Necromancer Spell/Pet Issues (Consolidated)

Im starting to give up hope on SONY and the collective creativity of their staff. People cry and cry and instead of changing something they have more controll over like the game they change characters. Necros seem to be the ones neglected the most simply because of EQ1 its not fair ALL of our spells are bugged or useless. I mean you have to test something before you hit enter and save or w/e. Its a shame when the people have to conduct the programers. man bump the month prices down to about 9 bucks and slash some pay checks and i bet alot of stuff around EQ2will get fixed. The customer is always right, remember, and when we pay you every month and say our spells are broken we mean they are broken. I dont care how powerfull other classes are, i just want mine fixed, tanks, scouts and or whatever can do what they want but fix us please SONY..

Some pets cast buffs on the group. Great. But when pet is gone, these buffs remain. Also great though clearly a bug. The necromancer, however, doesn't get the free 12 hr buff once the pet is gone. We seem to be excluded from this beneficial bug. So I guess I don't know if I want it fixed or made even "worse" so that we benefit from it as well...

Opal's Aggrivating Seal (Level 20 training option) also casts a signifigant heal on the pet in addition to its other effects. The heal is not mentioned in the documentation.

please fix this problem

1 more thing the wisp Pet never auto FOLLOW you + it "Eat" alot of power over time

Lvl 30 spell "Breath of the Unearthed" is multibugged.

1. It doesn't show up in maintained spell window.
2. Its HO icon is that of a fighter CA. I can use it complete fighter HOs. (Blue sword)
3. It's red indicating it's not bound to encounter members, when its description (and apparent performance) suggest that it IS encounter constrained.

Our invis spells share the fighter sword HO icon as well.. though I've never tried to complete a HO with it to see if it works.

it's actually nice when you don't have a fighter and you get one of those out-of-nowhere fighter HOs...but...

Any estimated upgrade time for our bugged spells ??

I am really disappointed about devs putting spells without performing any tests on it. I mean com'on , you create a spell and not test it even once ???
What kind of an idiotic implementation is this ?

I give SoE 2 weeks and then I am off to WoW...

Just buy the game now, this is one of those "dont hold your breath" topics, sony doesnt care....

I hate to mention bugs that work in our favor, but this is tied to a priest bug that does sort of cheapen the game somewhat. A priest can chain heal himself in an encounter. What this does is allows him to keep aggro (from the healing), not get hurt (because of all the healing), and (the buggy part) not go into combat mode so that he regens power fast enough to be able to do this perpetually. The remainder of the group can finish the mobs with no risk. At higher levels, huge damage and interruptions may or may not affect the viability of this strategy, but that doesn't matter for us. This is what WE can do with a priest:



I can team with a priest and kill red++ (single) group mobs nonstop, both of us mid-30s.

Buffed pet attacks mob.
(Necro spams buttons to end pet dance.)
Priest keeps pet alive, but does not go into combat mode.
Priest's power with level appropriate drink barely dips as it regens so quickly.
Summoner keeps pet buffed and pet maintains aggro.
Summoner applies DoT spells and DDs.
Summoner siphons health from pet to convert to power.
Pet's health is restored by priest.
Repeat last few steps until mob is dead (or healer gets bored and decides to add some damage).

Neither summoner nor priest gets aggro. I don't know why, but they do NOT. If a summoner tried to put HIS piddly heal on the pet, the summoner would probably be nailed. But a priest's reactive heal, for example, doesn't get aggro, nor do normal summoner attacks (this could be because summoner attacks aren't all that impressive on red mobs--with lower level mobs the summoner runs a mild risk when using mastery nukes). Other priest classes may generate more aggro--my experience is with a cleric (inquisitor).

Is this an exploit? Yes, kind of, because two people can do what should require a group to do. In rare instances, it's nice to be able to take out a boss mob without getting help. However, except for that case, it's a very slow way to get exp because it takes a looooong time to kill something red++ that way. Time to exp ratio does get more reasonable when you're doing it to yellow++ mobs and lower, however.



So, the bug is, healing a pet or himself doesn't put healer into combat mode with combat mode regen. [If a healer heals a group member IN combat mode, he goes into combat mode. If he heals HIMSELF or a PET, he doesn't go into combat mode and can regen his power (and by extension, the summoner's power) indefinitely.]
Message Edited by thisMoriMori on 02-07-2005 09:33 AM

Pet Speed is incorrect when Necro is effected by run speed reducers.

Pets do not follow their master properly when player is under the effects of speed reducing actions/spells/debuffs...

Instead of following you, the necro pet continues at its normal running speed in the direction you are travelling and overtakes you. If you are slowed for a long time this leads to all kinds of disappearing pet problems, and on more than one occasion the pet has pulled agro from way ahead of me when swimming/encumbered etc. This is odd since ive never seen my pet pull agro by itself unless attacking something.

The pet will generally return to its normal follow position once you remove the slow effect or if you remain staionary for a short while (sometimes).

Conditions that have caused this problem:

1) Swimming

2) Encumbered, through disease traps for instance, or just too much pie.

