Miscellaneous: P99 should have a +Mana cap and revised Base Mana Formula

[Rygar]

Careful sir, you are venturing into ban territory by trolling bug forums.

First of all, where do you get i made this up? Did you read the links? This was a confirmed feature from EQs lead developer.

Secondly, I think the devs have shown they are willing to adjust mobs to be more in line with classic, such as the sontalak fear nerf. Maybe things aren't perfect, but we are essentially playing in an extended beta. To say you shouldn't limited mana pools is the same as saying you shouldn't have any ac hard or soft caps because mobs are too hard. You can't wait on implementing a fix always until another fix is in place... If they did that, then things would seldom get done around here.

Lastly, i don't see these mobs being unkillable here despite all these supposed non-classic hit points. People are also using soulfires / reapers / words / wort pots / mallets / recharges / zone pull tactics that weren't commonly known or widespread as in the day, so hard to argue about keeping it truly classic. Velious was defeated in kunark gear and you are upset to lose like 300 mana? A caster won't be able to brag about highest mana pool on the server and that a semi casual can have equal footing to an end game BiS profile is what seems to be upsetting you most.

[Daldaen]

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

Is there any evidence to what the cap was? Didn't the introduction of AAs also alter people's mana pool? Was that taken into account with the devs comments?

The numbers I've seen seem to just be "these numbers would have made sense" instead of "this for sure was the case".

No innate AAs introduced in Luclin modify your stat cap, or the Mana pool.

Being sure about a hidden value you cannot see until GoD launches is sort of tough. The experiments and ShowEQ data mined from the era is the best we've got. It just needs to be reverse engineered backwards from that value to the value pre-Luclin when the post 201 WIS/INT calculation was changed.

Interesting again, I was looking through some old posts from Al'Kabor, there was a known 500 mana cap provided from spells. Which meant a wizard with the AA Familiar (300) and Voice of Quellious (275), only actually gained an additional 500 mana instead of 575. It seems they put many hidden caps on statistics that many classes couldn't even reach until after these caps were removed.

[Jaxon]

Another interesting point of agreement is in the formula that EQemu uses to calculate your base mana pool. That formula is at https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...47#post1580147

if((( Wis - 199 ) / 2) > 0)
	MindLesserFactor = ( Wis - 199 ) / 2;
else
	MindLesserFactor = 0;

MindFactor = Wis - MindLesserFactor;

if(Wis > 100)
	max_m = (((5 * (MindFactor + 20)) / 2) * 3 * GetLevel() / 40);
else
	max_m = (((5 * (MindFactor + 200)) / 2) * 3 * GetLevel() / 100);

These numbers are integers, so you truncate the decimals after each division operation.

If you want to calculate the base mana pool of a level 60 character with 255 WIS, it works out like this:

MindLesserFactor = (255 - 199) / 2 = 28
MindFactor       = 255 - 28 = 227
max_m            = 5 * (227 + 20) / 2 = 617 (617.5 truncated)
                   617  * 3 =  1851
                   1851 * 60 = 111060
                   111060 / 40 = 2776 (2776.5 truncated)

If you take 4164, which is the maximum mana seen in ShowEQ, and subtract 1388 from that, you end up with 2776 mana. The fact that these two numbers agree exactly lends support to the idea that the base mana formula in the emulator is the same base mana formula that was used during Luclin.

[Rygar]

Damn Jaxon, amazing find and corroboration! Is there a showEQ crawl from velious era that would validate Daldaen's math?

If not, what was the max mana shown in those crawls? Could reverse engineer a formula from that.

Here was his values:

Max WIS based Mana = 2455
Max +Mana = 1228
Total Max Worn Mana = 3683

[Rygar]

For what it is worth I saw this post about a slightly alternate formula for mana that was posted 3 months before Luclin, could run it by the ShowEQ results from Velious to see if the cap would match:

Mana Calculator:

To nit pick a little, the formula is really

((WIS/5)+2) x Level = base mana + mana from items = total mana

where wis is less than 200, and

42 * level + (wis-200) = base mana + mana from items = total mana

((Same, using INT for int casters))

Want to see something funny, loot your corpse at low levels with a lot of +mana gear on. Suddenly your mana bar drops to half without ever casting a spell!

Not sure where that +2 came from, but could see if the ShowEQ results match up. For 255 wis/int @ Lvl 60:

(((200/5)+2) * 60) + (255-200) = 2,575 base mana
2,575 / 2 = 1,287 (rounded down) +mana item cap
Max mana = 3,862 mana (not including buffs).

That is roughly 200 more mana from Daldaen's calculations. Again no clue on the authenticity.

Interesting to read the last comment about going to 50% mana from looting a bunch of +mana items at low levels, one would expect 66%... Would assume they also looted +wis/int gear too, but perhaps the mana cap scaled differently as you leveled? We may never know.

[Rygar]

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

If you take 4164, which is the maximum mana seen in ShowEQ

Quick question... i know not how ShowEQ works, but reflecting on this, why wouldn't the number be higher in the data to account for buffs? Were buffs not seen by ShowEQ?

If they were, then that would stand to reason that the mana cap didn't just apply to items, but to items and buffs... Ouch.

Edit: i saw in the FoH thread that they found an unbuffed 4164, maybe that is what you were referring to.

[Rygar]

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

Now that I think about this subject more I now see why the dev team had reason to buff our current raid content (mob hp/dmg ect) beyond live to account for inflated mana pools and other issues. Would make sense, need a response from dev.

I wonder if they could just adjust the mana cost of spells instead, would make more sense so it applies to group / solo content. Could have some issues of scale though, and not sure if there are client issues.

I am starting to develop a tinfoil hat idea that devs may have been aware of this!