What was the point of consolidating AA's & dots (debuffs) if....

So they tell us they need to reduce the memory footprint and consolidating AA lines was one way to do it. Then they turn around and create massive amount of new ones, that they are all going to have to consolidate again. They made Focus lines for almost every single spell, which doesn't make any sense to me.

Why not just create 1 AA focus line since most of those focus AA's are 2% bump up each rank. So consolidate it all into 1 focus AA that effects all the spells, just seems silly to me they spent this many months consolidating AA's only to create 15-25 new ones per class that bump % up on each spell/disc line. Could have just made 1-5 new AA's that costs a 1000 AA points that does the same thing for all appropriate spells by that class.


They tell us they need to reduce the amount of debuffs effecting a mob, and yet create more spells that add more debuffs to mobs, i.e. dots, alliance spells, and other debuffs etc....



Am I wrong on understanding that's what they did? I don't have access to beta forums, but this is what I gathered from the forums and talking to guildies and friends.

It could be they needed to consolidate them in order to grow the aa idea and implement new ones?

No they specifically said they needed to consolidate, because the were running out of memory.

So if that is the case, why not create fewer lines that accomplish the same thing, which is possible if you do it the way I suggested above instead of creating a AA line for each specific spell. If 10 spells are going to be bumped in dmg by 2% intervals you don't need to create 10 AA lines, you could just have created 1 AA line and includes all 10 of those spells.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. The current list under wizard Focus aa tab:

Focus: Beam 2% dmg per rank
Focus: Claws 2% dmg per rank
Focus: Cloudburst Stormstrike
Focus: Ethereal Flash 2% dmg per rank
Focus: Flash Rime 2% dmg per rank
Focus: Narend's Fire 2% dmg per rank
Focus: Rimeblast Cascade 2% dmg per rank


Instead they could have done:

Focus: 105 Spell Damage -
The following passive abilitiy increases the power of your Beam, Claws, Cloudburst Stormstrike , Ethereal Flash, Flash Rime, Narend's Fire, and Rimeblast Cascade spells by 2% per rank

And have that ability cost the total cost per rank of all those individual abilities currently.

if they happen to do a level increase expansion again with new spells (which isn't looking good cause dev time) than they'll just consolidate the aa lines yet again

Exactly my point. They'll just have to reduce the memory footprint once they reach it again, unless im mistaken and there is no effect on the memory footprint by adding 160 lines vs. 1600 lines of AA.

While they're at it I really wish they would remove the "Timer" information they added for each AA which is right under the /alt act number.

I accidentally have used the Timer's number instead of the /alt act when making macros on my toons. Then weeks, months later I wonder why one of my burns isn't firing >_>

I've never seen a developer say they were running out of memory for AA's. The closest I have ever seen was Elidroth saying the AA system was running out of space, but he meant design space not actual memory.

I'm fairly certain it's the difference between two different developer visions. One whose no longer here and his replacement in this area.

think it was also to make stuff easier to read and figure out. I mean take necros for example. just for dot crit chance had like 3 or 4 different aa that effected it. Why have 3 or 4 when 1 line is easier to read and learn.

I know. it drives me bonkers. be nice for a /hideaatimer toggle. on the aa screen

The Focus AA's might also work in a completely different way than old activated/passive AAs

This. The OP doesn't know what he is talking about.

What does "design space" even mean?

It refers to how much they can, or want, to give you of something. As an example, I will use critical chance.

The chance of any event happening is between 0 and 1. 0 means it will not ever happen and 1 means it will always happen. Any value between these numbers is not a whole number, and is commonly expressed as a percentage in which case the value is multiplied by 100. Hence: .01 becomes 1%, .1 becomes 10%, .99 becomes 99%, and .995 becomes 99.5% etc.

Therefore, the maximum chance of any event happening, 1, is 100%, so if you have 100% crit chance, you will always crit your spells. If you have 150% crit chance, which is 1.5 the extra 50% does absolutely nothing for you because 1 is the maximum and 1.5 is greater than 1.

