First to Engage: Exploiting the mechanic?

[pasi]

You guys have killed 41% hasted DW'n Hoshkar - you've already killed a stronger version of Zlexak which is one of the harder NToV dragons. Not to mention you did so while under duress of trains.

Thats why I made a very distinct, and very clear distinction between the first 3 months of velious, and after that point.

The first AoW kills took 3 guilds and 120+ people to get him to 70%, 30% and 20%, and two guilds and 90 people to get him dead, after months and months of farming NToV.

Considering what we know now, and what to farm, and how to gear, I still expect a properly tuned AoW to take 3 months of NToV farmed warrior gear.

I posted the math on the matter before, but AoW boils down to one thing - can you keep up a defensive warrior for a single round of his melee? If you can keep up a tank, it doesn't matter how hard the NPC is perceived - a 2-2.5 second CHeal rot ensures that they will never get to deal more than 1 round of damage before the tank is fully healed.

AoW has a DB of 254 and a DI of 45. He also flurries.

Max hit with defensive = 254 + 10*45 = 704.
Bash/Kick damage is more or less the DB.

Max round = 704*8 + 254*2 = 5632 + 508 = 6140.

A few things with this. 1) It's possible to take a Riposte. 2) It's very rare for an NPC to connect every hit. 3) Even with high ATK, the odds of distribution of 8 consecutive Max DI are very low. 4) He's not always gonna flurry 4 extra attacks and a kick/bash.

Top end Kunark warriors are 5500 HP. With sidegrades to drop a lot of AC for HP, you can reach 5625 or so in just Kunark gear. Velious raid buffs (PoTG + Divine Strength + Focus of Spirit) add about 300 HP. Unlike other expansions, Velious 60 spells are incredibly common.

So, assuming absolutely no gear upgrades, you're looking at a 5925 HP warrior. Now, to even get to AoW, you'll be killing Vindi and Statue. You'll likely end up with a Vindi/Statue BP or Vindi Boots unless you are incredibly unlucky (common drops). If you aren't a retarded guild, your main targets will be Zland/Kland/Sont/LtK/Yelinak.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect there to be 6k+ HP warriors within 24 hours of Velious launch. This is enough HP to realistically tank AoW for the duration defensive.

Now, I always get the DPS argument - our DPS don't have primal. So fucking what. DPS gains can more than be made up for by more players. Wu's Fists (assuming they don't get nerfed) are better than most monk weaponry. Ragebringer/RSS works great. Kael has a ton of great DPS pets.

How about the cleric mana argument? Well, if you ever raided Velious, you'll know that cleric gear didn't mean dick until the Luclin patch that nerfed mod rods. Velious is a buncha clerics starring at a wall, eating mod rods, counting to 3, and clicking a button.

The only 2 things that should prevent AoW from dying within 24 hours are 1) The Zone crashing. 2) A small guild blowing the spawn while everyone else is out getting ST keys.

[Brut]

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

1) The Zone crashing.

Looking at CT races wherein Fear is not able to support 120 people I srsly have a hard time imagining anything much dying on Velious opening when Kael alone is gonna be looking at some 300ish players.

[pasi]

I wonder how much of that is chalked up to aggroing the entire zone or the CT script.

[uygi]

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

Looking at CT races wherein Fear is not able to support 120 people I srsly have a hard time imagining anything much dying on Velious opening when Kael alone is gonna be looking at some 300ish players.

It would be really nice to think that with every damn target in Velious up at once, the server's raiding population would be split up enough to mitigate some of this. But yeah... you're probably right. I'd expect BDA, Taken, FE, IB, TMO and Divinity to ALL be at their highest raid attendance in server history that night.

But then again... just imagine if we could all come together and the server first AoW kill was a big huge group effort. That would be one fuck of a CCH.

[Brut]

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

I wonder how much of that is chalked up to aggroing the entire zone or the CT script.

Well, I've seen several of those 100+ player Trak socks in the day, and it's basically the same story.
US crowd with good connection survive the lag, but much everyone else is going to desync the moment autoattacks are flipped on.

And don't you need the key to go to Cobalt Scar and the zones beyond there (I think it's quest only at first?)? Kael is fastest access raid zone, it's going to be ridiculously crowded in there.

[uygi]

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

And don't you need the key to go to Cobalt Scar and the zones beyond there (I think it's quest only at first?)? Kael is fastest access raid zone, it's going to be ridiculously crowded in there.

You need the portal shards. The run through Velious really doesn't take that long.

