EZ Server

Answer what you can, I am not expecting full answers for everything. I am just trying to get a feel for how things are going (without being able to actually play).

• Is Kraken still proc'ing every hit?
• Is Crusader Fury proc'ing every hit?
• Is there any specific ability(ies) acting ridiculous? (i.e. Lessette's Kick of Fatality healing instead of hurting...)
• Does anyone have any concerns about any specific ability(ies)?
• Does anyone have any concerns about a specific class(es)?

-Hate

I know this one does not proc every hit

I've had to take off my weapon to AoE in pofire because it wouldnt proc before I killed the mob I was targeting

It works decently

I broke down and wrote a way to calculate attacks and procs per attack for kraken...

All tested with just Enchanter 3.0 Haste

Paladin with Weapon on
268 Slashes per Minute
77 Kraken Procs per Minute (procs taken by other augs!)


Paladin with Weapon off  --- seems to be 50% proc rate
113 Attacks (Punches) per minute
64 Kraken Procs per minute



Monk with Weapon On
520 Attacks per minute
124 Kraken procs per minute (Proc slots taken by other augs!)


Monk with Weapon Off --- 33% proc rate
434 Attacks (Punches) per minute
147 Kraken procs per minute




Seems the proc rate is fine to me.. not too many procs per minute like it was before. Was easily 90%++ proc rate before which was laggy if you had too many toons with it

Excellent, 2 down. Thank you! :-D

-Hate

Those results makes me wonder what dps would be like if you just took all augs but the ninja augs out of monks weapons...

I think there's a limit to the number of procs you can do per combat round, or something. This affects SKs, paladins (since they have innate procs and proc buffs) and dual wielders the most. Warriors generally only have 4 procs: cyclone blade and 3 angers, unless they are dual wielding which people generally stop doing once they have a 4.0 anyways.

I bet removing the procratemod from the augs but buffing their damage would help alleviate this problem quite a bit, similar to how kraken is supposed to hit harder but a lot less often now.

Edit: Bringing the 4.0s back down to 2 aug slots and buffing the damage of the VI and higher augs would also work, but I don't know how this would even be doable without people losing some of their augs. I think this ship has already set sail.

Nope, this has already been discussed and is not too far gone. This has been mentioned to Hunter a few times, specifically one evening a month+ ago that we spoke. The ideal solution would be to limit to 2 aug slots MAX per weapon. To compensate for the DPS drop, raise the next rank of strikes by 50%. This would result in LESS augs needing to be made, the proc cap being less of an issue, and a much easier process to aug weapons. :-)

tl;dr - You are on the right path Griz.


-Hate

I'm not sure how it would be possible to do that though without potentially hosing someone on their augs. I mean, you remove a slot, someone has an aug in it, where does it go? Even if you post warnings ingame and on the forums, how many people actually read them?

Oh no Griz, I was referring to future tiers (7+). New epics could come with less slots. Then the new strikes will be a SIGNIFICANT upgrade.

In example (theoretical): Piratestrike III is T5-T6 and has 1500 damage proc. Piratestrike IV is T7-T8 and has 2200 damage proc. Sweet, fine, dandy. Now we are making adjustments for the 2 aug slot limit. Piratestrike IV goes from 2200 to 3300 damage proc. This 50% step up will compensate for the 'missing' aug slot.


Does that clear things up at all?

-Hate

What would stop people from using piratestrike IVs in a three socket 6.0?

Hopefully the 20-50k hp difference, but guess we could always just reduce the slot number and leave augs as is.

-Hate

I am pretty sure this would result in a huge DPS loss


Reason being... I am pretty sure Augs can only proc 1 timer per combat round... and monks have 8 attacks per cmobat round.

What is the point of the various Shadoo/Tribunal/Jacinth spells for shm/bst? Do they even work? I mean I think the intention is for them to reduce damage from poison/disease spells. but I don't think they even work considering all they do right now is increase already capped resists. Even if they did work, it seems like they wouldn't even be that useful. Perhaps they can be turned into something else?

This is an issue with the code. I simply have not had time yet to make alterations to the source code, compile, test, then repeat the process until it works. The functionality intended is impossible at the moment due to some very inconsistent spell setup in the EMU source.

-Hate

Okay, but like. Unless something changes in T5+ (and by my poking around in the custom spells file, I sincerely doubt it), there is no real source of poison/disease damage at all from enemies other than an upgraded version of the minor/major dragon poison/npc deadly poison/etc line, which can be cured already, and the 1 hour long disease which is easily outregened by anyone who has beaten qvic.

The only way I see the spells being worth casting (and being worth a buff slot) would be if enemies actually had some meaty direct damage poison/disease AoEs, like some kind of AIDS blast that hit for 200k.

Personally, I'd like to see shamans get some more utility via debuffs. The new malos was a good start, but how about an updated cripple that is like 5% reduced melee  and 10% reduced proc damage? I know slow is out of the question.

Shamans are also pretty bad at healing, even with the new acquittal spells, mainly because they are the only priest who doesn't get holy knight strike procs on their epics. One of my favorite spells on live was the group quiescence they added in uh... DoD I think? I have no idea. Basically it's a group HoT

The poison used by the bosses in plane of Sky (I think it's just called Deadly Poison?) is still 99 poison counters. Can it get reduced down to 18 or something more reasonable? Takes 5 casts of Disinfecting Aura for my shaman to remove it, and then it's pretty much recast again by then. He has 150k hp with a shaman 4.0 click, and it is impossible for him to even remove it from himself

Also, is there any possibility the radii of such spells (root and poison) could get reduced to something more sane, like 200 yards?  Right now, if I'm fighting on the spawn point in PoSky, the AoEs still hit people on the extreme far edge of the island.

