I see a pattern, every single majorly nerfed class. Make sure to make an enc and switch in POP when torven 'balances' charm xp!
I think DA wiping hate was understood in some circles much earlier than that, but not widely used for the same reason many chose not to use the SK Voice spells to eliminate nukers' hate generation. I remember some Tem nukers being grumpy when they learned about DA hate wipes, as they enjoyed the metagame of walking the aggro line. This is definitely a departure from AKuracy, but I support the devs' decision to go with 'balance' on this one. It feels similar to the choice not to implement the Voice bug.
BTW, I think there's some serious weirdness with the pet aggro change. I don't have time to play with it right now, but earlier today I couldn't get my chanter summoned over a chumpy player-cast pet, even chain tashing, with my SK just standing in melee range. Maybe someone could investigate further?
Yeah i was convinced on AK this worked like it did on PC. Knovo was convinced of the other way. 2 people did die after i clicked DA off according to the same log you quoted, so i'm gonna guess i was wrong. I was a PC kid and a lot of my EQ knowledge back then on AK was straight from PC, and some of it was wrong.
I spent considerable time searching logs for this. The first case I see people talking about/using DA to preemptively reduce aggro is July 6 2012. It was Cabot explaining it to people who didn't know about it. He called it 'kinda cheesy'. So if 'some circles' knew about it, it wasn't common knowledge. Also, again, Zorblak never did it. (at least while logs were on) In fact Zorblak said this: [Mon Aug 2 23:39:25 2010] You tell temheals:7, 'DA doesn't actually clear your aggro. It just puts you on the bottom of the hate list for the duration of the buff. Still not a good thing, though.'
As far as accuracy goes. The bugs that are not as exploitable that was known on AK should be implemented. Not the exploitable one. Come to think of it. AK had more bugs as well as the glaring exploited one which made it so vulnerable toward the end. We intended to make takp better than that.
There's a Tem officer thread about it from June, 2011. Looking back, opinions were split about its use on raids. We did end up using it on occasion for stretch targets, like a low-numbers Fennin and some early attempts at Time gods. The DA change will affect the group game somewhat, particularly for clerics. If that's an issue, a possible middle ground would be to keep the change in place for bard DA, but revert it for the cleric and necro versions. The idea being that the clr/nec DAs and related clickies are either self-only or relatively hard to find or farm, while bard DA just opens the floodgates.
Knovo, the cleric describes the actual AK mechanic in those logs as well. There’s actually a thread in the Temerity officer forums from mid-2011 (about a year later) where the officers of the day discussed the mechanic which seems to be fairly unknown prior to this post. The above logs show that most have no idea about it but Knovo. In the thread they are discussing where in the hierarchy of AK bugs does this particular one fall. Is it a horse bug? MC Bug? Permapacify? Voice of Thule? Pit War? Comically, this is a fairly frequent type of discussion because of how many bugs existed on the server waiting to be discovered over time. In the case of some of these like Voice of Thule on raids or Pit Warring the guild officers banned these outright because of how unbalanced they were. In the case of horse bug no one really cared because it was mostly convenience. At the end of the thread, the consensus was that it is balanced out by long recasts on DA spells, and limited uses per night on DA Earrings/Dain Scrolls/Shiny Brass Idols. However the bard DA everyone admitted was likely the problem child with respect to this mechanic. Due to its group nature and 3minute reuse. But in the end, the Achilles heel to Temerity Raids was almost never over aggro, but instead low numbers and lack of time to clear content in a single night. So it ended up not being banned, but it also wasn’t made a staple strategy like CH Chains, FD/Fade pulling, etc. At the end of the day, I don’t think this will impact our or anyone else’s groups or Raids much. I know tonight for VT I will probably end up camping mid fight or I may end up AFK /gems halfway through the fight because I play a class that doesn’t get concussion or jolt or FD or derive much of its DPS from its pet. Nothing game breaking, just a bit more boring.
