by Vasei » Thu Aug 28, 2008 8:11 am
You can call it "content designed for solo play" or you can call it "content that's easily soloable because it's too hard to turn on the Can_Summon flag" - it's semantics. Since we're talking only about shaman spell drops, I think it's a fair term to use for spells that a shaman can solo.
You've gone from "I don't think you're intended to solo your spells" to "You are not "supposed" to be able to solo for your spells." in fairly short order. You must have some pretty specific dev quotes. I'd be interested to see this "large number of dev statements". From sometime in the last year, please. There isn't much about EQ that hasn't changed in the last year.
Of course, I'm kind of confused as to why you zeroed in on the word "soloing" with such venom - the whole reason I used it was as a relative measure of difficulty. As in "Rank 1 of spell X is so simple, even an embarrassingly undergeared shaman can solo it," vs. "Rank 1 of spell Y is challenging enough that my group wiped repeatedly trying to kill the mobs." The point is that the Rank 1 spells were given the lowest number for a reason, yet there are a lot of Rank 2 spells that are far simpler to acquire than some Rank 1 spells - which one would THINK runs contrary to the intent. Unless there's some other reason they chose those numbers (flavor or texture, I suppose).
I suppose we could get back on topic by saying that the relative difficulty of obtaining a couple of the Rank 1 spells is far outside the norm considering the difficulty of the majority of Rank 1 spell drop locations. In particular, the two crypt ghoul drops (Rolist's Drowse and Bite of the Brownie) - I'll take people's word for the HoS drops not being that bad.