Hodgepodge Dev Q & A - December 22, 2005
Developers address a wide range of issues in the Halfling Hodgepodge Q & A (as on EQLive).
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Will druids and wizzys ever get an AA to stop them leaving their group members behind when they evac? There is meant to be an inherit risk involved with most things in the game. Evac, by its nature, is removing risk from combat by allowing you to escape when you would have likely died instead. The chance of it leaving someone behind is very small, but its there to ensure that the ability isn’t something you can rely on to work every time. We have to be very careful when making evac work more often since it directly affects the risk involved in combat. So, removing that small chance to leave someone behind isn’t likely to happen.
Are there any plans to re-evaluate the racial exp penalty, or re-evaluate the benifits/penalties that races have for the exp penalty? We don’t have any plans to re-evaluate racial penalties at this time.
I very much enjoyed participating in the recent war events that began before DoN release as well as speculating and discussing the lore behind them. Will we see more major dynamic events such as these in the future, and is it a possibility that we could see much smaller but more frequent dynamic events also? Thanks. We’ve enjoyed making them. We definitely expect to see more events of this type in the future. Whether they are large or small events really depends on what we are trying to do with that particular event. Some events, like the major wars themselves, are naturally suited to being large events while others, like the ones that lead up to the wars, work better as a series of smaller events.
What is the status on the changes/upgrades to fletching and tailoring. For a long time now, there have been no viable skill up paths to 300 for most classes. I know there are plans to address this, but will we see these changes soon (tm)? In the recent weeks, we've spent some time looking at fletching and discussing what we'd like to do to correct the issues that you mentioned. Some of these corrections require some code changes, others require new recipes. In both cases, they're things that we've got on the plate to address, as time allows. Tailoring will require a little more of an in-depth review, but it is also on the list of things to look at.
With more and more of the racial only abilities becoming AA's, can we all have an AA for forage and put everyone on a level playing field for tradeskilling? While it’s something we might consider doing in the future, we don’t have any plans to give out forage to everyone right now.
Will the Guktan Frogloks ever move out of the Rathe Mountains and into a more suitible environment such as another swamp or someplace with water? Yeah, it’s very likely that they’ll get a true home city in the future. For now, though, be happy you aren’t sharing a shanty town with a bunch of dark elves like the last group who got booted out of Grobb. You got yourself a nice little tent city nestled away in some prime mountain real estate.
When is there going to be an upgrade to bring Lifeburn into parity with cleric turn undead, mage 32k nukes, etc.? There’s no comparison between lifeburn and turn undead/summoned. They are different things entirely. Lifeburn already scales with the users life so we don’t have any intention at this time to upgrade it. If we were to upgrade it, it would have to be subject to manaburn style limitations to prevent the same problems manaburn originally had.
Any chance of increasing the mana regen rate the same way you did HP regen, where the longer you sit still, the higher your regen gets? We’re looking at some ways to address downtime regeneration for both mana and endurance, although I’m not sure the same mechanism that we used for hit points is appropriate in this case.
There was mention of DoN cultural drop compnets being changed due to being too rare. Are these items going to still be replaced? This is something that we need to review on a case by case basis -- Some items will be replaced, while others will have their drop rates modified. Once we've made the changes and pushed them out to the test server, we'll let everyone know about the changes via the message boards. Currently, there is no ETA on when these changes will be made, but they are on the top of the list of things to do, as soon as time is available.
Why are there a lack of higher end any slot augments? The last "hp/mana" one was the Cipher of Veeshan at 30/30/30 compared to BiC there is like no middle ground between either. There are various issues with any slot augmentations. Primarily, they allow a player to add an augmentation to any slot, even though those slots have an intended augment in mind. A good case of this is the type 4 augmentation slots on the epics. We was asked to add type4 augmentation slots to caster epics because they felt there was an inequality between melees and casters in terms of not having an additional slot. The slot is used only for procs for melees. However, for casters, they were able to bind an any-slot augmentation to their epic, which was not my intent. So no, we won’t be introducing many, if any, any-slot augments.
Would it possible to change the Shinai of the Ancients and Crystal Hilted Shinai into 1hblunt weapons? Don't you think it’s silly to be punching with a blunt object? We have no intentions of modifying older weapons and are content with both being a hand to hand weapon.
Are the revisions to the Ranger ATK buffs completed? More specifically, are there any plans to address the Strength of the Hunter buff, which was the impetus for the revisions and which, ironically, remains identical to its original form? We don't anticipate any further changes to the ranger buffs in the short term, so yes they're done for now.
