Curious if there was mob data collected before the sunset on all the raid content ( hp , ac , resists , # of attacks per round, attack speed, etc ) If not, where will this data be imported from because eqmac data is different than live and setting these to true eqmac "hard mode" is what made the game so rewarding when beating encounters and otherwise would just be peqtgc without MQ
There was a very large effort to collect as much data as possible beginning after the announcement of the first sunset which got cancelled. Not everything is 100% but that's what we testers are trying to help get back to, how things were on AK.
Exactly as Lenas said. We want to fix obvious flaws but keep it hard mode. We take what we gathered from AK and then rely on Live as a base or our own knowledge/experience of AK until the player community chimes in on correctness. Also note, PeQ has seen a great deal of corrections as a result of our work here as well and will likely continue to see them. Items are nearly 100% reliable and not easy for us to be convinced otherwise because packets don't lie. There have been "missing items" but that is a different issue than what I mean here. Items will rarely if ever get modified. Only 1 to date has been changed slightly and it took some debate to do such. We want to be our own server not to be confused with any other emu out there. As well as an "improved" AK experience. But as far as encounters, resists, hp and various other things like this we can adjust based off of input if nothing is available. They say it takes a community to raise a child, well Takp is the child. We all got a job to do if we are to see it mature.
This is mostly what I'm doing. You can read some of my conclusions on this forum http://www.peqtgc.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=67 The truth is raid bosses are actually mostly unaltered on EQLive right now. Live is still a very good source of data. It's common mobs that got the most alterations, and some of them actually hit harder now. (such as lava duct crawlers) It also depends on the era/expac. PoP for example is very unchanged except mob DIs were reduced slightly across the entire expac. Velious raid bosses are almost entirely unaltered as far as I can tell. Even Nagafen still hits for double 225s right now on Live. I have logs and calculated damages of most raid bosses from either AK or EQ circa 1999-2003 so I have a good idea of which mobs were altered and how. Certain stats like armor class are very difficult to determine however (and I sincerely doubt EQEmu has an accurate AC formula to begin with) and that's kind of a lower priority right now as the work load is enormous, but I do want to make sure mobs like Rallos Zek end up max hitting more often and are resistant to melee damage.
PoP raid bosses vary wildly between what AK had and what exists on Live. There was an LoY spdat/DB in place (meaning revised AEs) and the beta forms of a lot of encounters (Ginto's original mechanics were super wonky, Bert was a slow reverser or unslowable, our really weird PoAir in general) on AK. Allakhazam is great for some info, but there were a series of patches that changed a lot of things for PoP zones. We were able to collect a lot of info for Tem strats, but even we could only find so much. I'm still bugged we weren't able to find out the rest of the elusive "PoP 17."
Oh, I'm aware more than a few mob AoEs changed to be made easier, but that is in the spell data which is directly copied over and generally doesn't need to be parsed. (although some AoE intervals differ from the 'default' in the spell data, which is why I parse it to check) I'm also aware mobs like Magmaton were changed to single ramp from wild ramp (and apparently was changed from MR immune to not, making him slowable). I know Grummus was made slowable later on. I'm recording all of this in my spreadsheet when I discover it. Stuff like max hitpoints and attack rates seem be be unaltered however. I happen to have most raid bosses in PoP logged from my time playing in 2003, and changes made to AoEs are noted in the Lucy history as well as archived forum posts. You have to understand however, that in the absence of evidence, Live is all we have. I asked people for logs and nobody seemed to have any to give, or they didn't care to give me any. Emulators are just simply not going to be a 100% recreation, but I assure you the goal is to try to get as close as possible to a pure recreation. There is one exception to that though; we intend to fix bugs so things like ez-mode Xegony won't be in.
Del was referring to Maggie when he mentioned the PoP 17. You're off base about him. We don't wanna take the fun of discovery away from the other guilds by spoiling a lot of hard fought lessons here, but we will get interesting upper plane info over to devs' eyes.
If the server is open source, unfortunately there won't be a "fun of discovery" except for those guild who willingly take that route. I understand the tension here. How much is freely given to public knowledge, and what is left for the thrill of guilds figuring out a workable strategy? I would just like to point out the nature of an open-source project (i.e., TAK in particular) and its contrast from what had to be tested and learned and checked and parsed (i.e., the Al`Kabor experience). I am curious about TAK's team stance on bugs. For example, Torven points out that "ez-mode Xegony won't be in" but most Al`Kabor mobs existed in such a state that made them much more difficult due to what also might be called bugs. To set aside some mobs in the Elemental Planes, what about Quarm? There's a big difference to me between alpha-version of PoP (which Al`Kabor was, barring its own unique oddities) and the finished and more polished version that most guilds on Live saw when the expansion was current. Was Xegony bugged, or was she not finished? Was Quarm bugged, or was he not yet tuned? Were Timeless BP's bugged, or had they not existed yet by our timelock? Was Plane of Time itemization bugged, not yet finished, or as originally intended?
