This is Dumb

[Steven01]

Shadowknights where Good tanks.. this change.. I cant even take aggro from my pet with Disease Cloud Shadow Vortex or anything... like?

Bards could do those things that you nerfed them on.. its ultimately dumb because people complain .. this is classic mechanics.. It is how it worked..

Is the classic or not?

im guessing No now..

[Steven01]

Another thing Enchanter pets breaking attack players sitting.. def not classic .. Charming was terrifying but deadly

[Steven01]

Fix bard charm.. put aggro back.. SK and Paladins where insane tanks classic
Now they just ded weight completely

[Steven01]

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/editorial/120199_Tanking_Guide.html

[Steven01]

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22disease+cloud%22+%22everquest%22+aggro&newwindow=1&rlz=1C1RXQR_enUS967US967&sxsrf=ALiCzsagXQjJwVrbpCJEBf58GQIf7Ccwhw%3A1672010 762586&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1999%2Ccd_max%3A2001&tbm=

[Steven01]

Taunting: A+. A lot of cheap casting cost taunt spells. Disease cloud, clinging darkness, when cast repeatedly alternating will steal monsters from any cleric or wizard. Harm touch seems to get some attention as well. Your damage dealing with a 2h weapon is also high enough to taunt at times if you decided to be a large race that can deal real damage.



I cant even steal from my pet....

[Steven01]

Taunting: C-. While the warrior gets the 'taunt' skill, it really doesn't do jack to the monster's hate-list when you have spell casters nuking the crap out of the enemy, or healers casting spells for that matter. Your only hope is to cause enough damage quickly that combined with your 'taunt' skill it will be enough to leave an impression on the monster.

This is a statement about a warrior.. meaning SK's def take threat when they want it without problem

Also makes me think Healing aggro is something.. and doesnt seem to be anything here

[Uthgaard]

I cant even steal from my pet....

An NPC should never have aggro over a player when a player is in proximity. Your pet is out threating you as an SK???

[Steven01]

Im not getting in range but.. Disease Cloud, Clinging Darkness, Shadow Vortex .. not ripping him off the pet.. this should function this way.

I am spamming these full force

But yes my pet has more threat than me . unless i do more white damage.. Heck from what i understand shamans can just slow instantly and pet still holds aggro

[patrick210]

IV had no issues with agro, yall prolly not turning taunt off pet.

[Cezar]

It’s not an issue about turning pet taunt off or on, we were king of aggro and now we fight vs a lvl 35 pet? We been nerfed hard with no reason. I am shocked that no one giving a sh*it about it.

At 59 was in a group with a lvl 51 bard slowing and I had no way to get mobs on me, still worth to play sk? Hell no, but I think if they want to change our class they should to it better and turn us into paladins or warrior, so we can continue playing. Stick with SK at this point is senseless.

[Octavian]

It’s not an issue about turning pet taunt off or on, we were king of aggro and now we fight vs a lvl 35 pet? We been nerfed hard with no reason. I am shocked that no one giving a sh*it about it.

At 59 was in a group with a lvl 51 bard slowing and I had no way to get mobs on me, still worth to play sk? Hell no, but I think if they want to change our class they should to it better and turn us into paladins or warrior, so we can continue playing. Stick with SK at this point is senseless.

Yeah, this is definitely SK-breaking. I heard they nerfed DC aggro, but I can't pull aggro with other spells either. Was trying to tank Narandi last night and couldn't keep aggro off raid at all. Was spamming DC and Shadow Vortex back to back. Pulled aggro occasionally for a few seconds, then it was gone. This was probably more to do with taunt than the spells though.

It seems SK's are just really, really bad dps now. Kinda killin my desire to play. Crazy they'd do something to make the game so much less enjoyable for us when there's already so few players. And when the only evidence I've seen of a nerf from live had no real metrics and seemed to come post-velious.

Classic bugs are classic. Even if DC was broken during velious, it should stay that way because that was the game. There's so much "fixing" going on and it seems they unfairly cherry pick what "should" or "shouldn't" have been classic, rather than just emulating what WAS classic, as I thought was the mission here.

RIP SK class. Had a good run.

[BenDerisgreat]

"Rogean: Bards are now capped at 140 aggro per song/spell/proc in all circumstances."

Bard aggro is completely borked. I can sing single target snare on a mob 8x and instantly lose aggro when sending in a charmed pet. Same thing with other songs and stun totems. Great for soloing but terrible for everything else. No more landing an aoe snare and kiting away some adds that are tearing your group/raid apart.

At the very least, aggro clickies should work the same as for other classes.

