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Re: Monsters that cant find home glitch - 3/24/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by Xearo
I posted same response on last thread. Turbine dev's are oh so busy! But they will spend month's trying to fix something that they screwed up in the 1st place insted of just removing the ignorant fix that they put in that caused this mess.

The possible fix for this took no more than a few hours.

Removing the portal home tech would break more than it fixes.
What it'll fix:
1. creatures will no longer try to portal home when they can't reach home.
What it'll break:
1. instead of portaling home when they can't find home creature's will just fly in circles endlessly until you manage to draw aggro or kill them.
2. creatures in dungeons will get stuck on walls/corners and will not return home as long as the dungeon is active.
3. creatures will get stuck on landscape and continue to try to get home while stuck until they aggro on something, someone kills them, or the landblock unloads.

The fix, innitialy, was largely due to the crystal golem exploit, yes, but it fixed more than just people being able to exploit one creature, it also stopped creatures from piling up in locations of dungeons and not being able to get home, creatures piling up on landscape features that were impassable, and otherwise allowed creatures to go home when they would have been stuck in some other behavior.

Re: Monsters that cant find home glitch - 3/24/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by YekYai
Increasing the size of the monster's home spot, which you say you did, sure seems like it should have worked. *Shrug*

Seemed like it did work on the test servers. I've reproed the monsters not finding their homes bug multiple times, I tried for over an hour this time and didn't manage to repro the issue. There may be a lag related issue, or some other factor of live servers, either that or possibly the issue was reduces/changed but not removed. Can't be certain till we repro it again.

Weekly Update 3/26/07 (by Frelorn)

Hello there and welcome to this weeks update on what is happening in the world of Asheron’s Call.

This week the team is busy working on things for the April event. We are at the point in development where things are being placed on the test servers and the team begins to tweak, adjust and balance out all of the new content they are working on.

We had a busy day on Friday, with lots of game industry press in the building for various reasons. We spent a good part of the day with some of these folks talking about gaming in general and what the future has in store for us. Our friends over at Warcry have posted about the visit today, which you can read about here. We even got a bit of a mention from the folks over at the LotRO Vault. It was great to meet the people behind some of the bigger sites and publications and to talk about what is in store for AC in the future. It was a fun day and I think we will be seeing some benefits from meeting with these folks in the future.

There has been a rather large amount of great suggestions for the game coming in to us lately, either through the forums here or via email. We wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you for all of the wonderful ideas and suggestions. I am not sure what has spawned all of these great ideas as of late, but please by all means keep them coming. While the team here works very hard to get the best content and features out that they can, the only way we know what the players want is the continued communication that we have with you all. You cannot imagine how helpful you all have been, and continue to be as we move forward with the game. From the very bottom of our hearts we just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for the ideas, thank you for supporting us, and thank you for being here and sharing in the joy we all get from working on and playing this game.

That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great week.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Re: Does anyone else think that the Slayer Gems should be removable?  3/26/07 (by Django)

I was thinking about this today and it may be more difficult than I thought, sadly. Pretty much the way it works is, there's a field available for weapons that can be filled with special data, this field is used to record if an item has a special effect, such as mukkir slayer on it so that other effects can not be added. However, I failed to take into account that the item would also need to know how to fix each specific change. It seemed fairly easy to clear out the slayer types and amount fields, but then with items like the rabbits foot and dark idol that change other stats this suddenly becomes difficult. As a one trick pony it was easy, it just cleared out some fields on any weapon and left it, however variance, melee defense and other changes that do not always occur and are not a field that can simply be cleared out would not be changable so easily. This means that the removal would have to be able to figure out what effect is on the weapon then remove it in a specific way, either that or each type of stone has a specific removal item that needs to also be able to know which effect is on a weapon.

It would seem to be a bit less trivial than first expected but I put in a suggestion for it anyway.

