And yet, it existed on AK and I guess trivialized the game for 10+ years there. The sky is falling...
I think mainly what it boils down to is that these CH spells were not intended for Luclin content. Their intent was to prevent clerics from monopolizing healing in PoP. In PoP the druid CH can not be used to heal a swarm tank for XP as PoP mobs hit too hard for it to be useful for that purpose. Druids have no way to drop aggro and clerics can DA. It kinda stands to reason that the spell can be exploited a bit when used out of era. I could see them generating next to no hate on purpose just as easily as I could see it being an oversight.
It's an allowed exploit here, though I personally don't like it. It's too late worrying about it now, the damage is done, as Mokli said. It seems like a significant enough thing to tell new players when they're deciding which healer to use for their trio. With a cleric, if you have to CH right away because the tank got 3 mobs, the cleric will most likely get at least one of the mobs on them and this will interrupt their healing which is deadly in a trio especially for a less experienced player. With a druid it's safe to spam heals without regard for how much aggro the tank has or doesn't have on the mobs. In raids where there are multiple healers, this is less of an advantage, but in a trio it's game changing. Anyway, there aren't any plans to change it, and it makes druid/shaman healing exceptionally good in a trio setting. I wish people would report this kind of stuff when they suspect it's not generating enough hate, though.
I guess it comes back to the bug vs exploit vs AKcurracy argument again. Everyone falls somewhere. AK existed for a long time and only imploded at the end mainly due to the influx of new people (whether you think that's good or bad) and SOE not willing to give the server the staff it now needed to address the new issues. The mechanics of the server wasn't its downfall.
I dont see why you guys are worrying, have you ever actually tried to get a druid to heal someone? most people who play druids think of themselves as DPS classes or solely there to snare things. Every druid ive ever tried to add to a ramp chain usually puts up some kind of fight. Druid is the class you play when you need heals but you dont actually want to contribute by playing a cleric before someone yells at me for bashing druids im most being sarcastic though there is a bit of truth to this
Druids are meant for people that like to heal but hate chains. You're right. Not going to lie. I hate chains.
The reason I personally don't like this is because it hurts group balance. If you pull more than 1 hard mob and you don't have some kind of plan to CC them quick, you will wipe. It's not a matter of skill, it's how the game is designed, to create a need to include classes that can do crowd control in your group. Warriors are tough but they generate the least hate out of all. If there was some way for them to constantly generate reliable hate on many mobs then it would break the balance in the same way as heals not causing aggro on a healer. Even the clickies people are using are questionable, and I heard they eventually nerfed them on p99. It is what it is, but it messes up other things in the game when there's a loophole for something, robbing the players of progressing through solving that part of the game. There isn't supposed to be a way out for healers. If you're fighting something that produces heavy DPS, or fighting many NPCs at once, you need heavy healing. You can calculate this out based on the stats of the mobs involved but it's just not possible to have a single healer using normal (effect 0) heal spells keeping a tank up over a certain amount of incoming damage from multiple NPCs because the heals will out aggro the tank, same as with nuking. It's only possible to survive it with more healers, more tanks, more dps, or CC, which is what forces us to group up and form guilds and socialize on this forum.
i see your point, but I also think its more important focus on being Akurate. Also, most high end content and soon to be MOST high end content the druid heal isnt going to suffice. It works on low level content but anything that matters it really doesnt work for, also they dont get it till level 58 so it is a problem people face already while leveling.
Yeah, sounds like another instance of the old 'AKuracy vs. balance' debate. Except the evidence for AKuracy here seems thinner than usual; I've only seen anecdotes, no data. Makes me wonder how much exp I could crank out with max DS on my SK and a couple of druids rolling a mini-CH rot on me. I think I can get 200ish DS with a potion and a bard. Should be PBAE-calibre DPS with a big enough train. No need for stuns, either. Paging @gardnerjens ! (edit: grammar)
My paladin has max defensives and about max raid gear in Luclin excluding maybe 3-4 BiS drops. A spam druid CH can keep me up against maybe 4-5 blue cons in Ssra mine or Umbral Plains. Beyond that the heals don't outheal the damage. So I could do that, or my paladin could cast 1 stun on each mob and then do cleric CH half as often and always top off heals with no AAs spent. Which I am doing anyways to try to slow mobs without pulling aggro.
