mob kite limits

I can't find any evidence that this behavior is Akkurate and believe I recall AK kite videos in PoP zones. Is there any compelling reason why this is set to lower numbers in VT and especially in PoP zones?

 

Some of it was done to simulate how the original server would handle large kites. The zone would lag and mobs would get lost. Some zones were much worse for this than others tooo.

In PoP specifically though, they’re artificially low because it was deemed to trivialize the EXPing arc if you let people AE kite 80 planar mobs.

Personally I’d like to see it just standardized to 80 across the board. I don’t think the leveling arc needs to be protected on the prime server really. Most people are leveling up alts now a days so let them do that however they see fit.

 

Thanks Solar! I would echo Darchons feelings about prime server no longer necessarily needing this, but understood and thanks for answering.

 

some background:

This originated from Maiden's Eye kite days, where people would kite mobs and AE exp them because Luclin AA exp was so awful.

The devs wanted ~1 hour per AA to be the baseline, and artificially nerfed anything that fell outside that (maiden's eye kiting, all PBAE exp, master of elements, spiroc guardian)

Additionally, devs felt parking VT coth bots, or killing TVXs without all the trash clearing was "bad", so they lowered kite limits in Vex Thal to be much lower.

These lower kite limits were carried over into PoP because devs felt people might disrupt zones or something like that with bards swarm kiting like they did in ME but doing it in PoP zones. This didn't really eventuate at all, but the kite limits remained very low in PoP (I think something like 20-30 mobs).

Additionally PoEarthA has low kite limits to prevent people from farming trap mob named, but this isn't really much of a hinderance, I haven't found it has much of an effect. In addition to this, SoS rogue was artificially disabled from being able to pop trab mobs, so a double nerf here.

Also the mechanics for ShakerPaging were nerfed / disabled due to fears of causing zone disruption.

I don't think most of these are very valid anymore, or warrant keeping the kite limits so low. In our guild nobody has killed TVX mobs for years. Being able to kite the courtyard might mean they get killed, maybe... still doubtful.

And being able to kite larger things in PoP might result in some fun? It's all kind of mostly irrelevant.

I'd be in favor of seeing the kite limits significantly relaxed in places where they were dropped to very low numbers (20-30 in PoP and VT).

 

I didn’t necessarily hate it being in place when PoP was recently unlocked on the server. When we were testing on the dev server at the time a bard was leveling 61-65 in like 2-3 hours swarming in PoValor for example. Would’ve sort of broken that zone early on when we had 6 guilds all grinding level 61-65.

May end up being relevant on the TLP as well in a years time.

But yea on TAKP Prime, any of these custom changes meant to prevent zone monopolization or normal raid progression aren’t that critical to keep around. Though changing them also isn’t that critical in fairness it would just offer up a new way to play the game for a bit.

 

I haven’t raided here yet (low 50s trio) but on p2002 when my guild started farming EPs we stopped regularly hitting TVX (waste to have a full raid force for them).

Became a fun thing on off nights to get 2-3 groups together and farm up haste items for alts & newer players. Absolutely not worth killing all those junk mobs for the loot you get, but a fun time for a smaller raid if you can kite.

Might as well let people have some fun with it, that loot is far from destabilizing compared to PoP gear.

 

Devs never had a "baseline" AA exp time. That's in your imagination. Other than the caller cave two days after Luclin launch I don't recall us discussing soandso is making AAs too fast, we need to nerf blah blah. There were times when I saw players doing something frequently that made me think, gee maybe I should double check and make sure it's accurate, then I discover that it isn't accurate, and I made it accurate. e.g. SSra temple charm pet stats. That wasn't from counting AAs people were making. Maybe bards in Maiden's Eye swarming 300 mobs but I was notified by a player reporting it to me, not some AA alarm.

I intentionally made the kite limits stringent in PoP zones to prevent people cheesing to max level in a matter of hours, yes. But the limits weren't just put in to prevent the exp cheese. People were using kites to CC zones then doing things like running in mages to CotH while the zone was essentially depopulated.

Exp from kills in PoP is massively higher than in previous era zones. A single level 68 flamehead in PoFire awards almost 4 million exp. A level 50 mob in a ZEM 75 zone awards 187,500 exp. On top of that the AoE exp reduction effect doesn't work on higher level NPCs or not in PoP zones or however Sony did it.

