Why change unlimited target AoE spells after 25 years? And which spells are still unlimited?

It was only on PvP servers, which made sense since it was essentially a PvP variant, no more no less.

You could actually level up, so you could have level 3-5 snakes attacking everything else in the zone.
Also, you had cases where someone made a newbie and like 10 snakes/spiders/bats swarmed and ganked them

This change primarily targets kronolords selling power levels and the people that buy them. I like it!

How many krono does it take to be a kronolord? Just trying to figure out if I fall in that category or not, I have never PL for krono but I do PL alot of people for free.

I don't like it when they have to change the rules for the masses just to kerb the few. There should be a more surgical response to this rather than the blanket changes they just roll out. The exp cap of 200% seems to be another example of this.

In the UK, we had some irresponsible people who couldn't help themselves eating / drinking sugary products. The response from the UK Government was to slam a 'sugar' tax on everything regardless of who purchased it. Us responsible people who enjoyed an 'unhealthy' snack in moderation were also affected as it was easier to just tax the product rather than the person.

This doesn't change the pulling it just increases the kill time.

I'll still be able to pull Plane of Fire in 2 pulls and AE them down with the wizzy, it will just take longer for them to die.

If true, yet another example of the TLP tail wagging the Everquest dog.

Although I think at this stage of the game, DBG have pretty much decided on which set of servers their priorities lie.

How does this only affect your kill time and not your pulling? Doesn't this affect the AOE stuns as well?

Most of pulling masses is proximity agro so it wont really be affected by this

You know what they need to do is prevent you from having aggro on more than 30 mobs. I am used to PLing by doing massive pulls as a bard and this will suck because there is no way to know how many mobs have been hit by the AEs. I normally do 5-6 ae nukes because alot of them can get resisted etc and I want to make sure I do at least 1 dmg to each before I DS kill the rest.

It would be nice though as a compromise if you don't want me to kill 100 mobs at once that you change it so anytime you have more than 30 mobs on aggro it orders aggro most to less then removes any over 30 mobs on aggro. That will save the problem with me AEing massive pulls and not getting exp from it meaning I have to do more pulls and more mobs are getting wasted hurting others because they can't camp the area while I am AEing and I will need so many more pulls hurting other people by not allowing them to camp the mobs I am not getting exp for killing making everyone's leveling take longer.

Only pull with flux staff as I run past, proximity agro does a lot of the work for me.

I get what you are saying, but if the person pulls more than 30, they can't keep them stunned. F1 alone has more than 30 mobs.

What I am saying is, if you pull more than 30 mobs, you can't keep them stunned with these changes. So you will have to go out and do small pulls.

I was thinking Yinla was talking about a high level wizard pulling PoF in 2 separate pulls for farming materials. A high enough level wizard wouldn't need any stuns.

While nice in theory, limiting agro to X number of mobs would still be memory intensive. You would need to check the agro of every mob in the zone, and then decide which ones make the 30 list. But do they keep reagroing and assisting? What if the mob has agro on more than 1 person? It drops from one but then auto assists again? It becomes a real mess.

Plus you can have 2-3 pullers and still do the entire zone. It also makes the actual AEing safter, because only 30 mobs can now attack any one person.

That would both be incredibly exploitable, and really taxing on the servers. Each mob having to count how many other mobs have aggro to decide what to do would scale with the number of mobs^2.

It would maybe add some load to the server but I don't know if it would be exploitable. It could be depending on how it was coded. If the check always used range to see how far away a mob is and it removed mobs from aggro starting with the furthest mob it would reduce alot of the exploiting which I could see if you say aggro 30 mobs then tried to run past 100 other mobs but none would aggro due to your limit. You would need to do a check everytime you aggrro a mob over 30 and find out which is the furthest mob away and drop that one first. This would stop exploiting of it for the most part.

They could reduce load on the server so the limit check only happens once every 30secs or so that way you couldn't use the limit to try to stop new mobs from aggroing and with a distance check which is already part of the current aggro system it could remove mobs that are furthest away and over 30 count every 30 secs and would stop pretty much any exploits.

You do know there is already a range check for EQ so you don't have to zone to clear aggro now and all you have to do is be so far away from the mob on your extended and it will drop off aggro after a while. Back in the day there was no range so it made pulling zones like fire, earth, etc so much easiest because you didn't have to make sure to stay close to the mobs with the bad pathing so they don't deagrro.

this is all a backdoor way to still AE down entire zones at once. Checking once every 30 secs? you can do alot of pulling and keep them clumped. Then they assist each other after the 30 sec check and you still are pulling the entire zone.
There is no solution about limiting number of mobs on agro that fixes the problem. The possibilities for exploits are endless (much less the massive server stress).

Well techniclly there is nothing stopping you from AEing the zone down atm. You can still pull 150 mobs if you want and ae them down 30 per nuke with how it is currently setup to work. If they made it so extended target removed all the furthest mobs if you are over 30 on extended every 30secs it would do more to prevent people from aeing the zone down. The only thing the current change did really was make it so I make smaller pulls to PL instead of pulling 50-100 mobs at once I can only pull 30 now or risk mobs dying with the toon being PLed not landing any ae nukes on them so no credit. So what I used to do in 2-3 pulls I now have to do 5-6 pulls.

I am not really sure if they really fixed anything for anyone, all they really did was make it take longer to do low level stuff but no real affect on the last 3 expansions. This isn't classic we don't do shakerpaging anymore so what did any of this really matter? It just made it farming tradeskill drops or PLing take alot longer.

It is preferable to try to solve problems directly and with as few side effects and resources as possible.
If the problem is zone/disruption of, or the mere existence of krono PL sellers than an XP reduction mechanism for quickly sequential XP would work.
XP timer on, first X XP within 1 minute = no effect.
Base timer updates each XP.
XP after the allotted amount diminishes significantly.
E.g. every kill after the first 6 within the same minute gets repeatedly halved.

Note, depending on these values it could have a large impact on what I would call 'traditional' alt/friend free PLing.
Could be implemented only post level 100 on live, or all the progression servers.

I'm not necessarily advocating for this change, just saying that its not clear what the Dev intent is or if the change that is on test will make the desired impact.