Re: Does anyone else think that the Slayer Gems should be removable?  3/26/07 (by Django)

Speed tried to make a removal item, it didn't work out. We're still planning on working on this, but we're going to need to recruit Sev and get some tech for it.

Re: Does anyone else think that the Slayer Gems should be removable?  3/26/07 (by Django)

And which bug would you be talking about in specific Javit?

I'm unaware of any bugs that we don't have in for possible fixes. It's all a matter of how much time Sev needs to do something. To do something like this Sev most likely needs about 3 hours, to fix the return home bug we need to figure out what's wrong so that'll most likely take a while of trying to get it to repro on test then debug the situation, to fix combat stances breaking when you enter them will most likely take a few weeks of work time because Sev hasn't worked with those systems much yet. If you've got some new amazing bug to complain about feel free to let us know and if it's a bug we'll look into fixing it.

Re: Does anyone else think that the Slayer Gems should be removable?  3/26/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by Javit al-Thirim
Chests insta-relocking.

Working on it.

Quote: Originally Posted by Javit al-Thirim
Animation bugs (fastcasting, delay casting. Oh wait, these are FEATURES now! )

Depending on the animation bug, I believe I mentioned these, will take a while for Sev to catch up on how things work there and get any kind of fix in.

Quote: Originally Posted by Javit al-Thirim
Your RNG is not random enough. When people are failing or succeeding 10, 15, 20 imbues in a row, that are SUPPOSED to be 33/38% chance of success, there's a definite problem in that system.

Well, look at the larger picture. In a small sample set most artificial RNG are streaky. If you look at them in large sample sets they are right on the money. Sorry we've all be on the bad side of a streak, then again some of us have also been on the very good side of a streak. If you don't want to break something don't imbue it. Breaking things is part of imbuing.

Quote: Originally Posted by Javit al-Thirim
Slayer bonus on some quest weapons like Undead Slayer isn't good enough to compete with the Composite Bow after imperil and vuln (May be by design, but seems silly to me, at least. Especially since the Shadowfire Bow owns vs. the Composite on shadows!). What, exactly, were you intending the upgraded Composite Bow for, anyways? Right now, it looks like the best all-purpose bow in the game, as long as an imperil and vuln doesn't put a monster below 0 base AL.

Not a bug, it's a very good quest bow. It's AR and has a non-elemental damage bonus, it's intended to be an all around weapon. Based off the amount of time required in hunting well below the level range of the characters using the highest bow it's reasonable for the bow to be as nice as it is, it can be a rather large time investment.

Quote: Originally Posted by Javit al-Thirim
Fellow leader stealing...did that one get fixed? I don't know how to exploit that one in the first place, so I didn't really keep an eye out for the fix on it. I think I heard a few people got banned for using it though?

It's been noted and should be fixed in the not so distant future (my measure of not so distant may be different than yours though).

- About any system/memory/directX based errors, I'm not really your man on that. I know there are a fair number of reports in our bug database on them, but I came on after ToD when all of that was tested.

Re: Does anyone else think that the Slayer Gems should be removable?  3/26/07 (by Django)

Nobody said anything about fixing fastcasting/slidecasting/holdcasting/etc.Casting. just said that qualifies under the same catigory as the other animation bugs which I had already mentioned.

Re: Shield of Perfect Light  3/25/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by Gaetano
Hey folks just noticed a possible error on this shield. Unequiped it has unparalleled to acid and cold (nice), but then it cast these same two banes effectively doing nothing for the shield. Its kind of a waste of two spells.

Oh, but you are most incorrect, having these two banes are absolutely useful.

Why?

Were you to cast negative level 7 item magic spells on the shield it would lower the proteaction for acid and cold down to poor. However, if you have it buffed with these two level 7 spells over the unpar and you cast negative level 7 spells on the shield it still appears as unpar because the negative and positive level 7s balance out.

So, the lesson here is that, yes, 2.0 is max, just as 0 is max for speed, but casting a spell that would go beyond the max, were it possible, will actually protect you from negative effects.