Also it's important to understand (people always ignore this part but it's important) that Sony's pathing code is different than ours. Our pathing code will make the NPC move directly towards you if it has line of sight, and Sony's code forced the NPC to take pathing nodes even while having line of sight to the player. The result is NPCs on Sony's servers would often take crazy pathing routes when trying to reach the player and balls of NPCs would often break apart which made kiting MUCH more difficult and unreliable or even impossible. PoValor was one of the few zones where, on Sony's servers, pathing was more forgiving. In zones like HoH the pathing was ATROCIOUS and made kiting large pulls impossible on AK. VT was a dungeon-like zone so it had this issue when kiting outside.

Even on Live servers today, zones will lag hard if you pull large trains. I leveled up a lot of characters to parse mobs with, so I had a common procedure to powerlevel. I often pulled the entire front area of PoNightmare, and when I did this the mobs would rubberband really badly, at least on Test server.

Anyway the server is old now so the limits are less important. I was never happy that shakerpage was 100% undoable either, but it's very difficult to put it in a state that is rewarding to do but not obscene. If all the limits were removed it would be far more obscene than it was on AK.

 

I did a lot of research into this because I was not the biggest advocate for some of the zone updating Hobart was making to AK. I think a lot of us witnessed the original AK pathing for HoH and how absolutely wild it was. Lot of zig zagging, lot of odd paths that were not uniform between mobs in a kite, lot of stuck pathing. This could be exploited, where certain mobs in tiny crypts would yo-yo endlessly if you moved 5 feet forward and back. But, on the whole, this broken pathing was protective.

After they updated pathing, AE kiting by bards in HoH ruined Live servers and caused the lag spikes that Torven is talking about. So much so that they had to drastically change AEing just so people could play the game. There were patch notes specifically about this and long forum discussions on the original EQ forums. They put artificial limits not only on number of mobs that could be pulled, but also the number of NPCs that could be affected by bard songs. Huge swings to balance a game that was, in essence, already balanced by the broken pathing that initially existed.

 

I do miss doing AE groups in PoFire on AK though. It was good fun and a cool reward for completing PoP flagging which was challenging at that time.

 

I don’t think anyone is advocating for removal entirely. I was advocating for the 72 kite limit in most other zones, be for all zones. Personally I’m pretty sure I’d mostly be getting myself killed more trying to do stupid stuff. Thanks for offering detailed information about how this came about.

 

how come Spiroc Guardian, which had the correct spawn mechanic implemented, had its exp reward artificially nerfed to 50% exp. seems like you were really strongly adjusting for that sub 2 AA per hour metric

additionally, I was told devs had alerts set up for exp gain to trigger if players exceeded 2 or 3 AA per hour, so that it could be "investigated", which commonly tripped so you had to move it to 4 AA per hour for the alarm

I think that's also how you caught people exploiting those lvl 55 mobs in Paludal , due to the exp alarm tripping. and that triggered spawn with someone getting 20-30 AAs per hour

I'm speculating the alarm being tripped is how you persisted in finding some made-up code to justify nerfing PBAE exp gain in FG/TheDeep etc because there were groups of 3-5+ humans all exping together tripping your AA alarms by sometimes getting 3-4 AA per hour, the horror of people playing together!

 

I don't recall how we learned you guys were doing the Spiroc thing. We didn't like it because it was extremely trivial to automate, zero risk and it's just lame. Do you really want the first level 65s to be people standing in the same location hitting auto attack every 20 seconds? Don't lie to us and tell us you wouldn't automate that. We could have nerfed it more.

Charm pets in Tactics gets people ridiculous amounts of exp and we never touched that.

The Deep was nerfed/tuned because I had failed to check the NPC resists before Luclin opened. I found proof that they had higher resists and I made it accurate. There was zero intent to customize them to make them harder than what they should be. The Deep trash just wasn't very high on my priorities list and it slipped my attention.

I forget the specifics of Paludal. I think a player I'm chummy with ratted you out on that but I forget. I think I just made the NPC accurate in that case as well but don't want to say I'm 100% sure on this.