This is the point I was making. In PoP, if this happens you are still likely to wipe because a druid can't keep up. The mobs hit too hard. We are using these spells out of era. At level 65 there are virtually no places to get xp while taking advantage of the spell. My SK has died to one, YES ONE, second floor elite because druid CH couldn't keep up. This only happened once ever, but it did happen.
@Darchon, yeah, I'm thinking lighter-hitting 55+ trash in old-world zones. Juggs, maybe, or deep Chardok. @Yarnee, nogs, so I'd have to channel Wave of Enfeeblement (2.5 sec PBAE, 40ish hate) or Word of Spirit (3.5 sec, 100ish hate). Or click, proc or cast runes, or have a paladin tank and self-heal a bit. And the druids definitely couldn't sit!
I would only see this as an exploit if it could be used to do things like heal 52s that are fighting vox/naggy, alone those lines. Just because its an effective strategy for other things doesnt necessarily make it an exploit. It still does add some hate, sitting and prox will still get the druid attacked
@Pithy Nah you don't even have to do that. I mean you can, but it's not necessary. The only thing you really have to do is not sit and make sure they are all in melee range before the first heal lands. I do cast word of spirit in those situations, but I've also not used it and never had druid pull aggro from healing. But I have ran SK/Druid/Bard and the bard DS did pull aggro and the pile did eat the bard. I don't know much about bards, and I may have been doing it wrong, but nonetheless, the bard did get eaten.
Were the hate values of all of the other spells measured on AK? Or were they measured against what is currently on live?
The druid and shaman spells are the same spell effect, same result. We call effect 0 'Current HP' you can see it here (attrib1) https://lucy.allakhazam.com/spellraw.html?id=9&source=Live Then there is this special one that uses a different effect, number 147, which we refer to as 'Percental heal' https://lucy.allakhazam.com/spellraw.html?id=2435&source=Live There are only 3 spells like that, 2 druid and 1 shaman. It's not clear to me what the original intent was with regard to the percentage and maximum amount - they were trying to give the other priests CH but appease the cleric players and give it some down side. It went through a few iterations and fixes but I guess with AK we got a snapshot where they hadn't added it to the heal aggro function yet. Our hate function is coded similarly, this effect is just not handled and falls through with no hate added. When these spells first went in, they also were affected by spell haste and such, so you could get it a lot faster than 10 seconds. It's possible that they don't crit for the same reason that they don't generate hate, an oversight.
The code base was taken before PoP was complete and dev was outsourced, why Quarm was broken, these hate values exist, etc. Hate was adjusted on its own for the spells. Crits never were added for the CH's for Druids (didn't play a shaman so not sure there) while I played on live. They did add group heals and divine arbitration type abilities for Druids later on. The group heal did crit from what I recall, so non-critting was intentional I believe on the CH.
yay, more talk of out-of-era nerfs via thread derails should merge it into a "Nerfs" thread to better keep track it sure is a risky proposition having any conversations on these forums
It must be Wednesday. The Mass Enchants you mention in our spell data are from the 7/10/03 patch. We also have several other spell data changes from that patch (Extended Affliction replaced with Burning Affliction, Draught of Lightning and Force of Akera created, component removed from Ferocity, Haste v3 added to Frenzied Burnout) but not others (no Kindle, no level adjustments on the group clarity line, no Quarm AE changes!). When ToSR was updated on Al'Kabor, Hobart told us that the new zone data was from 7/5/03 (meaning we missed ornate drops on ToSR trash by five days!). It may be that the spell data came from the same date but that it was some kind of developer's snapshot that hadn't been pushed to the live servers and therefore includes some but not all of what changed in the 7/10 patch.
