Also, for an enchanter, the strategy suggested above: "load up your fastest-casting, cheapest level 1 spell in a skill, drop a stack of coins on the keyboard, and go do something else" - doesn't work for conjuration (which is where the problem is showing itself for an enchanter), as I can only get off 20 or so fizzles trying to cast my current level pet and I'm down a full mana bar - and casting low level pet means not only do I have to then destroy the pet before the next cast (which can't be done via a stack of coins) but each pet is consuming a tiny dagger. So now I need to buy hundreds of daggers to level conjuration just so I can cast pet, which I've been doing at the game designed rate for the entire life of my chanter (but apparently that's nowhere near good enough to level the skill)? Lousy game design. The only other set of conjuration skills is mezz and casting this on NPCs or my other toons in PoK generates 'your spell would not have taken hold on your target' so AFAIK pet casts are the sole means of leveling the skill. Would love to hear suggestions that would allow me to follow the 'drop a stack of coins and leave it' option....
How about you undo this and put it back in in a month or so. Make it the MOTD to warn everyone to get their skills up. That would give us some time. Instead of now sitting and chain casting low level spells, we could still play as we used to and mix in the skill training in a more moderate fashion. BR, Nedush
As an enchanter, for building conj, you can summon a pet outside of PoK, and chain cast mez on it. Aren't required to do the skill ups in PoK, that's just where everyone tends to hang out. The hard part for a chanter is Evocation in my opinion. Can cast nukes on pet outside of PoK, but the cooldown on the spells makes it SO slow. Personally i think skill ups are WAY too slow. My SK for example has been using Engulfing Darkness on every single mob since level 22. He is level 30 now and still only has about 76ish con, which still fizzles anywhere from 3-7 times on darkness at level 30, and still nigh impossible to cast my level 30 pet. I'm on PC client, so it's not as simple as putting a stack of coins on the key board for macroing either. Don't mind the fizzle rate, just not a fan of the skillup rate.
I think this fizzle change was compounded by the fact that spell skill ups are rather slow (and before a month or so ago were extremely slow.) Also I do believe Torven is implementing the fizzle changes here based on this post from 2000 http://www.eqclerics.org/forums/showthread.php?t=223
Thanks very much, Liegezen! I'll use that approach. Seems to be something of a consensus developing regarding skill-up rate... also liked Arphan's idea of backing out the changes for a period to give people time to work skill-up attempts into normal game play...
If I understand Torven's posts correctly... someone with 200 int and 50 specialize casting a level 51+ spell will have a 95% fizzle chance until around 163 in their casting skill. After that their chance increases 1%/skill until fizzle chance hits 2%. Maybe that's accurate to AK, but the current state on TAKP is massively different than my experience on Live during PoP. During a normal rate of group levelling I don't recall ever reaching a point of being incapable of functioning to due to fizzles. I definitely would have done something about it if I was constantly fizzling away entire mana pools. This wouldn't be the only thing that was different on AK though. Someone could probably put the fizzle debate to bed with a log though. Anyone have an AK log with a streak of ~40 fizzles followed by a skill up in the 100-150 range to verify this? Comments about power levelled alts being useless until their skills were capped doesn't really address the mid-range skill levels of a normal character.
The dev server is up for a reason that people seem to forget. Every TAKP patch is live on the dev server prior to TAKP getting it. More people need to log onto there to verify accuracy of changes if they wish it to be less of a non-AK impact. The comments about reverting and letting people skill up first is so against the development of this server it hardly needs attention. This server is BETA. How productive would it be to implement a change that never gets tested/used? Then months or years down the road it is discovered it is wrong? Sudden changes will happen. Especially if NO one tests them prior to go live on Dev. 2 things people forget entirely. We were for the most part spoiled on AK, we had armies of max level max skill characters. Our memory of how the game works compared to a Kunark cap as current here will be skewed as we didn't have this struggle on AK for years. As mentioned we had KEI on AK as well. Secondly, this is a work in progress, much of the game mechanics have to be remade here from scratch. We don't have access to the original source code nor the database. So logs, change notes, and historical posts on the net is all we have to verify our easily changed memory. Getting all up in arms and semi-hostile over changes and trying to say "You'd have more people if you (insert easy mode tweak to be more like WoW here)" Does nothing for the health and accuracy of this game. Sometimes it feels like from posts such as in this thread, that people think of us like SOE devs. That we intentionally try to crap on the playerbase. This is not the case. First and formost, this is a preservation project. Not a quest to remake an easy mode EQ. Remember on SOE Kunark Launch, EQ was no easy mode game. This is where we are at now. Edit: One more thing to note. I specifically added and continually tweak the guides on how to setup your own testing server sandbox at home. This is not just useful for devs that want to contribute. But it gives tech savy players more power to test things locally and provide feedback. I am currently working on an easy setup script for OSX to run a private testing server. It is slow going, but getting there.
That post is about skill up rates. I'm talking about fizzle rates. Specifically: a log that shows very high fizzle rates just below or around the point where it currently starts to improve here on TAKP with the new code.
