Patch notes read "Enhance: Blighted Horde no longer increases duration on live servers." The duration was reduced as stated, but the recast has moved up from 12 to 27 seconds. Intentional?
Thanks Bludd - good idea. Gave it a shot, didn't change. Seems strange they noted a change to duration, then changed duration and recast. Was ~11 sec duration (5 secs from the AA they just changed), 12 sec recast. Now 6.3 sec duration, 27 sec recast.
Disabling the AA completely (duration AND recast) was way drastic, and from the notes not intended. Please adjust to the stated necro nerf or revamp the AA so it does something useful.
Understanding that this is the proper method to report things not working as described / intended - Can we please get a response if this was intentional or not? If so, please revise the patch notes. If not, please repair.
Waiting for a dev response so we know if the patch notes were wrong, or if it accidentally broke the AA.
Before "fix" we had 7s reuse reduction per AA? Now 1.2. On none live servers - 2s and 1s for duration.
Problem with Necromancer class is that native spells (except swarms with large reuse) do so little DPS that players can easily remove them from spell panel. Before last expansion necro had acceptable dps from soulrot and it helped fill time between large reuse spells. New "improved" aa "broke" soulrot. And now we have to use several spells just for triggering procs
Nerfing a top spell 2 times is still acceptable, but 4 times is overkill. The developers here must act like with assasin's 'Fatal' - once the top spell is nerfed - compensate for other skills.
Was able to do some testing last night, and for me it's a substantial drop in damage output. I know it's very difficult to tune classes because of so many variables, but assuming similar player skill, spell levels, gear etc. DPS classes should have similar performance (depending on the encounter, of course). Thinking this pushed us too far in the wrong direction, but would he happy to hear what other necros are seeing. EDIT - Would also like some clarification as to why the patch notes state one thing, but the actual change was quite different.
Thank you all for posting and sharing your experiences/testing. I'll be sure to pass this along to the devs.
@Accendo what constitutes constructive feedback in this situation from your point of view, can you please give (even if vague) example? the nerf came without discussion with community, so we're simply at a loss why it, this one spell, was randomly singled out for complete obliteration (the dps of the spell was slashed 5x by the patch). would samples of ACT logs from one of the most experienced remaining necros in the game be helpful, showing that this spell pre-nerf used to do reasonable dmg as percent-of-total dps (between 20 and 25%) on a variety of raid mobs? i can't picture that would be considered constructive feedback but I can if you like. many classes have 1 spell that falls into that percent-of-total dmg range and that damage range is considered "acceptable" for 1 spell by gamers and devs as far as I'm aware. Past that, my mind goes blank beyond the basic "there was absolutely no good balancing reason that this spell needed changes from existing form", so not sure how to feedback in a way that's can translate to you meaningfully, please advise? the reuse on the spell was bugged from the corresponding AA applying incorrectly (name - Enhance: Blighted Horde), however the result with the bugged reuse produced an acceptable final product. if the intention was simply to dis-entangle the reuse bug, that's fine, but then duration should've been increased to compensate instead, if anything, not removed from that same AA. for history purposes you should be aware (this happened before your tenure) that during the "great dumbfire pet buffing" patch about a year ago (to compensate for max level increase), Blighted Horde (this spell) even got completely missed in the buffing and never got its due boost. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...es-tuesday-march-10-2020.593795/#post-6600097 so the bugged reuse in a round-about way at least made up for that disaster of a patch ever since. for what it's worth, when that patch in March 2020 dropped we tried our best to tell the devs about Blighted Horded being missed, but as usual it fell on silence, so forever gimped it stayed. again - if the impetus for the change was purely to address the reuse bug introduced by AA - we're happy to have it fixed as a community, but it can't just be done in the vacuum without realizing it was the only thing propping up this spell. and - part2 - why take away the duration increase that was purposefully introduced in a previous patch and was working without bugs as intended?
Constructive feedback constitutes anything from "something changed on this ability without a patch note" to "you reduced this ability by so much that it is no longer effective". Both of these types of scenarios are entirely possible due to the multipliers upon multipliers that affect the EverQuest II spell system. For example, the highest damage any ability in the game does, is <200, before it enters the realms of mathyfuntimes, and those multipliers do not affect every ability or class the same way. What does not constitute constructive feedback for an ability (and to be clear, nothing in this thread really falls under that category) are comments of "x class is better then y class", "this is our signature ability", or as you alluded too "this ability should be doing 25% of my total parse". And while specific abilities being listed out as a parse, a single abilities percentage of a parse is not as important as a classes overall parsing in multiple scenarios. By multiple scenarios, an AoE fight is a different beast then a single target fight, and both AoE and single target fights may have jousting, curing or other components that break them down into further categories. Blighted horde has been a source of many reports over the last several months, and while we (I) have not had enough time to do a in depth investigation I was able to look over the enhance ability briefly. When I did so the lack of the time-locked restriction on the duration extension was immediately apparent, and it was fixed. What was not apparent was the fact that the Enhanced: Blighted Horde, which stated it reduced the base duration of the ability by 1 second per tier, was setting the base duration down from 60 seconds to 28.8 seconds. Which is obviously incorrect, being far more then 1 second. The correction to the duration override also caused this to right itself, so it was no longer affecting the ability incorrectly. While I am sorry that I did not notice and correct this bug sooner, Blighted Horde's duration being reduced by far more than the stated amount was a bug, and a significant one at that. And for clarification, Blighted Horde's damage was not adjusted in the march 2020 update because it was not affected by the bug that was addressed in that patch.
Caith, believe me, if you could communicate with playerbase on a more frequent basis regarding any mechanics changes, players'd be much more happy
Thank you for communicating with us Caith, your comments are appreciated. I can respect that the reduced duration of Blighted Horde was an unintended bug, but it was one that was keeping necros competitive. This week my raid parse was down nearly 20% overall because of the Blighted Horde adjustment, which is an enormous reduction for any DPS class. Is there any thought towards further adjustments so we're not left feeling frustrated and neutered?
This all makes perfect sense. Yet necros just got a ~15-20% overall dps nerf out of nowhere. Whatever class balancing was done going into (and throughout) this expac was done with blighted horde pre-nerf as the baseline, so fixing the bug without any compensating changes just really screws us over.
So up until recent months of players complaining about necromancers blighted horde doing so much damage, this was in the game and working as intended. So then the one AA was looked at even after it was adjusted in the AA revamp and found it to be not working as intended. hundreds if not thousands of dollars were spent for P2W items in order for some necromancers to stay competitive on raids. How about reimbursing the money, take back the P2W items and clean slate? Main swapping is impossible with these “crate” items not being an account unlock. I’ll save a response by saying none of what I’m asking is going to happen (granted a response is not really needed here). So now it’s back to …..nothing. 16 years playing the game (started in 2005) and quitting for the final time. I’ve contributed to content by the thousands and shall be doing so no longer. I hope others are happy with the game. Maybe DPG will do some incredible work here. Norrath was exciting and a great escape and a great way to meet people, morons and awesome ones. (Calling myself a moron here) whatever you all do, stay far away from AB server though, they are the greatest bunch of people and don’t need anymore great players. Good luck necromancers. ESP Twisty.