Well i'm not nerfing anything and I don't think Torven is either, but I think it would be a better if druids and shamans got creamed for a 3000 point heal the same way as they do for a 300 point one. When people know something is wrong and they exploit it instead of posting about it, it's pretty annoying to the devs. Like people killing the quest NPCs in airplane or felwithe, or trying to downplay how overpowered 0 hate heals are, for fear of having it changed. I talked to Torven about this percental healing a while back and as much as I personally don't like it, I believe that it's AKurate and using this advantage is allowed here. It's nice to tell new players about it and not be all secretive as this is a unique mechanic not found on other servers, AFAIK.
Thanks for the background, RW. It sounds like our spell data was very likely from summer '03, well after the 1/15/03 patch that added hate to the dru/shm CHs. So setting aside the balance question, the AKuracy question boils down to whether the hate generation from these spells was governed on AK by the spell data or by some other (10/2002-era) server code? If the latter, then most likely AK had the low-aggro versions of these spells?
Yeah, the most fundamental behaviors of the AK game mostly seemed to follow October of 2002 rules, and I imagine hate generation is no exception. As far as balance goes, I lean much more toward the "balance it!" school of thought (or maybe just the "use the more challenging version" school of thought, because it makes for a better game) these days, but I think this mostly matters for powerlevelers. Even the hate generation on CH (which would be larger than the druid/shaman heals regardless) is seldom an issue on raids.
SOE didn't try to balance the classes until after PoP though. The whole "re-envisioning" thing. Classes were way out of balance since the beginning, but then they tried to think of ways to rebalance them sometime in 2005. Remember the Druid stances? They shelved a lot of this because it wasn't popular. I don't understand why people feel the need to shoehorn this era of EQ into something it wasn't. There are plenty of other custom servers out there.
The evidence is rather strong. AK forked before it was fixed so the only way it would have been fixed on AK is if Hobart included it with the other work he did. I doubt people would be making comments about it not aggroing if it were never a thing on AK. [Wed May 29 17:38:14 2013] Minsc tells alliance:1, 'i have mine at alt for healing bc druid CH is non-agro' [Tue May 07 01:19:12 2013] Dorsia tells the raid, 'and druid CH / elixirs only for heals, of course' [Mon Jul 01 14:32:22 2013] Rangerwoodelf tells the guild, 'without haste eventually my cleric steals agro on a CH though... seems like a highly involved fight.... but i can go help if you wish' [Mon Jul 01 14:32:57 2013] You say to your guild, 'I relied on the overpowered druid CH ' [Mon Jul 01 14:33:27 2013] Rangerwoodelf tells the guild, 'What makes it overpowered?' [Mon Jul 01 14:33:36 2013] Oberyn tells the guild, '0 aggro' [Mon Jul 01 14:33:52 2013] Rangerwoodelf tells the guild, 'man what a bugged class for healing lol' [Thu Jul 04 16:45:17 2013] You told fanglore, 'Druid CH makes this fight super trivial ' [Tue Jul 09 05:39:05 2013] You tell _:3, 'heal over time draws like no argo' [Tue Jul 09 05:39:08 2013] You tell _:3, 'same with druid CH ' I could post more but you get the picture None of the mechanics work was done while AK was up minus some resist parses. I started work after the shutdown notice and Cavedude and Rob were busy doing data collection tasks like capturing vendors, boat routes, NPC spawns etc so doing mechanics stuff just wasn't he priority due to time constraints. Actually this is the problem: that these exploits become widely abused by the majority of the player base on emus. The reason why they were not fixed for so long on Live servers is BECAUSE they were not abused very much and therefore escaped developer notice. The more abused they become the worse it is for the game. If only a handful of people abuse it then it's not a huge deal. Spell hate is calculated by the server logic, it's not in the spell data
Sweet jebus sorry for bringing it up, was just confused about the spell differences cause neither the shm or dru spell show actual values on the wiki.
