From my experience on AK, you certainly didn't have to be exactly in line with the wall to get archery to work on walled mobs, but you did have to be somewhat close.
There might be an issue with Plane of Water, or other areas where walls aren't flat/straight surfaces. In PoWater the walls are more like curved cylindrical tunnels, and all the rangers present reported major issues trying to find any spot that made arrows land when a mob was on the wall, specifically middle ish of the cylinder. No parallel angle seemed to work. Tried in front of the mob, behind the mob, directly parallel, acute/obtuse, slightly above/below etc. It was a total fail. Maybe others can chip in how they are finding it in other similar non-flat-wall situations.
We were fighting in the below highlighted area, where the boss mob being on the wall seemed to stop arrows from working from any angle. Mobs: Krziik the Mighty and Ofossaa the Enlightened Refer to highlighted yellow area below. I think this was the area... https://i.imgur.com/T4ZMKoS.png
I thought that mobs were supposed to reject handin attempts (as in, you can't even open the hand-in window) while FDed, and say something to you about it, that contained their serverside name, like a_skeleton_017 ?
No way, I've been handing in stuff FD since starting here. Quests work, just you don't receive faction for it.
question ( i know im late ) is the archery nerf what was intended? it's almost impossible to hit any mob that even touches a wall? what was the reasoning behind the nerf? there aren't armys of rangers on takp blowing up raid mobs... the nerf has mostly turned us into really, really bad rogues with spells
It was determined that our army of rangers was blowing up raid mobs. From what I've heard, you have to fire parallel to the wall if mob is touching it, now. So our army of rangers just changed where they stand.
AK had a bug with archery which made it so you had to position the ranger in certain ways in order for archery to work if the mob was in a wall or was cornered. They are attempting to emulate that bug here on TAKP. You can still hit a mob if it is walled, you just need to shoot parallel along the wall.
Also appears to depend on if the wall is flat and not rounded, so keep that in mind. Our rangers had a really hard time finding a sweet spot in PoW. Or something else was going on with arrows and water again. In a way, this will likely force more tanking in open areas when possible. Of course the reason you wall or corner something is because people can't control their pet push. I'm hopeful better pet push control will come out of this.
Tem has 7 ranger mains, 3 wizards, 2 magicians, and 1 necromancer. So when Torven checks the damage breakdown on a raid mob - particularly Tallon Zek, whose AEs make it difficult for our rogues (5), monks (2) and beastlords (2) to melee consistently - he sees a lot of rangers at the top of the list. That concerns him because archery generates less hate than other forms of damage. We are naturally embarrassed by our superabundance of rangers - especially the halfings - but we didn't plan it that way and aren't loading up an army of 15 ranger alts (or any ranger alts, for that matter) to kill bosses in Time.
You should compare your ranger damage to your wizards' damage. Wizards don't have trouble avoiding Tallon AoEs. Part of the motive for this was seeing your melee standing around doing nothing because it didn't even occur to you guys to allow them to melee. The previous corner detection code didn't work very well. If you pushed the mob into a corner it would take a few seconds for it to kick-in, so a single spell could push the NPC out of the corner slightly which would be pushed right back into it 0.5 seconds later and arrows would still hit for awhile. This trivially circumvented the check. Part of of the trade-off to archery DPS is the requirement to position the NPCs. If rangers can push perpendicularly then managing push becomes easier. This is part of the challenge of the game. I didn't add this earlier because it would have delayed content development and frankly because of the complaining and I didn't think it would be as much of an issue it was.
Plane of time has been awesome. It's nothing like I remember it from live, much harder. Walls not blocking ae's makes such a big difference in difficulty. My guild always cornered most the gods and burned them down, max melee range always avoided ae rampages and lots of ae's (like tallon barbs). Rangers could shoot cornered mobs on live, everything was just tank and spank and burn it down before ae's did much. No bard song window makes buff management a challenge, no mgb celestial regeneration. It's like a completely different zone, in a good way.
I thought Plane of Time was your reward for doing Rathe Council. So that time was a breeze compared to the stuff before
Walls didn't block AoEs on PC side either, other than Quarm. The spells are specifically flagged to ignore wall LoS. AoE rampage is also quite infrequent in there.
