Kiting bug where mobs disappear after 20% hpFollow

hey guys,

im not sure if this bug has been raised before. I just came back to EQ after about 9 mths out of it and started kiting with my shaman. I know it's a weird thing to do but it works for me :)

I was kiting things around East Karana (griffs, crag spiders, dogs) and what would happen is once the creature gets to under 20% hp, it turns to run and disappears. You can still target it, it can still die from your DoT, but you get no exp or no loot.

I was level 17 and i was quite happily kiting (sowed and then dot'ed NPC's) around EK. Mainly gorge hounds and dark stalkers and the occasional Crag spider if it was low enough. That was fine. I hit lvl 18 and solely went for Crag spiders.. and they just kept disappearing. I started playing around with them for a bit. You can root them before they go below 20%. They hang around and if u can kill it before root runs out it's fine. If not, root breaks and it disappears. It doesn't happen all the time but around i noticed it happens lots with yellow conned (i was 18 at the time) crag spiders.

Quick google search revealed that over at Necro talk (http://www.necrotalk.com/index.php?showtopic=286&st=0) they are having the same problem with fear kiting. Same issue.

I didn't really care about the loot, more so the fact that you spend most of your mana kiting yellows around the place just for them to disappear and you get nothing out of it. Med up, go look for another creature and same thing happened. Made the level from 18->19 almost impossible. Got to 19 finally, almost lost my patience though. Picked a high blue crag spider, same thing happened. I just gave up and logged.

Anyone else see this?/know if when it's gonna be fixed? It's really irritating. I wonder if wizards or druis have the same problem too.

i was playing on fennin, i don't think it's an issue with a specific server since the necro's on that board weren't on fennin either.

I am having the same problem with my wiz, seems to happen consistently for me in Skyfire. I have mob snared, kite around with flaming sword of xuzl acting as a little dot for me. Once I nuke the mob to below 20%, causing it to stop, I let the sword whack away at the mob so I can med a bit. If I forget to refresh the snare, and the snare drops... Poof! Mob has warped across zone. It is still on target, but is on other side of zone.
Very annoying.

Happened to me on Fennon. My little DE wizzie was working on collecting the robes from the guys in white around the wizzie spire in Nektulos. The one guy by the one particular tree kept poofing like you describe here. Still on track, still invis, and wizzies have no dots or snares at that level, so SOL. I was fighting him AT the spawn point, and when he turned to run, poof. From what you say here, it might not have happened if I had had to brains to ROOT him, so he would not turn.

I think it is related to the old Z-axis bug, where the MoB was underground and could hit you, but you could not hit back. That happened to my Ikky SHM in FoB enough to be really irritating. So I think the 'turn to run' logic moves 0 to the Z axis parm and there you go.

But what do I know.

Karlowin, Fennon Ro

Pathing bug with mobs that are trying to 'run'. If you keep them immobile while they are trying to run, they won't warp. If you have a snare strong enough to make mobs immobile, use that, and mostly won't see it. Also, if you fight in relatively small zones, don't seem to see the problem at all- I think it's mostly in zones with a 10k plus loc range.

Happened to me last night in PoN.
Agro kiting a gnarled treant with necro pet and it disappeared with 1% left on it - VERY annoying...

Just in case anyone is keeping track: I have had the same issue with Forest Giants (they are the only mobs that run below 20%) in Burning Woods the last few days. Only solution so far has been to make sure they are snared. In fact, I was luckily tracking one and when I found it again across the zone it "warped" again before I could snare it.

Kind of disappointing to see that this isn't a zone-specific issue at the moment. Hopefully they make this a priority as it has made playing a bit frustrating the last few days.

This bug became more pronounced after the casiono patches (mid-December?). That was the first time I'd ever seen mob warping like that, and for the first week after the patches about 80% of the mobs I soloed with my necro were disappearing. To the best of my knowledge, all the mobs were *either* snared (Darkness) or feared, and this happened anywhere between mob at 90% or 3% health. Seems to have lessened a bit, though I still get one or two warping mobs a session now.
Someone once mentioned that it might be an outdoor Z-axis (hilly terrain) issue.

I normally am not too far away from my mob, because i don't want other people to think im running away from it and steal my kill.

I stay close enough for me just to cast a spell on it. I have tried a few other things such as nuking the crap out of the mob then the last bit I DoT and it still sometimes disappears.

Weird thing is they do EVENTUALLY come back. I'm not sure where the Crag Spiders spawn in EK, but I was killing one and it disappeared. I noticed there was a spider trying to cross the North Karana bridge, and low and behold, it was my spider. *confuzzled*.

