Test Update 03/07/2023 - Patch Notes and Discussions

Discussion in 'Test Update Notes and Bug Roundup' started by EQ Dev, Mar 7, 2023.

  1. Iven Antonius Bayle

    2, 4, 7, 10%.... are those power tiers and what would affect them ?
    Why do beneficial spells/songs/abilities do get affected ? It does make the idea of banestrike to be an offensive extra damage ability pointless. It would be better to just remove banestrike for even less lag before implementing such pointless effects.
  2. Ishbu Augur


    I would love this change.

    "Permanent" auras that drop randomly for no reason at all with no consistency are annoying to say the least. On top of that there is a perfectly functioning version in game in the form of the Shaman aura already. Just change them all to be an AA.
    Eviara likes this.
  3. Jyve Augur

    Seems reasonable. I've grinded out a fair few odd things in my EQ Gaming, and getting Banestrike maxed was up there in the "most time consuming things to do in EQ" list.

    Was Sirens Grotto the last roadblock, everything else could be 'skimmed' now and then. It was SG that was the "right, I'm going to get this bugger done", and it still took a few days of semi-afk watching telly, seeing respawns, zerging for 10 minutes, then semi-afk again until noticed the repops.
    Nice to get a decent boost from it.
  4. Svann2 The Magnificent

    I compared bard dots (chants) from live to test and the banestrike bonus was only 2.2%. I suspect its one of those things where its not calculated based on total damage but based on base damage or something like that. This is with banestrike aa maxxed. I did it for dots because thats something I dont need to parse for half hour - it usually does the same damage except when it crits.

    Not a big deal.
    Fenthen likes this.
  5. Badname3245 Lorekeeper

    Posted in the bug thread but they removed it and moved to discussion so unlikely to change unless melee folks push hard in PM's to Ganzito.
    Emilari likes this.
  6. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    That is what this change is doing, removing the banestrike proc which adds to overall lag and replacing it with a focus which does not add to the lag.
    Paladin and Emilari like this.
  7. Sancus Augur

    I suspect the reason Banestrike doesn't use SPA 482 is because Tanks have passive SPA 482 effects that wouldn't stack. This could potentially be avoided by having Banestrike add skill-specific SPA 482 modifiers, but to cover all skills would require a lot more data than the current incarnation (I don't know if that matters for lag or not).

    There's no set of SPAs that would create perfect parity between classes; everything scales differently. Right now Banestrike is additive with most Focus AAs (some use 302 and will be multiplicative). That puts the increase to base damage on most caster spells at 1.63 / 1.53 - 1 = 6.5%. This is watered down a bit by damage additions that add amounts (type 3's, spell damage, sorcerer's vengeance, etc.). For a normal caster this probably brings the benefit down to increasing the damage of a spell by about 6%. Procs (which vary in contribution) won't be modified, nor will pets. I can say for Mages all of those factors put the 10% modifier just north of a 3% overall DPS increase. Wizards will be slightly higher, but they still get a lot of damage from procs (and from FotG/SV), so maybe it works out to just under 4% or something. It's really not a material difference.

    For melee, because this is SPA 459, it's only additive with the Innate SPA 185 effects (as well as any activated 459/185 effects). For a Berserker, for example, they're getting 2.75 / 2.65 - 1 = 3.8% increase to base melee DPS (incl. Battle Leap's mod), and again that's reduced by the DB portion of the hit and damage from procs. That probably waters it down to around where Mages are (just north of 3%) passively, but somewhat less when you account for activated SPA 185 effects. The alternative would be an SPA 482 mod, where a 10% mod (again, watered down by DB & DPS from procs) would probably increase overall DPS more like 7% or something.

    From a class balance standpoint, it definitely would be better if melee got more than casters vs less. That said, realistically this is adding 2-4% DPS for most classes, and it's not that material to the state of aggregate balance if you're on the low or high end. If there was a workaround to squeeze a bit more out of Banestrike for melee, I think that would be positive, but the changes that would really have an impact are well outside the scope of changing Banestrike. If it launched as-is, it really wouldn't move the needle.
  8. Brickhaus Augur

    Here are the numbers Live and Test for a 120 wizard casting spells with Banestrike 3/4.

    The wizard had Improved Familiar 27, Twincast spell, Fierce Eye 7, Auspice of the Hunter 30, and cleric spell haste (FE and Auspice to drive crit rate to 100%) .. sitting on a mount. Wizard is full CoV ore gear (except TBM belt!!!) and max augs for that period, geared towards HInt. Wizard is max aa.

