Test Update 07/12/2022 - Patch Notes and Discussions

It seems like the goal is to compensate classes for the restrictions added to item procs that prevent them from proccing off of triggered spells. That change was made to reduce lag, but it also reduced DPS disproportionately for different classes.

Rangers were the most acutely impacted because their primary nuke (Summer's Torrent) has two component spells that can no longer proc a number of sympathetic procs. Wizards were the next most impacted because they have high Twincast rates due to Claw (Twincasts fall under the triggered spell restrictions) and because Fury of the Gods makes proc volume especially important for them. Mages were the next most impacted beacuse of high twincast rates from Chaotic procs. The rest of the casters are roughly equal with lower twincast rates but some special cases (Druids have a component nuke, though it's a low portion of their overall casts, Necros have a component DoT, etc.).

While I agree that future growth of these values might cause issues, the % modifiers are pretty well thought out as is to replace DPS lost due to that proc change. The problem is, as you pointed out, that this change does not exist in a vacuum, and in the larger continuum of game balance, some of the classes benefiting are among those performing the highest.

I think it's important that the devs prioritize addressing the balance issues that ToL introduced (roughly, caster/priest vs melee disparity, with Wizards somewhere in between), because that's the dominant theme in DPS balance right now. It's a shame these changes move things in the opposite direction; they would've made a lot more sense a year ago. That said, I kind of want to make effort to acknowledge that the tuning to meet the goal (reversing the impact of the proc nerf) is actually pretty good here and clearly had some thought to it. If that same level of thought/effort were to be applied to those larger balance issues there's actually a shot that things get better, so I hope there is more to come.

Ideally they wouldn't update this again until it could be used to improve class balance in some way. The same goes for enhanced decay a few years ago. It was a good one time adjustment but continually updating it isn't a good idea. They need to find things that scale better to update on a regular bases and keep these others for major adjustments.

I have been using maximized window mode for most of the past 2 decades. The one issue it has always had is that the game client freezes up if you accidentally right click on the window title bar (bringing up the window menu). The client remains frozen until you close that popup menu. If you do this during combat, .... you can be in deep trouble quickly.

Oh. Now you mention it - this sounds like something I read about they had to fix in New World, and thats all I can say about it.

Are beastlords to be excluded with the sympathetic amplification AA by design or an oversight?

While I am looking forward for the bloomless graphics, the forced windowed mode is a horrible idea. It might fix the recent gamma problem that got served with one of the last bad updates for some users, but will produce big UI issues. Reverse the gamma update instead of producing even more serious bugs !

They did that already for other stuff like housing frostfell/christmas toys, before.

I am guessing you do not raid a wizard. With the DD changes, wizards are in a much better place than they were a year ago. Do I personally feel like they should be competing for the top spots on a parse, yes. From what I've personally seen from low tier guilds to top end guilds is based on player's skill not specifically the class. This statement is true for any class not just wizards. Just feel like I see a lot of complaining about wizards specifically. As stated above, I think looking into balancing melee dps would be universally applauded. (I know a zerker with big hands who would clap). Perhaps reducing disc timers would be a good place to start considering the majority of events qualify as sustain events vs burst events.

/cheers to 82% for rangers!

Here is a thought, how about revert the change until you know why you made it in the first place? Your seriously about to upset a ton of people and for.. ????

Its to fix some serious bug with fullscreen that .. noone knows about? What bug?


Honestly, I don't think you guys need to explain every change, but this one... I think we need some details as your about to wreck some of our setups for.. again.. no specific reason you can think of other then some "waves hand" serious bug.

Details my friend.. details.

I get the distinct impression they do not remotely understand the magnitude of negative reactions this will cause if pushed live sloppily.

Full screen windowed should be added at the same time and people should be transitioned to that if currently using full screen.

A "hide titlebar" and in game interface to specify exact window size and location would be nice, including whether to cover the Windows taskbar, but full screen windowed using the UI data previously saved in the full screen .ini is an obvious solution to not have a massive wave of people freaking out. I'm not sure off hand if EQ is "aware" of DPI scaling, but that's something to watch for if not.