This is also true if you have a dagger with 20 speed, you could cast Swift Killer 2 on it but if you do, in the event that Leaden Weapon 7 is cast on it Leaden Weapon = -70, add that to Swift Killer 2 -70+20 = -50. So, your total speed will end up at 50. Now, were you to cast Swift Killer 7 on your weapon, and someone were to cast Leaden Weapon 7 on your weapon they'd balance out and you'd end up at 20, much better than 50.

Re: Any Plans for a Shadowfire life wand?  3/28/07 (by Kitani)

Quote: Originally Posted by Taomagicdragon
I have a martyr mage and wonder if it would be at all possible to allow for some kind of quest to modify the shadowfire wand into a life wand? Take away the +% to fire damage and replace the war wield to a life wield. I would beleive this to be a fair tradeoff and a rather nice tool for those that prefer to use only offensive life magic. Any official comment on this idea from the almighty devs of AC *bows down humbly*

I'll bring it up to the team for consideration. Not likely it'd take a whole quest to do such a change, as that'd be a lot of work for a sub-section of the players, but we may be able to come up with something. No promises it'll get in, of course, but I can't forsee any reason for us to not come up with something.
__________________
Kintani
AC Content Designer
Turbine, Inc.

Re: After turning in 100 shrouds...  3/29/07 (by Severlin)

Good feedback. I'll add some comments:

Quote: Originally Posted by Danalif
I didn't even get the time of day beyond my 9 mil XP. I was hoping that there would be something: A title, a special shroud or even opening up a new part of the graveyard.

The shrouds are meant to be a nice supplemental XP source for those who hunt the graveyard. We didn't intend to lead players on into thinking that turning in tons of them would provide some additional reward.

Quote:
Wisps: Turbine really needs to do something with these, in their current state they are nothing but a hard to kill, chain casting pain. Flayed Skin - Decreases a targets natural AL by 500 and monstrous war spell. Maybe decrease the respawn rate to 30 min from it's current 10. Have them drop special protection gems gets to match their debuffs and war spells that would only last for 15 minutes. Also, for a monster with 20k HP, the loot is horrible off them, if it even drops any, the loot profile needs to be brought up on these.

The Wisps are meant to add difficulty in the graveyard. They are a stopper creature - something you have to avoid or pull and eliminate for more lucrative hunting. As such, we didn't want them to be extremely rewarding. Also, the Sorrow and Despair Wisps are heavy debuffers and while they have some offensive power they aren't intended to be that much of a threat if they are pulled alone by a group. They are much more dangerous if one catches you while you are fighting something else. If they were extremely rewarding groups would spend their time single pulling them. Hatred Wisps are a curve ball - they are rough either way. They are also worth more XP.

We wanted a hunting area that required people to pay attention and hunt smart. We imagined that it would be difficult to set up and mindlessly hunt the graveyard without paying attention. Wandering monsters are designed to make the area more interesting for players looking for a more active hunting experience.

I will throw the idea of a longer respawn at the team and see what they think.

Quote:
Undead: Either the Skeletons and Ghosts need to be reclassified as undead or the undead slayer should also recognize these types too, because in their way, they are undead too. Time to bring out a bigger Mnemosyne for these guys, make it worth 3 or 4 Gems of stillness. No need for xp out of them, anyone who is fighting in the graveyard would probably scoff at an XP reward out of them.

They are specifically not undead so we can populate the graveyard and the closer groups don't necessarily recognize the agro "screams" of different groups. It has to do with how the graveyard is layed out and how we want groups to agro each other.

We also didn't want a single slayer weapon to be the best against all the creatures in the graveyard.

Quote:
Damage: Once again, grouping is impaired because different classes have a better damage type due to damage due to differences in max damage not being the same across a characters weapons, IE. the bludgeon attack of Axe being less then slash.

Why is this different in the graveyard from any other hunting area?