[pasi]

You can kill Ziglark for the key.

Posted @ Sat, Dec 16th 2000 2:43 AM Score: Default[2.00]
He drops a "Shrine Key". Used to enter Cobalt Scars from clicking on the dragon with the fire pot in the "Court Yard" area in the little pond.

Posted @ Sat, Jan 6th 2001 7:12 AM Score: Decent[3.00]
Actually he does both, if you kill him you get the key, if you do the quest you get the key, just matters what faction you want to keep.

No need to quest it - he's level 30 or something with a few level 30 friends.

[Splorf22]

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

I wonder how much of that is chalked up to aggroing the entire zone or the CT script.

The problem the server has is that it has to update the position of N 'things' to M players. So with 100 players and 100 mobs it has to send 200 position/velocity tuples to 100 players multiple times per second. So from the server's perspective each update is 200 units * 100 players * 50 bytes (assuming 25 bytes header and 6 4-byte position/velocity fields) = 1MB. If you're trying to do this 10 times per second that can add up, and remember this is a quadratic algorithm. Quadratic algorithms do not scale well.

If we assume there is only 1 mob, it's pretty easy to solve for the number of players which will cause the same number of updates: 140.

There isn't really a good solution to this, but its probably better to gracefully degrade under pressure and update less frequently and hopefully in a semi-intelligent manner.

[Alarti0001]

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

You guys have killed 41% hasted DW'n Hoshkar - you've already killed a stronger version of Zlexak which is one of the harder NToV dragons. Not to mention you did so while under duress of trains.



I posted the math on the matter before, but AoW boils down to one thing - can you keep up a defensive warrior for a single round of his melee? If you can keep up a tank, it doesn't matter how hard the NPC is perceived - a 2-2.5 second CHeal rot ensures that they will never get to deal more than 1 round of damage before the tank is fully healed.

AoW has a DB of 254 and a DI of 45. He also flurries.

Max hit with defensive = 254 + 10*45 = 704.
Bash/Kick damage is more or less the DB.

Max round = 704*8 + 254*2 = 5632 + 508 = 6140.

A few things with this. 1) It's possible to take a Riposte. 2) It's very rare for an NPC to connect every hit. 3) Even with high ATK, the odds of distribution of 8 consecutive Max DI are very low. 4) He's not always gonna flurry 4 extra attacks and a kick/bash.

Top end Kunark warriors are 5500 HP. With sidegrades to drop a lot of AC for HP, you can reach 5625 or so in just Kunark gear. Velious raid buffs (PoTG + Divine Strength + Focus of Spirit) add about 300 HP. Unlike other expansions, Velious 60 spells are incredibly common.

So, assuming absolutely no gear upgrades, you're looking at a 5925 HP warrior. Now, to even get to AoW, you'll be killing Vindi and Statue. You'll likely end up with a Vindi/Statue BP or Vindi Boots unless you are incredibly unlucky (common drops). If you aren't a retarded guild, your main targets will be Zland/Kland/Sont/LtK/Yelinak.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect there to be 6k+ HP warriors within 24 hours of Velious launch. This is enough HP to realistically tank AoW for the duration defensive.

Now, I always get the DPS argument - our DPS don't have primal. So fucking what. DPS gains can more than be made up for by more players. Wu's Fists (assuming they don't get nerfed) are better than most monk weaponry. Ragebringer/RSS works great. Kael has a ton of great DPS pets.

How about the cleric mana argument? Well, if you ever raided Velious, you'll know that cleric gear didn't mean dick until the Luclin patch that nerfed mod rods. Velious is a buncha clerics starring at a wall, eating mod rods, counting to 3, and clicking a button.

The only 2 things that should prevent AoW from dying within 24 hours are 1) The Zone crashing. 2) A small guild blowing the spawn while everyone else is out getting ST keys.

^^ This guy knows what sup. VP was farmed for a year now. TMO is going into Velious with an exponentially better geared force than ever occurred on live. Not to mention the hoards of nice rechargeable items we will be using for aggro/healing/dps etc. AoW might not last the first night. I'd give him a week though. Much of ST will be dead within 2 weeks.

[Brut]

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

You can kill Ziglark for the key.

No need to quest it - he's level 30 or something with a few level 30 friends.

Oh, coo. Was wondering if he'd be dropping it early Velious or if that was added later.

Huge sadface tho knowing some retarded knobends will permapoopsock & delete all keys to cockblock half Velious content.