I guess I'm just curious whether this has been reported and whether we have an official response on whether it's an issue that can be fixed or not. Very disheartening when a level that normally takes x amount of kills, now takes x times 2 or something because kills go missing.

Just to let you know guys I believe gbaji is correct. I just spent the last session doing the same ol crag kiting except this time I run to melee just before it hits 20%.. so around 23% i run at it and start to melee it. NONE warped anywhere for me.

For those classes that can't melee the other option is the time a spell (DD or DoT) so that just before he gets to you it hits the mob below 20 so just as he gets to you, he runs away again.

My theory on it is along the lines of this.

The game needs your co-ordinates to determine where the mob runs away from. IF you are too far away it can't determine your co-ord, the mob doesn't know which way to run and it just warps back to spawn point. just a guess :)

Distance between myself and the mob, and mob health, do not have any bearing on mob warping, in my experience.

This happens to me in PoV if the mob turns to run while it's on the hill in NE. I'm always right in range, and the mob does not poof back to it's spawn point. I have the spawns very well timed, and I have checked several times.

I can repro it about 33% to 50% of the time if I get them to turn and run on a certain part of the hill in NE. The mystic poofing only seems to occur when the mob is running UP the hill. It doesn't have to be an extreme hill, and a 20% grade will do. I also seem to see more repros where the slope of the hill is changing, like uneven ground or the base of a hill where it is just starting to slope up.

I have yet to see a case where the mob is running down hill, switches to an uphill vector, and warps/falls. If you have a repro case for this, please tell.

Distance to mob does not matter in the cases I've tested. I only started seeing this about 4 months ago. I've killed in PoV NE for about 12 months now for a total of about 80 aa's worth of xp.

I suspect it is a terrain based bug because it only happens if the mob turns to run (or otherwise changes movement) in certain places. It is more likely on a slope, for instance. I've NEVER had this happen in HoH, and HoH is perfectly flat in most areas. I believe I've also had this happen when I root a mob as it is running toward me, but I'm not 100% sure about that. (about 80% sure)

I also suspect that the mob isn't going to the far reaches of the zone. I believe that the mob is below the terrain. I think this because if you get far enough from a mob, it regenerates at an alarming rate. In PoV, they regen 4% per tick. When my mobs disappear, they don't regen faster than what is normal for an in range mob.

I've also seen posts that say they dotted the mob and got xp for them after they disappeared. You don't get xp for a mob if you are a long distance from it on the x and y axis (not sure about z) when it dies.

I also notice graphically, the mob starts turning around an instant before they disappear.

Has anyone had this happen on perfectly flat terrain, like in paved zone where the fighting surfaces are flat? I've noticed this in outdoor zones only, but has anyone noticed it indoors? The warping only appears to happen only during a vector change. This happens when a mob suddenly turns while it is moving; when a mob turns to run, when fear wears off, when snare wears off, when fear takes hold, etc. Anyone have any cases where this is not true?

I need to do some packet sniffing to see if the mob is falling down or warping to the "Mob safe point"? I know that it is not warping to it's spawn location.

The rest is slightly more technical, and is somewhat speculative.

If I had to guess, I'd say that when the movement vector changes, they are applying the original vectored offset one time without either applying or checking the z axis of the vector. Normally, on movement, the z axis appears to be adjusted after the x and y positions have been determined and terrain has been checked. If you miss the z factor in the last vector offset, then you can end up with a mob that has moved toward the hill one last step without stepping up appropriately. When the mob turns and applies the new movement vector, the mob's z axis is below the plane of the terrain. It fell through the world.

This may happen because the movement/bounds check pair is not a completely ACID transaction, and a race condition occurs. If a new vector is applied in the middle of a movement calculation it may skip the bounds check on the previous vector, for example.

When a mob regenerates past it's run threshold it starts coming after the pc. Most of us know that if the mob can't get closer to you for 4 seconds, the system corrects the position so it can. This would put the mob onto the nearest pathing node to it's present location that puts it closer to it's intended victim. Since all pathing nodes are on the world plane, the mob would reappear on the world. If the mob is within a certain distance to the pc, then it just teleports onto you, which we've all experienced.

And, just curious... can you really bind sight on a mob across the world?

I had no problem binding sight on mobs clear across the SK zone, I was all the way down in the southern part, fighting a cyclops, it poofed, I bound sight and watched it up at the undead camp near the NK bridge. I have fought aviaks in the north, they poof and with binding sight I see them under the aviak tree clear down in the south part of the zone. Distance from where the mob ends up after warping doesn't seem to prevent me from binding sight to it.