Changes and Suggestions

[Feyndal]

- fear respawn is fine , i did a golem at 55 with a 4 box (shm/shd/mnk/nec) in about 20 minutes , cleared along the way a bit but not too much (and epics were designed for lvl 60 in kunark era)

- quest armor in Kael drops plenty tbh , considering the respawn rate of the zone ... (ToV east is 4 hr respawn)

- read all the changes , he knows fungi staff still snares

- and there are prismatic dye vials on the vendor in PoK


pls remember that Control is doing everything on his own in his free time , this is an emu after all

[Control]

quick reply since i'm about to run out the door:

Have you grabbed the current spellfile? I think that might fix the fungi staff snare. I had some trouble getting it to behave before, but can't remember how it turned out without checking my notes.

I thought I'd fixed all of the sk mis-aligned procs (the default db had the proc id's off by 1 for that line), but I may have missed one. I'll have to go and check again when I have a chance. I wouldn't think the spellfile would cause that, but it's possible.

bergurgle should spawn more often now (at least the next time I log into the server and refresh the item tables)

[curtlikesmeat]

Hello mate, just a quick one to say thanks very much for putting this on, I'm having a great time and you've done a great job. Cheers.

[greenspectre]

Is it possible to adjust the respawn times of trash mobs in NToV HoT? It's definitely becoming a hotspot for gearing toons up on this server, and the 4-hour respawn time means it gets a bit competitive and some people run it on a timer.

[Control]

A consideration with lower respawn times is that it also puts a shorter time limit on finishing, which ups the difficulty for less powerful groups or people learning the content.

[greenspectre]

This is true, but there are approximately 20 trash mobs in the east wing. Some of them cast minor AE's occasionally or a DoT, but I don't think it's anything that would require a major change of strategy unless you're trying to do HOT in your 40's for some reason.

Furthermore, with a 4-hour respawn and roughly 20 mobs that means you'd have to take about 12 minutes per individual mob in order to be in danger of respawn a, which, on this server, isn't realistic unless you're coming in significantly under leveled. I had never done the content before on live (went down the wrong wing the first time actually lol) and cleared it with my toons being 55 in less than an hour.

Maybe others can weigh in on their experiences, but it seems to me that with this place being the hotspot that it is, an adjustment of spawn times wouldn't be harmful. Especially since a full run doesn't gear a toon up nearly enough. Several runs are required.

[Feyndal]

firstly idk if you can split up HoT and NtoV so easily , i mean the 4hrs were put in for Ntov and HoT just got bumped to 4hrs aswell , having to sort out through all the trash and named and adjust their spawn rate individualy seems like alot of work to me , which isn't imho a big priority ... besides on live idk what the respawn timer was on HoT but it sure as hell wasn't 4hrs and the competition was even more fierce...

Also with a 2hr spawn not that much would be different , the place would still be camped regularly and would be even easier to maintain camp.

Personaly i would much rather see LDoN open up as an alternative , for luclin/pop tier gearing options aswell as a place to just go if your favorite camping spot is taken.

Which brings me to my second point ... HoT is not required to gear up early on , it's one of the options , veksar+droga actually has slightly better drops HP wise for example and better exp. Or you could do old world planes and even do PoSky quests for some surprisingly decent gear , or clear PoGrowth for some HoT equivalent. These are all options in the same difficulty / lvl range btw , you could skip all that and go straight to luclin , or even PoP (Sol Ro tower has an easy alternate access quest and is the best source for ornate tranquility armor and great AA exp)

A 3rd option is to ask around who else is doing HoT and ask if you could loot the rotting stuff , I have often let other people come in and loot what i don't need and i even pull everything to the entrance of HoT and loot all the trash so only mobs with armor or symbols are visible. i'm sure whoever is there for their last 2-3 pieces don't want to see all those other drops go to waste ... my advise is Bind yourself just at ToV entrance in WW and use origin/PoK to travel around or if you really really want to do HoT just stay there until the respawn , if no one else was there b4 you the camp is yours , no matter if the other guy has it timed , i did that twice (with some netflix on my tablet it's not that long of a wait)...

[Fierlen]

Is HoT quest armor the real issue here? As has been stated, there are plenty of options to gear up. You can skip HoT armor all together and go straight to NToV in Kunark/planes armor. Dozekar quest items on the other hand can last you well into Vex Thal order the Elemental Planes. Compare the difficulty of Dozekar to Vulak which drop the same quality of items. I guess it is possible people are running a circuit in HoT for the quest armor drops but I certainly wouldn't invest the time. Run NToV for the plethora of drops from the dragons there are collect the Kael quest armor drops at the same time. You can go from max KoS to max ally killing the arena for an hour and faster if you move back and forth between the arena and Tormax's throne room area. Skip Tormax's and kill the quest givers for a quick faction bump.

