EZ Server

Guardian Charm/Ignore Death

After some discussion within the admin team, a decision has been made to nerf Guardian Charm and Ignore Death augment. I won't go into all of the reasons that both of these are entirely overpowered, and people will likely strongly disapprove of these nerfs, but neither one of these items was intended to gimp content in the way that they are being used now. Changes that were shelved previously, will be re-tested and moved to Live server as soon as they feel properly tuned. I won't comment yet on what changes will or won't be made, but neither item will be a near guaranteed invulnerability anymore.

If you would like to be a part of the testing for these items, let me know. Being a part of testing is the best way to find a balanced solution for these items, and have your opinions heard. While changes will certainly be made, what those changes are is still up for discussion.

-Draca

Understand. Was fun while it lasted. GC was really handy in Sunderock, trying to ZP the zone for those UA hammer pieces that are a rare drop. Turn up the grind I guess.

Mix

good call

Both items are pretty OP as they are now - the fix for the Ignore Death can be easy - just add a refresh timer on it that is longer than the buff itself.

The Guardian Charm on the other hand is too strong as it is now. GC can be obtainer relative easy and quickly - just need T3 / HoH access and you able to do ZP more&less. In my own personal opinion, the leech effect (in any form) really helped with extremally long & boring camps like the camp for hammer parts in Sunderock. It is not just you are able to ZP with the charm (still need decent gear for it also in SR) but it was more for pulling. Same as pulling in HoS for example. I tried it a few times with the UCv3 charm, and was not able to pull a lot without dying very often. Oke, that might be related to my leet pulling skills - and again - my own personal opinion - is that I loved pulling HoS with the GC charm and I was able to complete the Sunderocks faction/hammers/tokens ect with it. I am not saying that it could not have been done without the charm, but it would require a lot of dedication to do so - and for the ones who completed SR the hard way (much respect for those who did) would probably not agree with me.

Anyways, to keep a long & boring story short. The GC charm is to OP mostly because it is obtainable relative early in the game.

A solution I had in mind, and would like to see how others think about it - is to remove (partly?) the leech effect from the GC - and add it in some form on a other item (UCv3/UCv4? - or something else that is obtained later in the game?).

And if you still looking for testers - hit me up! I would love to help.

Very good calls for sure.

What about things like vie rotation macros, they are pretty much there to make the tank invulnerable in VP, there's plenty of people using macro's to walk that thin line between what's legal and what's not, it's out of control the amount of macro's people use now, we went from being allowed a loot macro to being allowed casting rotations and timed casting etc etc, that's not what EZ is about and Hunter would be so pissed that stuff that this is allowed.

Tank

Whataboutism is almost never useful because it gets in the way of constructive and directed discussion. We should talk about both those issues in their own thread. Vie is the most powerful thing in the game after these charms and if we want to have content that is challenging but doable for people with and without 3 clerics, vie will need a nerf. I don't think many people are automating it in the way you describe, some use the Clyde macro which identifies the cleric capable of casting it when you want it cast (to avoid double casts) but I don't think that's illegal. More people probably are like me and just have three different hotkeys for each cleric. The automation you describe, I'm sure draca would agree, would not be legal but I also doubt it's as widespread as you are projecting. However I don't think there's anything special about vie that is making people break rules .. the people breaking rules with vie are breaking it with nearly every aspect of the game.

On the subject of GC I think this one is tough and will take a light touch because a change is likely to have a lot of implications to farming speed of previous tiers... One option is just to make it not work on your current tier. I think changing the percent returned on vampirism could work too but I think that's going to be a delicate balance. ID I think you have a good handle on how it should change

As Shadow said Ignore Death can have the recast time longer than the buff.  I think that should tone it down.

As for Guardian Charm, maybe halving the healing effect would have you pressing more heal buttons from your other characters to balance it out?

Would love to help test it out if needed.

I will wade into the water and just throw this out there...no uogradeable item should be less effective than the FIRST tier of that item. I was all in favor of making it unusable past the T4 level to force people to upgrade to the UCv1 (for T5) and then that starts your progression....thank God I am not the server GM  ;D

starting with UC1, 25% of damage leeched up to max 75% at 3

Guardian and ZPs are a large reason why I'm no longer playing. They make the gameloop very repetitive and leaves little room for skill or even thought. While my army grew to 30+, my use of characters plummeted to only using my Warrior essentially.

My best time playing this server was grinding up the tiers and at one point I decided to try out TOFS. First floor was easy, but then 2 kicked my ass and I had to farm up res stones on all my chars and I was able to get to floor 3 which kicked my ass when I tried to do big pulls, so I had to slow it down and do small pulls and utilize my whole team between healing and using vie/drakes, and DPSing fast with my whole team it was great.

Right now, the server is largely based around ZPing, so I don't think nerfing guardian would solve the issues I personally have. The design of VP to be more about fewer stronger mobs is great, but the rest of the content is still all about mass pulling and if you don't have ZPs or guardian, the grind would be excessive. I know this may be a controversial opinion, and also there isn't a quick solution... but these are my PERSONAL issues with the server.

My solution would be to massively nerf guardian, and remove ZPs. Rework the content around slower dungeon crawling with small pulls and thoughtful use of game mechanics. With the removal of guardian/zp, it might be as easy as upping the progression rate.