Quote:
Trophy turn in: Change the trophy turn in from having to do it in lots of 10 to how ever many that person has on them, that way they can completely turn in at the end of hunting without any leftovers. Due to the comparatively small xp from the trophies, it should be able to be shared in a fellowship, as it almost requires a fellowship to hunt there.

Our current tech doesn't allow for this since you can't do "math" in a script. I know that probably doesn't make much sense but trust me that a script that tried to count items in that way would be cumbersome and inefficient at best. We don't want a heavily used NPC to have a long script that checks inventory over and over to "count" out items and reward for each possible amount. It wouldn't be good for the server. On the other hand, you don't have to single drag each shroud onto the NPC for it's own XP reward!

If there was a large player outcry for it we could probably add an option to single drag shrouds onto the NPC for a partial reward. QA didn't feel that it would be all that useful.

As for trophy quests and fellowships, the trophy quests are fine tuned to give maximum rewards to smaller groups. The graveyard is not balanced for a full fellowship group, and they already get group XP bonus. A full fellowship group has other areas they can also adventure in. The Colosseum is an example of an area that is cool for a full fellowship. While nothing prevents a full fellowship from hunting the graveyard, they already have a substantial XP bonus for the group. The trophies are there to make the graveyard even more lucrative for people who feel like hunting in smaller groups since there isn't any other hunting spot that rewards that kind of play.

Quote:
There is a lot of potential in the Graveyard, a lot of places to open up for little "Crypt Quests" and Hunter tasks.

We agree.

Re: After turning in 100 shrouds...  3/29/07 (by Severlin)

Again, good feedback.

It's almost as if there is more to the graveyard, waiting to be unearthed. Naw, that couldn't be it. If that was the case then we should have had an NPC hint that things were still being unearthed. :P

As for the specific gather quests, I will talk to the team and see if their XP reward needs to be revisited.

Re: After turning in 100 shrouds...  3/29/07 (by Severlin)

Quote: Originally Posted by TheKnight
I. Increase the XP you make from turning in 10 shrouds from 9million to 70million.

You are discounting the XP for the creatures themselves. The shrouds are supplemental to that. I would not be surprised to see an XP bump in the shrouds or the more powerful night time creatures, but if your expectation is *that* much of a bump you will be... disappointed.

Quote:
In it's current form it takes to long to change from daytime to nighttime in this place. I would say it should change once every hour from daytime to nighttime and vice versa.

The cycle is and has been standard since the inception of AC and I wouldn't change that at this point. (Oh, and the day night cycle *is* two hours already, though night time is slightly shorter than the day.)

Quote:
III. The Pyre Skeleton Mobs/Boss's need to have slightly less damage from their attacks.

The night time is meant to be rough.

Quote:
Overall I enjoy the graveyard, but would not hunt here until the xp is brought more up to the level it should be for it's difficulty. It's a step in the right direction to get away from dungeon crawling, but until the XP is brought up to the kind of XP you'd make in a dungeon or on Viss or DI, nobody is going to take this place as a serious alternative to dungeon crawling.

Good feedback. We do not want an area where the rewards do not match the risks.

Sev~

Re: Monsters that cant find home glitch - 3/30/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by G_L
My job is to reproduce customer bugs, I do this all day, I find it very dificult to believe you cannot reproduce and fix this bug we have complained about for a long time.

I can, I have, it stopped happening, or was not observed on the test servers after Sev made his changes.

Quote: Originally Posted by G_L
Either your testing procedures/servers are broken or you are not trying very hard. I don't play much and I see this bug reprooduce on DI within 5 minutes to 1 hour consistantly.

Testing servers are far smaller than live servers and have far less load on them. As Sev pointed out this is most likely either a bug related to lag (unlikely) or related to server boundries. We have very few server boundries on a test server. It might be nice if we could have a live server to test on, but that's a lot of hardware and it takes far longer to set up on a daily basis.

Quote: Originally Posted by G_L
You stated you think you fixed this bug and introduced a patch. Please investigate your testing procedures/servers or DO YOUR JOB!