[FatMice]

I for one really hope they roll back these agro changes.
But I am not hopeful. It's not often we see rollbacks from these sort of updates.

[bluedecember]

An NPC should never have aggro over a player when a player is in proximity. Your pet is out threating you as an SK???

I totally agree and when I saw this behavior from mobs I was stunned. It's happening all the time now.

[Octavian]

Tested out SK aggro with a friendly group of lowbies in Highkeep.

Me: lvl 60 SK
Them: lvl 20s to low-30s

I tested Disease Cloud, Shadow Vortex, and Shroud of Hate (our former most powerful aggro spells) on both incoming mobs and mobs which had been locked down by the group until sub-90% hp, thinking incoming aggro gank would be a sure thing and the sub-90% mobs would be the real test.

NOPE.

Couldn't even pull aggro on incoming mobs BEFORE they reached the camp.

To reiterate... Level 60 SK spamming DC, SV, and SoH cannot pull aggro from non-SK players OR pets less than HALF my level on mobs which haven't even made it to camp yet.

Obviously we don't need to go further on this. SK's are completely broken and useless now. Our aggro is non-existent. Okay... so let's talk about classic vs. non-classic.

I read the evidence of the DC aggro nerf. It was a post-Velious nerf and Luclin introduced the "Terror" line of spells to make sure that SK's were still the aggro gods.

So where is our DC replacement then? EQ live always very clearly intended on knights being able to snap aggro, with SK's being superior to Paladins in this department. This stayed true throughout the ENTIRE live timeline, through present day. There has never been another class which can out-aggro an SK. It NEVER. HAPPENED. ON. LIVE.

When they nerfed DC, it broke, leading to other unintended consequences (irrelevant to aggro), and they introduced the terror line to make up for it. SK's never lost their status as the top hate producers. Yet here we are on P99, unable to snap aggro from players or pets half our level...

Since we're not going into Luclin, where the terror line exists, this patch needs to be completely undone. Not fixed again, not tweaked, just completely rolled back. It goes against the entire timeline of EQ live to nerf SK aggro without a replacement spell. Please roll back this aggro patch. The game was working fine. And the nerfs which happened on live were also a mistake which was completely remedied in Luclin. We don't have that remedy to look forward to, so leaving aggro in a broken state will only ruin P99 for many players, especially SK's.

[Allishia]

Pretty sure its based off mobs HP. The agro gets better on higher HP mobs...but ya I was going oom trying to keep mobs on my 47 so in stables.

Disease cloud does nothing, I just used the ac tap cause was less mana than atk tap. It works ok but was still having to put 2-3 cast on every mob to hold it + dpsing with rocksmasher aary 2hb.

[Encroaching Death]

I recently created an SK.

I really hope the class isn't broken because I'm really enjoying things so far.

I wouldn't know what to compare it to though...but I do absolutely know how well SKs are supposed to keep aggro though.

I'll keep an eye on how well my aggro does. But tons of people have been complaining about this since the patch that I think a dev should at least look into what's going on.

[Infectious]

Tested out SK aggro with a friendly group of lowbies in Highkeep.

Me: lvl 60 SK
Them: lvl 20s to low-30s

I tested Disease Cloud, Shadow Vortex, and Shroud of Hate (our former most powerful aggro spells) on both incoming mobs and mobs which had been locked down by the group until sub-90% hp, thinking incoming aggro gank would be a sure thing and the sub-90% mobs would be the real test.

NOPE.

Couldn't even pull aggro on incoming mobs BEFORE they reached the camp.

To reiterate... Level 60 SK spamming DC, SV, and SoH cannot pull aggro from non-SK players OR pets less than HALF my level on mobs which haven't even made it to camp yet.

Obviously we don't need to go further on this. SK's are completely broken and useless now. Our aggro is non-existent. Okay... so let's talk about classic vs. non-classic.

I read the evidence of the DC aggro nerf. It was a post-Velious nerf and Luclin introduced the "Terror" line of spells to make sure that SK's were still the aggro gods.

So where is our DC replacement then? EQ live always very clearly intended on knights being able to snap aggro, with SK's being superior to Paladins in this department. This stayed true throughout the ENTIRE live timeline, through present day. There has never been another class which can out-aggro an SK. It NEVER. HAPPENED. ON. LIVE.

When they nerfed DC, it broke, leading to other unintended consequences (irrelevant to aggro), and they introduced the terror line to make up for it. SK's never lost their status as the top hate producers. Yet here we are on P99, unable to snap aggro from players or pets half our level...

