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5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 10:09 pm
by Cenadyen
May 14, 2009
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*** Highlights ***

- EQ’s 10th Anniversary celebrations continues. All the raid events will remain until May 25th. Lower Guk and Unrest group encounters kicked off on the 11th and end on the 25th as well. Enjoy the rest of the celebrations!


*** Items ***

- Added a missing heal focus to the Protective Gorget of the Deep.
- Added Improved Parry/Block to several neck items that were missing it.
- Applied new icons to the Beastlord epic 1.0 (Claws of the Savage Spirit).
- Changed the displayed solvent on many destroyable augments to make it clear that they can be dissolved by the Augmentation Solvent.
- Irae Faycite Shard: Ethereal Enhancement, Irae Faycite Shard: Klixcxyk's and Icesheet Casc., Irae Faycite Shard: Ethereal Burn and Irae Faycite Shard: Inizen's and Glacial Collapse should now properly focus the intended spells. A change has been made to all similar foci that should prevent a similar problem in the future.


*** Spells ***

- Triggered PC spells with large dummy values in cast time have had that time reduced or removed.


*** AAs ***

- The Berserker AAs Blur of Axes and Precision of Axes have been increased in power.
- The Shadow Knight AA "Cascading Theft of Life" has been renamed "Cascading Theft of Defense" to better fit its function.
- Harmonious arrow now correctly assigns hate to its user.


*** Raids ***

- Added Fractured Coeval Luminessence and Fractured Coeval Incandessence as a chance to drop from the chest that the mini bosses in discord tower drop. This also reduces the chance for stat and weapon augments from this chest.


*** Tradeskills ***

- The first set of changes to poison have been made. Strike of Ssraeshza poisons have a 10 second recast on them. Bite of the Shissar, Strike of the Shissar, Solusek's Burn and E'ci's Lament Poison remove about half the hate they give on each strike. Quellious' Trauma removes about half the hate it did before. Quellious' Trauma, Myrmidon's Sloth, Messenger's Bane, Fighter's Bane, Warlord's Bane, Archer's Bane and Monk's Bane have had their "proc count" increased so they last longer.
- Messenger's Bane poisons will properly snare their target rather than giving them a speed boost.
- The recipe for Thundering Blades Rk. II has been disabled. It should not yet be able to be created.


*** Pets ***

- Fixed some typos in the pet help window.
- Fixed some problems with hot-keyed commands not displaying their state correctly.
- A new "regroup" command has been added. This command is very similar to "stop" except when using "regroup" the pet will not only stop attacking, but will revert to either follow or guard depending on what is selected. This essentially mimics the old "hold" behavior. "Regroup" and "stop" are mutually exclusive. If you use "regroup" both sit and stop should turn off. If you use "stop" then "regroup" should turn off.


*** Miscellaneous ***

- Campfire summoning has been turned on for the following zones (note that all usual restrictions apply): Crystallos, Mansion, Qinimi, and Tipt.
- Guild Banner summoning has been turned on for the following zones (note that all usual restrictions apply): Uqua, Tacvi, Qinimi, Tipt, Anguish, Demiplane of Blood, Deathknell - Tower of Dissonance, Crystallos (both normal and raid), Mansion (both normal and raid), Discord Raid and Discord Tower Raid.
- Fixed a problem that was causing voice chat volume sliders to get stuck on the screen.
- Revamped the way guild information is stored on the server to get around limitations on the maximum number of guilds. Some servers were hitting the max.
- Fixed a problem with raid dumps that were made when the raid window was not visible.
- The voice chat bar is now visible on login if your voice chat is active.
- Fixed a problem with bard focuses that caused Singing and Instrument mastery to not work if the song was otherwise not focused by any item or effect.
- Fixed a problem with guild creation that was causing it to fail when you tried to create a guild with a name whose beginning was a subset of an existing guild (e.g. creating "Killer" when "Killers in the Mist" already existed).
- Fixed an issue with displayed ordering of marketplace items.



Emphasis is in bold, looking forward to being able to use banners in raid zones at least :D

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 2:54 am
by Cenadyen
Cenadyen wrote: - Triggered PC spells with large dummy values in cast time have had that time reduced or removed.
Note for those that are druids or rangers that don't know what this means =). This is a "bug fix" that results in a MASSIVE nerf of druid and ranger dps.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 7:52 am
by Malegolas
Yup.. key for us is "reduced or removed." We'll see.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 8:50 am
by Jorrell
This is concerning a loss of DPS of a specific nuke. Its a loss nonetheless.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 9:16 am
by Pherawk
Given how vocal the dissension on the Sony boards has been to this, I'm a little surprised and very disappointed that Sony let this go from Test to Live without so much as a dev response to the issue. Putting it off a month to make sure they get all the facts and figure out a good compromise wouldn't have hurt anything, considering this issue has existed for 18 months and the devs were told about it. I'm not directly affected, but this this is very frustrating to see such a cavalier attitude from the devs.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 9:33 am
by Annissa
Cenadyen wrote:
Cenadyen wrote: - Triggered PC spells with large dummy values in cast time have had that time reduced or removed.
Note for those that are druids or rangers that don't know what this means =). This is a "bug fix" that results in a MASSIVE nerf of druid and ranger dps.
What nuke is involved here?