3) Stealth spells... Not entirely sure on this one... When using my own stealth the pet seems fine most of the time, but when effected by a smuggle my pet was behaving VERY streangley and running off through walls though that may just have been dungeon pathing problems.

Which Brings me onto the next pet problem:

Dungeon Pathing

After fighting in Stormhold for the first time with my pet as Main tank for a small group of guildies, it became obvious that pet pathing is incredibly bad in dungeons. When assiting a group this isnt a huge problem since the "Dance of death" doesnt occur while someone else has agro, but when agro is on your pet all hell breaks lose.

Problems included:

*Pet (and the Creature its fighting) disapear through walls/floors/ceilings.

*Pet sometimes disapears completely... both in combat and out of combat. It is still alive but cannot be buffed and isnt hitting or being hit.

*Group members cannot see the pet, or it appears at different positions on all players screens (tested with 3 players in same room and another 3 on voice coms... Some players saw the fight going off in the next room !!!)

*Group Members can see the pet and creature it is fighting but cannot cast spells or use attacks on either of them.

*When ordered to attack, Pet sometimes takes CRAZY routes to get to its target, doing 3 laps of the dungeon to get to a creature standing 4 feet away.

Ive used pets in several dungeons and seen these problems, but never as bad as in stormhold where EVERY fight involved at least 2 of these problems. Mainly the mobs and pet being sucked into the ceiling or floor.

I have a theory about this pet dance thing and why SOE will never fix it (why they are ignoring the issue). Sony uses a modified predictive code to predict where MOBs will be instead of constantly updating every exact position of the MOBs...saves on bandwidth. Now, the MOBs' positions are held on the Servers, and I THINK the pets' posistions are held on the clients (your computers). When you send your pet to attack a MOB, the MOB is not EXACTLY in the position you see it (because of this predictive computing). When the pet and MOB meet, the client sends to the server the position the pet met the MOB...The Server fixes the MOBs position only a few "feet" causing the percieved position of the MOB on the client to change...The pet then moves to keep up with the MOB and the cycle repeates Ad Nausium. Now, when the MOB dies, sometimes you cannot get the drop from the bod? well that's becasue the client and server now have different locations for the corpse. You see the corpse right in frnt of you, the server reports that it is not there and "You are too far to interact with that object".

This would also explain why pet/MOB battles sometimes end up in the walls. The server has them in the hall but the predictive computing on the client side puts them in the walls.

Now, SOE will NEVER fix this if this is true because the problem will lay at the very heart of the code used . They cannot and willnot mess with the core code. This leaves us with a detrimental bug that will not be acknowleged nor fixed.

Believe me, I worked in customer service jobs for a long time before I joined the military and I can honestly tell you, The customer is most certainly not always right... in fact, I'd say that 8 out of 10 times the customer is trying to rip you off.

That being said, I whole heartedly agree that they need to fix the current content before worrying about adding new content. I am assuming that new or fixed content is put on the test server for a few days before it goes live. What are the people on test doing because they sure aren't testing the fixes...

Why don't they copy the codes from EQ1 for pets / Mob positions? : seemed to work quite alot better. Cuz this looks like it just may be the cause...

By the way, at level 28, my tank pet (zombie undying adherent) cant land ANY hits on red con mobs. This is truly annoying and makes me look like a noob. I have tried to take on a level 34 mob at 28, which is basically red con to me (and my pet) and my pet missed EVERY single hit. (Same reason why a grey mob will miss you every time in melee, here my pet is grey to the level 34 mob i was trying to kill)
This is really truly disturbing, specially since when I guidies - bruiser(27), warlock(28), and warden (30) killed the same mob without much of a problem. I would suppose most of the other classes would not have much problem with these mobs either, but it is truly embarassing when a necro, which supposingly has a slight advantage in solo fights and a disadvantage in groups, cannot kill a non-upped, mob 6 levels above him.

I am not sure of the effect of this at higher levels (well probably a red con will own you at level 50) But this is highly disturbing and annoying. Could SOE please raise our pet's (and probably conjuror's pets) levels? Leave the HP, Power, damage etc intact but at least let the pets be able to hit a mob which is within physical limit of soloing. It is a 6 level difference, not trying to solo level 40 mobs at 28, just something which other less solo-friendly classes are able to kill without any problems..
Message Edited by Sentarius on 02-08-2005 08:39 AM

More Updates

Hmm I used this last night to complete many Mage HO's (Flame or Star, cannot remember as I do it without thinking heh). I have never had it as a Sword on my end. I will re-check this tonight

One day we might actually get to cross ONE of these problems off those list...

Err.. the ones that have been fixed have been removed from the list already. Theres a partial list of the removed items further up this thread somewhere.

Aye - I remove items from the list as they get fixed. There have been about 5 or 6 items removed already =)

Confirmed this tonight (I was using Accursed Cloud). I have updated the bug list

1. The lifetap does show up in the spell effects window, the DoT does not show in eh maintained window.
2. Yup
3. It was originally a true AoE and not encounter based. It was fixed/nerfed/patched later - only the art was not updated so it is, at least, cosmetic only.

(Just trying to be accurate )