[UpheavalStature]

One suggestion I would have is to make the Symbol of Grandeur a little more useful. I love some of the components that it already has. DS, shielding (which goes above and beyond ac, the more shielding you have the less damage you take) accuracy, attack, etc. What makes this lack luster to me is the plain stats. I have items in that spot that I would love to use, but can't bring myself to lose the great stuff on the symbol. If you could make it as good as or better as the intricate wooden figurine that would be awesome. I'll leave a link to Eq Alla to show what it is....thats just my personal preference though


http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/ques ... quest=2469

[Fierlen]

I would look at the charm as any other piece of gear. There are trade-offs from equipping items and there are choices to be made. The current charm is so grossly overpowered I'm not quite sure how it would be a consideration to replace it with any thing else. A few hp, ac, ect in no way compare to the Mod 2's on the VoG charm.

[UpheavalStature]

I would look at the charm as any other piece of gear. There are trade-offs from equipping items and there are choices to be made. The current charm is so grossly overpowered I'm not quite sure how it would be a consideration to replace it with any thing else. A few hp, ac, ect in no way compare to the Mod 2's on the VoG charm.

It may be overpowered, but I would like to see something other than 1 on stats. I love it, but it's not practical for some classes. Great for Dps and classes that get pets, but for melee and hybrid it could be a bit better, maybe we can make a different charm for each archetype of class?

[UpheavalStature]

How would you feel about making the Guild Lobby a static zone and making it more of hub then PoK? I feel it would eliminate the cluster of people in one spot and allow for people to move around some. You can move all the npcs there and make it really nice. It just seems really cluttered at the moment

[UpheavalStature]

Sorry, making a lot of suggestions! I would really like to see Ldon open. For augs and content. It's not to groundbreaking. It doesn't really advance people past PoP. It would honestly help people be able to beat end game content in PoP.

[Fierlen]

How is the charm not practical for melee and hybrid classes? I'm not logged into the game so I may be wrong but doesn't it have shielding, strike through and avoidance? The shielding by itself is better than the fully upgraded PoP charm. A few points of ac and even 100 hp don't even come close to comparing with a flat 10% melee damage reduction.

[UpheavalStature]

How is the charm not practical for melee and hybrid classes? I'm not logged into the game so I may be wrong but doesn't it have shielding, strike through and avoidance? The shielding by itself is better than the fully upgraded PoP charm. A few points of ac and even 100 hp don't even come close to comparing with a flat 10% melee damage reduction.

Here is my reasoning- Say a mob hits for 500-700. Depending on your ac. 10% shielding would equal 50 less damage per hit, but the key factor your ac. The higher your ac. The more damage get reduced. Say you have 1500 and it hits you for 600 - that equals 540 damage. While let's say you 1650 ac and the mob hits you for 500 damage. That equals 450 damage. These aren't exact numbers on ac and how much it takes to reduce that much damage. That's 90 less damage. And based on your ac. These two stats go hand and hand, which is why I was suggesting something a little more. I feel it's practical, but I'll leave it up to control.

[Feyndal]

i'm sorry ...

if you read a bit more what control has already changed , and what he has planned down the line ... it kinda renders your whole conversation moot

the charm is planned to have progression quest type things to upgrade it and a custom hub is also planned


that said the charm is already very powerfull for any class and the lack of base stats is irrelevant since once you hit 60+ and get some gear your primary stats will already be maxed with some buffs ... and the few stats you get at a young level don't really matter that much since you level so fast and decent gear is so easy to come by if you box a full group ...

[Kopek]

the secondary combat stats on the charm are insane

[greenspectre]

Hey Control,

Wanting to say thanks again for all your hard work :) I've been slaying raid mobs left and right as I finish leveling to 65 and am having a blast.

I grabbed your spellfile but have noticed that unlike the changelog, cleric pets still seem to be temporary. Also, is there a way to PERMANENTLY rename your pet? I've noticed if you rename your pet and it dies, the next one is randomly generated again. This would help my shaman Puma his pet easier- I tried //tar pet but sometimes that targets the cleric's hammer pet instead.

