The information I seek is the number of drops and respawn times. (although reboots respawning mobs makes this difficult to determine from raid kill timestamps) Also the actual item names for some obscure revamped mobs.
Yeah, imho only fix the large ones that affect zones. (pit war, planar paging) I'm of the mind to leave time boss mechanisms as they were, outside fixing Quarm's stun. Do we want to be AK or "P99+"? Also, didn't hobart not fully fix perma pac, but make it last 10 minutes as a compromise? Or am I misremembering? (put in hobart fixes, imho, as well) Thinking some more about this, I realize no one will ever be happy. I was also thinking "would be also nice of the aa's worked, like clr cele regen, mgb paragon, but then where is the line drawn??" I'm glad I'm not the one deciding this stuff.
PP did not lat 10 minutes; there was no compromise. I wish there had been. I loved PP, I am so disappointed it got "fixed."
If you ever endured mad crazy chain aggro in BoT from every single mob being perma pac, you'll be glad it's fixed.
Pacify had two bugs. 1) a single pacify would last ~7 minutes or something really long 2) a second pacify would make it perma pac Pacify is listed as a "beneficial" spell I believe. The extended buff AAs would reduce that single cast to the accurate 24/36 second (whatever it should have been) timer. I believe Hobart fixed the perma pacify. But left the single cast bug there. However if you purchased the extended enhancement AA you essentially had non bugged pacify. After his fix. Where if you never purchase that AA you had a single pacify that lasted several minutes. (Then there's the third pacify bug where casting it on mobs that were immune would make their frenzy radius massive and as someone mention would seriously mess up some zones if someone tried to paci some named mobs)
That's pretty hot. I say we save this for a hard version of AK along with unkillable quarm, among others. I vote for HAK (hard AK) for a name.
This was kinda covered in the original post here, in terms of item ID numbers; but Timeless BP pattern combines were broken. I am fairly certain that it had something to do with item ID not corresponding, because you could combine and get a result (something like a Blackened Eye?), but certainly not the result you expected. IMHO, Timeless BP combines should certainly be fixed.
To be fair, pre-nerf bellow also ignored line-of-sight restrictions, worked while you were DA, and didn't break your invis. Add that to infinite cast range and you get a pretty powerful (likely unintentionally so) ability. Totally badass and fun, though! I don't envy the dev team when it comes to making balance decisions like coding bellow. I'd be interested to know what the high-level policy on recreating AK bugs is. Can anyone point me to posts/discussion? If I were Dictator for Life, I wouldn't reproduce bugs that (a) radically alter raid mechanics (e.g. SK voice spells making aggro irrelevant for nukers/healers), (b) unleash torrents of free exp (e.g. shakerpaging), or (c) incentivize behavior that makes whole zones unplayable (shakerpaging again). Anything else... meh, whatever.
I never really benefitted from shakerpaging (maybe one or two groups in my entire career) and I do not play a war here on Takp, but I will say, shakerpaging even existed on Live servers until it was nerfed in like 2007 or something...it was probably not intentional that ES+Rampage would interact the way they did, but it sure stayed that way along time before it was "fixed?". So yeah, these kinds of decisions are tough. Whichever way you go, somebody is gonna get pissed.
Im not sure if they can be? For example, Askr's BP doesn't even exist in the database and as far as I know, devs are not able to add items that don't exist.
I'm fairly sure they can add items.... But they do have a finite number of item IDs to work with, most of which are already occupied. It's also possible they could rename/rework some LoY items that are in the DB to be the Time BPs. I will say when Nirron combined the server first BP and the resulting item was a "Blackened Eye", many lols were had over the irony of working hard to get a kill in P5 and 1 of our 2 drops was useless.
we have a lot of rooms to add items since we have over 1000 of unused item id. So when we get to PoTime and adding items that were later added outside the range, we can add those but without that extra stats that isn't possible with this client.
I recall this night quite well... saw the Blackened Eye linked in guildchat and I'm sure Nirron felt like he had a blackened eye as soon as he hit that combine button. But I guess we had been warned that the combine was more than likely not going to work.
Shakerpaging is kind of unique due to the factors involved. We couldn't really replicate it accurately if we wanted, because on AK, one of the things that dramatically limited its effectiveness was the poor pathing. If we enabled it here, it would work far better because NPCs path better and stack up more. On AK you simply could not pull all of skyfire and shakerpage the entire zone at once. I tried pulling that zone using my IVA PBAoE trick and pull sizes were very limited due to the pathing. We'll have to do something about HoH as well since on AK the pathing in that zone was TERRIBLE which limited pull sizes to like 30ish tops. On Live after Sony fixed the pathing there, they had to give the mobs a special ability to gate back to their spawn points when you aggro too many because bards were kiting the entire zone and making absurd amounts of exp.
In Plane of Valor (which is the only Shakerpaging I ever saw extensively), the pathing was definitely wonky, but with enough patience, you could definitely get 99% of the mobs in the zone (not including the razorfiend tunnels, although those could be pulled out too, if you did it right). You really had to get the vast majority of the "out-in-the-open" mobs for it to work properly. If you got only, say, 90% of the mobs in the zone, only about 5-10 mobs would die and the remainder would be seen walking back to their spawn point with about 1-5% life left... close, but no cigar. It was a tricky thing to pull off, which made it a challenge... I could appreciate that part. It was no easy feat... but could be mastered with lots of practice. It was the lag that usually screwed it up, but pathing could do it too. But, when others wanted to play in the zone, it made it unplayable until the pagers stopped. I admired the idea that someone (with a better math/gaming mind than me) decided it would even work to begin with. Not sure who began it all, but to figure out that the right combination of a specific weapon proc, combined with specific warrior AAs/ripostes, and the right pulling skills, coupled with a bit of luck and ALL the mobs would die due to some exponential math is mind-boggling. That was someone with far too much time on his/her hands But I guess back in the early EQ days, we apparently all had too much time on our hands... or we wouldn't be here today
The problem with shaker paging on AK was mostly that you instant crashed people nearby once you hit the button. Gathering enough mobs to kill in Valor wasn't exceptionally challenging. Desynching and not having the ability to have 2 different Warriors shakerpage were the main problems, not the pathing. Fire could easily be shakerpaged if you could do multiple warriors without an instant crash. Instead we just AE kited fire, which honestly is more fun and fair.
I know you're not arguing against my point, just illustrating how powerful the ability is. I just want to point out that, in spite of all these beneficial aspects to the ability, monk/SK FD pulling was still the preferred method of pulling for the VAST majority of encounters on AK. I'd also like to point out that FD splitting/pulling itself was an unintentional mechanic, if I remember correctly.
Bard pulling was extremely limited by no mana regen and 900 mana cost per fade. Getting capped out 15 FT on a bard without raiding EPs was nearly impossible too. It basically meant bards had 4-6 fades in their mana pool and they were spent. Near the end of AK when the majority of our active bards were gone I did my fair share of bard pulling in PoWater/Fire. I can only think of two prime example where having the unlimited range Bellow would have been extremely helpful. Quavonis and Griokhin. However both could be managed without the ability, you just needed to properly time your DA song during the swim through the lava tunnel and the swim down the depth3 tube. But beyond PoWater/Fire minis, you had to clear a ton of trash for every other VT/PoP raid and bard pulling was useless due to the mana regen/fade cost mentioned above and it was a monk/SK's realm.
