but... but.. but... we cried and cried about casters kiting for so long to get these changes put in. You wish to have all those tears shed for nothing by reverting all this hard work back ?
Not an issue, no need to change it. Player based solution is either the 5 things Ishtass lists in his post, or learn to agro stuff, not damage them until you want to them damaged. If one of the mobs does start to summon, just stop and kill the summoning mobs, letting the rest of the mobs on the agro list catch up to you and die.
Not saying it's not easy to work around, just an annoying mechanic that I'm sure is a simple code tweak. Would be one of those nice to have lines in a patch notes that some folks would /cheer for. There's currently no gain to having it on grey cons and it's an easy win for the return on code investment. jm2c, thanks for reading
Would definitely be nice to just for once be able to say, "hey the patch notes weren't all nerfs today", so that I could fall over and die of shock.....
The one major thing we all should and need to remember however is that these so called "Grey Cons" are only grey to upper level toons, and therefore it should not necessarily be removed from what we consider to be trivial. Also that this type of change would alter the TLP experience rather drastically, I would think. It would be far easier for the Devs. to implement a resist factor that is based upon character level than to go and remove the summon code from every mob out there, that we upper level character players feel shouldn't have the ability to chain summon us. OMG, did I just play Devsil's Advocate??? What's wrong with me, lol.
Not asking to have summon code removed from mobs. As you said, based on player level. Whether or not that's even possible is one thing, and whether or not it's something that DBG cares about is another entirely.
Gah! Remove this stupidity already! Summoning was crap when it was implemented for anything other than end boss type mobs. To have zone trash summoning is just crappy design. Rather than fix pathing bugs they decided to just let mobs jerk the players around, then rather than just when they were out of range for an extended period they made it so mobs summoned on agro or minor damage instead of actually attempting to pursue. Having mobs behave as they did originally before this garbage was implemented will drastically effect the TLP experience? Please! Gimme a break!
Ironically, the summoning mobs that make play disappointing when leveling in a zone, actually end up protecting players from higher level power levelers later on. And the zones that do not have the mechanic (thinking farmers/army dudes in Valley as my prime example), high level power levelers can often wreck havoc over a large area with little consequences. When Valley was still a hot zone, I'd see at least a message a day on the weekend about a guild mate complaining someone is pulling every farmer/army dude in the zone. Less messages now of course, but I can still recall 3 times in the past few months where I'm fighting in the zone with level appropriate alts and all of a sudden every other mob around me is gone. If these mobs summoned, then at least whoever is being rude would have to deal with each mob at a time. Players have very little regard for others in zone these days (whether malicious or feeling entitled or just stupid). Without an active GM force helping to police bad zone behavior (and we know that is never returning), summoning mobs can be a ghetto zone police force that at least keeps a single player from ruining entire zones for a server. As a new player (and despite the gloom and doom, there are new players in EQ), there can be nothing worse than trying to start a toon in Crescent Reach and having some moron train them while attempting to power level their alts (and feeling zero remorse about it). Happened to me twice when trying to introduce some new people to the game. And no, they didn't decide to continue playing Everquest... I hate summoning. It was lazy coding when introduced. It killed perfect valid play styles for several classes. But it is now part of Everquest. Just making it go away without seriously thinking about the consequences with the play style of today's players would be as bad as just living with it.
What I despise most about summoning mobs is they do inordinate damage. Example: I'm in Fear Itself to farm the augs for my mage. I run around to grab up mobs to kill while waiting for the toads to respawn. Bam, summoners. Now my tank is 105 with 10k+ AC. Facing numerous FI mobs is trivial. But when they summoned they went through all my defenses and did maximum damage. With several summoning me I had no chance of getting back to the group and took damage far greater than if I stood and tanked them. I couldn't get a COTH off in time and the tank died. He should NEVER have died in FI but did because of the summons. I don't know why mobs rip you up on summon, but they do.
They may have summoned you into a position where they could hit your back. Mobs get huge advantages when they are behind you (no block/parry/riposte, maybe 0 AC?).
To those saying summoning should only be raid mobs.. shame on your for being greedy. i know you just want to kite them group mobs for easy loots. that being said, only raid bosses and group bosses should summon. nothing else. no reason for any trash mob what so ever to summon.
I think non-named or non-boss summoning mobs should have some sort of level adjustments to them. So, say I'm level 90, and a mob is lvl 90. His summon should hit always. if he's lvl 89, say drop to 90% success, lvl 88 drop to 80%, etc. down to lvl 80 where it should drop to 0% success rate, meaning it can no longer summon you. That example assumes a 10-level adjustment... maybe 15 or 20 levels would be more appropriate. 20 Levels would probably work better, so that a 71 lvl mob would only be able to summon you 5% of the time. what I hate is when trying to kill summoning mobs and they ping/pong you back and forth so that you can hardly hit them. On those (I play tanks mostly) I try to get them close enough together in order to get to where I can turn and have them all face me. Then there was one named that I was tanking the other day where summoning was great. It kept booting me away, but I never had to run back as it summoned me before I hit the ground. Like a yo-yo effect, but I only missed a few rounds as I was flying about.
