Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

Agreed. I think SOE could have resolved the issue of SK swarming by simply nerfing the heck out of mortal coil, but after doing additional parsing this weekend, as far as grouping goes I am more comfortable with the hit limits that were put on Lich Sting, Leechcurse and the BP clicks than I was a week ago - even for those 'oh, SNAP' moments. I don't like the approach SOE took to the issue, and I wouldn't mind having them increased to provide more of a buffer, but it doesn't look like SOE picked the numbers out of thin air.

[We are only in RoF T2 raid content , so I will defer to others on potential raiding impact, but I don't see any immediate red flags.]

We'll see - but looks better than I was thinking it would last week.

Make people quit so that all the money in eq next get made back, well you hope! End gamers in eq enjoy the game but take away how many player freely enjoy your game rather then a solution was silly! You can hope gold subscription go play eq next rather then put money to pathing. like one tech said it would cost to much !! Between eq next and that maybe it would !!
Now swarming n instant kills take the casual gamer out !! The everyday guy that does it is why this is gone!
I am shocked a petition got ignored about this topic before the patch. why I petition to be ignored ??
Locking that spell to a instance or raids! ( erelivent) make zerks , rogues , ranger a faster rate of killing wouldn't hurt make sure it's cut to the melee range abilities not spells so mass killing does t happen .. Sk your swarm is lag lol unless u cut mobs and like a beam the more for the minute the better!!
Only posted again because I had iPhone page not closed yet. Take care guys hope stuff works out !

I have UTTERLY no sympathy. 30-40k beaming, ya that's about the standard, but that's 30-40k PER HEAD per beam, which is like 150-200k PER BEAM, lets say you at the min, do 2 beams an hour, that's 400k, which is equal to a Krono, which is bought for $18. highest min wage in the USA is in Washington state at $9.32 an hour. your making almost twice that. THAT is why beaming needs to be nerfed, its disgusting. Alas its also why beaming should stay from a bissness standpoint, beamers probably are the greatest draw in getting people to buy kronos.

I do, and always have Plvled for truly reasonable sums, aka, not much more then I could make myself if I were strictly looting corpses constantly throughout the entire time, if someone wants to donate more in grattitde that's fine, but its just horrible that people are being allowed opertunitys to make more "money" playing EQ then the Janitor at sony probably makes scrubing the toliets. Or the dev (though I have no idea how much they make) does for reading this stuff on the forum.

I didn't really notice anything today. Probably because my main is max AA, my alts are close to it and I don't beam, HS, or really swarm. I have not opted in on anyone yet.

So yah...today was just...Wednesday. I didn't stop my clocks when this patch went live, like some of y'all.

I did the auto-grant. so now I have a couple 100 AA that I did not have before. I would have never assigned them there. if I had xtra AA they go in glyphs; at least some benefit would be gained.
I might as well idle my toon until the next expansion, so I can be auto-granted a few 100 HOT AA.
I have a paid up subscription. I am not happy. no biscuit for soe. do I have the option to suspend my account for, lets say till next expansion. tia

You make no sense. You're unhappy you got free AA's in spot you would have never filled in and that is going to cause you to quit? Obviously since it was a couple hundred you are already past the bonus, so why are you complaining?

Now if you where complaining that they nerfed several classes to cut back on mass killers so they can sell their 85 characters we would understand. Because the excuse of the server issues due to swarming just went out the window with the server instability yesterday and today.

Oh the irony of releasing a counter-lag patch only to have your servers noticeably more laggy and unstable after it goes live. Way to go SOE, another swing and a miss.

On the plus side, there is no plus side! It still takes hours to find a group (spent 3 hours yesterday until a guildie saved me from mental insanity). My fallback of HSing in the always dead zone (still dead) of F2 was excruciating as HS procs maybe once every 50-55 seconds on average. I'd rather cut my arms with razer blades than spend hours trying to HS for 5% AA exp per kill. Any soloing of current or near-current content was only achievable by bow kiting (also excruciatingly slow). Add on top of all of that the server lagginess and random Runtime errors when zoning that I didn't get before the patch and I'd say this patch has been a bust for me.

