Test Update 03/26/14

" New items that drop randomly in Call of the Forsaken zones no longer have race restrictions, but no longer drop in Heroic Adventures in order to preserve their intended rarity."
Hopefully these are getting restored to HAs. The expansion is pretty much built around HAs. The XP gain in EWK is pretty abysmal. NerD is okay. The problem wasn't that they were dropping in HAs, the problem was that they were set to drop off a specific mob in each HA. That rarity can be preserved by changing the drop rate away from specific loot mobs.

Have to agree with the restoring of rare items to the heroic tasks. I tend to do heroic tasks for exp as well. I am in a raiding guild that has had the cotf raids on farm since the first or second week of launch and having chaser items seems to give a reason for me to do the heroics past the initial hunter/progression reasons. I have 5 other non raiding level 100 toons that I love to get items like this for. Please turn them back on.

My recommendation would be to have fast-camp in non-combat zones enabled by default, with an option to either confirm or disable it.

Edited to add: The inverse would work too, having NCZ fast-camp disabled by default with an option to enable it. Without the pop-up, preferably.

Pop ups are annoying. Make it a check box in the Options window to either camp immediately in non-combat zones or the 30 second normal thing.

Quite a few annoying changes in this update that weren't even needed to begin with.

In that case can we just have it only come up in non combat zones and not in the combat zones?

If Felbane didn't have Primary Secondary, then None/None wouldn't be displayed. If it didn't display None/None, you wouldn't be able to tell why you can't use it because it has worn slots.

This change looks like it reduces the amount of reading. Assume that you can wear everything unless the item has restrictions.

From the examples provided.
Sword of Truth.
1. No worn slots, I can't wear this. Doesn't matter if it's All/All or None/None at this point.

Felbane the Dragonslayer
1. Worn slots, I might be able to wear this!
2. None/None, nevermind.

Gloomingdeep Lantern
1. This item goes in Range Secondary, I can wear this.

I dislike this change, first thing I check is if I can use it followed by which classes is recommended (which is scrolling to the bottom) and then check the slot.

If I cannot use it the slot doesn't matter.

Unless they are making ALL gear All/All I'd rather they left it as it is.

I recall a number of people complaining about accidentally hitting Ctrl-X in Guild Lobby and POK, so I assume that the change was an attempt to address this issue. Personally, I have never had this problem, so I would appreciate the ability to modify the default behavior via a check box in the Options window.

I think an old version of the zone was pushed live?

• Half the NPCs are dougs
• None of the mobs in the zone (I've seen so far) drop loot of any kind except their weapons that have a 100% drop rate and are annoying as hell to see over and over again.
• The Rock Pick part takes forever and is going to suck majorly when there is 100 people doing it.
• The spell Boisterousness [ID 42121] should not be cast in the Mines area. Up top it's fine (though annoying) because you can out-range it (which I assume is by design). Inside the mine this isn't possible, and it makes casters almost completely useless.
• Several mobs in the Mines (a disgraced scout, an anguished scout, a mindless miner, maybe more) backstab from the FRONT, which is literarily (I know that's not a real word) impossible to do because then it would be a frontstab.

It's possible:

They keep making this mistake again and again. IIRC the first time it happened in TSS Frostcrypt when rogue mobs there would backstab players in the face for ridiculous damage. Back then it was identified as 'rogue NPC inadvertently given the Rogue class AA allowing them to backstab not from the back'. The AA was taken away from the Frostcrypt mobs, and all was good. Then it happened again a few expansions later. And again, I don't remember the details.

And here we come again. Could somebody modify the whatever generic NPC rogue template once and for all not to include that AA (Chaotic Stab)? And make a note: "Do not ever give Chaotic Stab AA to NPC's"?

Re: Camp pop up window ...I don't like it. I type /camp desktop most often and it no longer sends me to the desktop if I am in a combat zone and that annoys me. Also, what's the point?

