So this morning I decide to take it easy and set up camp in my favorite grind spot - the beach in Morell's Castle. I start clearing, and pull a few seawitches. Get them to camp, and my SK gets mezzed! Next thing I know my Cleric is mezzed too! These mobs are now casting "Misleading Flash Rk. II". They never casted this before Rain of Fear launch. I've spent hours upon hours upon hours at this camp since HoT release and have never been mezzed by those mobs, only the nameds. I even went back and loaded old log files from just a couple months ago, and these NPC's were definately not casting this spell then. Code: [Wed Dec 05 09:01:31 2012] a seawitch begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:01:42 2012] a sea sorceress begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:02:00 2012] a seawitch begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:02:09 2012] a seawitch begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:02:11 2012] a sea sorceress begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:02:42 2012] a seawitch begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:02:48 2012] a sea sorceress begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:03:12 2012] a seawitch begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II> [Wed Dec 05 09:03:14 2012] a sea sorceress begins to cast a spell. <Misleading Flash Rk. II>
must be a level thing, though i could see this with VoA release not 10 levels later, they arent level 96 plus mobs. Slayer stereotyping might have reminded the mobs they are chanters and reset their spell books with 91 plus spells (that werent out when they were first released)
NPCs have any spell available for their given level for their archetype, so if the mob is over the existing level cap when a new expansion comes out, any higher level spells will automatically be available to cast by that NPC. They were not specifically added to them, it was an automatic thing.
This is happening to me in SS, too. I have a high level tank and I can't resist the mez AT ALL! This stinks. Take this mez out.
This shouldn't happen, the content was tuned without those spells being used, players coming up through that content now are going to have a hell of a job beating some of the zone trash, let along the named.
*bump* Sony, this has to stop. You never go back to fix bugs in old zones but you're content to let old mobs suddenly get overpowered?
As much as I hate to say, this usually happens after every expansion. *Wonders how they deal with it on the progression servers*
This only happens to a very small amount of mobs. Only those that are over the level cap of the previous expansion are affected, and the majority of them are only 1-2 levels over the cap anyway, not even the full 5 levels so most of the "better" spells they don't even get.
They weren't over the level cap of last expansion (VoA) tho. They were DB and LB at 95. And for MC it's a good chunk of mobs, not "a very small amount".
The Satyrs in the coutyard in SS cast mez now as well. (I don't remember them doing it before.) It's interesting to have the tank mezzed on inc for 20+ seconds.
these mobs you guys are mentioning all conned white and yellow when hot 90 was cap, the ones that conned yellow are going to get the spell upgrades when new spells become available for those levels with level increase on expansion releases. They have always automatically done this as far as i can recall.
The spell you mentioned in your original post is a level 91 spell Rorce, which means they have had it available to cast since VoA went live. It mezzes up to level 98, so once you get to 99 you should be all right. Prior to VoA they would have cast Baffling Flash Rk. II, which is level 88 and mezzes up to level 93. Can you look in your logs and see if they were casting this? As far as I am aware they control which spells are cast by which NPCs with a certain value in the spell file, and to the best of my knowledge these spells have this value and shouldn't be being cast. It is possible something broke with regards to this restriction.
I'll make this short story long... There are two ways an NPC knows what spells to cast (well, three, but I'm ignoring special scripts for this discussion). Unless told otherwise, all caster NPCs will pick spells through an arcane method determined by code, which often leads to things like NPCs that infinitely cast some version of Tash or constantly summon terrible old enchanter pets whenever one dies. This is, basically, the way NPCs have chosen spells since 1999. Some years ago we added something we call spell lists to NPCs. An NPC with a spell list will pick from that list rather than the default method. This allows us a lot of customization. It let's us set a level range of NPCs that will have a chance to know a spell, what there chance to know it is and even set resist values and other such things. So we can set up, say, werewolf clerics to cast different spells than vampire clerics (though I don't imagine you would see either in EQ...). We have what we call generic spell lists. So if you make a Cleric NPC, say a Human, and you don't need a special list of spells but you don't want the 1999 spell choices, then you can attach the generic spell list to your cleric and move on. However, when reviewing these spell lists this year, I saw that they hadn't been updated in a very long time. If I remember correctly, they hadn't been updated for about 4 expansions. So level 90 NPCs didn't have access to any spells over level 70 (I think that was the highest they had). So I updated the lists. Not very many NPCs actually use the generic spell lists. Specialized lists are much better at achieving what we want to do and giving them the kind of flavor they need. This will certainly make some of those NPCs a little harder. And there may indeed be some spells on there that need adjustment or removal. I'll review what you've posted here in a few hours, after another long, boring meeting I have to go to in a few minutes. A
This proves what I have said for years. Sony doesn't play its own game. You'd think somewhere in the dev cycle someone INSIDE SOE would notice this. The fact that it slipped by tells me no one there plays the game with any seriousness.
Absor thank you for taking the time to explain all of that, it is greatly appreciated. Is there anything we can do to aid the process? Perhaps submit a /feedback or a /bug? I know this thread won't always be here .
I didn't add any rank 3 spells, as far as I know, to the generic spell lists. So this is something done by the designer of that zone. A