Give me a break on this 'it was harmless' stuff. If any class in the game can insta-click dump all their hate, that's a serious balance issue. Wizards not meming concussion because they can ignore the hate they are doing is not OK. When I played the game, wizards were dying to get elemental pants. If, years back, somebody had told me "on that emu over there, wizards don't need to worry about aggro and can chain nuke bosses all they like" I'd have laughed at how terrible the emu was and never considered logging into it. Darchon, while I was trying to figure out how you guys were dumping all of your hate without CoH or logging, I witnessed you overaggroing a raid boss and then a bard (or some other source of DA) saving you after being summoned and then allowing you to continue chain casting, which you could immediately do after clicking off the effect. It wasn't just used for clerics trying to sit.
The fact that DA agro dumping was fixed essentially 'in-era' at POP/LOY is a reasonable argument for changing it as an unintended bug.
Fading Memories is intended to wipe agro. DA is meant to be a respite while someone else tries frantically to regain the agro you stole.
I’ve never said it wasn’t powerful. I know it’s powerful. That’s why I thought it wise to buy one earring for 600k and another one for a Powater Ceramic on AK. I only mentioned Cleric aggro to address Solar. Wizards when grouped with bards don’t really have to worry about aggro too much, this is undeniably true. When a wizard is not with a bard they just have to worry about it in a different way. You only have 4 charges in your DA Earring for the night and you can’t burn multiple per boss so you need to burn a charge before you pull aggro, but not too early such that even with the aggro dump you pull aggro later in the fight. Tonight I’m sure I’ll pull aggro as we are still in new content and I’ve not gotten a good feeling for it yet, like I did whenever you were watching us. I will probably reach to my DA Earring again here and assuming I don’t get one rounded, I will just leave DA on for 18 seconds and the 1k Nuke I cast I’m sure will be overridden by the warrior attacking for 18 seconds. Then when it ends I just can’t do anything for awhile. You may call this balanced, a druid probably shouldn’t do DPS, and that’s fair. I tend to think it’s a more boring that balanced. I could cast more spells with the mana I have before the mob dies, but because warrior hate generation isn’t Knight hate generation I just have to sit there unable to do anything but /gems to pass the time. But I tend to agree with Nukem in both his posts. The game isn’t balanced and people play for nostalgia. Changes to attain the former reduces the later for some people, myself included. This is why I’ve always leaned on AKuracy rather than balance the past 3 years when these topics have come up. My issue is it makes me concerned to see what is next determined to be AKurate but imbalanced. Item recharging? Charmed pets? DA Hammer? Proxy Aggro? AE Stuns? The more these change the more you’re pigeon holed in the way you can play. I think the developers very likely had ideas on how most quests, raids and group zones should play out. However players often found different or better ways to accomplish some of these things. That’s what always made the game special to me. I get that occasionally some of these are clearly exploits and need to be shut down like being able to pit war and AFK for 50 AAs a day. But I don’t think that is comparable to this. A mechanic that either requires another character/player to use or a limited use per night rare Earring from a raid event or a single use idol. (I am ignoring Cleric, Paladin, SK and Necro spells because the later two can dump with FD, Paladins rarely want to dump hate and clerics rarely pull aggro unless it’s many mobs)
[Mon Aug 2 23:39:25 2010] You telltemheals:7, 'DA doesn't actually clear your aggro. It just puts you on the bottom of the hate list for the duration of the buff. Still not a good thing, though.' [Mon Aug 2 23:39:35 2010] Bragon tells temheals:7, 'correct'
Hell has frozen over. My feelings exactly. Archery, da, leash range, resists in various zones to trump aoe groups, shakerpaging and so forth. None of this are deal breakers, but they are not akkurate I wonder where we are headed a year from now?
If this change was in fact due to how Bards can drop hate on others, I'd rather see it limited to this as well. The recast on others' DA/HS spells is long enough that it shouldn't be a concern.