Please no excuses, it appears this bug is EASILY reproducable.

Frankly I would be ashamed if I delivered a patch for a reproducable probem and it did not fix the issue.

... I don't know what to say, you're a bit discouraging there. I spend a lot of time looking into issues that players bring up, supporting ideas that players have and represeting players concerns on bugs and functionality to the team.

By the way, just so you know. I've reproduced this issue on live and still am not reproducing the issue on the test server. So... as I stated as first, and as Sev said, it's an issue with the difference between live and test, there'll always be some differences between live and test it's just the way it is.

Best part of this all is if I'd simply ignored the player complaintes in the first place and Sev hadn't tried to fix this you would have never posted those remarks. By working on this instead of ignoring it we've been accused of not doing our jobs, that's a bit ironic.

Re: Monsters that cant find home glitch - 3/30/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by Flandamier
Try different distances Dj and Sev.

We can repro it without any issue on live. I went 10 for 10 earlier today. I used exactly the same spells in exactly the same area using the exact same combat techniques on test on went 0 for 10. We're trying to find the reason for the difference, we'll see what happens.

Weekly Update 4/2/07 (by Frelorn)

Hello there and welcome to the Weekly update for 4/2/07.

This week the team continues to work on the April event. The balance on things is being worked out and bugs are getting fixed. The team has also begun the work of planning what will happen for the May event. Of course this is only in the rough planning stages at this point, but we have a general idea of what direction we will be going in for that month.

It appears that most everyone got a kick out of our April Fools fun over the weekend. If you haven’t had the chance yet, make sure you check out the Tanada House of Pancakes, but watch out for those Pancake Golems, they can be really sticky critters to handle. :P

I have been really pleased with how civil everyone has been over the past couple of weeks on the thread about our customer service. It is always nice to have a discussion on how to improve things without resorting to flaming or name calling. It is a tribute to how mature this community is\has become over the last few years. As I said in the thread already, the feedback that is gathered from that thread is going over to those in charge of our Customer Service team, so the constructive criticism is welcome.

Our friends in the great Pacific Northwest are having the bi monthly Asheron’s Call dinner this month. I recommend that you go if you have the chance. It is a good time.
From Gouru’s post:
We meet at the Azteca http://maps.live.com/?v=2&sp=yp.YN925x15726177 at 5 for happy hour and at 6:30 for all ages invited Player Dinner. This is always a great time to come out and meet fellow local area players! Prices are reasonable, and you do NOT have to purchase dinner to attend.

Bring a non-playing friend for a FREE boxed copy of Asheron’s Call and a one month subscription.

Hope to see you there! Please RSVP to johndilley52@hotmail.com so I can let the restaurant know how many will be there.

Last but not least, some of you have been PM’ing me about the resolution for those people whose Colosseum keys were “eaten” by the chest. I apologize for the delay on resolving this for those folks. Things have been exceptionally busy for me in the last couple of weeks, and I let this keep sliding down my to-do list. This week I will be taking care of it. I have the list of people who PM’d me and have gathered all of the information I need. If you sent me a PM about the matter when I asked, I would ask that you send me one more PM with the best time to reach you in game. Once I have this time I will log in and attempt reach all parties involved. I thank you all for your patience, while waiting for a resolution to this matter.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Quote: Originally Posted by Ceryni
I used a vuln even while i was hitting with the rend, which would supercede the blung vuln VI the rend would have "cast". They were both on a level playing field.

I think Danafil's point is that the two weapons are not on the same playing field. It'd be more similar were you to compare a CS or CB weapon or a weapon with no imbue to the Channeling weapons. Comparing a rend to a Channeling is like comparing a rend to a CS or CB without casting any vulns, of course the rend is going to do better.

Well, I know why loot generated weapons are better in PvP than the Channeling weapons.

Where was it said that the channeling weapons were intended to be good for PvP? I don't believe that would be correct for a few different reasons.