This is so far in the future of this infant server...we as a community can decide what is right for us. Right now the biggest worries are staying connected, npcs always max attacking, and slow not working......we ll worry about elemental planes about 2 years down the road when the dev's get through the next 3 xpacs beyond classic.
Very true on the open source aspect. But strats and open discussion of what mobs "should do" is not something easily garnered from just looking at the source. There still is an element of "oh crap" unless one really picks things apart. As far as PoP, we have a loooong ways to go before we really consider that. Our advantage is, we can discuss and determine the path we want over time because of the progression aspect we are forced into with content deving taking quite a while. IMO I don't want a dumbed down easy mode. But depending on the "bug" or unfinished state of the mobs that will guide us to where we want to be. We can adjust anything as we go unless it is client only issues.
As has been said, this is an open project so there are no secrets here. I am making the majority of my materials publicly available right now, before it goes into the DB. (although I still need to write a tool to strip my old EQ logs of chat text before making those available) Also keep in mind that anything can be changed at any time as evidence surfaces. If you want to look at my current progress and offer corrections, you can download my spreadsheet and much of my other data from my google drive: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= ... sp=sharing I am not the final arbiter on this, but things like 'reverse slow' won't be going in; those are bugs. Most of my slowability data came from a december 2003 list posted on a popular shaman class forum, and while I did not enter EPs on AK, I was MT of a top 10 guild back in '03-- you won't be seeing slowable gods that shouldn't be. I am in fact taking great pains to parse precise slow mitigation percentiles, (tedious work I might add) but that requires Live parsing; although I can look at old logs and see if the numbers jive. Things like max hitpoints also have to be taken from Live parses. I only take from live when I have to, but most raid bosses are unaltered. (minus the DI change which affected all PoP mobs) Untuned Quarm and unitemized Time are more debatable I suppose, but I would assume the consensus will be to implement them in a 'finished' state circa EQ 2003. I would certainly advocate for that. Edit: For convenience I imported my .ods spreadsheet to a google docs sheet so it can be looked at without a spreadsheet program. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
Slow reversing was, scarily enough, something intentionally put in by SOE. It actually wasn't a bug and could be considered one of the truly hardcore aspects of AK.
looks like it was intentionally put in but was removed on January 15,2003. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/history/patches-2003-1.html
Probably not, because nobody knows what mobs they were. Only a couple (out of seventeen) were ever identified on live, and Temerity only found five. The majority were most likely in Time, which nobody reached before the removal of reverse slow.
Do you have a developer quote regarding that? All I can see from the patch notes is them not calling it a 'bug fix' and simply mentioning that it was removed. They removed it less than two months after PoP launched, so that's a short time frame to have second thoughts about a 'feature'. I had just assumed it was a bug involving the slow mitigation code, which was also added in PoP. The thing is it doesn't make the server more challenging at all. Not casting a spell isn't difficult. I would argue that it opens the door for griefing. All the reverse slow mobs could easily be made immune. There is a time/benefit analysis that has to be made and I can think up plenty of things more relevant than implementing server code plus editor code just for a handful of reversed slowed mobs anyway. Which mobs were reverse slowed? All google is bringing up is Fennin Ro, and he is unusual in that his slow mitigation is very high. My parse indicates he only slows a few percent, which is margin of error territory. I may have to revisit him. edit: it was just under three months, not two
And things get more complicated by the dilemma that reverse slow was on AK and was also removed by Hobart late in the server's life. MGB Paragon existed for the last six or so months on the server, but didn't in all the time prior. Which is part of the truly hardcore nature of EQMac? All sorts of tough questions, because it's not a matter of simply emulating Al`Kabor because as frozen as Al`Kabor was, it wasn't immutable and is better understood as glacial. Aid Grimel was a GM-asissted quest, because our alpha version of PoAir didn't have the drops. I'm not sure that's a bug per se, and so the question arises - should it be recreated to be like Al`Kabor, or should it be more in line with the intent? The fact that Air didn't have a zoneout wasn't a bug, but it received one eventually on Live. Droprates are something that sadly won't be able to be replicated. Imports from Magelo or the PEQ database will result in an easy mode for epics as well as rare raid drops. Some quest items on Al`Kabor were astonishingly rare (though I suspect we'll never get the real data), and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were so rare because of bugs or mistakes in the database while others are more reflective of 2003-era design. Al`Kabor was spaghetti. It's all hard to make sense of, and I'm sure even harder to emulate (the dev team is brave for even thinking of all this!). Deciphering whether something is a bug or "working as intended" is often trying to distinguish between to very similar shades of grey.
