This is Dumb

[long.liam]

Also, there is a ton of evidence that Spells debuff spell effect hate is supposed to scale based off of level. Many of them from the EQ devs in Era:

"--- We've capped the amount of hate that can be awarded to most
casters, specifically for debuff-type spells like the Malo and Tash
series. The hate calculation for these spells takes into account the
number of hitpoints of the NPC and did not "play nice" with the
increased HP limit of Velious. It explains why Enchanters, for
instance, would complain that casting a Tash spell would lead to near-
instant death."

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/his...es-2001-1.html

This has been well researched before. It would take take a ton evidence from Player logs in Era and developer posts in era to convince P99 Devs that this change is wrong. The only thing is broken right now is the Disease and Poison counter hate was mistakenly removed for some reason.

[Octavian]

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

The comments said things like it needed to be repeatedly cast. Obviously the current implementation seems to have underboiled the egg, but the previous was equally wrong.

2 DCs and MAYBE a shadow and you were keeping aggro an entire fight versus very twinked out melees. I don't think that fell under the scope of 'repeatedly'?

Depends on the fight... if I'm grouped and the mob is gonna die in <30sec, then yeah 1-2 DC's was prob sufficient. However, for raids I was not only spamming DC but using GCD to weave other spells in for extra hate, all of which was necessary. Your assessment is a gross oversimplification and really only applies to shorter duration fights. No SK on P99 would have held aggro on a raid target for >a minute or two with 1-2 DC casts prior to the patch.

The way DC was functioning was as intended. It worked extremely well in group situations (SK's have always been group tank gods) and it required nonstop spamming during raid tanking. There was nothing about it that needed to be changed, and live EQ only dropped it when they were ready to implement its replacement, the terror line, which preserved SK's as aggro gods.

[Infectious]

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

Tested out SK aggro with a friendly group of lowbies in Highkeep.

Me: lvl 60 SK
Them: lvl 20s to low-30s

I tested Disease Cloud, Shadow Vortex, and Shroud of Hate (our former most powerful aggro spells) on both incoming mobs and mobs which had been locked down by the group until sub-90% hp, thinking incoming aggro gank would be a sure thing and the sub-90% mobs would be the real test.

NOPE.

Couldn't even pull aggro on incoming mobs BEFORE they reached the camp.

To reiterate... Level 60 SK spamming DC, SV, and SoH cannot pull aggro from non-SK players OR pets less than HALF my level on mobs which haven't even made it to camp yet.

Obviously we don't need to go further on this. SK's are completely broken and useless now. Our aggro is non-existent. Okay... so let's talk about classic vs. non-classic.

I read the evidence of the DC aggro nerf. It was a post-Velious nerf and Luclin introduced the "Terror" line of spells to make sure that SK's were still the aggro gods.

So where is our DC replacement then? EQ live always very clearly intended on knights being able to snap aggro, with SK's being superior to Paladins in this department. This stayed true throughout the ENTIRE live timeline, through present day. There has never been another class which can out-aggro an SK. It NEVER. HAPPENED. ON. LIVE.

When they nerfed DC, it broke, leading to other unintended consequences (irrelevant to aggro), and they introduced the terror line to make up for it. SK's never lost their status as the top hate producers. Yet here we are on P99, unable to snap aggro from players or pets half our level...

Since we're not going into Luclin, where the terror line exists, this patch needs to be completely undone. Not fixed again, not tweaked, just completely rolled back. It goes against the entire timeline of EQ live to nerf SK aggro without a replacement spell. Please roll back this aggro patch. The game was working fine. And the nerfs which happened on live were also a mistake which was completely remedied in Luclin. We don't have that remedy to look forward to, so leaving aggro in a broken state will only ruin P99 for many players, especially SK's.

It scales with mob hp. Pull a 40s mob with that same group of people and you will keep aggro.

[Encroaching Death]

I recently created an SK.

I really hope the class isn't broken because I'm really enjoying things so far.

I wouldn't know what to compare it to though...but I do absolutely know how well SKs are supposed to keep aggro though.

I'll keep an eye on how well my aggro does. But tons of people have been complaining about this since the patch that I think a dev should at least look into what's going on.

[Octavian]

So, if it scaled with mob HP, I should have been able to keep aggro on Narandi during raids? Because that was a total shit show. Spam cycling did nothing on him either.

I've also spent a good amount of time offtanking in PoG since patch during raids. Holding aggro is nearly impossible on mobs I wasn't locking down for 30+ seconds before raid switched to them. Constant spamming, still lost aggro on most mobs.

But also, aggro scaling with mob hp is dumb anyway lol...

My advice is to hold off on investing into your SK until we see what the devs do about this, Encroaching. It's a complete break.

[Muilezel]

Disease/poison counters were completely nerfed. You can't use disease cloud anymore.