Quote: Originally Posted by Ceryni
Weapon 1- Weapon 2-

Damage 18-92 or whatever Damage Variance 35-55 or whatever

Assuming that we can write off crits (which we can't completely seeing the crits on the 18-92 are going to be worth quite a bit more) simple math is 18+92/2=55 35+55/2=45. The total DPS without counting crits in this case should favor the 18-92 weapon by a fair amount. Compare the damage done by the 18-92 to a CS or CB weapon they should be more in line with eachother.

I'm not saying the weapons are good, just saying that they're in line with other weapons DPS wise, it's just represented differently. I'm not a big fan of wide variances myself, I like my DoTs to be tight and as standard as possible.

There are two issues with your test though, one I have mentioned (this weapon doesn't compare well with weapons that are not CS or CB) and a second that I have not mentioned, but players should be vaguely aware of.

When we did our PvP rebalance just over a year ago now we made changes to how much damage players took from certain imbued weapons and how this damage was handled. Seeing that you're using a loot generated imbued weapon on a human target you get an extra bonus to your damage. So it's not just that you're using comparing a rending weapon to a non-rending weapon you're comparing a rending weapon with an innate damage increase due to use against another player to a weapon that has no damage bonus against players.

Here's the Raw DoT:

Channeling Guruk Fist - 15735.67 + Proc
Max Loot Weapons - CB Imbue, No Tinkers - 15974.95

Yes, they're not great in comparison to fully tinkered weapons. However, the quest is short and the weapons are comparable with other 400 wield weapons, just not fully tinkered weapons.

I never said players should use them over other weapons, anyone with 400 wield supplies will most likely have something better to use, however this is a quick quest that players can run as they are just becoming able to wield 400 wield weapons.

So, the point being that they're not "Messed Up!" they're just not as awesome as some people were hoping they would be.

I agree, not my favorite weapons in game either. They were something new to try, very high damage, very high variance weapons. They are tradeable if I'm remembering right, and if not anything else at least they look pretty cool. My over all point of posting was just to point out that the test was flawed at the basic level and they're a bit better than it made them seem.

Quote: Originally Posted by Ceryni
I got excited when I saw that there was an awesome looking (and sounding, Channeling Bone Sword is a wicked cool name)

There was some talk about maybe making a Bur specific loot profile that dropped these items from creatures. It seems unlikely to happen at this point, but you may see weapons that look like these again in the future.

Quote: Originally Posted by Gengis
Sev - any Chest love you can give is soooo welcome. I have many keys muled just waiting for the day when chest loot is upgraded and the BMRs aren't bugged. I've lose many a BMK when the chest didn't open, or otherwise bugged.

Quote:
I hope the investment of your time means there is going to be an overall review of chest loot and lockpick. I am trying to put the pieces together here and If I had my senior dev working on something, I'd be sure that is was something that would have value going forward.

Any hints?

Quote: Originally Posted by Slash Atoyot
Huh? That can't be right. You're telling us that HARM spells have a longer range than War spells? Are you absolutely positive on that, or perhaps your looking at old data?

According to the data Kinitani pulled, yes. You are going to make me dredge the code looking for a programatic range decrease, aren't you? Um, I'll look into it if I get a chance. But the data says 36.

Quote:
That, would be a perfect solution, IMO. It doesn't unbalance PvM, it doesn't allow HARM spells to be used by "gank squads" (you know, the guys that work at the Bael Buy stores), it adds a reason to increase Item Magic (or even spec it), and, geez, there was one last point that I was gonna mention, oh yeah, it prevents PK's from running away from their imminent death.

And it doesn't require any new tech. Could also find a good use in PvM, when trying to lure monsters away from their groups. You know how they LOVE to head back and tell their buddies ALL about it....

Um, AC currently doesn't have a root effect, so that's definitely new tech. Our slow effects would also require work to make ready for PC use.