Since we're not going into Luclin, where the terror line exists, this patch needs to be completely undone. Not fixed again, not tweaked, just completely rolled back. It goes against the entire timeline of EQ live to nerf SK aggro without a replacement spell. Please roll back this aggro patch. The game was working fine. And the nerfs which happened on live were also a mistake which was completely remedied in Luclin. We don't have that remedy to look forward to, so leaving aggro in a broken state will only ruin P99 for many players, especially SK's.

It scales with mob hp. Pull a 40s mob with that same group of people and you will keep aggro.

[Octavian]

So, if it scaled with mob HP, I should have been able to keep aggro on Narandi during raids? Because that was a total shit show. Spam cycling did nothing on him either.

I've also spent a good amount of time offtanking in PoG since patch during raids. Holding aggro is nearly impossible on mobs I wasn't locking down for 30+ seconds before raid switched to them. Constant spamming, still lost aggro on most mobs.

But also, aggro scaling with mob hp is dumb anyway lol...

My advice is to hold off on investing into your SK until we see what the devs do about this, Encroaching. It's a complete break.

[Muilezel]

Disease/poison counters were completely nerfed. You can't use disease cloud anymore.

You need to be using Clinging Darkness and Shadow Vortex now.

Clinging is the new Disease Cloud.

But their hate value scales with mob HP (up to 1200 on high hp mobs), so don't expect to spam them on low hp mobs to keep aggro necessarily.

Vs lower level mobs, you probably want fast weapons or DD procs, but I can't really speak to holding aggro on non-raid stuff.

I've witnessed some of the best server SKs effortlessly holding aggro as recently as the last non-draft quake.

[Octavian]

Yes... we all know DC doesn't work anymore. That's... kind of the whole point here?

I would question the circumstances of them "effortlessly" holding aggro. What exactly did you witness? What were they doing? Did you actually communicate with them about it? What were they tanking? Raid or group? How long were they building aggro before others joined and started DPSing? All of this matters because we're talking about snap aggro.

Shadow Vortex is as useless as DC, so that's incorrect. Both stat debuffs and both useless for snap aggro now - as I stated I was spam cycling, not just spamming DC on Narandi.

What are you basing your statement regarding Clinging Darkness on? What testing have you conducted or who told you about theirs? To say "clinging is the new disease cloud" is a big statement, because CD was not improved afaik. DC was far superior to CD prior to this patch, so I'm failing to see how CD could possibly serve as a replacement, especially since you're suggesting it be paired with a spell that does absolutely nothing for snap aggro. Just seems like uninformed commenting.

[Danth]

The notion that shadow knights should be expected to struggle with aggro until level 50+ due to HP scaling is absurd and nothing like the original game was. Holding hate versus other melee types is now quite hard at any level. Oddly, against some of the casters, it's fairly easy. The wife's shaman generates very minimal hate now (head-scratching in and of itself) and the patch has actually made it easier overall for my character to keep hate over hers when we do something like West Wastes dragons. Since duo is mostly what we do, I can live with this patch personally, but it's a rough time for the class more generally. Tactics used in-era such as aggro kiting with other melee classes are very difficult now. This should be another indication that something's amiss. I sincerely hope this is some sort of glitch or unfinished implementation because at present it does not feel like the original game. If anything it feels like "Warrior's dream;" knights kind of suck and debuffers are easy to manage.

Since we're stuck living with this for awhile--who knows how long--I've had the best results using Clinging Darkness and Shroud of Hate or Shroud of Pain. Disease Cloud is worth only about 1/4 of the hate of those spells and is no longer valid as a means of generating significant aggro. Was that in fact a Luclin-era nerf? How peculiar.

Danth

[Octavian]

Agreed, Danth. Also, the idea of it scaling with mob HP is absurd for the fact that many lower level mobs have a lot of HP and many higher level mobs have very small HP pools. So, my ability to aggro things depending on their HP pool is a completely ludicrous metric.

But also, the fact that my aggro is weak af regardless of level difference is another non-classic experience. As mentioned earlier in the thread, I was unable to gank aggro on incoming mobs from players less than half my level.

Here's hoping we get the patch rolled back completely. I see no point in trying to tweak/fix it. Just remove it. The game was working fine. When they messed with DC on live, they broke it and very quickly recognized the need to replace SK aggro with a new line of spells, hence the "terror" line, which has remained throughout all of live through present day. SK's were always meant to be top dog when it comes to aggro. They are now less effective than rangers.

