Game Mechanics: Mez/Charm immunity is not classic

[Treats]

Xornn's post was made after the resistance changes sometime between November 14, 2001 and February 12, 2002.

Wednesday, November 14, 2001 - 17th Circle (55) is almost finished, I just hit 56th level today so I've been kind of busy running around buying spells and talking to a recruiting guild.

I agree specific immunities should be removed, but not at the cost of trivializing Plane of Sky or other high end encounters.

[Tecmos Deception]

Originally Posted by Treats [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I agree specific immunities should be removed, but not at the cost of trivializing Plane of Sky or other high end encounters.

What does farming Stanos with 4 count as? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]


My point is that classic EQ had a TON of situations where certain abilities or classes could do things that probably weren't intended or expected, but figuring that stuff out and pulling it off was a ton of fun.

If the staff here is going to concern themselves with unclassic balance issues, such as leaving a bunch of sky stuff immune to mez/charm for the sake of not trivializing the zone, then they might as well be revamping class balance and removing xp penalties and nerfing donals bp/puppet strings/etc right now instead of waiting on some arbitrary-ish timeline (or just never adjusting at all).

[Ele]

Originally Posted by Tecmos Deception [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If the staff here is going to concern themselves with unclassic balance issues, such as leaving a bunch of sky stuff immune to mez/charm for the sake of not trivializing the zone, then they might as well be revamping class balance and removing xp penalties and nerfing donals bp/puppet strings/etc right now instead of waiting on some arbitrary-ish timeline (or just never adjusting at all).

I agree that the "immune (charm/slow/runspeed)" vs. simply "insanely high resists" needs to be further examined and time line correct; however, the GMs have already addressed unclassic balance issues vis-a-vis DA tanking, which was not taken out until later in the server's time line (6-7 months post Velious release).

[koros]

Charm is definitely way more powerful here than live... I'm not sure if it's simply matter of duration (or if that's even the issue at all). Back during Velious my perma groupmate was a very well geared, very skilled enchanter. We would have him charm for DPS as often as possible, but keeping a Bok in Seb perma charmed while 2-3 man farming proved to be a resource drain (although a huge dps boost). For one... lull was much more unreliable. Additionally, mobs just seemed to do more dps to players.

There's some mechanic here that makes it different, but pinpointing it exactly is difficult.

[KotBK]

Originally Posted by koros [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Charm is definitely way more powerful here than live... I'm not sure if it's simply matter of duration (or if that's even the issue at all). Back during Velious my perma groupmate was a very well geared, very skilled enchanter. We would have him charm for DPS as often as possible, but keeping a Bok in Seb perma charmed while 2-3 man farming proved to be a resource drain (although a huge dps boost). For one... lull was much more unreliable. Additionally, mobs just seemed to do more dps to players.

There's some mechanic here that makes it different, but pinpointing it exactly is difficult.

This can't be right, if you go on EQmac which it seems is the new thing to do for devs and players here to test things. You will find that even with low end charisma the charms there hold a great deal longer than on here. Without very much gear over there you can contribute with charm far more effective with much less charisma than on this server. Charm is strong here with high charisma, but on EQmac it seems to operate differently than here across the board.

[koros]

It's possible my memory is off but I don't think so. There was a massive resist system change in late Luclin (Sept 2002), around this timeframe we found charming while grinding AAs became much much easier. This carried over to POP where it was common to be using level 61-63 NPCs as pets while xping without much issue.

Edit: EQMac is using that system.

[Treats]

Sorry I just skimmed the resist quote, wrong one.

It was meant to reflect my other post about charm and level, just disregard it.

Resistance Changes:

We've made some fairly drastic changes to the way the spell resistance system works. Previously, there was only the smallest benefit to having resists over a certain value. We've reworked resistance in its entirety, completely replacing the old system with one that is more logical.

The idea behind the changes is pretty simple: Resists should matter in a way that makes sense.

Important things to note about the new resistance system:
Resists matter more for PCs. There are now tangible differences between having 50, 150, and 250 in a given resistance, for example. Resistance buffs, bard songs, and resist gear have actual value, all the way up the line.
Conversely, resistances also matter more for NPCs. Some NPCs became more vulnerable to things they have always been vulnerable to, other NPCs became more resistant to things that they were inclined to be somewhat resistant to.
Resistance debuffs should also have more value, all the way up the line. For the first time, resistance debuffs now have the ability to bring NPCs that were lure-style only down into the range of being hit by normal spells.
The hard level limit involving players casting on NPCs has been removed. This used to be referred to in EQ folklore as the "Six Level Limit" (It was actually 1.25 times the caster's level, but more people likely thought about it the other way.) This means that in the vast majority of cases, there is at least a small chance that a person will be able to connect a spell with an NPC, even if they are out of that NPC's traditional level range.
Overall, against NPCs that have medium-to-high resistances of a given type, expect to see more full hits, fewer partials, but more full resists in the new system. Taken over time, the damage done by PC casters to semi-high resistance NPCs should be approximately the same, but will definitely improve when the proper debuffs are applied (we wanted to make sure that this did not turn into a universal nerf of casters).