I knew we blocked some of quarm's ae's using the right side wall in his room (some of his ae's hit through walls, some didn't), but I could swear we blocked TT/bert/CT ae's by using the port-up room walls for P4 and P5 respectively, might have been specific ones also. TZ/Ginto are the 2 mobs where max melee range kinda gimped the fights on live (tz's barbs, ginto's ae rampage) could avoid both and still get full melee dps on while they were cornered. I just thought it seemed quite a bit harder than I remember, and I enjoyed it more.
Oh, we did indeed not only consider, but many times try, having all mele in. When AEs seemed to do too much damage for the cost/benefit, we tried other strategies.
I know a lot of people experienced a PoP where the real end-game was defeating the Elemental Planes gods and that Plane of Time itself was the easier raid. One thing to keep in mind is that every guild that experienced PoTime outside of Temerity on AK, did so with LoY enabled. This means everyone experienced it with the short/song buff window. Meaning instead of needing to be diligent on some fights to account for needing to leave 4-5 buff slots open for Debuffs/MGBs, you could use whatever buffs you wanted up to 15. This often isn’t an issue for some classes but it does mean that extraneous bard songs just aren’t an option and extra clickies that provide minor benefits like 1-2 mana Regen or 10 resists that do stack with anything often can’t be justified due to limited buff space. It also means every guild had access to 10+ cleric MGB Celestial Renewals. Meaning you need more Druids to counteract AE damage from Rampage or AEs or you need to spend 2000 mana to MGB Ethereal Elixir for a MGB HoT that is half the duration of the Celestial Renewal people are used to. It also means that on events like Bertoxxulous where curing an 18 disease counter DoT is critical, we don’t have access to Blood of Nadox on every shaman capable of curing a full group with 1 cast instead of here needing to cast 1 Abolish Disease per person, or Pure Blood on every Druid/cleric capable of curing each player with 1 cast instead of requiring 3 Counteract Diseases. There are plenty of other examples where our era of EQ differs from many peoples experience of PoP. People will definitely find PoTime to differ greatly from their last experience with the zone. Often times I think this is a good thing due to a challenging raid at the end being better than a trivial one.
Time also wasn't limited to 60 on AK from what I heard. There were ways to gimp in another 12. That is a big difference.
Not to mention the better raid window and 72 by default allowed into Tim on live. So, its likely harder here than on AK. And definitely harder than live.
I agree with Marvn that Time has been great here. I love that it's a challenge, and that so far, nearly every god has required us to try the event, wipe, talk over our approach, and come back and try some more before finally winning. I love that. I don't want to roll over TAKP's last expansion's endgame in two nights of raiding and then have no other challenges to look forward to. It's worth noting that on AK, PoTime gods dropped two items, not three, and some of those items were disappointing and half-finished with missing stats and effects. For most of AK's history, PoFire minis also dropped only one mold each, and the drop tables were heavily skewed toward a handful of patterns that rotted over and over again (we called Fire the Plane of Leather on AK). Here on TAKP, raiding PoP's endgame zones is more rewarding. It's fitting, and better for the longevity of the server, that it's also a real challenge! I know that keeping it that way has often been a thankless job, so thanks to the devs, and Torven in particular, for sticking to your guns on the raiding game's difficulty and putting up with the heat that comes with that.
I agree about the challenge being neat and completely unique - like the ring of vulak bring done in-era (in terms of no AAs, and no luclin gear, though we got focuses and ancient spells from it) that didn't really exist on live ever. However, the 72 player limit, I think, should have been preserved. Maybe they'll have to see if everyone hits a wall in P5 and reanalyze if that happens.
The 60-character limit is a good call. It's the size of our raid window, and the dials are meant to limit Time to the size of one raid. The elimination of a workaround (that was only used a couple of times on AK anyway!) in exchange for fixed loot tables and a killable Quarm (remember Timeforged Airblast?) is an excellent deal - especially on TAKP, where overpowering an encounter with a horde of boxes is so easy.
Well....I feel extra toons may be detrimental if just boxed due to reaction times being lower. Ideally, you'd want 1 human per toon, so more toons in P4 or P5 may have the opposite effect. The exceptions I guess would be clerics which can be easily boxed in chains or bards and rangers which can be set on auto something. With that said, extras of those classes alone (even boxed) could be enough to flip an encounter.
