The sentiment is great but Hobart's intent was obvious. He didn't mean for many of those bugs to exist but he did not have the time or ability to fix many of them so he tossed out some bones. The new dev team isn't putting in all of this work to give you a broken server.
Aside from the community, a large part of what made Al'Kabor, Al'kabor, was the unique bugs. I'm fine with there not being the certain bugs that Hobart patched out, since they weren't on the server at the end: Perma Pacify Bellow Range (Even after range fix, LoS was not required nor was stopping an active song) Voice of Thule Enchanter instant-cast But the ones that were on the server til the final day I think should stay: WotW/Rune Stacking Out-of-Range EXP calculation MC Mana Feed Horse Bug Magician Reclaim Energy bug
A couple of those weren't bugs, and weren't AK specific. Using the horse buff with old models was left in place by Sony for over a year after they introduced new models with Luclin. The model looks and the animations (in particular) received massive scorn from the playerbase. And it wasn't just a question of bad looks. They were system performance killas. Not to mention the grandpas-gotta-poop run animation, pantless elves and bards doing their suicide jack maneuver. Sony did a lot of fine-tuning on the models in the years following their release -- much of which our AK and TAKP client does not have. Full disclosure: I still wrinkle my nose at the janky things! Even if they opened another prog server this year I'd show up wearing nothing but original models and a wild one wig. Zetro
Indeed, several were not AK specific but they were part of the time-period that AK was locked in. Magician's Reclaim Energy bug allowing them to actually get a net + mana return when summoning + reclaiming a pet due to their pet foci / AAs. Same with WotW/Rune Stacking. Same with Item Recharging via vendor. etc. If you remove a lot of things that were bugs and later fixed on PC side, it stops being 'classic' EQ to an extent.
I'm not with Darch on the Wild/Rune stack, but I agree that Pet Canni and Vendor Recharge were not just Al'Kabor anomalies but each part of EQLive game physics for several years. We probably need to come up with categories when talking about this stuff. Zetro
Wrath of the Wild was part of the game physics until they figured out how to implement hit/proc counters. This was when they figured out how to have certain things only function for a certain number of hits. Spells like those that mitigate 30% of damage for the next 20 incoming hits, or proc 32 times before disappearing. Before that point, the AA was subject to rune-stacking order. Which means it lasted longer than both Reclaim Energy (which was removed in GoD, and at which point devs gave mages a consolation "Pet Canni" spell for mana regen) and longer than item recharging (which was removed in late 2003). I'm sure you have your reasons for disagreeing with me, but without this one functionality, that AA is a complete joke and waste of time. Even with it, its marginally useful, requires you are paired with an enchanter, and is only useful for killing things much lower level than yourself.
Your point is fair, if not your timeline math. I'm keeping an open mind about that combo. Not that anybody's asking me! Zetro
There's been no mention in this thread about instant clickies refreshing the global cooldown. The bug wasn't a specific one to Al`Kabor, it was one of those timeline issues. FWIW, P99 has been able to successfully code it. The "feature" is present there.
Divine Aura also worked differently on Al`Kabor (again, I think an era thing - I'm sure someone will chime in). DA (or any of its likenesses) would drop hate to 1 (was not a full aggro drop) as soon as the buff took place, so it could be clicked off quickly to drop a lot of aggro. DA (or any of its likenesses) did not affect the rampage order, and a person with DA would still be rampaged (of course the character was invulnerable). It wasn't rare to see a paladin ramp tank with a DA hammer. The Divine Arbitration AA would still heal (rebalance HP) when the buff was active.
There's also the nature of (perma-)rooted mobs and aggro. On Al`Kabor, a (perma-)rooted mob would have the person with the most hate on the top of their aggro list regardless of where that person stood. This meant that a mob could be "tanked" in relative safety 80 feet away, since the mob's melee radius wasn't large enough to reach the tank. AE's would hit, and normal summoning rules applied, so it wasn't totally trivial.
If I may be so bold as to give some input on Bellow in particular, I didn't see the pre-nerf Bellow as that broken within the context of PoP-era EQ. For starters, as a puller, you were still limited by the pursuit range of the mob you were tagging (For those who don't know, a mob would not chase a player who did something to agro them if they were outside of a pursuit range X, which varied based on mob/zone/era/etc...). Secondly, the Bard bellow/fade pulling mechanic has the limiting factor of a bard's mana. I had the most mana as a bard on the server and I could get like 5 or 6 fades consecutively before I had to sit on my ass forever to recover mana. This meant, for the most part, an FD puller would almost always be the more efficient option. From a raid perspective, I think I was only effective as a puller for PoFire (Excluding Doomfire Ring), PoWater, parts of P3 in PoTime, and parts of Ssra. Everything else required FD, a more durable puller, or no pull at all. Thirdly, I don't think it really trivialized pulling as a bard for any content with a couple exceptions. You still needed to acquire a target and you still needed to split stuff effectively. You could have a rogue help out or do some tricks with Eye of Zomm hat, but you still had a boatload of stuff coming with whatever mob you pulled. You could fade stuff off (I did this regularly in PoFire when pulling Reparm from his Castle back to the first Fort), but you run into that mana limitation again. Pulling was still a challenge. If it wasn't, then we would have only used bards to pull for Temerity. The only pull that I think it really trivialized was Lord Dolj in Velk's (I could get him to zoneline by literally training myself). Lastly, from a balance perspective, I think it actually does put bards on par with other pullers in this era. Without infinite range and no-LoS, I think a monk is a better puller in PoFire (Excluding Quavonis), I think an SK or a Monk is a better puller in PoWater (excluding isolated parts of Coirnav), and a lot of the cool stuff bards could do solo or in a group setting is kind of tossed out the window. All that being said, I can understand why SOE would remove it within the context of future expansions. It would have put hefty restrictions on their future design decisions and it would have made balancing the pulling classes incredibly difficult. But that's irrelevant on a PoP-locked server.
Did you guys decide on the old AK spell bugs yet? I'd like to make an educated choice when rolling my first toon. Also racial benefits... Ogre stun immunity and troll regen... Will regen scale as you level? How will the stun immunity work? /Kaz
