must do dmg for exp - update 9/20 - how does this work in groups?

From update notes 9/20:

Pet classes must do at least one point of damage to an encounter in order to receive experience and loot.

Has anyone tested this? I expect it works as it says, when solo.

Simple Question:
What happens when you group? If you don't nuke in a group, just heal your pet, while the rest of group kills the mob, then?
a) does the whole group not get exp?
b) do you not get exp?
c) or does everyone get exp because the rest of the group did at least 1 hp?

Advanced question:
And what about 2 necros: If both necros let the pair of pets kill the mob (so no nuking or dotting), then
d) do neither of them get exp, because each did not do at least 1 point of exp?
e) or does each get exp, because the "rest" of the group (the other pet) did at least 1 hp?

Thanks



Message Edited by cfteague2 on 09-21-2005 12:26 PM

I dont see this as being a big problem when soloing/grouping, maybe thats just my playstyle though.
I think this was put in place to keep necros/conj from leaving their character on overnight in an area with aggressive mobs that are easy enough that your pet can just plow through them every respawn, giving you xp while being afk all night.

But what is the point of doing this? A Pet is a spell thus part of a Pet class's damage, has there been issues of the pet going off on their own killing stuff? I don't get it.... Watch in SOE's superior way of fixing things now any pet class working on TS will gor NO exp because they are not doing damage.....

Ahh good point Eirgorn, didn't think of that.




Message Edited by Viromage on 09-21-2005 01:17 PM

I made a thread about this in the combat forum already. The thread's link is here.

And it's much worse. If I'm right, if you send in your pet on a group of vvv mobs, and it kills one before you do anything to the group (very possible, as they go down fast), then you're screwed out of the exp from that mob even if you start killing things in the encounter afterwards.

Will DEFINITELY be testing this out tonight.

Nice, what are we suposed to do lead the fight off with a AOE?

People asked for EQ2 necros to be more like EQ1 necros, so the mandatory damage from a player got carried over in the process. I am just glad it is not the 51% that it used to be in EQ1 - hahahaha

As far as those groups of three and two arrow down mobs, that is most unfortunate, but I can already hear the "Go fight mobs that are appropriate for the power we gave you in LU#13" response. I guess you either group for xp or you go fight mobs that won't die in two or three hits from your pet before you can get an AoE off. To be honest, when I am fighting those types of mobs, I usually run in with the pet, and once it has aggro, my AoE gets cast, so it won't effect my playstyle at all.

They did this to prevent some people "cough cough" from leaving character on all night in say.. Feerott, on say.. a Bitter Bloom. It was the only aggro mob in its area and pets could easily solo it for a level a day just leaving character on.
The problem is, if you send your pet, and then lead with your swarm pets.. if it dies before you cast something else you get no exp.. I usuallly do my pet, then swarm, then the new mini pet thing they changed our dot too, and those 3 things get no experience now, usually its all I would stick on a single mob then just heal the main pet. So basically its an efficiency nerf until they correct it.
Swarm pets and the new limited pet should NOT count toward this. But thats Sony.
How about if we SEND our pet instead of it ASSISTING us that also counts as way to make it yield exp, that fixes the problem. Or give us an free instant 1 dmg clicky spell with a 2 sec reuse. (we can call it Sony's Oversight even)

I have already spoken to a dev re this issue and I believe the fix will be that a necromancer only has to damage any mob in an encounter for 1hp for experience.
I don't have a big issue with this at the moment as I usually open with Torrential Plague while in lich mode on encounters after sending pet, this damages all mobs solving the problem. A resist could make life interesting though as has been said they can go down pretty fast.
Sark.

But how does this address Eriol's point, which he eloquently stated in another thread:
"Yes but the point was that right now the way it awards experience is NOT all at the end. It awards it AS the mobs are killed one-by-one, then adds a bonus on after the entire encounter is killed (or killing single ^+ mobs with a recent update). So since it awards experience "as you go", what if your first action is purely sending your pet in on a group of mobs? This is actually the "normal" way of doing things. Now what if from buffing or purely burst dps (like from a scout or warlock pet) your pet takes down a mob before you've cast a spell at all? By the change you have NOT caused any damage to the encounter, but one mob is dead already. Do you get the experience the moment you damage something ELSE in the encounter, or is it lost forever?

