Spells: Flash of Light

[Datante]

As Flash of Light is currently my most effective aggro-to-me machine, I am a bit wary of tinkering with its coding. Yes it could be even better at pulling hate, but the last thing I want to see happen is the return of potential train-causing 'fleeing' in dungeons that I saw on occasion back in '99.

Datante (mid 20s paladin)


Edit: Great analysis overall though everyone; thanks for bringing the topic up Danth. Paladins rock!

[Danth]

Right, threat from Flash wasn't quite on par with disease cloud, that's 100% accurate. Disease Cloud is king. Compared to stuns, I'd say they were about even, hard to pinpoint exactly which was more threat, but both were 'very high'. The reason I can't pinpoint it exactly is because Flash of Light was infinitely more spammable than higher-mana stuns, and of course spamming Flash of Light 2 or 3 times was *far* more aggro than a single stun. I know nothing of how it compares to snare since I never played a snaring class to any significant degree.

In my own memory, the blindness portion did not matter; how close I stood to the target didn't significantly impact who it hit. I cast flash of light a few times and the mob stuck to me like glue, even into the PoP era. Pre-expansion often a single cast (plus whatever incedental aggro I generated from melee) would keep a mob stuck to me. Indeed, on Live the Blindness portion of the spell usually wore off within a matter of seconds, if it even landed, so that further correlates to my recollection of the blind itself not really mattering. (Of course, it may be the case that the blind didn't matter entirely *because* it practically never lasted for any length of time--all I know is effect, not cause.)

Halladar is correct in that the blindness routine, while approximating live, might be a little too generous. This may be extremely hard to tweak perfectly, but as it stands now a mob won't run around wildly until it's quite far away, and even then sometimes makes a beeline right back to me. Of course too much tweak would render the safe zone too small and make the spell useless; it's a tough balancing act. For my own part, on Live I was afraid to use this spell against NPC's that had knockback specials, as being knocked back out of range was sufficient for bad things to happen.

When the mob is blind and running around wildly, I can hit it as much as I want and it keeps running around until either Blind breaks or it finds a target in melee range. This is also how I remember it on Live. However, the blindness effect here often lasts much longer than I recollect it lasting on Live. This, however, is the same as many 'random' duration effects (such as Charm, which is so reliable on P1999 that I could set my clock to it) and is therefore likely not a quirk with FoL itself.

Danth