Re: All/all removal...again, what was the point? Why do you guys change things that aren't broken when there are constantly broken abilities, mobs, quests that pop up? It seems like wasted development time (I don't care how easy it was to change it...we get the Excuse that there's not enough time in the development cycle for stuff ALL THE TIME so I hope there's some good reason that I fail to see).

Re: Plane of War. Adding on to what's already been said, the rogue (read: Marauder) type goblins in the Field of Blood also facestab to the tune of 40k and more (we saw one facestab for 46k). One last night even double facestabbed my tier 4 raid geared ranger for 41k and 32k along with a flurry round of regular melee, and my 120k+ hit points vaporized - there was not even the two seconds I would require to reach for Weaponshield. You cannot possibly intend for these mobs to backstab from the front...can you? I tried Disarm but my skill is pretty low compared to the 500+ cap on it now. Also their accuracy is really high (66% on the raid geared paladin I was with - similar results mentioned in general chat from other groups). Don't get me wrong, I love a challenge. I think dps wise, the non-rogues are just fine...but something has to be done about the facestabbing.

Is it intended that the mobs in Plane of War resist / ignore things like Moving Mountains/Hate's Attraction?

The progression for the Field of Blood part of the zone (to get into the Field of Strife part) was pretty cool. A lot of people in general chat were confused with the character flag system (from PoP) and it not being a task in the quest window. I don't think it should be changed, but maybe on patch day next week mention that since the zone is originally PoP, players should expect PoP style flagging.

This is not a good change. The extra information helps prevent confusion. Having NONE/NONE on unequipable items makes it clear that they are not equipable.

Sword of Truth is a great example here. It says its a sword, it looks like a sword, why should anyone expect it to not be a sword? Having NONE/NONE on there sends a clear YOU CAN NOT USE THIS message. Rather than hiding the unequipability behind the lack of slot information in this new style. It's quite possible to look at the new Sword of Truth template and not be able to figure out why you can't equip it.

For random items like TS components, having class/race legality is certainly useless information. But there are a lot of items in EQ that one would reasonably expect to be armor or weapons based on their name and having a simple way of communicating that they are not wearable via positive/provided information is much more user friendly than implying that by negative/not provided information.

Please fix /camp desktop to actually camp to desktop. Right now it's behaving as if I'd typed /camp server. This is particularly vexing because trying to log in a second character after logging out the first has been crashing for the last few days, so I've been having to /camp desktop every time I wanted to log out one character and log in another.

I have been dutifully pressing the button that sends crash information your way, so I hope that's been useful.

While you're in the /camp code, adding the /camp <charname> functionality from eq2 would be awesome. But mostly just fix /camp desktop.

Technically they do already provide this - if the item can be equipped, the name is in green. If it can't, the name is in red.

As an aside, I actually like it when non-equipment items have class/race assigned as all/all because (for quest items, in particular), I can loot them without the nodrop prompt coming up. This is nice for Dead Hills HAs but kind of annoying in West Karana HAs where the various lumps of dirt, water flasks etc for HA steps are none/none.

Re: Dougs in PoWar. There was a late character model change introduced to the zone files that didn't get patched out, it will be fixed, thanks for letting us know.

Re: Face-stabbing rogues in Plane of War. Apparently the combat code for NPCs does not check if the target has their back turned to the rogue only in the event the rogue NPC is physically equipping a weapon. I'll be taking the weapons off of the rogues so they will only backstab you from behind.

Re: Plane of War NPC fling immunity. It is intended, I'll add clearer messaging when a spell lands and is resisted if the mob has been made immune to that type of spell.

Hero.

As for the aggro spell, its already an issue with just 3 groups here... they're in close proximity and since its an ae its hitting me and im not fighting their mobs, its sucky

We got a Stone of Tranquility (25 purity aug from CoTF) last night. Think we neglected to loot it.

This isn't limited to the mines, we were getting facestabbed in the field of blood all night.

Frostcrypt shades of zek still backstab from the front for 9k, which is an obscene amount of damage for a single hit on a TSS tank, we ran into that on progression servers. Just dealt with it tho, it doesnt make it completely inaccessible, just a challenge.