I'll keep playing until my gold expires and hold onto a Krono in case things get better. I hope so but if this patch is any indication of the competency of the dev team, then all hope is lost.

yes, because "an issue with server stability right now" means "an issue with server stability FOREVER".

Read it again, where did I say that it did? The fact they rolled out this patch as a fix for the lag-causing abuse is laughable when you consider that the servers are even laggier. I have no doubt they will (probably) be fixed over time but I'm not going to pay them to work out the bugs like they should have done before forcing this patch through.

This does somewhat lend to the claim many people made about the old servers being the problem as opposed to the abuse. The abuse is gone by-in-large and yet servers are worse off? What would the cause be if be if not aging equipment or a really rushed patch?

where did i say that you said that?

it's funny in a comedic irony sort of way, but not in the way you're implying.

no, it really doesn't - all this does is prove once again the fact that many of us know and have known for quite a while - that a lot of people who read these forums and post their bleating little snipes understand less than nothing about coding or network architecture.

a fun little anecdote from back in the day i always like to share regarding this subject:
back in the late 90's i used to play MUDs (text-based grand-fathers to EQ) and for a while i was a content designer in a particular MUD.
i was creating a new dungeon area, and tinkering with figuring out how to make it so that a mob could have a weapon equipped but then not actually drop the weapon as loot (for lore purposes, it was a lightning bolt).
anyways, point is, in creating a flag that would make the item poof when the mob died, it caused all mobs in the game code flagged as 'smurf' (don't ask) to hit for like 97 times their normal damage - and made the 'dragonkin' PC race breath attack do 25 less damage.
that took me like 3 weeks to finally figure out the linked tables that randomly decided to talk to each other and cause completely unrelated pieces of the code to flip out because of one little change i made.
that was in a C++ programmed environment that had oh maybe 25,000 lines of code in total.
did you know EQ has something like... what is up to now, about 8 million? and its original source code language is just as old and prone to fits of utter insanity as old MUDs, which is what EQ is based on.

point being, random things going -up any time they change something is such an expected behavior i'm frankly stupefied it doesn't happen more often, and it's got nothing to do with malice or incompetence on the part of the devs.

OK, I thought that the granted aa's would not count against the total aa's, but they do. I got a grand total of 3 aa's for repo, and 8's for TGE. before patch i was getinng 13 for repo and 39 for TGE NM i was getting 8 and now 2, So TA's are a thing of the past. I was lucky that i put most of my aa's in newer expansions so i effectively got 3300 additional so not i am at 5750 aa's. Experience is also very hard to get as i was soloing 15 yellows at lvl 100 and got 1 pct increase. so why not wait pay 30$ get 4k aa's and a lvl 85 char and go for it! it will take you a year to get to 100 now! my 2 cents

While that does make me respect the work the devs do much more, and I thank you for your anecdonte, I stand by the fact that they rolled out a patch with an expected result (less lag) and got the opposite (more lag). That sounds like situational irony to me, if nothing else.

That whole, unexpected results of putting in new fixes thing does happen, it is true. Is a really big hole in that whole argument though, it is called 'testing'. Ideally, you don't decide to drop a patch on top of all your servers without giving it a good run through. Now, SOE is rather infamous for forgetting to do this, sometimes barely having it on test a week before shoving it down everyone else's throats.

You can't tell me, with all this fix lag and server stability issues that the MEGA NERF was supposedly addressing, that it didn't occur to anyone that this shouldn't be at the top of the list. In fact, I can't imagine this ever not being at the top of the list, servers being up so people can play and keep desiring gold accounts seems pretty damn important. But a patch promising to fix these issues? So yes, while fix one issue, cause 10 new issues isn't anything new with development, this is just sad.

Everquest is broken.... Please fix

Now we have moved from large lag spikes that happened every 1-2 hours to small lag spikes that happen every 30 seconds to 1 minute.

You have taken away all the things cool about many classes.

Cleric shining ramp nerf just sucks! terrible idea.

