September Patch Preview

What's one of the worst things about dying in EverQuest? For many of us it's having to reapply all of those clicky buffs that come on our gear. Ancestral Memories, Expanding Mind, Form of Defense, Grim Aura, Prismatic Ward. Every time you die you need to put all of those things back. It's kind of annoying. So we got rid of it.

Starting with the September 23rd Update, any time you use one of these "standard" item clicks, you will be given an appropriate passive AA that gives you the same effect, permanently. If you only wanted the stats from the buffs, you never have to activate the items again. If you decide you want to use the buff slots (to protect others from being dispelled, for example), you can still use your standard items to get "shadow" buffs that apply no effects but take up a slot. Here's a list of the lines that have been consolidated:

Ancestral Memories
Aura of Battle
Breath of Atathus
Expanding Mind
Form of Defense
Form of Endurance
Form of Protection
Form of Rejuvenation
Grim Aura
Might of Stone
Myrmidon's Skill
Prismatic Ward
Knowledge of the Past / Soothing Breath*

*You can only have one of Knowledge of the Past or Soothing Breath active at the same time. If you activate one you will deactivate the other.

Should you ever wish to get rid of your passive item effects, you can activate the new ability "Item: Disable Item Abilities" and all of your passives will be reset. You can then reuse your items to get back any lines that you want.

Not every line of buffs lent itself to this method, so the following lines of clicky buffs were converted to permanent duration effects that persist through death:

Aura of the Void
Essence of Ruaabri
Gnoll Reaver Fortitude
Gunthak Grit / Fortitude
Illusionary Spikes
Thorny Shield

We think you'll agree that these changes make life more convenient for everyone. Some of our changes, however, won't...

Fading Memories and Fling

We've been examining the meta-game and pulling isn't quite the challenge it used to be. One of the reasons for this are that several of the initially intended effects of the Fading Memories ability never worked the way they were intended to. We've re-worked the Fade effect in the following ways:

1. Fade currently applies a "hidden" effect to the caster when it is activated. This effect is permanent (except for rogues, on whom it immediately breaks if they're not sneaking) and can't be dispelled or wear off. We're changing it to apply an explicit buff when it's effective, and to not apply that buff if it fails. Not only will this let you see whether you're invisible or not directly, it will also allow us to apply different effects to different classes.
2. Fade has always had code that was intended to make the invisibility it offers fail if you were within 30 feet of NPCs that hate you. Unfortunately, that check never worked. Now it will, meaning that you must put a decent distance between yourself and the NPCs before you can become invisible.
3. While many of the spells we've used Fade on have specified a percentage of effectiveness, a bug meant that any Fade spell without a duration would ignore that percentage. We've found and fixed that bug as well, meaning that any Fade spell that was intended to have a less than 100% chance to remove hate now has that lower chance.
4. Fade effects now have the ability to be capped by level. The original abilities will be capped at level 75, and classes that have those abilities will have upgrades added to increase their caps with each level cap extension. From levels 75-105 the level cap on fade effects will be yellow con NPCs (your level + 2) for most classes and level +5 for certain classes (Bards, Monks, Rogues, Shadowknights, Rangers).

Fling effects have also been in heavy use in the past few years, and together with fade have made pulling any encounter almost trivial. We're also adding level limits to fling to combat this. Players will no longer be able to fling NPCs that are not below their level, meaning you will probably want to pull minions away from a boss now rather than the other way around.

We understand that the net results of these changes are going to make pulling harder to do in general, but that is the intent. By adding challenge back into the pulling game we can allow skilled players to once again separate themselves from the unskilled. We chose these particular methods over others (such as putting longer lockouts on them) because we want the abilities to remain useful in the majority of cases, but also we want to return some of the player skill to the pulling and aggro management game.

These changes will be included in the patch rolling out on September 23, 2015!

Cool beans.

Don't Form of Endurance and Form of Defense overwrite each other as well? I though you could only have one of the "Forms" active at one time.

Hope you remember that:

Form of Defense
Form of Endurance
Form of Protection
Form of Rejuvenation
you can only have 1 of, and also cannot have Prismatic Ward + Form of Defense on at same time, i think it is.

Can you add haste clickies etc to this? Or at least change the timers?

Lizardscale Plated Girdle for instance. A quested haste clicky has a 26 minute timer.... that is annoying as all get out. I believe the Eyepatch is even less time.

Hooray, no more wax pencil on my monitor!

I really hope the class that has had fd the longest of all didn't suddenly just have their AA fade capped for yellow con or below mobs simply because they got left off the AA party for far to long. Necromancers should for sure be +5 their lvl if thats they highest you will go. Or it should be monks, necros and bards + 15 levels.

"Grim Aura" you mention how about the higher versions of it like "Aura of Rage"

Are these changes on test server now for checking for those 'unseen consequences'? Seems a huge change to not test out before going live

So, are you planning to do something about every freaking mob being runspeed immune, Aristo? That's the most challenging and problematic part of pulling now, that you can't slap a root on an unexpected trash mob add, EVER.

Adding to Kolani - while it's "old' content, quite a bit of the last couple of expansions (not TDS) had pacify immune mobs for many/most of the zones - significantly more than previous expansions or the most recent one. Almost as if an error had been made on that 1-2 expansions. Happy to provide more details.

Hopefully Requiem of Remembrance and Ancient Flames aren't missed either since these will be what many people use.

As a Shadowknight, we frequently rely on Hate's Attraction to position raid bosses. It sounds like this is being removed. Quite sad.

I personally would like to be immune to Lurch effects myself.

And finally thank you for the changes to clicky buffs. Very much looking forward to these changes.

Will "permanent" auras finally be really permanent?

This is about fade not feign death. So for necros, Death's Effigy is what could change. Currently it looks like the fade portion of has a 100% chance and no level cap so the question becomes, will it get a level cap and will the NEC and SHD lines be split or not. The post sounds like they will probably be split with NEC getting a version that's level capped to yellow cons if you keep the AA up to date and SHD to be +5.

While I appreciate what you are trying to do with fade and pulling, I think it's a huge mistake. We have learned to play with the tools you've given us. Changing the way this works so long after the fact seems more punitive than anything for non pullers. If people start to complain about not getting things done without a puller, you could introduce a puller merc!

If it's about giving pulling back to pullers, will next month get rid of pok and gh ports to give porters their niche again? Want to wipe out illusion clicks to make the few bards/rogues/chanters that care happy?

As a solo wizard, life is already a bit tricky...as I'm sure it is for many classes. I'm afraid this will make a chunk of my non raiding time less enjoyable, rather than more. Kiting areas/mobs are already very scarce. Will this close yet more areas/mobs/tasks to those of us who rarely have an ideal group?

Will this bring even more advantage to pet classes (in comparison to everyone else) in group content? Will this hamper exploration of unfamiliar areas? Perhaps we will massively reduce SI and summoning mobs as well as those immune to runspeed changes?

Can we get a full list of which spells or AA's (by class) were adjusted for the Fade change - both to confirm everything has been adjusted that should be (and none got missed/added by mistake) as well as what the specific adjustment is (to double check it's working as you now intend).

Would be nice if the other pull tools work before you kill off the ability completely, Harmony / harmony arrow are beyond useless currently

This ^

Please make all auras "permanent".

Seems like yet another hit to the raiding SK, though admittedly not a large one.


Our fling effect along with monks was one of the very, very few things we could uniquely bring to the raid. Most raid mobs, even "minions" are not blue con mobs.