Are Necromancers going to get a new pet model other than Spectres and Skeletons? We don’t have any plans at the moment to expand the necromancer pet repertoire beyond specters and skeletons. Adding some different pet models for all the pet classes is something we’d definitely like to do, though.
Are there any plans to add another tradeskill "epic" quest, along the lines of the Coldain Prayer Shawl and the Aid Grimmel Earring? This is something that's been discussed and is something that we would really like to do, but as of right now, there are no concrete plans or timeframe on when something like this would be added.
Will we see fabled Velious mobs for the 7th anniversary? If the past is a good map of the future, the frosty continent should be inundated with Fabled NPCs in a few months time.
What about giving pet handlers the ability to see their pets hit points, stats, and gear? Being able to see more details about your pet is definitely something we’d like to do in the future.
Ever consider giving the next Necro lich spell a new skeleton model that shows equipment like a normal player model? I like role playing aspect of being a skeleton but showing off a new robe might be nice once in awhile. We'd love to make that kind of a change, but it really goes hand in hand with new player models. It's something we'd like to do, but it's not feasible in the short term.
Bard dot are extremely out of balanced compared to what they used to be... any hope in raising cap on instruments to make these useful or raise base dmg? We’re looking at changing how bard caps work so the cap is on a per-spell basis instead of a global cap. That will allow us to raise the cap on spells where it is needed without overpowering other spells, which happen if we just raised the global cap right now.
Are there plans on adding recipes for Taelosian Wheat/mountain wheat? Yes, we will be adding recipes that use the Taelosian wheat in future recipes.
What's taking so long with the healing changes; that is the druid stances and whatever with shamans? Many of the healing changes were made several months ago in the large batch of spell changes. Specific to the druid stances, that’s always been planned as one of the last things we wanted to do. In order to balance the stances out properly, all the other pieces really need to be in place first.
Has the aggro thru the floor in Dreadspire Keep, namely in the west guest wing and in Vule's room been dealt with yet? We’ve identified and corrected a number of potential problems in Dreadspire’s pathing since launch and a few more changes went out with the patch on the 21st . The initial reports we’ve gotten have shown that the fixes are helping and we’re hoping that this latest batch of fixes corrects most of the remaining pathing issues that have come up in that zone
How do fizzles work? If you fizzle, do you then automatically continue fizzling for a set time? Or is there an increased chance to fizzle if you just fizzled the last cast? Fizzles are rolled each time you start casting a spell, so there's no connection between fizzling one spell and then fizzling another. Each fizzle is an independent event that has no thing to do with previous fizzles.
Is there going to be a reinstatement of the higher level Mistmoore so we can use this quest drops you input into the game? We don’t have any plans to reinstate that content at this time.
Bards are often considered a "hybrid" class... it appears that 1/2 is Rogue. What is the other half? They’re definitely a hybrid, but not in the traditional sense of being a hybrid of two others classes. Bards are a bit of a mixing pot and have traits from most of the other classes in the game in addition to their own unique abilities.
Why do we see Life Sap on weapons since GoD release instead of Serpent's Bite? Was this deemed to be too powerful since it is unresistable? We are not too keen on unresistable procs of any type, regardless of their effect. Our calculations for DPS from procs usually assume a slight resist chance, which doesn’t happen with spells like Serpent’s bite
Does Wurine Feeling Stone have any effect for bards? It lists the Improved Dodge III portion as being a "Focus Effect" (and focus effects do not work for bards), but every other Improved Dodge III item lists it as "Effect" (which DOES work for bards). Thus there is some confusion as to whether "Focus Effect" is a typo, and whether or not the effect works on bards. Also, is there any chance that this could be changed to Type: 7,8? This is a bug and has been fixed. The modification will go Live in the next full patch.
Since Berserkers and their throwing axes were originally introduced, only 1 new axe has been added for the berserkers summon use... can we expect to see an upgraded version of the Tainted Axe of Hatred to be found soon? There will be more summoned throwing axes through spells in the future. Through items however, we may introduce more, but we believe that they should primarily be spell/skill upgrades.
Will slow and snare ever be added as effects to augs for weapons? No, you will not find augments that allow you to proc slow or snare. You won’t even find new weapons with those effects.
When will run speed buffs be fixed so that Bard and Monk Run8 will not be overwritten by FOE, SOE, Bih'Li, SOW etc...? This is how the system works, how it was originally coded. You get the innate run speed mods as long as you don’t have any run speed buffs on yourself. It has been that way for as long as AAs that increase run speed have existed, but it’s coming up more now that people have faster ones. It’s something we’ll take a look at in the near future to see if we can do it a different way.
