Game Mechanics: Cazic Thule 2.0 lost his pbaoe knockback dispel

[nilbog]

Will wait on more research to be found.

The only verifiable information is that Silver Breath and Abolish Enchantment originally used cancel magic effects.

[CrazyPro]

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

Will wait on more research to be found.

The only verifiable information is that Silver Breath and Abolish Enchantment originally used cancel magic effects.

Okay, time to drop the nuke then.

The devs themselves hid a cheeky warning in a series of "UltraDeath" spells saying that the spell data that you see in your client's spell file is often overridden in the code: https://lucy.alkabor.com/search.html...ing=ultradeath

UltraDeathSpell:

Cast by you Oh come on, you know that there is no such thing as an ultra
Cast by other death spell in this game. This is EQ - we balance things
Cast on you as well as we can. No tank-mages. No uber class. Etc.
Cast on other etc. Thanks for asking though. BTW - what are you doing readi
Wears off this file? - Geoffrey Z.

UltraDeathSpell2:

Cast by you Just a FYI - I do practice poor mans encryption.
Cast by other This means that I intentionally fill in some unused fields with
Cast on you bad data. We also cap things in code and then display differen
Cast on other data here. In other words, don't trust stuff you read in here.
Wears off Why? Read UDS III

UltraDeathSpell3:

Cast by you Why give bad data? Because (a) players shouldn't be reading
Cast by other this (b) we don't want to spoil the mystery - and hard numbers
Cast on you do that. Therefore, expect to continue to see numbers change i
Cast on other spell.dat - this doesn?t mean the real spell changes - just the
Wears off info here. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

An easy example of this being that nothing in the old spell data for fixed duration invisibility spells. Their duration was hardcoded, and then cleaned up to have the spell data be accurate waaaay later in the timeline, just like every other spell with hardcoding.

https://lucy.allakhazam.com/spellhis...06&source=Live
Improved Invisibility for example:
2006-10-05 07:37 Removed Slot 1: Invisibility
2015-01-22 18:33 Added Slot 1: Improved Invisibility
From 2006 - 2015, this spell literally did nothing, according to spell data, yet it still functioned properly. Why? Because that was hardcoded.

The Silver Breath AE is supposed to be 375 range, I think part of it's hardcoding was to increase it's range by 25%, since they were trying to throw players off by giving them false spell data, as Geoffrey Zatkin conveyed in the spell text for his UltraDeath spells.
So this change: 2017-11-16 16:47 Changed AE Range from 300 to 375
Was just them removing the hardcoding that scaled up the range and then changing the spell data in turn to have it be accurate, they weren't actually buffing a random AoE from 2001 16 years later, that would make zero sense.

The best example I can give of spell data being wrong due to hardcoding behind the scenes and then being cleaned up way later in the timeline to remove the hardcoding and updating the spell data reflect how it always was, is bard song durations.

Bard songs all show up in the spell data as lasting 3 ticks, but they were hardcoded to actually last 2 ticks, and then later on in live as they were cleaning up old hardcoding in spell data meant to throw players off, they removed the hardcoding and corrected the spell data to be accurate to how these spells had always functioned in game.

You can find this change in the spell history of every single "3 tick" bard spell on https://lucy.allakhazam.com

2020-01-18 19:43 Changed Durationtext from 3 ticks to 2 ticks

There is mountains of evidence that bard songs were always 2 tick duration.
This does not mean that 18 second long bard songs were impossible, it sounds like you just had to time it just right for it to last an extra tick.

https://dbsanfte.github.io/eq-archiv...html/3035.html
1999-07-07

Start up Accelerando. When you see the "faster" message,
start your stopwatch and turn the song off. When you see the
"slow down" message, stop it. I got times between 12 and 18
seconds in about a half dozen timings, and when I'm running, I
*always* slow down when I see the "slow down" message. This
would indiciate that:

> Incorrect actually. Restoration is not a healing song, but
> rather a song that increases HP regen. It, like all other bard
> songs, lasts for 10 seconds from it's start. It does not heal
> on the pulse, the pulse just happens to be when HPs are
> updated. So starting and stopping Restoration does nothing to
> increase it's effect.

You are partly correct, partly incorrect. You're wrong in
that the song *does* heal on the pulse. The song effects seem
to be tied to a 6 second heartbeat. If you catch it right
before a heartbeat (I'm guessing when your hp naturally
regenerates), the song will last just over 12 seconds. If you
catch it right after, it will last just under 18 seconds. In
all cases, it lasts 3 pulses, and the healing happens *on* the
pulse. If you were correct and it didn't heal on the pulse
but rather increased your regen rate, you'd get a fractional
amount between 2 to 3 pulses worth of healing from starting
and immediately stopping Restoration. That doesn't happen -
you always get 3 pulses worth.

You are correct in that you cannot exceed the maximum healing
rate of one pulse every 6 seconds. If you try, you can see
your hp go up a second time, then immediately go back down to
match the original healing heartbeat. It's like the second
instance of Restoration causes a incorrect early refresh, but
the server sends the correct info on the first instance's
heartbeat.

> You can't twist more than 3. And then with only a third of a second to
> transition songs.