Someone in another thread mentioned that they didn't care about the state of the game on AK and wanted to see TAKP replicate their experience of EQLive on Karana, so I thought it might be good to make this point: AK wasn't an approximation of the EQ people played on live; it was an exact snapshot of the state of the game on the day PoP launched in October of 2002. Yes, a very small number of AK-specific oddities (mostly DB-related) subsequently came about because of Hobart's tinkering, but the vast majority of the server's weird quirks were weird quirks that simply got changed prior to the PoP most people remember. My understanding is that Torven's estimate of fizzle rates is in fact more based on PC-data from the era than on AK, but nevertheless, it's worth pointing out that the fizzle rate on AK was the fizzle rate on live, at least in fall of 2002 (and I doubt the fundamentals changed much in the following year or two, although I'm sure some broken bells and whistles like the fizzle AA may have been fixed).
It doesn't match my memory from Live but I'm not suggesting it needs to be anything other than how AK was. For the sake of TAKP's records for accuracy, why not track down logs that validate the formula?
Judge the fizzle rate with one of your maxed skills... Personally I think it feels fine, but getting skill ups after 150+ sucks balls.
It's me your misrepresenting a quote from. The only reason I posted that part is that %90 of the time in these threads people prefix what they state with a reference to how something was on AK. And it gets to a point were it feels like my opinions are irrelevant because I only played on live. Since AK was based on code that was previously on live, I feel my opinions should matter about as much as any one else's as I don't see how AK cold be THAT much different from live on topics like these. Sadly, I now know skill rates and maybe fizzle rates WERE that much different on AK then what I experienced on live. =(
I get that, DarkAkuma. And I agree that someone's experience of EQlive circa fall of 2002 is not irrelevant to the state of the same mechanics on AK, because in the vast majority of cases, the two would have been identical. The flipside of that equivalence, however, is that if there's evidence something worked one way on Al'Kabor, and I remember it working differently on Bristlebane in October of 2002, I'm most likely mistaken.
I'm hoping Haynar can get the precise function from a client decompile and put this to bed. That is highly technical work, so if he can manage that, then he should be commended. But really, I don't think casting skills for one or two nights is a big deal. Raising skills was something we had to do back then.
This might sound silly... but my eyes see through a game lover's perspective and I'm someone that enjoys the lore and the feel of the game to make it immersive and not just 0's and 1's. You know, like kinda actually being there as a character in Norrath. Even if 99% of the way most video games played aren't true to life, I like it when they try to be a *little* bit realistic. You can't swim like a brick and then suddenly as a dolphin by jumping off of a ship in the ocean and swim to shore miles away, or become the most powerful being you know by killing animals and other people all day, but still. The same thing must be true for casting spells in this imaginary world. I'm wondering if originally the game creators/devs were liking and in agreement that it was part of progressing your character to get skill-ups for casting spells out of combat? Or maybe like me, you just feel a lot better about your chars when the game is difficult. Either way from that perspective I like the idea. Before you run off to battle as a spell caster, you probably should practice your spells! That's the thinking i see here. Especially with spell skills being a huge game mechanic. Instead of assuming that someone could just automatically have all of the skill-ups handed to them simply by constant combat from zero to hero throughout leveling but actually had to practice out of combat before you entered it as well. After awhile though people figured it out and realized they just had to spam spells in a safe place for awhile to get necessary skill in all of their spell casting skills or even others that require the same thing, like pick locking, throwing, safe fall, sense heading, swimming and such. The whole roll o' coins plan always worked if you're tired of doing it the normal way. /shrug TLDR - I think they meant for people to have to practice skills while not just fighting/leveling back then even if it's a monotonous old-school style of leveling something, although later with other games doing it cooler/flashier and making it 100x easier became the norm probably drove them to "fix" it.
I remember even in PoP days the amount of work it took to get a handful of skill-ups in a number of high level trade-skills was far, far, far beyond what it takes to spam see-invis while you watch the walking dead
Yep I remember days for each skill even using a looping script to "press the buttons" to get max. I was constantly getting crap from people because I wasn't maxed in my mezz skillups. *shrug oh wells. (well till I took the time to afk skill it lol)
When you say I shall put coins on my keyboard to level these skills, how does that work? For me, I have to press my hotkeys manually each single time. That will be 2 nights of sitting at the PC and pressing a key? Or should I load some program that is doing that for me. Is there anything that I can use and that you allow? With my 2 casters, I have to get total 7 casting skills from below 50 to above 200 to make them work properly. I got 3 of them to 80-120 by now. Its slow. If the system had been like this from the beginning then I would have leveled more slowly cause of focusing on these skillups. But I would have been able to spread the training. It wouldnt have felt so plain stupid to do it as it does now. BR, Nedush
Ah, so thats why you dont see it as a problem. Any suggestions on how us PC users can get their skills up reasonably? Best I have so far is a macro to repeat the casting 5 times. Whats the looping script that has been mentioned, can I use it? BR, Nedush
My tried and true method for 'macro' casting without a script: 1. Map your Right Left move keys to a hot key (I keep hot key 10 mapped to movement keys for forage, corpse dragging etc...). 2. Make that hotkey have the spell gem you wish to macro cast. 3. Switch camera angles so that the camera doesn't move with the toon (3rd person works well for this). Unless you don't mind watching the room spin around and around. 4. Target yourself (or some other appropriate target) and weight down one of the RL arrow keys. As your toon spins, they will cast the spell gem over and over until out of mana. 5. Med up, then repeat 1-4.
