Necro and SK have been using Eye of Zomm for lifetaps in EQ for a long time since original Velious expansion as an important part of their toolbox, but it seems a recent patch broke this mechanic. All spells will only hit the eye of zomm for 1 damage, making it no longer viable to lifetap an eye.
Only the actual damage done will be shown now. If you take a 120 SK with a 2 hander to a newbie zone, you'll be hitting for under 20 dmg per swing- only doing their life total and not 1 damage more. Same with NPCs your own level who are at 0% - 1% when you get the kill- the damage will be almost nothing. So technically it's working as intended, and I hate when they take cool things away as well, but I think we all know you weren't intended to be lifetapping the eye.
If tapping eyes wasn't intended, then why was it left a certain way for more than 20 years only to be suddenly changed now? It would be strange if the devs actually intended to nerf such a defining mechanic at this point. I am hoping they just did not consider the impact of the recent change on this. The utility of holgresh elder beads for Necro & SK was always there, and there was nothing game breaking about it, so why take it away after so long? I understand the intention behind the changes they made to damage, but the eye of zomm mechanic should be restored to work as it did. Rather than just write it off as collateral damage, I'm sure they could increase the hp on eyes or do some other workaround to restore this mechanic.
Don't forget that they left in illusion and shrink through locked doors for 20 years as well, and that surely was not intended. I'm not here to take sides but I think you should prepare for the worst, which means accepting they won't be changing it back.
Yeah, I understand where you are coming from, and it would be unfortunate if they don't bring it back. I don't think this is something that is comparable to by-passing locked doors though, which was a bug that gave access to spots players normally wouldn't have access to. Eye of Zomm received a lot of tuning in the past. It used to aggro mobs, it was also possible to /pet attack eyes to position pets for pulls using pet & bind sight. All of that was removed many many years ago. The utility of life tapping the eyes was always known, so if it was ever a problem for the devs, they simply could've made the eye to be unkillable by PCs when they did all those other changes.
This is a pretty big nerf to utility for these classes. It was by no means a game breaking utility, so it would be nice to have it back
It could have been that they couldn't fix the issue until now or they decided that the work to fix it was enough and the gains that players got was low enough made it not worth fixing. Ether way I don't see it as coming back as I don't see how it can be intended to summon an eye over and over again for life taps being intended.
It's not like anyone could do this rapidly. I'm pretty sure the fastest Eye clicky that doesn't have a lengthy cooldown is 4 seconds cast time. The main utility for it is self healing when there are no other hostile targets available.
The issue isn't how fast they can do it and besides from what I see the fastest one is instant click with no refresh. The problem would be the self healing from a tap spell when you are out of combat and at 0 risk. If they wanted self healing for those classes I would expect them to get a self heal spell not use a combat spell to do it out of combat.
I'd be curious to know what item (that is Necro and/or SK usable) is instant click with no refresh... (because I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist) The biggest complaint I have is that I'm fairly sure this was an unintended nerf. If it was at least communicated that this would be happening, that would be somewhat more palatable.
Clever interactions like this are the bread and butter that make the game good. Changes like this just serve to make the game experience increasingly bland year after year.
This long standing mechanic was an Easter egg, which are fun to initially discover and are interesting to pass along to new players. Easter eggs add depth to the game, intentionally designed or not. Perhaps the proper fix would be to scale up the total hit points of the eye with the level of the caster, in a semi-random dice-roll fashion. That way lifetap damage would not exceed total HP of the eye in order to make the game developers happy and the players may continue to have fun with rare utility clickies.
Just because something has been in the game forever doesn't make it a good feature. This being fixed is an improvement.
We did not target Eye of Zomm with this change to damage. The target was other behavior. We do not want you gaining more health from a lifetap than you do in damage, unless the spell is specifically designed as such. We are not reversing this change.
The fact that this has been this way for like 20 years and not one designer, programmer corrected this until now is why many players dont believe you guys play the game. If what you are saying is true, have none of you ever been in a raid or heard in guidlchat that this was going on? Heck I never play necros and I heard of this before I took my break from the game. Things like this that was in progress for MULTIPLE years and then get dusted off with a sentance seems very trival.
While I'm not defending the lack of communication and intent here, a plausible scenario is that this was a known bug for years... decades even... But it was so minor, that it was simply never worth the effort to address. Quite likely that nobody even came up with a workable solution. This much larger change to the combat system and the way damage is calculated and reported was being done for purely unrelated reasons, and as a side-effect, a long-standing "bug" was fixed; developers considered it a bonus. Yeah, it sucks that a useful mechanic was changed, but it's a pretty sensible change, honestly.
They tend to go out of their way to leave bugs like this in the game as long as they're not too over powered just to make players happy. But there's zero reason to go out of their way to put the bug back after it being addressed as a side effect to another change.