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 9:38 am
by Malegolas
Winter's Flare line for druids and Summer's Mist line for Rangers, I believe. They are both the best nukes in our lineups.

As Pherawk pointed out, this "bug" was brought to the Devs attention in Beta for SoF I believe, and nothing was done. It was assumed to be intentional (I've seen some say the value was actually increased intentionally), so many Druids and Rangers have made all their gear decisions around maxing out Spell Damage.

SoD Beta was done and completed with this in place.. and the DPS balance was considered good.

Now so much time later, and they change it without even testing the consequences.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 2:21 pm
by Dawgrin
Malegolas wrote:Winter's Flare line for druids and Summer's Mist line for Rangers, I believe. They are both the best nukes in our lineups.

As Pherawk pointed out, this "bug" was brought to the Devs attention in Beta for SoF I believe, and nothing was done. It was assumed to be intentional (I've seen some say the value was actually increased intentionally), so many Druids and Rangers have made all their gear decisions around maxing out Spell Damage.

SoD Beta was done and completed with this in place.. and the DPS balance was considered good.

Now so much time later, and they change it without even testing the consequences.
Per Nodyin

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts ... 4&#2198423
Nodyin wrote: Let me put this to rest. At no point did we look at Rangers and Druids and think "Yep, looks good to me!" under conditions where this higher-than-expected amount of Spell Damage was in evidence. I did a large amount of parsing in the SoD Beta to get some relative DPS comparissons but I didn't use these lines of spells because at first glance there appeared to be other, better options for DPS - the Spell Damage massive overinflation didn't occur to me because I didn't examine those secondary spells (and, quite frankly, I was not involved in creating those Mods in SoF's development and so it wouldn't have jumped out at me anyway.)

I've looked over various guild parses after SoF and SoD launched but the only reaction I had to them was to wonder why Rangers were doing so much more DPS than we expected. I guess now we know. As soon as I fully understood the issue I took it to the team and we researched the scope of the problem and decided to act.

Information about the change hit late last week. Ordinarily I would have had a lot of responses to the threads that popped up but I had an abnormally busy weekend. So despite the fact that I read everything that I could find that was posted about the change (I really love having the internet on my cell phone) I wasn't in a position to respond. By the time I got back to work the conversation had worked itself into such a frenzy and tangent filled discussion I didn't feel I had a lot I could contribute. So I didn't.
I feel your pain...Paladins were hit with the same nerf bat over hand of piety a couple months ago...

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 2:43 pm
by Malegolas
I love how they did our dps testing without using these spells..

The devs are clueless.

They would be much better served going into stealth mode and standing at raid events or groups parsing the different classes so they could get real world data.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 2:53 pm
by Pherawk
If they did DPS testing without using these spells, aren't they essentially saying that they see no point of the spell, and that they just put them in as filler?

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 3:07 pm
by Malegolas
I guess so. Maybe he just logged into each class, \testbuff'd to 85, loaded the highest damage spell\ability he could find quickly, and hit a test dummy for 60 seconds. Lord knows. :roll:

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 6:55 pm
by Zzzapp
Cenadyen wrote:
Cenadyen wrote: - Triggered PC spells with large dummy values in cast time have had that time reduced or removed.
Note for those that are druids or rangers that don't know what this means =). This is a "bug fix" that results in a MASSIVE nerf of druid and ranger dps.
If I am reading that correctly, reducing or removing the large cast time would make them cast more often? thus adding to dps?

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 6:57 pm
by Jorrell
"Large dummy values" do not equate to reduced cast times.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Thu May 14, 2009 7:12 pm
by Zzzapp
agreed. Though I thought that is what they were reducing to a lesser value. Making the cast times lower now.

Re: 5-14-2009 Preview

Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 8:03 am
by Malegolas
The way these spells work is that there is the main spell which you cast on the mob, that then procs two nukes, one fire based and one cold based. Because the actual damage spells are proc'd the cast time value is ignored. Except that Spell damage does not ignore it. Spell damage scales based on the cast time of a spell, so since these had such large dummy values, it granted a ton of extra damage to each nuke.

Before, one or both of the two spells could crit for up to 14k and change. Yesterday my best was 10.1k