Anyway, if we ever gave PC mages a slow or root effect we would have to give melees an escape option, and I am not prepared right now to try to add kiting balance to AC. It wouldn't be used to prevent escape, but to prevent engagement. Adding engagement effects and counter effects to AC would be very involved, hard to balance, and it's questionable if, at the end of that, the game would actually be more fun.

Sev~

Quote: Originally Posted by Sizlunt DT
Thing is, it used to be this way. Even after Sev's response I still don't see why this would require new tech. If anything, it seems to me that it would only require removing tech. Maybe tedious to dig through the code, but it wouldn't require any new development at all, if I understand things correctly.

Increasing the range on Harm spells is easy to do, even if it is programmed in. It's a matter of "Do we want this" rather than "Can we do this." The problem is the effect this would have on allowing people to trivialize PvE encounters with a long range Harm.

Root and Slow spells are definitely not happening in the foreseeable future. Too much of AC PvP totally relies on mobility for all PvP archetypes.

Quote:
Out of curiosity, do you only want this for harms, or drains as well?

Reason I ask is because it is probably easier to remove the radar limitation for both than it is just for one, since when the change took place it affected both the same way. Just a guess tho.

The problem isn't the technical difficulty. I doubt we would increase the range of Drains at this point, and increasing Harm is probably not going to happen for reasons mentioned above. I don't think we want to start tweaking spells so they act differently in PvE and PvP unless absolutely necessary. It isn't intuitive to players.

Sev~

Re: Monsters that cant find home glitch - 4/9/07 (by Severlin)

Quote: Originally Posted by Ceirce
I dont know if this is along the same lines but while fighting Asheron's golem he was chasing a missle toon that was on the wall. The golem jumped the wall and ended up falling the whole way to the bottom of the island, he then of course portaled back to the spawn point with full health after the group fighting him did have him down well over half way.

This is correct behavior; working as designed. If there is a real reason they can't get back home they *should* go home and heal. This is in place to prevent working the AI by using terrain features to catch creatures this way. The problem is when they do this with no terrain involved.

Sev~

It turns out that the reason Harm type spells are shorter range is that the range is not modified by the casting skill. Projectile spells are generally set up with a range modifier based on casting skill. So while the Harm spells do have a longer base range than projectiles, character skill modifies projectile spell range until it reaches its max, which is radar range.

In discussing an increase to Harm type spells several issues came up.

First, we discussed the reintroduction of the Harmbot. This is the UCM that finds some dungeon corner where it can safely harm creatures on the other side. While we don't want to encourage this behavior, we also believe that you can probably make better XP per hour simply hunting creatures many levels lower than you with minimal risk.

Second, we discussed the effect of full radar range Harms when abused with add ons. We don't particularly like the concept of hunting packs that go into dungeons and simply spam Harms on hunters through walls using add ons to target and coordinate strikes. Suddenly dying to a PK Harm group would not be fun.

Third, we discussed the fact that increased Harm range is really a caster boost. Although many archers and fighters also use life magic, swapping to a wand and switching stances to finish off a fleeing opponent would be cumbersome at best. We are wary of adding to the power of casters in this way without some kind of melee and archer answer. For melee we are less concerned since sticky melee means that people are much less likely to escape if they break into a run. Archers are more of a concern.


Our best options follow:

- The easiest thing for us to do is simply add in a skill modifier to range. For most top end PvPers this would hit the max radar range.

- We could also add tech to create an "Execute" spell that was a longer range Harm 7, but it only worked on someone who has less than 10% of their Health, or maybe less than 40 points. This way coordinated strike teams can't launch an opening salvo through walls.

The second option would honestly detract from valuable development time which is a slight disadvantage.

We are considering one of these options as a playtest but we want player feedback.

#1. Do PvP players think that coordinated Harm spells are actually a viable threat? Is it worth protecting against this?

#2. Do PvP players think that this would unbalance things in favor of casters?

#3. Would an execute Life Magic spell as a reward from a quest, perhaps a PvP oriented quest, solve your issues?

Sev~