EQ for the most part uses integer math. Integers are whole numbers, that is, 1, 2, 3, etc. meaning that fractions or remainders are generally disregarded. This means that they express chance using the percentage values mentioned above, that is, they use 1, not .01.

This means that the lowest possible chance in EQ you can have of something happening is 1% (.01) because anything lower (.009) would still be a decimal when converted to a percent (.9%) and EQ does not use decimals.

This means than that when dealing with chance-based effects, the maximum number of AA ranks they could possibly add, that actually DO something, is 100. They could make 100 ranks of 1%. Any more than 100 would result in a higher than 100% chance and therefore do nothing.

This is the design space.

When they add an ability, they use some of that design space. If they add 1 rank of 1%, they have used 1/100th of the total available space. If they add 1 rank of 5%, they have used 5% of the total available space with a single rank.

This is the problem with many of the older AA lines. The first expansions gave out large percentages for the first few ranks, such as 2, 2, 3 for crit chance. This used up 7% of the design space with just 3 ranks of AAs. Then ranks 4, 5, 6, were each 2%, which used an additional 6% of the total design space with 3 ranks. Crit chance for some classes is 30 ranks with a value of 57%. This means 57% of the total possible design space is used for that effect for those classes.

Notice of course that I said "total possible." I said that specifically because that makes no accounting of whether or not they actually WANT to use the total amount of something. In the case of crit chance, they may not (and actually probably don't) want classes to reach 100% crit chance permanently. They may decide that the maximum they want players to have is 60%, in which case this is now the "design space" and they are already at 57/60 (95%) used.

In that case they could add 3 more ranks of 1% in which case they would use up their design space. (not the total maximum possible, but the total amount they are willing to give).

Make sense?

Dot consolidation while intended to help with debuff cap issues is just simply shifting the load of who eats up the slots. Debuff cap issues will remain after it occurs.

Each necro in a raid might use 10 or 15 less debuff slots, tbd based on how they do it. So in theory this frees up some debuff cap room to avoid spells, synergy, etc from being buff blocked at the wrong time. However many guilds will just carry another necro after which will fill many of those slots back up. Plus all those other classes that also have revamped dots will now want to use 1-3 of them. So any freed slot will be immediately filled right back up again. Never mind the silly that continues to further the problem like giving zerkers dots, giving rogues dots, giving wizards dots, giving beasts an uncontrollable debuff proc, trying to require necro synergy to use a debuff slot (the poor choice of Mind Extraction as proc spell) and on and on.

I think it's a terrible direction for AA.

What's most disheartening is that non level-cap expansions are typically when we see fun and cool new abilities being implemented. Apparently during a level increase, it takes the whole cycle to copypaste, multiply by 1.x and come up with a dozen new words to work into the name of existing abilities.

We already saw this "grind just for the purpose of grind" with hastened/extended lines and most of the general tab. It shows me DGC has folded their chips when it comes to creativity and possibly even a desire to not expand class toolsets.

Any AA that modifies a spell/disc in such a basic fashion implies that the ability was not correctly tuned in their original state. Rather than fixing it, DGC says "oh look, here's something meaningful for players to grind for" This is in stark contrast to the players' historical request of "give us an upgraded version of X" (unlocked at a specific level) or base ability tuning suggestions, both of which go largely ignored.

It's unfortunate that the EQ team's position on class requests has largely been to implement anything but what class experts ask for and to ignore almost all feedback once the abilities are proposed. Well, unless there is a clear case showing where an ability could be situationally overpowered!

Go to any page of this forum and you'll be presented with tons of inspiration for useful and class-appropriate abilities that *gasp* might actually make the game fun to play.

"Improve X ability by Y"? Really? That all you got?

Can you provide some links that will inspire since they are abundant as you say ? Just curious. All I mostly see is outlandish requests nerfing one class or overpowering them among their archetype.

Not saying you are full of it but Technology and memory capacity and storage has advanced 20 years since EQ was released... the game has not... not even close.

the OP subject brings up Dots... but i just have a question; they did not finish this for all classes yet, did they?

shaman and necro not yet. two classes right there probably require the most work.