Torven - It was not a bug. Initially (and perpetually on Al'Kabor) all slow mitigation was silent. In a patch on 1/9/03, they added messages, of which there were four: 9029 Your spell was mostly successful. 9030 Your spell was partially successful. 9031 Your spell was slightly successful. 9032 Your spell may have had the opposite effect of what you desired. This changed nothing; it only made the client report what was already happening with slow. The fact that the "opposite effect" outcome was possible was news to most people. The internet exploded, and a week later the devs caved, removing the ability in the patch you cite. All the NPCs with reverse slow become either fully resistant or "slightly" mitigators, though some of them were made more slowable down the road. Somewhere - it may now be lost in the mists of the internet - there's a dev statement from the time of the change that went into more detail; essentially, the powers that were agreed with players' rationale that it wasn't fair for shamans to stand a chance of hurting a raid by doing their job. Lurari - Hobart didn't actually remove reverse slow from Al'Kabor. He just updated the two big slow-reversing zones (PoFire and PoTime) to their July '03 states, at which point the slow-reversers were history. Laef in BoT and so forth reversed slow right to the bitter end!
The nature of EQ was to be one of, if not the most complex game on the market for it's time. One of the things I liked about reverse slow is it caused people to pay attn and not mindlessly play their class as if they were grouping during raids. As well as each encounter had it's own quirks. You really could not transpose one mob's raid tactics to another verbatim. I think this reverse slow is something that should be in place here. This is not supposed to be easy mode and we don't want to be another PC Emu clone. Tho some things will be fixed and mimic PC, this is one of those that doesn't have to be. Another thing to point out, we are so far off from PoP even being a real debate with actual outcomes being applied to the game. I would like to request that people keep a majority of the focus on the current available content and maybe some of the next expansion once you see the tracker reflecting progress being made in that expansion. Debating anything beyond this is kinda counter productive for the moment. As always great post Raven, this quote was not ment to counter anything you said.
To be fair, one of the aspects we can look at because of this topic is why Shamans were somewhat pigeon-holed during raids. They drew ridiculously high agro due to their best dots having poison and disease counters on them (without the aid of FD like Necros had). Relatively certain that the shaman dot agro issue was adjusted on Live servers at some point during GoD.
Nothing we can really do about adjusting classes outside of PoP. If this was a completely custom server that would be no issue to change. But game play changes beyond even PC PoP are pretty much out of the question. We also have to keep in mind, OSX Intel compatibility.
Interesting! I remember a conversation with Bijaz in the last months of the server's life where he was sure all the reverse-slowers were removed!
Reading that string just jogged my memory; I recall seeing that before. I think I recall my guild's vocal shaman complaining about it. 11 years is a long time after all. Funny thing, I was killing Laef in the last few months of the server's life, and I never noticed my slows not working. I slowed him 15 times according to my logs. I just parsed him for the hell of it: Fight #1 [1] Laef Windfall - Thu Sep 19 05:07:02 2013 - Duration: 2m 24s Rounds: 46; Bashes: 13; Dmg Type(s): hit; Swings: 74 rounds with 1 swings: 18 (39.1%) rounds with 2 swings: 28 (60.8%) Avg pre-slow round delay: 2.615; Rounds per second: 0.382 Adjusting for 2 outliers, 0 double rounds, and 2 post-cast rounds Adjusted avg pre-slow round delay: 2; Adjusted rounds per second: 0.5 (1)11(OC2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(1)2(2)2(2)2(1)2(1)2(2)2(2)9(OC2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(1)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(2)2(1) Avg post-slow round delay: 4.222; Rounds per second: 0.236 Adjusting for 3 outliers, 0 double rounds, and 5 post-cast rounds Adjusted avg post-slow round delay: 1.785; Adjusted rounds per second: 0.559 16(OC1)2(1)6(C2)1(1)1(1)2(1)1(1)2(1)7(C2)2(2)12(OC1)2(2)1(2)4(1)2(2)3(1)1(2)10(OC1)1(1) I still think it's a bad idea to implement it though, which is why I wanted to be certain it was intentional. I don't want easy mode, but in this case I think the cons outweigh the gains. TAKP will never have augments and vie buffs and EP bosses will have the harder AoEs so it's not like it's going to be as easy as EQLive2003 was if all the stats get replicated correctly. In this case it's only 'harder' because you have to keep your shamans from accidentally hitting a key or a rival guild might sabotage your raid. Actually now that I think about it, it would be trivial to implement, so development time would be minimal. It's more a gameplay consideration.
The "other guild" dick move is why it should not be in. I ll be playing a shaman on launch....and the last thing I want is to get yelled at because a sneaky skele illusion sham that doesnt show nameplate hoses the raid.
Did he "reverse" it or just mitigate? I'd always tell people just don't bother wasting mana trying to slow. But i never noticed the dps go up as a result of one.
He "reversed" it in the sense that any slow (regardless of its percentage) functioned as 25% haste. (Looks like about 20% in Torven's parse, but I'm going to chalk that up to being within the margin of error). The fact that he casts so much, and that BoT minis were so frequently fought with charm pets, may have made it hard to notice if you're not specifically looking for it.