As a side note for those that don't know, "Windows Key + Shift + Arrows" will move windows from screen to screen while retaining the same location and size. I edited the. ini to move the title bar off the top of the screen and that shortcut stops Windows "helpfully" forcing the title bar into view when moving EQ instances from screen to screen.

Most of what you said is correct in regards to the wizard, but wizard dps is all over the place, and it is because we have the lowest crit rate of the caster dps classes. There are two very distinct classes that can do 2x more dps than the wizard with same adps and both are good at their classes. I see it all the time, as do others hense why the complaining.

I agree with your statement 100% on our melee friends.

1. Delete 90% of procs and swarm pets from the game
2. Rebalance using base values of the remaining spells/aas/disciplines.
3. Stop adding new procs/swarm pets.

They should have walked back ToL ranks of Enhanced Maladies-Pestience-Decay-Torment as well as adjusted Focus: Storm of Many down to 37% before pushing through the FD-TYV changes.

And all these reductions for the sake of balance and the health of the game do impact what guild and group power is relative to content. Unlikely raid mob hit points or dps checks are reviewed after these adjustments down.

In the last year I've raided in a lower tier guild, a mid tier guild, and a top 5 guild, and roi. The discrepancy from the the best parsing wizards to the lowest (outside of roi) could be as much as 50% for total damage. I've seen the top wizard do more total damage than the two lowest wizards combined together. So I know the class isn't "broke"- I think it comes down to the individual player not utilizing the adps with their own abilities and using the correct spell weave (I'm not sure if they are just hitting their spam key over and over without putting any thought as to when to use certain spells/ae). I've also noticed the lower parsing wizards don't seem to take advantage of ae's when it is appropriate to do so.

TLR: I believe well played wizards with proper adps support should be competitive for topping the parse, specifically for burn events (however majority of events in recent raid content are too long to be described as burn events.)

I personally do not know. The engineers know, but I was not speaking for them, but for me. I also knew if I said absolutely nothing... there would be a ton of "what about" posts.

Test just crashed twice and is currently down.

For a guild with a lot of SK's and Bards - This is going to be a pretty big hit to melee toons (10-11% for most of the fight).

I hope there is something in the works to bring melee DPS back up closer to casters as this is going to take them in the wrong direction from at least what I'm seeing in our guild in game.

In and of itself, I don't disagree that 31% was huge. But it has been there last couple expansions and melee are no where near top caster DPS; at least in our situation. I realize guilds differ.

I am assuming it's related to the gamma bug that caused your entire system to go dark when logging in any account/character both. It would usually go back to normal once you got in but if you loaded a box up it would do it again. I haven't noticed it since the patch so that may be why it was done. To go back to full screen hitting alt enter as soon as you load into the world will take care of that.

So again your not wrong, and I do parse in the 1 millions which at times is double lower dpsing wizards. But its rare to hit the 1 million mark even with full adps. I AE a ton in these raids and its still a challenge the fights are long. I use a more sustained dps approach as in not stacking crit chance on ADPS. There are some classes that do double my dps fairly often, not saying I dont parse top 5 on occasion, I do.

But the wizard consistency is messed up even running same adps, same rotations, same aa rotations avoiding over 100% crit stack often yields wild dps results and never peaks near certain classes, but often times on the lower end. My high parses are "meh that 1.1-1.2 was good for a wizard" but never touched the 1.5-2 mil of other classes. My 1.1-1.2s are hard to get, and my average is 700-900s full adps full effort

That's fine if you can remember to do that every time. Unfortunately, for many of us who have been playing the game for 20 years, race memory (pun intended) has kicked in, meaning the click sequence when we login is automated in the brain. That's why being able to rely on the client .ini settings is so important. The rest of the gaming world is able to honor this convention, EQ should as well.

Launching in windows mode is mugly rude.