[Vivitron]

What are you basing your statement regarding Clinging Darkness on? What testing have you conducted or who told you about theirs? To say "clinging is the new disease cloud" is a big statement, because CD was not improved afaik. DC was far superior to CD prior to this patch, so I'm failing to see how CD could possibly serve as a replacement, especially since you're suggesting it be paired with a spell that does absolutely nothing for snap aggro. Just seems like uninformed commenting.

I tested SK and Wizard spells with another player on Corudoth (high hp) in Iceclad. Each high aggro effect is equal (or at least very close, we weren't looking for small differences) to 1200 aggro -- where 1 point of aggro is the amount of hate generated per max damage on a wizard nuke; e.g. Ice Spear is equal to an aggro effect on a high hp mob, and so is 24 flux staff clicks at 50 hate per.

We tested high aggro effects to include Snare (tested wizard snare and darknesses including clinging), Root (Fetter), Ac debuffs (Heart Flutter and Shroud), Blind (tested w/ a cleric against a cliff golem, their blinds have both blind and ac debuff and put 2400 aggro into the CG instead of 1200 -- lucky paladins).

Darkness aggro works on immune to runspeed change mobs (Corudoth is) and when it doesn't take hold (checked on a passing wolf with wizard snare).

Others have reported slow capping at the same 1200. (Up from IIRC 700?)

I think root being high aggro is new. Too bad. It may be an annoyance for root parking adds.

I think removing disease and poison counters from the list of high aggro effects is an error for our timeline; if any of you can find smoking gun evidence that they were high aggro in velious you should open a bug thread.

[Octavian]

Others have already posted enormous chains of old zam comments about DC being primary aggro and generating massive hate during the Velious era. I've also added that the "terror" line was designed to replace it after it got nerfed on live, highlighting the point that SK's were never meant to have a timeline gap in their position as top hate generators.

It's in the hands of the server staff now. Really hoping I get to enjoy my character again at some point, because this is crap.

[Veleria]

I main Sk and I can confirm non of the spells in our arsenal compare to the aggro DC used to have. In addition, we are using 2-6 times as much mana for all the spells in rotation for aggro. I can't maintain aggro fo any reasonable period of time and the aggro I hold is tenuous. I can hold aggro for a short time in raids spamming the aggro spells on cooldown but I still lose aggro to people I never had issues with before. Mana is now a major issue. On a side note, Engulfing Darkness from the Blood Ember gloves is not a solution either. It has weak aggro and the casting time is too long to sustain aggro during the cast when spamming those nonstop.

[wuanahto]

I am more curious about the proc part of the change. My level 15 dwarf war on green just got a pair of obsidian daggers

[Jimjam]

Pretty sure its based off mobs HP. The agro gets better on higher HP mobs...but ya I was going oom trying to keep mobs on my 47 so in stables.

Disease cloud does nothing, I just used the ac tap cause was less mana than atk tap. It works ok but was still having to put 2-3 cast on every mob to hold it + dpsing with rocksmasher aary 2hb.

I think the issue is the scale for mob hp is broken.

IIRC max aggro should be achieved on mobs with hp in the ball park of the higher level DL giants.

I wouldn't be surprised if the implementation here doesn't achieve max aggro until the mobs have 10s of thousands of hp instead.

The notion that shadow knights should be expected to struggle with aggro until level 50+ due to HP scaling is absurd and nothing like the original game was.

Original game vast majority of people were using like 6/27 weapons til pas their teens. Of course it was easier for low level SKs to keep aggro against this instead of rogues backstabbing with 13 dmg weapons.


Others have already posted enormous chains of old zam comments about DC being primary aggro and generating massive hate during the Velious era.

The comments said things like it needed to be repeatedly cast. Obviously the current implementation seems to have underboiled the egg, but the previous was equally wrong.

2 DCs and MAYBE a shadow and you were keeping aggro an entire fight versus very twinked out melees. I don't think that fell under the scope of 'repeatedly'?


I am more curious about the proc part of the change. My level 15 dwarf war on green just got a pair of obsidian daggers

Obsidian daggers won't be effective at this point in the servers, even pre nerf. Maybe offhand one while your dual wield doesn't produce many swings (they can proc even if they don't swing), but you need a much better ratio primary to generate consistent white aggro.

[magnetaress]

I think the issue is the scale for mob hp is broken.

IIRC max aggro should be achieved on mobs with hp in the ball park of the higher level DL giants.

I wouldn't be surprised if the implementation here doesn't achieve max aggro until the mobs have 10s of thousands of hp instead.



Original game vast majority of people were using like 6/27 weapons til pas their teens. Of course it was easier for low level SKs to keep aggro against this instead of rogues backstabbing with 13 dmg weapons.