    Wizard was casting a three spell rotation from a keybind: Ethereal Ignition Rk 2, Flashbroil Rk. 2, Wildflame Strike Rk. 2. Wildflame was added because there are changes that affect this spell in the patch so killing two birds with one stone...

    [In case you are wondering about the large change in proc damage Live vs Test, there's probably a non-listed change in Sorcerer's Vengeance working with procs in the patch. See Casters subthread if you want more discussion on that.]

    Live:

    [IMG]

    Test:

    [IMG]
  9. Pikollo Augur

    I like the idea of doing this if the reward is worth the effort. Personally see some things I don't like though.

    For one the faction thing. As an evil race I kinda don't care about most of it. But having Coldain on the list kinda sucks. Its only 100 though.

    The other is being on a TLP there are a bunch of them that cannot be finished until the expac opens. I.E. Alarans. While I know live folk don't care about TLP woes it'd be nice if at least one mob was added to some of these so TLPs can complete them too. As it stands we can finish "A force of nature" but thats it.
  10. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    Anyone on Test that can speak to whether this BS ( BaneStrike :D ) change has actually reduced lag?
  11. Tweakfour17 Augur

    TLP can complete them, just not in classic. There is numerous other upgrades / AA / Abilities that unlock with various expansions, it's not unreasonable to have this also staggered at Classic/GoD/VoA
    Svann2 likes this.
  12. Captain Video Augur


    The only thing your log entries show is players pressing a button. If no mob was engaged, no damage was assessed. To get any damage, the virtual pet had to be up (what pressing the button did), AND you had to do one of three things before it went away: swing a weapon, shoot a weapon, or cast a DD spell. Then the AA would be triggered at the appropriate level and you'd see lines for both the base damage and the banestrike bonus in the parse. (If memory serves, it was possible to filter out the banestrike damage lines, and sometimes people did this by mistake.) Your log above is meaningless without time-matching parse data.


    Emphasis mine. While we all hope a change such as this one will help with lag, the assumption that it will is entirely speculative. It's one proc out of a sea of thousands of procs. Plus, it begs the long-unanswered question of whether the servers are CPU-bound or IO-bound. Removing a proc that does a bunch of math only helps in a CPU-bound scenario.

    Others are analyzing the new numbers. I'm not fussing about those answers. Presumably the devs did their own number-crunching before this change was committed to a patch. There was a time, long ago, when we might have expected to see a summary of their results without asking.
  13. Iven Antonius Bayle

    It might reduce lag but basically one mechanic does get replaced by a new mechanic. Is the new banestrike a tiered AA or a new item focus ?
  14. Pikollo Augur

    You know most TLP's don't survive to VoA. Much less CoTF which is one of the requirements.

    Like I said. I like the idea. But its pretty moot for tlp players. Its also a nerf in a way. Current system means we can banestrike stuff in the current expansion. If we can't get the achievements with the new system then we basically lose banestrike and get one whole achievement in return.
    Tweakfour17 likes this.
  15. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    It is a new AA with 4 ranks that provide 2, 4, 7, 10% focus depending on your achievements.
  16. Pikollo Augur

    Also its not very staggered. You can't complete A Force of Nature until OoW. You can't complete Highly Decorated until VoA? And you can't complete Progressive until CoTF?

    Stagger would mean every expansion or every other expansion to get an upgrade. This is giant leaps.
  17. Gorg00 Augur

    You can get 2% in Classic, 4% in GoD, and both 7% and 10% in VoA (the COTF achievements in progressive are optional).
  18. Valcron Elder

    When they say "Remove the max spell limiter" What does that mean?
  19. Emilari UI Designer

    Thanks for the post Sancus, I found it quite illuminating.
  20. Emilari UI Designer

    It's just simplifying systems. For example, right now on live, there are 11 different Gift of Mana effects; they all do the same thing, the only difference is which one triggers based on the level of the spell that is cast.

    By removing this limiter, they're changing it so that there's only one Gift of Mana effect that is universal and level agnostic. Gift of Mana still works the same way, it still does the same thing - we just no longer need new AA's and new effects every time the level cap increases for it.

    It's being changed to reduce combat calculations (thus lag) without making any real changes for the player, because all these limiters did was make it so we'd need to buy a new AA for Gift of Mana to work on our new spells every time the level cap is increased.
    RPoo and Thunderkiks like this.