Killing Yourself on Teal Makes You Respawn With No Mana

[loramin]

I was in Najena, had just finished a difficult fight, and was low on health. I tried to summon bandages, hit the wrong key, and instead nuked myself to death. Not my finest moment :(.

When I respawned, strangely I had no mana! I did have full health, as I should though.

I can only assume this was some sort of side effect of me killing myself, as I can't think of any other detail (eg. having a pet up, being in Najena) that could have caused it.

[DMN]

Ya, I think this is too early for this feature to be implemented. For awhile in vanilla EQ you could kill yourself or have your friend kill you and you'd respawn with full mana... it should be obvious how easy this would be to exploit for classes that can freely bind themselves. No idea when they fixed it, but they eventually did after bind rushing became a common strategy for smaller guilds who would have no chance at a raid mob otherwise.

[Dolalin]

Patched in on February 23rd, 2000:


Today's patch was primarily comprised of server-side changes in preparation for the release of EverQuest: The Ruins of Kunark. Only one gameplay-affecting issue was updated as a result of this patch:

-Being killed by another player in a duel will now cause you to re-spawn with zero mana.

This change was implemented to counter a strategy used by casters where they would duel to reduce downtime between fights, thus allowing groups to engage creatures that they normally would not be able to.

The EverQuest Team


https://wiki.project1999.com/Patch_Notes#February_23.2C_2000

At least I *think* this would also cover suiciding.

[loramin]

Interesting, although really /duel is different, because you don't lose XP from dual deaths.

No one would ever suicide to get mana back (at the expense of a bubble of XP) :)

It just seems like a bug to me: either you should always get back mana when you die, or never ... or at least, I'm not aware of a specific classic reason why suicides specifically shouldn't restore mana.

[DMN]

Interesting, although really /duel is different, because you don't lose XP from dual deaths.

No one would ever suicide to get mana back (at the expense of a bubble of XP) :)

It just seems like a bug to me: either you should always get back mana when you die, or never ... or at least, I'm not aware of a specific classic reason why suicides specifically shouldn't restore mana.

Why wouldn't you, especially knowing you will eventually get a 90% exp rez after raid mob X is dead?

[Dolalin]

On early Nagafen raids on Fennin, we were encouraged to bind at Naggy's lair to bind rush him with nukes. I think this was after Feb 2000 for me, so maybe this persisted until later, let me dig a bit more.

[Videri]

you don't lose XP from dual deaths.

You lose double exp from dual deaths.

*runs away and /cackles*

[Dolalin]

Here's a newsgroup thread about mana loss from deaths, just before Kunark:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.games.everquest/uY03IxDIAAA/discussion

Read through this and parse what you will from it.

[loramin]

Here's a newsgroup thread about mana loss from deaths, just before Kunark:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.games.everquest/uY03IxDIAAA/discussion

Read through this and parse what you will from it.

Great thread!

Any method of no exp loss death has a potential to be exploited. Using a
mana stone to suicide just before something would kill you anyway was an old one.
A recent one they fixed was dueling to get FM quickly. They seem to have made
it so several methods of dieing cause no exp loss, in each case you will respawn
with no mana to prevent exploitation.

This actually works out to your advantage, you basically get a free 100% exp
res with no res effects besides no mana and half health. You also don't have
to pester any clerics to get it.

Well there's some classicness (avoiding death XP loss via manastone) we won't see here ;)

There are circumstances other than that which drop your mana to 0.
I was not in a PVP fight, died an odd way to a Gnoll (bled to death or some
such) and came back with nada.

Only has happened once though.

This seems to describe my situation the closest. But at the same time, based on the rest of that thread ... on live you lost mana from such deaths because you didn't lose XP. The logic was simple: no XP loss, no free mana recovery (and therefore no exploiting death to save time).

Here there is never XP-free death: all deaths lose you XP. So then if all deaths work the same in that regard, why make some deaths, which aren't in any other way meaningfully different, not restore mana?

[Dolalin]

I found some more English patch notes and I think they answer this conclusively. Suicide (eg, with Manastone) didn't give you xp loss until the October 20th 1999 patch:


General Enhancements

* If a user is killed due to self-inflicted spell or melee damage, experience will be lost.


http://web.archive.org/web/20010210085939/www.eqic.net/patches.htm

I would bet that the way the code worked was, if it was an xp death, you got your mana back. This was then changed later on (as described above) because people started exploiting it.

[cd288]

Great thread!



Well there's some classicness (avoiding death XP loss via manastone) we won't see here ;)



This seems to describe my situation the closest. But at the same time, based on the rest of that thread ... on live you lost mana from such deaths because you didn't lose XP. The logic was simple: no XP loss, no free mana recovery (and therefore no exploiting death to save time).

Here there is never XP-free death: all deaths lose you XP. So then if all deaths work the same in that regard, why make some deaths, which aren't in any other way meaningfully different, not restore mana?

Because it's still exploitable. If you have enough of an XP buffer in your current level and you know you're going to get 90%+ EXP rezzed for each death, just kill yourself so you can bind rush the raid mob and you can get those corpses rezzed later and get the vast majority of the XP lost back.