That's the concern."

The other day I grouped my 24 Illusionist with a 25 Necromancer, this occurred during the double experience DoF release window. I went from 24 to 29 with my Illusionist, while the Necromancer went from 25 to 27. I thought this was odd since the experience gain was noticeably different, I was gaining experience twice as fast. Something is going on with necros other then the 1 point of damage required for experience. Do necro pets affect the amount of experience gained?

Eh....I'd be alright with this change as long as all fighter/priests/scouts now have to use at least 1 spell/CA to get exp. No more killing with just auto-attack. Wonder how that would go over heh

But how does this address Eriol's point, which he eloquently stated in another thread:
"Yes but the point was that right now the way it awards experience is NOT all at the end. It awards it AS the mobs are killed one-by-one, then adds a bonus on after the entire encounter is killed (or killing single ^+ mobs with a recent update). So since it awards experience "as you go", what if your first action is purely sending your pet in on a group of mobs? This is actually the "normal" way of doing things. Now what if from buffing or purely burst dps (like from a scout or warlock pet) your pet takes down a mob before you've cast a spell at all? By the change you have NOT caused any damage to the encounter, but one mob is dead already. Do you get the experience the moment you damage something ELSE in the encounter, or is it lost forever?

That's the concern."
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I agree this is a HUGE problem and needs to be addressed ASAP. We are losing out on xp in group encounters if our pet kills a mob before we can do any damage. A common case would be a weak encounter with plenty of aoe mobs, you send your pet in at the start and it does shadestrike and unseen blade and kills a weak triple down arrow mob and then you guys finish up the encounter and you didnt get xp for that mob. Add this up over the span of 10 levels to level 60 and I bet it would be a huge chunk of xp.

"Pet classes must do at least one point of damage to an encounter in order to receive experience and loot."


Also, what happens in a group if you are with some warlocks and a zerker? A group of mobs comes, a lot of necros send swarm pets, dumbfire pets first with their pet, mobs like the snakes in Vault of Dust get killed so rediculously fast by warlocks sometimes I cannot even do 1 point of damage in a fight. Since I did not do 1 point of damage I do not get experience? It is very common to fight groups of weak mobs that will get killed without you doing damage sometimes, it does not seem fair to single us out like this.

My biggest concern is, does this apply while grouped? Easier mobs go down QUICK in groups, as we all know, and having to cast a damage spell on every encounter would be immensely tedious, not to mention a real nuisance if you're trying to conserve power. While solo, I can understand this perfectly - they don't want people AFK leveling, and I really don't want to see that either.

In addition, swarm/limited pets really shouldn't count against us here. We have to cast them with each mob we want them to attack, so it's impossible to AFK level with temporary pets.

Obviously, this fix needs to be fixxed. Granted, missing out on the xp from one mob in a group of four tripple down's isn't much of a loss, but it can eventually add up. And besides, it's the principal. If we send in the pet, instead of it auto-defending us, we're obviously at the keyboard commanding it.

That's their real concern - keeping 'sploiters from gaining free xp while they sleep or go to work/school. While the current fix takes care of that, it makes things just enough of a nuisance to us honest players that it should be looked into further and appropriately retuned.

I have posted about this elswhere, so appologies for repeating myself.
I am, in my spare time, a provisioner. As such I do spend a fair bit of time harvesting the raws I need to cook things and gain tradeskill xp and my point would be this...
What happens to the xp from pathing mobs that aggro while I am harvesting?
Currently I harvest by setting my tank or assassin pet on an aggressive stance and letting it deal with any aggro (Wasps in EL are a good example here) that stumbles across me while I get my 3 raws and start moving on to the next node. By this system I would have to stop harvesting and DoT the mob or, (again referring to the EL example) it may be that the mob is green or blue con and has been dealt with quickly by the pet before I have chance to do this. This possibility intimates that I would have to interrupt my own harvest in order to DoT the mob, and give myself the chance of discovering a chest drop.

