Test Update 02/13/2024 - Patch Notes and Discussions

I think what happened, is that the Steel line was brought up many times over the years as needing a massive update, or making it an AA, or rolling it into another spell line like Fury or something because it was just not something that we ever can afford to load because of spell bar limitations.
You guys can look for yourselves at just how often it has come up over the years.

However I do not think it was really ever asked for to give this spell a small boost since it is still not drastic enough of an increase to warrant a spell bar slot.

The ONLY time I find it useful is when I am straight soloing undead mobs without a merc or any group mates and I can drop splash, and Harmonious and really simplify some of my spell bar slots.
But since so many expansions are devoid of good undead camps, its not a common thing for me to do at all.

Now if they added a 25% Holy Leech effect on Steel, this would be a full time spell bar occupant.

Just playing devil's advocate here for a second.

What if it's their goal to disincentivize swarm pets in raid environments by specifically making them less worth it (dps-wise) for non-mages? Or restrict the environments where the spell is worth it to a smaller subset, like, only when grouped with mage for Theft of Essence?

If the non-mage swarm pets have no niche, there's a problem (since having useless/never-used spells is bad - already have too many of those!), but if the niche becomes restricted/specific and ends up benefiting raid performance and diversifying spell bars/strategy while still maintaining a local optimum in the presence of mages, then perhaps some of the swarm pet changes could be intentional.

Unless the if/then of "Is this target a swarm pet?" is more work than just adding the HP and moving on to next target.

Any ETA on getting a fix?

The changes a few days ago made this issue worse not better. To get back to full screen you now need to spam alt enter. If it isn't fixable say now and I'll cut my losses and quit now.

EQ is the only game I have ever played that I have had an issue where I cannot play full screen.

I thought not being able to log in full screen was bad enough but lack of support for full screen is ridiculous.

It is unlikely that it would be that much work to add a target exclusion to the spell.

This. I never bought the feeble explanation offered at the time for why the client had to be forced to launch in windowed mode, when the entire rest of the gaming industry has moved on from such restrictions. We had/have a setting for this in the eqclient.ini file which worked fine for many years. It undercuts my confidence level that the team is ever going to get the DX11 upgrade right.

This. Innate heals are great and all that, but we already need to load so many spells to be effective tanks that it's just not worth the spell slot and having to recast it every 2 minutes. Preservation has a lower heal, but at least it lasts for over 6 minutes (was longer before this upcoming patch) so you wouldn't need to recast it every 2 minutes (which you sometimes can't afford to do while tanking and spamming aggro/mitigation/heal spells).

If they would combine it with fury or preservation and get rid of the proc counts it would be ideal. Or just give it some holy leech effect like you said

not the code work, the processing/lag time of doing an added lookup for every target.

The damage component has some niche uses, just not as a spam ability. There are times, particularly on raids where you have to run away. Jumping back onto the mob using battle leap provides a benefit because it moves you faster than just running, and since you were already out of melee range, there are no lost rounds. That said, 96k of damage even if it can crit is meaningless over the course of a raid event where you are already putting out over 1B in damage. Adding another 0 on the end might make it more interesting to use outside of a burn, but spamming it is definitely a noob trap.

Oh, still don't think it would be an issue as it is already doing that for NPC targets to exclude them from the heal.

" AAs granted via rewards should now correctly apply to all personas. This includes Banestrike, Essence of the Dragon, Hero's Barracks, Hero's Fortitude, Hero's Resolution, Hero's Vitality, and Trophy Collector."

Negative. I have 3 125 personas, Some AAs but not whats listed

On main Banestrike 4/4
All personas 0/4.

and the augs are still screwed up.

Looks like Hero's Vitality is showing some. 33/98 on Persona but 42/98 on main.
Hero's Fort 0.

Also, very disappointed the DoN AAs are not included.

On test? Send a PM to Meeko.
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...02-13-2024-new-bugs-only.296230/#post-4284768

They are included once you reach the required faction as is the current way DoN AAs are designed, because its complicated and they do not have a better way to handle them (yet?).

I haven't been able to reproduce this claim on several configurations. Please PM me with your system configuration and I'll take a look, thanks!

I posted my configuration somewhere in one of these threads. It takes me two (2) alt-ENTERs to get back to fullscreen. The first one always closes any open bags, which makes it seem like it's doing a refresh of the zone. The second brings me back to fullscreen. It didn't start doing this until after the hotfix that I thought was supposed to be just for fixing the broken persona swap issue.

I'll try to find it thanks. Before I do that, I'm guessing (both of) your issue is going to be due to a multi-monitor setup. We have a known bug that can ignore input from one display in that situation. That'll be among the fixes in progress.

No. Single monitor, Samsung 4K display. I run the game fullscreen at 2560x1440, because the old UI won't do the font scaling and the new UI doesn't have its long-promised font scaling in yet. The system is a Dell 12th gen i9 with 64 GB RAM running Win11, of course, along with an RTX 3090 GPU. It's been my primary desktop for a little over two years. As I said above, this was all working OK until the latest hotfix patch on Test.

I run the game on one screen. My current work around is to play in windowed mode but when I was in full screen, if I hit alt+tab to switch to another open app or the windows key to bring up the task bar, I would get the small windows of what was open to pop up on top of EQ, EQ would switch to windowed looking mode, and then when I selected the window I wanted, EQ just went back to full screen, not allowing me access to anything else that was open at the time.

Samsung 4k, and I actually play in 4k. It's incredible. You can open every bank and inventory bag and only take up 50% of the screen. Windowed mode, because fullscreen sucks. I multibox so I need to alt tab constantly, and I run youtube in a 2nd monitor so fullscreen is totally undesirable. No problems. Loving life.
Good luck, my stubborn friends.

This sounds like you have AlwaysOnTop=1 in eqclient.ini. Change to AlwaysOnTop=0 should improve that UX.

Messaged you details earlier, I don't duel screen.