Lastly regarding the PBAoE exp reduction: I've stated this clearly several times but it doesn't seem to be sinking in. I implemented it for a singular reason which is my research proved it existed without doubt and it was included in a much larger experience system overhaul. You can go back and watch my AK videos on Youtube and count the number of NPCs that were required to gain the amount of exp that is visible in the video. The intent was to match the rates seen in my videos exactly. The PBAoE reduction Sony had put in actually prevented me from figuring out how exp worked for some time because the exp in my caller cave logs didn't match the expected rate. But I later stumbled upon old ShowEQ data (I was very excited to find it) which gave me enough of the puzzle to fill in the blanks with log data. Why else would I nerf that 2 years after Luclin launched? I just suddenly decided I didn't like your AA rates 2 years in? Come on man. AA rates increased for people who didn't AoE or farm the ssra mine because the amount of exp needed for an AA was significantly reduced at the same time as I found out we had it wrong. (exp from mobs level 53-54 were reduced which is why the mine felt nerfed because the high level kill bonus should only apply to mobs within 5 levels)

 

I wouldn't automate that (or anything). No lie.

 

At this point in time on TAKP Prime I would like to see the general kite limit in PoP zones bumped up to 40 (up from 15-25 in many cases, a few zones already are at 40). Personally I don't see any issue with bumping it up to 80 globally on TAKP Prime either, but 40 at the very least would be nice when doing some pulls to prevent random leashing of mobs due to hate limit constraints.

On a slight tangent, something I've brought up in the past but feels relevant here as well, I would love to see the Rampage AA activate weapon procs like Earthshaker.

Earthshaker has base delay of 7s, with Turgurs slow on thats up to 12s, so 5 swings per minute with 2 procs per minute at max Dex, about 40% of swings will proc. Each Proc is about 250 PBAE DD. So each mob in the train is worth 100 damage not accounting for resists.

Based on these numbers to clear a max (15 target) train of PoFire C2 mobs (43k HP), you would need 29 Shakerpaging warriors assuming no resists. Even if the PoFire kite limit was bumped to 40, you would need about 11 Shakerpaging warriors. Hell even if all zones were standardized at the 80 kite limit. You would need 6 warriors assuming no resists. And anyone who has ever tried to quad tables with a wizard or druid can tell you... they resist magic base nukes and snares a shitload.

If you are wondering what this would look like in a lower tier mobs (23-26k HP) for example PoFire field 1, PoValor or CoDecay, you would need 4+ warriors to clear an 80 mob train and that assumes little to no resists. This is in the realm of being feasible but still very unlikely that at a minimum 2 people would be getting together with their 4-5 warriors all with Earthshakers to grind some AAs. You would have to go through the trouble of dueling and turguring all of them, rezzing them all after each pull, and having some character(s) in the exp group. The reason it was an issue on AK was because a single warrior could down most of the EXP mobs by grabbing 220-250~ mobs. Here that just can't happen.

Without the kite limit changes though at the very least a warrior could blow up a train of green con goblins in Droga or Grimlings in some old zone with an 80 mob kite limit and it would allow them to farm some quest or tradeskill stuff. Hell it could even be fun to see a warrior equip a Truncheon of Doom and pop a Rampage on a wave of Rallos Zek adds or a wave of Phase 5 PoTime trash to try to land a few slows immediately on incoming. That would be nice.

Also of relevance, the Rampage nerf wasn't actually until PoR era, so it wouldn't even be in era in the Post-PoP server timeline. And the minor enhancements in proc rate through Mod2s/AAs are counteracted by the future mob HP increases that would continue to relegate the behavior to older content. You are still requriing multiple warriors in a group to clear 80 mob trains in PoP with those enhancements which would prevent any sort of fast-track to 70 using this method.

 

@Torven , there is still something off about the 5 level thing. It's been a while since I tried it so I don't remember the exact numbers. It's something like level 57? in PoValor is when mobs start giving a decent amount of xp. That isn't right. On AK, a level 55 and a level 57, 58 or whatever would get virtually the same amount of xp per mob. Currently it's not feasible to take a level 55 to PoValor because of the 5 level thing, but on AK it wasn't like that. I leveled all of my toons on AK in PoValor and level 55 xp was significantly more per mob that it is on TAKP right now.

Edit: Also on AK I could take my level 65 toon to, I don't know, like PoInnovation(Any Tier 1 zone), grouped with level 52? toons and they would get beau coups of xp per kill. On TAKP they get almost nothing.

 

That's not what the Zamiel data showed. Zamiel's data showed that the MLM scaled with player level up to level 60. I'll quote him:

This shows the amount of exp per kill was the least when the mob was higher in level than the player. In fact the gargoyles awarded the most exp when the mob was blue. The reason is because the MLM ramps up with level up to 60.