In short this change has ruffled my feathers because it is going to prove distracting from my 'hobby' of harvesting, as I do not want to miss out on the chance of getting a chest drop from mobs. Again I have posted this comment elsewhere, but I'm not bothered by people exploiting certain areas of the game in order to gain adventure experience. If they are comfortable with that then great - its not for me but if people want to go to those lengths then Im not going to bemoan them the extra xp. I hope people can at least see where I am coming from in this post.

Thanks for quoting me from the other thread Selantyr. That is EXACTLY the worst concern.

And I tested it last night: it's as bad as I thought, and behaving EXACTLY as I predicted. If a pet kills a mob before you do any DIRECT damage to the ENCOUNTER, then you get no exp from said mob.

Now this doesn't apply to groups, though with multi-pets it MIGHT. I believe how the mechanic works is there's a flag that triggers on mob death that says "has any PC direct damage from melee or spells been done to ANYTHING in the encounter yet? If yes, then give exp, if not, then don't give exp." So once you've damaged ANYTHING, you get exp as normal, even if you haven't damaged a specific mob. But this flag works ACROSS people in a party, so as long as SOMEBODY does damage to a mob, the summoner doesn't need to worry about not having damaged something. It's whether the ENCOUNTER has been damaged by a PLAYER, not denying exp per player depending on whether they did damage or not. What I meant by multi-pets, I just meant that if there's multiple pet classes in a group and they both send in pets, and they kill something before anybody in the group acts, it acts just like it was just you, and the mob doesn't reward experience to anybody in the group.

But basically it's a per-encounter flag of whether a player has directly caused damage to anything there, and not tracking "per person" who has caused damage for rewarding exp.

Still crappy though.

Nothing new or unexpected here. They had to fix this exploit years ago in EQ1, they have to fix it in EQ2. Just the way it has to be. Or else you, me, and every necro in the game finds a nice spot full of green agro mobs and we level while we sleep.

Of course swarm/limited pets should not count here. And it should be 1 point per encounter, not 1 point per mob in encounter I guess, though I usually cast an ae at some point in the fight I guess.
Message Edited by Moridian on 09-22-2005 09:47 AM

Thanks for the test Eriol
So, it requires us to pay more attention during solo, to make sure we land a spell thats not resisted, before the mobs die. That's a bit of a pain but we will get used to it if we have to.
It sounds like it's more of a problem in all-pet groups. It's too bad; they finally fix the spell stacking problems that made it a problem for me and my brother to group (both play necros) and now our pets are more likely to cause us headaches, if we pair up. We are better off soloing side by side to each other now =/
Edit: (not to make ppl think I'm happy with this, it's still a problem, just not as broken as it might have been)They definately do need to change for swarm pets.
If they can set an encounter flag when a player does damage, they should instead set an encounter flag when a player casts a spell. That should be enough to stop AFK exp, and will make it less restrictive (works even if you get resists, works for swarm pets) For bonus points they could also set the flag if a player turns on auto-attack, and if the player tells the pet to attack.

Message Edited by cfteague2 on 09-22-2005 10:18 AM

Both good ideas. I had only considered the "flag when you tell it to attack" as that would catch MOST of it, but flag on spell STARTING to cast would be great too, though I suspect harder, as I'll bet the current code is "encounter-side" not "player-side", and so how do the npcs in the encounter know you're casting until they're actually hit with something?

But yes, will make pet-heavy groups (well, all-pet grps are the only ones really) need to be much more careful. It IS affecting my gameplay, and I don't like having to "make sure" I do dmg before one goes down. Slight, but a noticable effect.

If they can set an encounter flag when a player does damage, they should instead set an encounter flag when a player casts a spell. That should be enough to stop AFK exp, and will make it less restrictive (works even if you get resists, works for swarm pets) For bonus points they could also set the flag if a player turns on auto-attack, and if the player tells the pet to attack.

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These are really great ideas.