We look forward to seeing how these changes play out in front of a larger audience.

This is how it was.

[Splorf22]

Treats: At least I read that as being mostly relevant to high level encounters?

Koros: what level was your friend in sebilis? If he was 55 then obviously he wouldn't be able to control a bok; you couldn't do that here either.

Nirgon: You were just told that charming is easier on eqmac [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

And back to my original point. I found this on the Alla page for Prince Selrach

Originally Posted by Nov 2001

As 60 shaman i sent Malo on it, ok, but tried about 5-6 times then to slow it, and it resisted.

Guess it's a 100% slow resist like the Giant in the bugged WW ya have to kill for Scout charisa's quest.

Akabah - Heritage Guild on Karana

Originally Posted by 2002

He's slowable, I got him first shot for the last 3 times I've killed him.

Malo/tash/Malosini = toasted sarnak

Now the date on the first post is 1 month after the resist changes, but if the guy fought the prince 1 month before he made the post then this makes a great deal of sense. Remember that the prince is only L61: if he wasn't MR immune you could rapture him for god's sake. Basically I think the most reasonable thing to do is: every raid mob should be 100% magic immune to everything except unresistable spellls (tash/malo/mana taps/mana drains etc but NOT rapture which is not actually flagged unresistable, it just has a -1000 check, lifetaps etc). There should also be a few MR immune mobs (spite golems, city of mist stuff, sebilite protector, phinny's guardians, golems in fear) which have the same rules. Nothing else should be flagged immune to anything with the exception of racial/level based immunities as discussed before.

[Splorf22]

Originally Posted by Treats [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Xornn's post was made after the resistance changes sometime between November 14, 2001 and February 12, 2002.

I agree specific immunities should be removed, but not at the cost of trivializing Plane of Sky or other high end encounters.

Treats I really don't understand what you are talking about here.

1) Xornn hit 55 1 month after the resistance changes, so presumably he was leveling during velious with the older code
2) I don't see why the resistance code changes would matter as they primarily affect very high level mobs who would not be charmed anyway (clearly Xornn was not charming Lord Nagafen for his XP)
3) What is trivializing plane of sky right now is sirran the lunatic. Of course the queen bee is doing 3x what her classic damage should be anyway.

Anyway I agree that charm here is OP, but I think it was on Live too. Especially there are two huge nerfs to enchanters (the inversion of the bash/kick ratios and the nerf to durations) that brought it down to be much more reasonable than it used to be when Kunark came out.

Charm is definitely way more powerful here than live... I'm not sure if it's simply matter of duration (or if that's even the issue at all). Back during Velious my perma groupmate was a very well geared, very skilled enchanter. We would have him charm for DPS as often as possible, but keeping a Bok in Seb perma charmed while 2-3 man farming proved to be a resource drain (although a huge dps boost). For one... lull was much more unreliable. Additionally, mobs just seemed to do more dps to players.

There's some mechanic here that makes it different, but pinpointing it exactly is difficult.

Do you remember what level your friend was? If he was, say L55 with a L50 bok then it's no surprise he had problems. Do you remember what his charisma was? I know Xornn basically says lull is worthless but he was also running around with 85 charisma. I just spent 10-15 minutes googling and I can't find anything, but Giegue posted:

http://web.archive.org/web/200212310...ame=Lull&type=

Which indicates that Lull did work, and worked better the better your charisma was.

One thing that you might be right on is the damage to players. I don't think the effect of AC on this server is strong enough. I did some AC tests with both of my characters and Sakuragi was mitigating something like 15% more damage per swing at 1050 AC compared to Loraen at 700AC. That really doesn't jive with AC being such a god stat for classic EQ. Also I remember L50 mobs used to hit for 150+5/level rather than 140+4/level. Why was that changed? It would balance charm soloing quite a bit if enchanters were taking 15% more damage per swing from charmed pets; that adds up fast.

http://www.project1999.org/forums/showthread.php?t=6733

Also this test (from PoP era sadly) suggests that charm should be resisted occasionally! This is a big deal because it effectively ups the mana cost, which would jive with your memory. The biggest problem with charm on this server IMO is the very low mana cost which allows enchanters to go all day, not the duration.

As long as you guys are going to hijack my thread to a charm duration thread, i might also point out that currently when charm breaks there is almost no aggro. It should be very large according to Xornn.