As to the question of whether the MLM should apply when NPCs are more than 5 levels above the player, this ShowEQ developer states explicitly that it should not, in multiple posts: https://www.showeq.net/forums/showthread.php?2586-New-XP-fomular-confirmed-for-50-blue/page2

Admittedly I don't have direct evidence of this, but the source is credible. I couldn't find actual data showing it since it's such an edge case.

As for grouping with high levels, that same thread had somebody post that their level 51 alt didn't get the MLM bonus with his higher level (62) character, to which fester responded that Sony had some sort of level check to prevent the MLM bonus from enabling powerleveling. I suppose it's possible this may have been added some months after AK's time point, but the MLM would be small at that level anyway.

I won't claim that the powerleveling edge cases are fully correct but I am confident that the typical experience cases are highly accurate.

 

Doesn't this directly state, if accurate, that the 13% AA XP cap is not Akurate? Would be very happy to see this and the higher kite limit (universally 72 would be very consistent going forward, and avoid needing per zone logic).

 

No question that the 5 level thing was a thing. What I'm saying is it's not ratioed correctly or something. A level 55 should get virtually the same xp in PoValor as a 57. A 56 didn't level to 57, hitting within five levels of the mobs and suddenly begin giving 1 percent per kill. The 55 and a 57 would both get 1 percent. But on TAKP it's like 5 or 6 kills per 1 percent, which is nowhere close to accurate.

 

I checked logs for this scenario and I actually found a case. Showstring at one point leveled a level 55 rogue at the crystal area in PoValor and it clearly shows the MLM being applied. He had logs on for all characters so I could be sure who was getting exp or not. It took 64 kills to reach level 56 in a 4 man group but the druid was out of range for 24 kills and I accounted for this in my calculations. This matches the expected experience amount very closely if the MLM is applied. (about 2x at level 55) The next two levels took 76 and 75 kills. So it seems AK was unique in this regard or PC EQ otherwise had the limitations added shortly (like weeks) after AK's time period.

 

We had a guildie recently inquire about swarm kiting in Plane of Fire and issues they were experiencing. They weren't able to swarm kite more than 7 or 8 mobs with their bard. Is this expected and due to the kite limit being low in PoFire or is there something else going on?

Any option to revisit the kite limits?

 

guildie managed to find the insane piece of code that blocks swarm kiting in four PoP zones, so that explains the strange behavior in Plane of Fire

https://github.com/EQMacEmu/Server/blob/main/zone/mob_ai.cpp

Code:

[ Only registered users can see the bbcode. Click Here To Register... ]

 

Thanks for the reply!

We have very low kite limits which, even at standard 72 by math would preclude zone crashing and probably not work to shaker page (not to mention no possibility of riposte procs, so this is moot). A hard code to teleport mobs to players seems somewhat unnecessary given all the other substantial mitigations to prevent zone disruption, my 2 cents.

a bard swarm kiting do 120 damage a tic, killing 15 mobs every 20 minutes is not going to beat any standard dps group anywhere.

 

The comment about balling NPCs on TAKP being unnatural to normal AK/Live behavior is correct.

It also makes me think how apt a name “train” is for these massive pulls. Even after trying to circle around the pull they still stratify themselves out into a sort of train-like line rather than a neat ball.

I do think that if there were no kite limit there feasibly could be some exp methods that invalidate other ones. But I do also think the kite limits in PoP are on the low side generally. 15-20 mobs is quite low and makes certain pulls not really doable as they should be.

As I mentioned above I think blanket upping the limit to 40 NPCs wouldn’t be outrageous. The best zones to do this style of pulling in also tend to have long respawns that preclude you from making the exp methods a standalone one. For example in PoFire mobs respawning at 40+ minutes and requiring probably 10-20 minutes of gathering and killing, you’re still looking at an hour recharge time between killing 40 NPCs which is more or lesss what a regular solid group would be grinding at in a normal camp.

 

looking at the code, the pull limit in plane of air and water is 80, so why don't you go play with your bard friends over there sweetie

 

Plane of water swarming will be top tier. I can’t wait.

The Dust Ring endless spiders and Coirnav event 25 trash mob waves probably necessitated the 80 cap though.

 

Maybe we could decrease the amount of spiders in the Dust Ring to stay within the limit as a winning compromise for all.

 

From the db for reference incase this wants to be discussed more. This wouldn't include any anti-bard swarming code which I believe exists. HoHa being so low is interesting too.