I *have* twisted 4. You need a fast connection and have to be
pretty accurate at guessing when the song effect will kick in.
With around 100 ms of lag, the 4th song ends just as or just
before the 1st song effect kicks in again.

I think I now know more about how this song pulse thing works
than I ever wanted to know. :-)

https://dbsanfte.github.io/eq-archiv...html/9622.html
1999-11-04

While in an external view during a battle for a screenshot, I
noticed something. It seems to me the song graphics show up a
fraction of a second before the text message (last night I was
having an atypical 280 ms ping time). I suspect what's going
on is that the graphics are drawn based on a client-side
timer, while the text messages are sent by the server. So the
slight difference is just the time it takes for the server
message to get to you.

I mentioned before that I usually use the song graphics
pulsing to tell me to switch to my next song. Some time ago,
I also said I thought our songs weren't lasting quite as long
as before, yet when I timed it I found no difference. Well
now that I think about it, I started getting this impression
about the time I turned particle density off and began using
the text messages to tell me when to switch songs.

So maybe this is why I was able to weave 4 songs?

On the topic of weaving 4 songs, I'm starting to wonder if JM
Capozzi was correct when he said our DoTs last for 10 seconds,
pulsing 4 times at 2.5 second intervals. I disagreed with him
because if you start/stop Accelerando, the boot icon (and
effect) lasts from 12-18 seconds. However, the latest test I
ran with weaving Clarity (the effect began to taper off when I
weaved it with 2 other songs) points to its duration being
somewhere between 7-11 seconds. I suspect what's going on is
that some effects (Accelerando, see invis, etc.) are entirely
client-side. These will last 12-18 seconds (depending on when
you started the song in the 6-second "heartbeat" cycle).
Others (Clarity, DoTs?, Hymn?) are server-side and quite
possibly could last only 10 seconds (which you can't really
see since the client only updates every 6 seconds).

https://dbsanfte.github.io/eq-archiv...msg-174562.txt
2003-01-13

In article <v24a03nrobkm8d@corp.supernews.com>,
Connie <connietescar@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I started a newbie Bard today. I have a couple of probably easy questions:
>
>1. What is song twisting, and how do you do it?

Song twisting is a technique for having more than one song effect going
at once. Bard songs, in general, take 3 seconds to cast. Once cast, the
duration of the effect is ("however long you continue to play the song" +
12 seconds). So you get more effects going by stopping the song as soon
as you get it cast, then start casting a new one during the 12 seconds
before song #1 wears off. When song #2 is done casting, stop singing song
#2 and restart song #1 again. This is a two-song twist, because you have
two song effects up continuously. A three-song twist is where you play
three songs in rotation, etc.

So I would say it's safe to assume that the Abolish Enchantment and Silver Breath changes on live were just them cleaning up old hardcoding and making the spell data accurate, and it also just makes sense that there'd be some unique hardcoding behind a clicky named after a GM.

[nilbog]

I fully understand that spells can and do have server code that augments them beyond what is exposed in client side spell data.

The 209->27 changes can be reverted, but I wanted a good look at research. It's not like I disagree with the hypothesis, but that's really all it is. I was hoping someone would find evidence of Klandicar dispelling charm from pets in era, or not dispelling, as that would have been much easier to witness than the limited amounts of Abashi's that people were able to procure.

[CrazyPro]

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

I fully understand that spells can and do have server code that augments them beyond what is exposed in client side spell data.

The 209->27 changes can be reverted, but I wanted a good look at research. It's not like I disagree with the hypothesis, but that's really all it is. I was hoping someone would find evidence of Klandicar dispelling charm from pets in era, or not dispelling, as that would have been much easier to witness than the limited amounts of Abashi's that people were able to procure.

Oh, easy.

Here's something from 2004:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040705...icID=323.topic

Anyone ever tried to solo Klandicar (ST key mob by DN zone in)? Other dragons in WW with AE dispel don't dispel charm, anyone know if this one (being unresistable) is different? Probably give it a go anyway, just wondering if anyone had experience with it.

iirc a bard from my guild soloed him he just kept throwing charmed dragons at him , but this was a while ago. I wasn't in the guild at the time but I heard about it.

So his AE dispel won't blow charm away every few seconds? Alright, time for me to die trying.

When they say "Other dragons in WW with AE dispel don't dispel charm" I'd like to point out that Entariz has Silver Breath.

[Darver]

I played a bard on live and I vividly recall only being able to charm 3 seb frogs effectively. But even then the 3rd mob would sometimes wear off mid mez due to the server ticks and when the first song landed. At most you'd get 18 seconds. But that was 25 years ago...

[Baugi]

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

I was hoping someone would find evidence of Klandicar dispelling charm from pets in era, or not dispelling, as that would have been much easier to witness than the limited amounts of Abashi's that people were able to procure.

Charm pets on raids never happened, in my guild at least, and Klandicar was fairly trivial for the guilds farming him so there wouldn't have been any motivation to optimize. I suspect strictly Velious-era evidence of either is going to be scant.

Would you settle for evidence from before the "Fading Memories" spells file change at the end of 2004? It's how they evidently started unwinding the hard coding when they gave Rangers a beneficial only dispel during Omens, ie - Nature's Balance.