[Feyndal]

Hey Control,

Wanting to say thanks again for all your hard work :) I've been slaying raid mobs left and right as I finish leveling to 65 and am having a blast.

I grabbed your spellfile but have noticed that unlike the changelog, cleric pets still seem to be temporary. Also, is there a way to PERMANENTLY rename your pet? I've noticed if you rename your pet and it dies, the next one is randomly generated again. This would help my shaman Puma his pet easier- I tried //tar pet but sometimes that targets the cleric's hammer pet instead.

pretty sure not , and why ?
the time he would have to spend on that is silly

i'm assuming u use mq2
try this social macro:

/pause 2 , /target ID ${Me.Pet.ID}
/say #rename <name>


feel free to add a 1st line with :

/pause 120 , /casting "<name of pet spell>" 8 -maxtries|2


or if it's just for puma use:

/casting "Spirit of the Leopard" 8 -targetid|${Me.Pet.ID} -maxtries|2


8 beeing the spell gem which you can ofc change

and as for the cleric pet it stays up until you leave the zone , it's in the mechanics of that pet
and
tbh
again
control runs the whole thing on his own so pls think b4 you start asking for stuff and wonder if it is really needed ?

normally i would keep my hands off of things like that , but i've seen many a server die because owner gets burned out
and i like it here so i'm speaking up

[greenspectre]

Thank you for the mq2 help. Definitely will run that command instead and it alleviate the problem I was running into. I agree with u that permanent pet renaming isn't necessary and concede that I should have instead asked for mq2 help. Though I would appreciate a nicer tone instead of being made to feel like other players are going to judge my suggestions if I post them. Makes the forum feel a bit hostile. I have no idea if you or control are going to find my suggestion trivial or not, but I don't want to have to worry about getting flak for posting a "stupid" suggestion. I don't want to burn Control out any more than you do- it's his server and I am sure if he doesn't consider my suggestion worth the limited time he has to implement, then he won't implement it. I appreciate what he is doing and I love this server which is why I try to mention that every time.

In reference to the cleric pet issue, mine is dying when the mob dies, like on live. I should have been more specific with the issue I was having. If your cleric pets are living until you zone then I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. Re-downloaded the spell file and everything, and my client download came right from this forum, too.

[Fierlen]

When did Control change it that clerics pets didn't die when the mob they had targeted died? When I was playing here the pet was always temporary. Where is the change log you are referring to?

[greenspectre]

It's this post, the second post by Control. It's in there "made the cleric pet non-temporary" about midway in. Before the stuff about increasing spawn rates of named in veksar/frogs/velious

[Control]

Thanks everyone for some great discussion and responses while I was neglecting the servering! Here's a bit of a status update:

As always, the list of stuff I'd like to do dwarfs what I'm actually going to practically ever have time to do, so it's just a matter of which things bubble to the top. The next big thing on my list is to find a reasonable way to merge the two servers so that any dev time doesn't need to be either split or replicated. That will be an opportunity for some more significant dev work since I need to set up a more proper dev and testing environment for the db combining and testing. It might not be quick though, depending on how much time I'm able to carve out, and I'll probably not be changing anything major until then.

Getting the hub zone out of pok and adding some sort of progression mechanics are definitely things I want to do during the change over. That will also be a good time to test out LDoN, and if it can go in without too many issues, I'll probably enable it.

I also know that the last bit of time is probably more difficult than this server really calls for, so things need some tuning. I would like to add some post-time content, though I want to do it in a way that doesn't spoil the pop experience, so it's really tricky. One thought that I want to test out is ramping up power levels via progression and incremental remorting to make post-time content do-able without big numbers. It would add some grind to the top-end, but in any game with limited content, it's either have a grind at some point or have content end.

On the pets, I thought the perm cleric hammer was in and working, but I'll give it another test. On the pet naming, it seems like I had a way to persist the name, but it's a little fuzzy now. I'm not sure if I just never got to it, or if there was a problem that kept it from working. I'll have to take a look at my notes.

As always, I welcome suggestions of any sort as long as everyone understands that it's just brainstorming and the chances of any particular idea getting implemented is pretty low. I also really appreciate that you guys discuss the merits of the suggestions too (saves me some considerable time sometimes :) )

[michahs1]

As a suggestion, perhaps on the Aug vendor, add a seru bane aug, and a shissar bane aug? The process of farming up bane weaps is incredibly... lame? I guess is a good way of describing it.

[Feyndal]

haven't done seru yet but in the 2nd post from this thread under completed changes it says:
-removed bane requirement from emp/seru