For all we know, SoE didn't like how quick some classes were gaining AA (especially with their public statement about AA's being less in the future since many lines are much more limiting and some classes were getting up to 100 AA's in a lesson soloing) - and therefore took the wider angle that they did. - I have no idea if this were the case, but just tossing it out there.
If they want to carpet bomb the player base with nerfs due to this approach, than people will get that. Most people will think that it stinks but will get over it. If the nerfs are just to quell the whining about swarming/beaming/kiting/etc than a good compromise would be to leave INSTANCES be while adding the "fix" to static zones.
Bad fix to a real problem. Headshot and decap are almost gone. They will die soon. SK swarming also is no longer viable after you hit level 100. Current zones hit too hard and have too many hp. Kiting classes get screwed and mages will just beam elsewhere. The way to fix beam kite lag problems and stop rampant PL garbage is to fix beaming. Right now you hurt others more than the intended target. Bad decision devs.
It started with just a few bad apples swarming the hot zones . As of today. it was a real pain in the butt to do are dailies. 1.You got swarmer's pulling mobs over the top of you. 2. Pulling the whole zone. 3. Failing at killing all the mobs. next thing you know you are dead from 10 mobs hitting you all at once They should of just nerfed the powers that let this happen . But then ppl would of been crying of that as well. I see why they went the path they did to fix it. Now to kit a mob you will have to ck it to see if its a summons mob 1st. that is why they put in the color change on the ones that summons.
It already theoretically is true that a kiter with evac or a fade can just snare the mobs they actually want to fight with a long-duration snare and then drop aggro, which will cause the unsnared mobs to eventually go home, while the snared ones stand around looking derpy until the snare wears off. People call this "snare parking" or "dark parking" (after the SK/necro habit of accomplishing a single pull using a darkness spell and then FDing). This has been this way since forever, as well as I can recall. That said, doing this can take a while and it would obviously cut into one's kiting efficiency. As others said, perhaps that's intended... but yeah...... As someone who generally does not swarm, this is my number one etiquette complaint about a number of the swarmers I see. I have encountered several who are just egotistical jerks and will yell at me to get out of their "camp" (which consists of an entire massive, sprawling region of a zone and is as broadly defined as they want it to be) and swear at me for "stealing their mobs" (often when I'm not even fighting anything they're pulling, or picked a grand total of one straggling, not-yet-pulled spawn from the fringe of their gigantic "camp" in order to kill it for quest credit). But then there are the unaware or deliberately jerkish knight swarmers who round up a train and run it right over me while I'm in the process of boxing out five kills for a daily before I sign out for the evening. Obviously not all swarmers are like this, but the ego on some of them rivals the kind of crap I used to see from "pseudo-uber guild" people in sorta-endgame dungeons years ago - i.e., it's quite bad.
Evac'ing won't work well, most mobs will warp back to their spawn point after a few minutes of being non-aggro. They will still be snared, but not parked where you left them. And I really don't see much future in Druid fade - that has to be on the short list for nerf's as well.
Max length of a wizzy snare is 3 mins, and our snare is an AE (4 mobs) not so easy to snare one and leave the rest.
How is this fixing anything at all? Beamers now move to other zone; EW, beast domain, Neriak maybe? While regular kiting is still possible in those old zone, it's gonna become really tedious ( avoiding every farmer or mature oashim in valley? avoiding braxi and selyrah in CoB? ... yeah) it's gonna become really tedious. especially for people who still quads or quint. As a result, those people kiting now move to the few zone left untounched ( the same ones the beamers will go to!) causing even more friction between beamer and kiters. Oh, and zone-wide lag isn't fixed either! What's the idea behind such a complicated fix? why not reduce the number of target? ( you want to kill greybies for TS mats? fine, limit it to 20 target). why not reduce the range of the spell? why not make mobs gate if there's more than 40 of them? What's the dev reasoning behind that blatantly awful idea?
If this was the case you would expect SOE to change the abilities/spells for the classes who can do this, not a blanket change for those who do not get this kind of gain from kiting. It will be interesting to see how many mobs in the next part of CotF are anti snare or summon, I wasn't impressed with the number in Ethernere.
Sorta depends on how fast you can zone and how far the mobs are; I can do a snare/evac combo on my druid to peel specific mobs I want to kite, Cheetah myself upon zoning, invis up, and run back, but I've not attempted it in a place on some far-flung end of the zone. Either way, it's a pretty clunky method of operating.
Could just reduce the beamrange to like 20 feet. It's currently 150. Would that not be enough to kill beaming, but the mage could still kill an endless amount of adds on raids or farming ?
Seems like an ineffective, uncreative way to fix a problem. If the goal is to remove swarm kiting this was , for a lack of better words, an epic fail =) out of the dozens or more ways to fix it, this really could not have been a top five way. In the process of resolving one issue you go after other classes too.. I know many years ago devs were not fond of kiting period and for the most part EQ is one of the only games left that actually supports "Kiting". Back in the PoF table days of EQ i think devs had a cow about people killing things without anyone taking damage. I guess they still have hate towards kiting period. What baffles me is how other classes had this ability at one time or another and they were nerfed into oblivion. But yet so resistant to do the same with the few remaining classes?
@Turbben Yea could or should make beam range the same as the typical PBAE spells at least. the use of beams for mass exp was not intended so the goal is to make it so they can not do such.
As a long time veteran magician that has never done "beam kiting", I would be comfortable with a reduction of mobs that a beam hits when I do grey contradeskill farming. However I think 20 is too low; maybe increase the amount to 30-50 or so. I also really like the idea of reducing the range from 150' to something less. However I do feel 20' is too short, maybe 50' would be adequate? There are still some legitimate situations for legitimate magicians where having some distance is a benefit. I say 50' not knowing exactly how far that is in game, mind you... I would want to see that actual in game decision first before etching it in stone. Like I have stated previously, many of us legitimate magicians never did the beam kiting experience, and we did not enjoy having our class be ostracized and villified over some bad apples on each server. I personally do not want beam to be changed; however am willing to make some compromises and concessions if it gets rid of the bad apples ruining my class' name...
Really, what they should do, is if the mob-types they mentioned are on aggro with someone who has a train of 20+, they should gain a 100000' hit box or a root ability. Summoning at 97% with just that mob on target is lame.
There are still plenty of mobs to kite and/or root rot. Beasts is just fine for root rotting for instance instead of CoB. For the zones that are changed there are usually quite a few places where kiting is still viable. It's just a little harder now.
Careful what you're saying when you ask for different changes. The Dev team is notorious for not undoing the original change and implementing the other changes on top of it.
I think the problems is that for example valley is a hotzone and with the quest it nets in a good amount of xp/aa , people being unable to solo their daily quest, like farmers cause of summoning ( necros/etc) will just make people mad.
