The Spirit Realm

the thread on the eqforums. Not just pet pulling nerfed, Bard fade nerfed as well (part 1 of the fix).

Its about time.

Makes Fights like Shyra difficult from beeing trivial - in terms of raiding the changes bring up new challenges to pull tactics for raidleaders but for group content my first impression is - damned. A raid has 2-3 monks to split so things can be solved different - but groups tend to have 1 fd class at most
Remember devastation in the beginning - when zone was full of roaming mobgroups - best strat was monk pulling a long line of mobs and mage petpulled the candy mob out of the line - gone

So changes that make the group have to work as a team for difficult pulls are bad?

Brave fix and I hope more of the like are in store.

Ah, the glory days of faithful puppy bringing back one mob are gone: Named in Devastation, spiders in 69.1, Furious in Creator, girplans and named at cubbies and the Tent in WOS, Pixt camp in NC, giants in BoT, mobs in PoI/PoV, singles in LDoNs... depending on zone and luck, I reckon I had about a 70/30 success/fail rate, and died quite a few times, but the good memories linger best.

I have not made it all the way through the thread on the SOE boards, but wow. That's a lot of positive feedback.

As stated in the thread on the EQ live forum that some of you apparently haven't bothered to read, bard fade is not being nerfed, because a programmer found the bug in the code that allowed "tick" pulling to work. Because that bug was found and has been fixed (on the beta server and as coming to the live servers with the new expansion), the originally anticipated bard fade nerf is not happening.

This fix also does not affect normal monk/sk/necro pulling, where you tag, run, flop, wait, get up, run, flop if needed, then rinse and repeat until you have your mob split.

Based on what I read in the first few pages of the thread over on the EQ live forums, the only class that could exploit the "tick" pull trick solo was bards. All other classes needed an accomplice to pull it off.

Lifeburn "bug" has been around since before I quit a year ago.

We will know very shortly (if the expansion goes out as planned), but I am more and more thinking that there will be HUGE changes to the way EQ is played. Its strange that the level 71-75 spells have been so effectively hush-hushed so close to the planned launch date.

One possibility is that there will be much more multiple-mobs-in-camp play. So if 6 mobs come to camp simultaneously, the group would have to find a way to knock out all 6 mobs before everyone dies, or before everyone goes OOM and either dies or gets evacuated or fds.

This theory is consistent with the ooc mana regen. The idea here is that the group would all be oom and loh (low on health) after the battle, and would need to refresh to full from basically zero before pulling another big set of mobs. It is also consistent with the devs spending the time to track down and deal with each pulling technique currently in practice, and making sure that none of them trivializes the content by allowing smaller groups of mobs from being brought to camp. Bringing mobs to camp in 2 sets of 3 makes for much easier content than all 6 at once. Pet pulling could have been eliminated any time over the last 2+ years. I am thinking it is not a coincidence that it is being eliminated now.

It would not surprise me if the classes balance MUCH differently in TSS than they do now. The level 71-75 spells may end up helping some classes substantially more than others, and also if the content of the new areas has a substantially different feel than the current content then some classes will be winners as their natural strengths are emphasized, while others will fall down the class balance ladder.

As has been discussed on another thread, shamans will take a non-trivial power hit as the ooc regen helps other classes substantially more than shamans. The power (or lack of power) of the level 71-75 spells will also likely affect class balance. Finally, content changes may shuffle class balance around quite a bit as well.

As has been stated many times on this board, there is no way at all that the devs/testers/beta people will be able to more than scratch the surface of all the ramifications of all the changes that will likely be part of our reality shortly. Some of these interesting changes will be good - while others will be not so good. Here is hoping that more of the interesting things are good interesting not bad interesting, and that there are not too many crashes while stuff gets sorted out!

Re the incomming nerf on pet pulling...

Perhaps this will make the game somehow "better", perhaps it won't. The Devs obviously seem to think that it will, but who am I to say? /shrug.

I can't help but be astonished <blink blink> though, by the things that perhaps should have been changed years ago, but were not -- and so have become part of the established fabric of the game -- that quite suddenly need "fixing". /boggle. These guys are freaking me out! Seriously. LOL.

A mob never calling for help does need fixing. When you pet pulled something the mob never called for help Ever unless the pet died.

EQ is reported to be nearly 2 million lines of code. /Shrug Some times clearly take longer when you have that many functions doing differant things.