The comments said things like it needed to be repeatedly cast. Obviously the current implementation seems to have underboiled the egg, but the previous was equally wrong.

2 DCs and MAYBE a shadow and you were keeping aggro an entire fight versus very twinked out melees. I don't think that fell under the scope of 'repeatedly'?




Obsidian daggers won't be effective at this point in the servers, even pre nerf. Maybe offhand one while your dual wield doesn't produce many swings (they can proc even if they don't swing), but you need a much better ratio primary to generate consistent white aggro.
💯☝️🏎🥇

[long.liam]

I think the issue is the scale for mob hp is broken.

IIRC max aggro should be achieved on mobs with hp in the ball park of the higher level DL giants.

I wouldn't be surprised if the implementation here doesn't achieve max aggro until the mobs have 10s of thousands of hp instead.



Original game vast majority of people were using like 6/27 weapons til pas their teens. Of course it was easier for low level SKs to keep aggro against this instead of rogues backstabbing with 13 dmg weapons.




The comments said things like it needed to be repeatedly cast. Obviously the current implementation seems to have underboiled the egg, but the previous was equally wrong.

2 DCs and MAYBE a shadow and you were keeping aggro an entire fight versus very twinked out melees. I don't think that fell under the scope of 'repeatedly'?




Obsidian daggers won't be effective at this point in the servers, even pre nerf. Maybe offhand one while your dual wield doesn't produce many swings (they can proc even if they don't swing), but you need a much better ratio primary to generate consistent white aggro.

The formula for Spell Effect hate is Mob HP/15, so to hit the max of 1200 you would need to cast on a mob with at least 18,000 HP.

[long.liam]

Also, there is a ton of evidence that Spells debuff spell effect hate is supposed to scale based off of level. Many of them from the EQ devs in Era:

"--- We've capped the amount of hate that can be awarded to most
casters, specifically for debuff-type spells like the Malo and Tash
series. The hate calculation for these spells takes into account the
number of hitpoints of the NPC and did not "play nice" with the
increased HP limit of Velious. It explains why Enchanters, for
instance, would complain that casting a Tash spell would lead to near-
instant death."

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/history/patches-2001-1.html

This has been well researched before. It would take take a ton evidence from Player logs in Era and developer posts in era to convince P99 Devs that this change is wrong. The only thing is broken right now is the Disease and Poison counter hate was mistakenly removed for some reason.

[ratweed]

I miss using infestation. please fix this.

[Octavian]

The comments said things like it needed to be repeatedly cast. Obviously the current implementation seems to have underboiled the egg, but the previous was equally wrong.

2 DCs and MAYBE a shadow and you were keeping aggro an entire fight versus very twinked out melees. I don't think that fell under the scope of 'repeatedly'?

Depends on the fight... if I'm grouped and the mob is gonna die in <30sec, then yeah 1-2 DC's was prob sufficient. However, for raids I was not only spamming DC but using GCD to weave other spells in for extra hate, all of which was necessary. Your assessment is a gross oversimplification and really only applies to shorter duration fights. No SK on P99 would have held aggro on a raid target for >a minute or two with 1-2 DC casts prior to the patch.

The way DC was functioning was as intended. It worked extremely well in group situations (SK's have always been group tank gods) and it required nonstop spamming during raid tanking. There was nothing about it that needed to be changed, and live EQ only dropped it when they were ready to implement its replacement, the terror line, which preserved SK's as aggro gods.

[Octavian]

Also, there is a ton of evidence that Spells debuff spell effect hate is supposed to scale based off of level. Many of them from the EQ devs in Era:

"--- We've capped the amount of hate that can be awarded to most
casters, specifically for debuff-type spells like the Malo and Tash
series. The hate calculation for these spells takes into account the
number of hitpoints of the NPC and did not "play nice" with the
increased HP limit of Velious. It explains why Enchanters, for
instance, would complain that casting a Tash spell would lead to near-
instant death."

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/history/patches-2001-1.html

This has been well researched before. It would take take a ton evidence from Player logs in Era and developer posts in era to convince P99 Devs that this change is wrong. The only thing is broken right now is the Disease and Poison counter hate was mistakenly removed for some reason.

For sure, this agrees with the point of this thread - fix disease cloud. It should still be our primary aggro spell and it should work well.

[Drueric]

I thought warriors were the ones designed to taunt and hold boss agro in raids. I mean, if sk's are expecting to have this role(casting their newb level spells), then what are warriors good for? I mean if there is bug here, then it needs to be fixed. What is the bug? Im only asking because this is the bugs section.