Edit: Looked at the spell file, spell ID for the poison looks like 11112

Just Ported my shaman down to kraken my group while doing some T4, hit kraken and immediately bolted for the teleport pad to try and get away. Got hit with both root and the poison. Cured the poison and root with radiant cure, then healed myself while running the rest of the way to the pad (Acquittal of the Tribunal is only like 11k base). When I ported back up, I was alternating acquittal of the tribunal and disinfecting aura (which has a 2.5s cast), and purple clubbed before managing to finally remove it.

Alt tabbed back to my SK who had been rooted and punted out of melee range, and my cleric/paladin were out of range of radiant cure. Thankfully my loladin had aggro on the boss/adds, and after about 30 manastone clicks I was able to get back in the fight.

Interesting gameplay, this is.

Glad you enjoyed it! :)

The irony is that if the shadoo/tribunal spells actually worked, this would be less of a problem!

Well if you know anything about C++ and have the time to sit down and add in the sections for it, by all means, please do so. Otherwise, I will do it when I have ~4h to burn in one sitting.

-Hate

Sorry, that sounded more condescending than I intended, I was just making a joke about how the poison sucks. I appreciate all the work you've done.

Hehe I know Griz, don't worry. Just being a dick. :-D

-Hate

The thing is, the other spells used by the T3/T4 bosses are so weak that they barely matter. I think one of them is a rain that does like 5000 damage x3. What is the point of that? Same for the root. All the root does is make it obnoxious to try and loot after you win. It doesn't prevent you from actually fighting the boss, because nothing about the fights actually requires mobility. I'd much rather see the poison get toned way down and the other spells super buffed. Make the fights themselves challenging, not the cleanup afterwards.

Anyways, I'm not expecting any of this, but here are some suggested fixes:

Triple the damage done by the following spells:

Minor Dragon Fire
Minor Dragon Frost
Minor Dragon Shock
Major Dragon Fire
Major Dragon Frost
Major Dragon Shock
NPC Winds of Gelid
NPC Circle of Fire
NPC Explode
NPC Lightning Storm
NPC Winds of Gelid II
NPC Circle of Fire II
NPC Explode II
NPC Lightning Storm II

Then reduce the counters on Deadly Poison (spell ID 11112) to 16, and the durations of all npc poisons to 1 minute. They are cast enough on boss fights that they will be constantly up if not cured even with 1 min duration, but it makes actually healing through them after a fight viable instead of frantically trying to unroot and cure people.

The Minor versions of these spells only hit for 3k, once. Minor Dragon Poison ticks for 3k every 6 seconds for 10 minutes. There is a huge disparity in damage of these abilities. Also, the NPC disease cloud damage is so hilariously anemic that anyone with a 3.0 will outregen it. I think

I can't speak for the balance of the anguish spells, but it looks like some of the aoes hit for like 100k which isn't too bad, though that's only 65k with max spellshield, so maybe they should be buffed a bit also.

Also, I'd like to see maybe a 500k rune effect put on NPC True Name, so you can break it by damaging the person, Obviously this would need to be tuned.

Lastly, I saw an NPC Theft of Thought spell in the spell file. I think this is an interesting mechanic, but I think it would be cool if a boss drained your mana and killing the adds triggered an AoE that restored it. It would make you think about when you actually need to kill them.

The entire point is to make fighting bosses fun. Killing a boss and then having to perform all this maintenence afterwards is not fun. I'm guessing there is no way any sort of procced debuff with counters can ever be challenging with how spammy the proc curing is, which is why I suggested removing counters from holy knight strike entirely as it's just an arms race between nastier debuffs and the speed at which they can be removed by an autoattacking paladin.

Let it be said that I think that debuffs have their place, I just think that it's stupid that the way they are currently implemented, they are extremely trivial when actually fighting, and obnoxious when the fight is over. I think any change that makes fighting the bosses not be an autoattack slugfest is a good one. Making players react to things that are happening when fighting is good, and until we can get some of the debuffs more in check, there isn't really room to implement such things.

As a final thought, how well do the "Trigger on fade" spells work on EMU? There are a lot of creative things that can be done with these to make some interesting encounters/abilities.

As much as we all hate the root mobs have, an one way to make it an interesting mechanic for a boss fight (granted I dunno how T7 is gonna be, it would work in a more structured zone like anguish or tacvi but less so in an open zone like T1/T2/Abyss) is to have a boss that roots, but then have its spawn permarooted adds that you need to  run over to and kill, because they nuke your group while they are alive. Presto, annoying mechanic made interesting. Though I'm not sure how this couldn't be cheesed with the current unrootable pets.

Why are we still talking about buffing content that is two tiers behind end game? It isn't going to get more entertaining to kill and we could be coming up with ideas for t7. The zone everyone seems to enjoy the most (abyss) has some of the easiest bosses....its just a grind to spawn them.  The root is annoying and does not accomplish much else....but why try to trade abilities that are annoying for something that will hurt newer players?

I'm not. My point is the poison is the only ability the bosses have that is actually threatening, and it is trivialized by the spam curing via holy knight strike procs. I think the challenge should be shifted away from the 10 minute 300 yard unresistable dots, that's all.

Challenge is the grind.

This was a few simple questions...the thread derailed so hard. Stop replying to this thread. Going to attempt to close it.

-Hate