Spells: Bard dots last too long

[Lubian]

As a bard who played from (Not Classic) Kunark to Underfoot, I've never experienced bard DOTs sometimes having an extra 4th tick.

On real EQ, songs would tick three times and almost always lasting <18 seconds: 0.1-5.9s before first tick, then 6s for subsequent ticks, for a total of three ticks. So, that's an average duration of 15 seconds, not 18 seconds as many are led to believe.

I think some people are getting confused, since you can twist FOUR songs (well, actually 5 if you don't mind debuffs dropping between ticks), but each song only ticks THREE times.

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I'm not sure how the formula is on here, but many of the stock eqemu formulas don't match real EQ and seem to be much less accurate than lucy's formulas. The only reason I know this, is because I've worked with parsing the spell file and used eqemu's duration formula's as a rough (and bumpy) start.

It's hard to pinpoint where the error occurs, since even if a spell has the same tick duration, the type of spell can affect if it gains an extra tick. For example, the Promised Renewal cleric line, seems to say 3 ticks (even in the game description), but on real EQ it seems to gain an extra tick, while the bard songs say 3 ticks, but doesn't gain an extra tick. Take a look at the Lucy data and game description yourself, but you won't be able to confirm the inconsistency unless you have an active EQ account with a high level cleric and bard.

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If there is an occasional random extra tick on eqemu, it's definitely something I've never experienced on the real EQ servers and is probably a bug or a limitation of how the tick system is coded.