You need to be using Clinging Darkness and Shadow Vortex now.

Clinging is the new Disease Cloud.

But their hate value scales with mob HP (up to 1200 on high hp mobs), so don't expect to spam them on low hp mobs to keep aggro necessarily.

Vs lower level mobs, you probably want fast weapons or DD procs, but I can't really speak to holding aggro on non-raid stuff.

I've witnessed some of the best server SKs effortlessly holding aggro as recently as the last non-draft quake.

[Octavian]

Yes... we all know DC doesn't work anymore. That's... kind of the whole point here?

I would question the circumstances of them "effortlessly" holding aggro. What exactly did you witness? What were they doing? Did you actually communicate with them about it? What were they tanking? Raid or group? How long were they building aggro before others joined and started DPSing? All of this matters because we're talking about snap aggro.

Shadow Vortex is as useless as DC, so that's incorrect. Both stat debuffs and both useless for snap aggro now - as I stated I was spam cycling, not just spamming DC on Narandi.

What are you basing your statement regarding Clinging Darkness on? What testing have you conducted or who told you about theirs? To say "clinging is the new disease cloud" is a big statement, because CD was not improved afaik. DC was far superior to CD prior to this patch, so I'm failing to see how CD could possibly serve as a replacement, especially since you're suggesting it be paired with a spell that does absolutely nothing for snap aggro. Just seems like uninformed commenting.

[Danth]

The notion that shadow knights should be expected to struggle with aggro until level 50+ due to HP scaling is absurd and nothing like the original game was. Holding hate versus other melee types is now quite hard at any level. Oddly, against some of the casters, it's fairly easy. The wife's shaman generates very minimal hate now (head-scratching in and of itself) and the patch has actually made it easier overall for my character to keep hate over hers when we do something like West Wastes dragons. Since duo is mostly what we do, I can live with this patch personally, but it's a rough time for the class more generally. Tactics used in-era such as aggro kiting with other melee classes are very difficult now. This should be another indication that something's amiss. I sincerely hope this is some sort of glitch or unfinished implementation because at present it does not feel like the original game. If anything it feels like "Warrior's dream;" knights kind of suck and debuffers are easy to manage.

Since we're stuck living with this for awhile--who knows how long--I've had the best results using Clinging Darkness and Shroud of Hate or Shroud of Pain. Disease Cloud is worth only about 1/4 of the hate of those spells and is no longer valid as a means of generating significant aggro. Was that in fact a Luclin-era nerf? How peculiar.

Danth

[Vivitron]

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

What are you basing your statement regarding Clinging Darkness on? What testing have you conducted or who told you about theirs? To say "clinging is the new disease cloud" is a big statement, because CD was not improved afaik. DC was far superior to CD prior to this patch, so I'm failing to see how CD could possibly serve as a replacement, especially since you're suggesting it be paired with a spell that does absolutely nothing for snap aggro. Just seems like uninformed commenting.

I tested SK and Wizard spells with another player on Corudoth (high hp) in Iceclad. Each high aggro effect is equal (or at least very close, we weren't looking for small differences) to 1200 aggro -- where 1 point of aggro is the amount of hate generated per max damage on a wizard nuke; e.g. Ice Spear is equal to an aggro effect on a high hp mob, and so is 24 flux staff clicks at 50 hate per.

We tested high aggro effects to include Snare (tested wizard snare and darknesses including clinging), Root (Fetter), Ac debuffs (Heart Flutter and Shroud), Blind (tested w/ a cleric against a cliff golem, their blinds have both blind and ac debuff and put 2400 aggro into the CG instead of 1200 -- lucky paladins).

Darkness aggro works on immune to runspeed change mobs (Corudoth is) and when it doesn't take hold (checked on a passing wolf with wizard snare).

Others have reported slow capping at the same 1200. (Up from IIRC 700?)

I think root being high aggro is new. Too bad. It may be an annoyance for root parking adds.

I think removing disease and poison counters from the list of high aggro effects is an error for our timeline; if any of you can find smoking gun evidence that they were high aggro in velious you should open a bug thread.

[Octavian]

Agreed, Danth. Also, the idea of it scaling with mob HP is absurd for the fact that many lower level mobs have a lot of HP and many higher level mobs have very small HP pools. So, my ability to aggro things depending on their HP pool is a completely ludicrous metric.

But also, the fact that my aggro is weak af regardless of level difference is another non-classic experience. As mentioned earlier in the thread, I was unable to gank aggro on incoming mobs from players less than half my level.

Here's hoping we get the patch rolled back completely. I see no point in trying to tweak/fix it. Just remove it. The game was working fine. When they messed with DC on live, they broke it and very quickly recognized the need to replace SK aggro with a new line of spells, hence the "terror" line, which has remained throughout all of live through present day. SK's were always meant to be top dog when it comes to aggro. They are now less effective than rangers.