SK Epic changes was hard to tell cause for sure but cast time on epic seems to have been changed so it is interrupted more no. That may have been the wacked lag I was having last night. Not sure if it was related to claims on AA's and Achievements. My SK is gear so well and max aa that I couldn't even tell if anything else was off. I'm sure for the group player who's epic is the only thing between them a bad pull and death will suffer the most. Little guy gets crapped on again.

Zerk decap nerf is only going to hurt the little guy. Pretty much your screwed if your in group gear, my zerk in raid gear was dominating group kills in POS last night was a nice DPS boost for the most part.

Ranger HS nerf is just dumb you have nerf HS so many times honestly its one of the only fun things about playing a ranger. I'm glad I quit mine awhile ago after logging in last night on 3 dif level rangers HS just sucks you have limited the ability to self level and forced people to buy your stupid heroics I guess.

Rogues have sucked so long only the truly dedicated play them crapping on the few that had the skill to mass pull and assassinate was just low and un called for.

Mage nerf I didn't beam pull before cause I didn't think it was worth it because of risk vs reward. It was easier just to grind exp out and level up. Took to long to pull and make it all happen perfect but those out there that could pull it off with out disruption of others should have been left alone. Wizards should have been brought on par a long time ago with mages as I have said before.

Stop making classes crapper make them cooler.

I'm still up on the fence trying to decide what I want to do. Play through or take a break or quit and play something else. The past year has been one of the most enjoyable years in Everquest I have had in a long time. The choice to force me to play Everquest the way you want instead of the way I want is weighing heavy on me. This weekend I am going to put the game to the test and see how bad most of the nerfs and changes are going to hit me and the decide.

I know the changes were made with the intention and belief that they would make the game better. Maybe they will, I disagree with this notion.

Giving away free aa's was just crappy for years we have seen nerf after nerf to change ways we were able to gain aa or help others only to have you decide to give them away. At least when we were giving TA's and mass killing or doing OMM we were earning them.

Please just start selling higher expac raid coins in the market place, more LoN gear for SC and TA's to events you can't get groups for, maybe some collection items and what every else to ruin the game further. I know all of these things happen everyday on every server player to player but you know what that's part of what makes EQ so fricken cool is the world has is own economy, its own you unique rules that have evolved not forced on us.

We may have been in Your "World" 15 years ago~ But you are in "Our World" now so make some good content and leave us the hell alone!

I wouldn't put much stock in server stability right after such sweeping changes. I'd not be a bit surprised if every beamer and swarmer in the game had all gone and gotten instances just to swarm unkillable clumps and see if they could still kill like that

a really big hole in that whole argument though, is called "there is literally, physically, no possible way to test how 100,000 players at once will make servers lag when nothing you did in the code touched any of the systems that can cause lag."

god, i KNOW right!? and our jboots are slower too!

absolutely true... except for the part where it is ridiculously and frankly hilariously not even remotely true.

the changes to SK abilities do absolutely NOTHING to the SK class playstyle in any capacity, at any tier of play - that is what the math showed before the patch, and that is what every single parse and anecdote that has come out from every SK since the patch went live has shown..
nobody in any grouping or raiding circumstance has had any lifeleech ability drop earlier than its full duration due to hit counters... so, you can just stop with that little bit of being completely and utterly wrong about something.
(not just you, but everyone talking about SKs - the patch did nothing to the SK play style except make it so that high end geared people can no longer solo an entire currentish content zone at once)

removing game-breaking mechanics so that you can allow classes to have more expanded ability sets IS making them cooler.

which you're welcome to do, but know that you're objectively wrong.

The problem is SK's got off easy. We can still pull 50 mobs and not have an issue. Rogues, Zerkers and Rangers have lost this whole play style. You have to to realize that this was people preferred style of play and it is shell shock when it takes you as long to kill one mob now then it did to kill 15-25 mobs before.

Serious lag issues caused by this patch??

i do understand and appreciate that, which is why i'm not commenting on rogue zerker or ranger abilities - i'm not qualified to speak on that matter, just as gobs of people aren't qualified to speak on matters related to the SK class and so should stop doing so.