I understand that the changes I'm talking about aren't perhaps in the spirit of EZ. I just thought I'd share the things that made me fall in love with the server, and ultimately fall out of love with it.


--- Also, a side note to address Tank's comment: You may think my macros are too powerful, but I personally could accomplish everything in them combat wise (so barring stuff like looting) with in-game socials. This is because I have professional experience in software, 20 years of on again off again experience writing and tinkering with EQ socials, and tons of experience boxing with 0 tools in many different games. Many of the other high-end players have similar knowledge at least in EQ socials. I wrote my macro collection as a way for people inexperienced with software, socials, and boxing to have the ability to box and just play on a more level playing field without making a full time job out of learning macros. This server has a big problem with it's barrier to entry, and I made my collection just user friendly enough to enable high end play but still require a little bit of work.

Cheers- Clyde

No flame or rant, but if you guys have some other suggestions, maybe better open a separate topic for that and keep this topic for Ignore Death and Guardian Charm?

These items are no different than the Warrior's Way fiasco that happened 8 years ago or so....Hunter said then it was an OP and an exploit.  He was pissed off that the player base didn't PM him to let him know such an abuse was going on.  Yet this has been going on for years.  I think the case law has been set in stone on these OP items and exploits. That is all.

Once I began testing some changes to these items, I noticed something that has been reported before, but honestly didn't get a look until now, which is the lack of frontal melee damage taken by highly geared players. With some further testing, I have determined that at our incredibly inflated Agility levels, (nearly) all incoming frontal melee damage is either dodged, parried, blocked or riposted. This is true of every zone, save Sleeper's Tomb and Veeshan's Peak, where the mobs are set to ignore these defensives to varying degrees. To be honest, I don't really know that any action needs to be taken with this information, although it is absolutely what makes Sunderock zone pullable, otherwise you'd get goop nuked than immediately melee'd and die. I don't think that this was intended to be the case, but again, I don't know that it needs to change. All new content will continue in the line of Sleeper and VP and ignore defensives.

Now, for the changes likely coming to Ignore Death and Guardian's Charm.

Starting with Ignore Death, this will likely see a reduction in spell resist chance from 100% currently, to somewhere in the 75-85% range. This still leaves it incredibly powerful, but not near invulnerable.

Guardian's Charm is still a bit of an issue. That issue being that because the effect heals for a percentage of your health, even at the lowest effect I can assign it (1%), it still heals for over 200,000 hp's per hit. Factor in the absurd level of ripostes we perform, and your threat of death become incredibly small. At it's current level (12% on maxed charm) it heals for 1.7m per hit. Ultimately though, none of this should be an issue, as Guardian Charm should not have any effect following level 72, as it was designed to lose 100% of it's effectiveness, which clearly doesn't work. Likely fix will be enforcing this level restriction as it was designed.

(http://i.imgur.com/OTQQ0ULl.png) (https://imgur.com/OTQQ0UL)

---

Final decision will be made this week.

The thing that gets me is that Rent has known about this for years, it was never an unreported "exploit" like some people think, certain people just kept it quiet from others..

I didn't even have one until I came back in 2020 and had to do SR before the ramp tweaks...

Tank

I was completely unaware of it as well, despite having been in both La Familia and Origins. Ultimately, what Rent chose to do isn't my concern, but clearly the Guardian Charm was not designed with the intention of it working into later tiers. It's use in later tiers isn't an exploit, but it also isn't intended.

Can we all just cut the bullshit? EVERYONE knew! it was in OOC when ever some new player was asking for advice! Turn a blind eye if you must, but check the logs! how the hell can anyone zonepull T10 without anything else then a warrior... Nobody can say "i didnt know"

Just the sheer number of new people getting fed GSS and what not. if you just took a look at what was mass farmed then you all knew! you can lie about most things, but when the price on things drops like HELL then its a sure sign that something is wrong.

Im all for that things needs to be changed, as we talked about Draca. But things needs to be changed alot more then this. If you can get to endgame within a month and then just say "oh i powergamed" then there is something wrong with the core.

But all of this is just an old guys opinion, and im trying not to point fingers, but dont think anyone didnt know.

And another thing, the items are OP yes... But the game is more or less made for it. if you dont run a million bots at endgame, or have them maxed out with everything, then its hard as hell. Plus the number of items/essence/plat and what ever you need to farm is a SHITTON! doing that without the ability to mass pull without breaks will make it a deadly grind for anyone who works or have a life

I had no problems zonepulling t10 without guardian charm for a long time, just pulled the slimes first so it took a few extra seconds each time, but not a huge amount. Legit did not know about guardian charm until Draca announced VP.

I've never been able to zone pull T10 due to disconnect issues so never really found a benefit from having the GC and ended up face pulling it for months :D

I did however report the no frontal damage quite a few times so nice to see that it's actually been observed.

Tank

Ignore Death change will be pushed live tonight. I have had several rogue-centered players test the change, and while it's not what it used to be, they still found it useful.

Ignore Death has been changed in the following ways, the buff itself lasts 1 tic longer (extra 6 secs), but now has a recourse buff that results in a 2-3 second ID buff downtime in between procs. Buff remains the same at 10000% Dodge and 100% Spell Resist. As with everything, this is subject to change following more thorough use on prod.

Guardian Charm changes remain ongoing.