leaps of illogical steps you need to take to willfully believe that devs actually intended for mass PB AEs or kiting to exist while you have interviews clearly showing their naivety and novice like design intentions is baffling. Heck, Brad McQuaid himself never intended for "camping" to exist. The intent was to crawl through dungeons. Hence, dungeon crawl. Like I said, they were shooting at the hip half the time and the evidence is there on display with multiple interviews.

This game gets nerfed more and more every year and loses its charm slowly.

unintended consequences. Take my fun away and what brings me back to the game? eventually nothing.

AEing in the 2nd floor of Time, was probably one of the coolest things I ever got to do as a Wizard.

ok. you mean Phase 5? Are you suggesting you can't do that anymore or just making a statement?

I'm just hoping little game play mechanics like that in raids don't go away with this change. I should have probably been more clear in my post. As a Wizard in a raiding guild AE encounters is where you got to flex a bit (and hopefully not die). Other than that, your AE spells take a backseat to your rains, lures, single-target. Changes like this may weaken already "under preforming" classes to the point where no one wants/needs them at all *cough* rogue *cough* But that's just my opinion.

Why would it? As-is, until LDoN I've never seen anyone consider pulling the entire wave at once anyhow since the PBAE stun that will actually hit them is a LDoN spell.

I feel like there is alot of underlying schadenfreude here about unnamed raid trash.
Many AEs in raids like beams and such already had caps.

There is so much concern trolling about "those raids that cannot be done without unlimited AE", but just about zero mention of which raids those are, much less gigantic lists of how raiding isn't possible without unlimited AE.....

This also won't phase tlp, they can already roflstomp every raid with 25% of the players that were originally needed.

Bottom line, none of this is some game breaking exploit. The sad part is, they will nerf some AE pulls which also effects normal players like me who like to PL my own toons, and not even catch or ban bots, take care of all the duping WHICH HAPPENS ON EVERY SERVER. And anyone who has a rudimentary understanding of how this game client works will tell you, that there will always be a duper or hacker, its the nature of the game. The least they could do is take an active role. I understand paying even 1 extra employee to enforce those rules is tough on small game companies, but I have myself reported bots in guk as recent as Oakwynd and watched them pull for weeks on end without logging. I have even seen people with screenshots of their millions of plat on Aradune, Mischief, Yelinak, FV, etc. Then another screenshot 2 weeks later with close to the same amount, on the same account.....without being banned. buying krono's for weeks and tanking markets. This isnt some story, these are hard facts. So when I see them working on making an AOE pull smaller, its laughable at best, and negligent at worst

People forget that the original EQ Team never even thought they would get so many players. It is mentioned in old interviews with Brad McQuaid also. They were surprised at the "unintended use" of game mechanics, and thought many were quite clever.

A few off the top of my head: There are many, many more.

-- Initially there were no spell level resists - they were brought in after a whole bunch of low levels brought down a sand giant in oasis with dots and nukes.

- the whole you needing to do >50% dmg to get full exp, because necros could FD and AFK at low-blue con camps and their pet would kill the mobs...for hours (Pets had the owner's faction then, so mob would aggro on it) - sure no loot, but nice exp over night.

-- Kiting was never an expected game play. So much so the DoT damage was reduced if the mob was moving and chasing you. Druids were hosed by this, and the necro snare+fear kiting became immensely popular (Note that in TLPs these don't happen anymore, unless it is some very hard hitting mob.. Player power creep has made it irrelevant).
-- Mage pets could not wield weapons. Necro pets would. A necro pet with 2 fine-steel daggers was amazing and would rip through sol B kobolds (remember this is when a meh-group - which was most groups - would wipe in sol-b past the entrance). This was because pet would use the FS dagger delay (18) and it's innate damage. The fix was for pets to ignore weapon delay (Late sep/oct 99?) and would only take/use the weapon damage IF it was higher than it's innate damage.
-- Then came kunark - one weapon (tantor's tusk?) which had a very high delay, but also high damage became the go-to for pet weapons. This was addressed by making many non-equippable by pets.

-- There were no loot messages. You have to accept whatever the person who looted the dead named (person in your group) said it dropped. Imagine raid drops being handled this way for a long time!

-- At one point /ran and /em had the same color (when you could not change the chat colors) - this was changed soon for obvious reasons, but not before many cheated rolls to get items.

-- FD pulling (by monks) was not an expected game play either as per devs in those days.

On the topic at hand - I am only curious as to the reasoning behind this change now. Surely it can not be a random dev going "hey guys I think we should limit PBAE dmg to say 30 mobs!" and everyone going "yes, do it!"....

I haven't read through most of this thread, so I will just ask this question blindly. Are AOE powerleveling crews on TLP's viewing this change negatively or are they operating just fine with it?

IF they really wanted to fix this they could simply do what is in effect in HoH... mobs poof back to their spawn point if there are too many of them in one spot.. prevents huge train pulls BUT you can still get decent acceptable sized pulls... no need to nerf anything, just add that feature to all the problem zones... it will keep raids working as intended

Behold the majesty. https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=3579

There are no raids which are not doable with these changes. Claiming raids need to "work as intended" is disengenuous.

I enjoyed levelling my guys using ae methods in various zones, but the game is better off with this change

The new limits will have some effect on the PL action but almost no effect on other players.