7thGate
03-21-2025, 05:20 PM
I have not been active for a little over half a year now, and today I decided that I would retire permanently from P99. Its been a fun ride; I joined back in 2015, but was not really active until I found ALS in 2017 and made Jayya. Since then, I've been a raid leader for ALS and Hydra/Aegis/Sanctum, played off and on and had a lot of good times doing a lot of fun things. I have signed over my accounts to Sanctum leadership after deguilding Jayya, so she may be around as a bot for Sanctum, but I won't be playing.
One of the things I most enjoyed about playing P99 was experimenting with game mechanics, strategies and plans for things. Some, I was able to work out and did something interesting. Other things didn't work as planned or I didn't have the time and drive to follow through and get enough assistance to work out the issues, or couldn't get the people. Since I am leaving, I will leave my thoughts and plans here; I expect that probably noone will use any of this, but perhaps someone will be inspired to follow up on one or more of these.
Autoriposte damage: There's one form of damage in the game that is uncapped with number of targets, and that is the damage done by a Rogue, Monk or Warrior using an Autoriposte discipline. If you can chain people successfully, its possible to do huge amounts of DPS with a small number of people riposting a group. There's two possible uses for this I've found; first, you can spawn blocks of 8 halflings at the Blam Stick chest in PoM and corner pull them. That allows you to stack them all on top of each other and riposte all of them at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czAd7a8pqoI had 136 hobbits, and the warrior did 9868 dps with a Narandi's lance. You would need 215 seconds, or 24 warriors to kill on average with that setup; if you can land a memblur every second for 5 minutes, you could have 2400 halflings active for about 175k DPS by the riposting members.
Notes:
--Having someone DA earring or corpsed box of the void ring DA to hold the pack stationary between ripostes would probably help stabilize this a lot and smooth the timing significantly
--Monks can't FD to make enough hobbits for this to be worthwhile inside the 5 minute despawn window. Run an enchanter memblur chain while non-monk melees punch the box to up the spawn count.
--No computer problems with 136 hobbits, would need to test stability at higher scale.
If it works, you can possibly kill thousands of level 55 mobs that drop up to crowns with a few minutes of work on a coordinated raid force for powerleveling/resist flower farming.
Blam stick hobbits have the same ratio between HP and their number of attacks as Vulak's guards, which leads to the other possible use. It may be possible to do the same thing to them, which could provide a fast way to farm flurry loot (raid force kills the 6 flurries in 5 minutes, then AFKs to recharge until the next mini raid in 3 hours, repeat) or depending on raid rules could maybe be a way to engage Vulak with a small force CotHing people up on the bridge and engaging Vulak+guards in place instead of kiting them.
Sontalak Archery/Disc Tanking: There are a number of bows that can shoot from outside dragon fear range. Sontalak is a low HP (for velious) raid mob with exceptionally nasty AOEs. Standing outside the AOEs and DPSing uninterrupted allows for doing a lot of damage with a small force and could maybe open up another route to killing him without a pile of wizards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XORm61GB5-I&t=65s was an attempt where we got him to 65% with, IIRC 28 people.
Notes:
--Archery range is bugged, the client doesn't agree with the server and firing from your absolute max range fails. You have to hit a sweet spot or the client will put you on cooldown without firing. Getting this right takes practice and makes a big difference.
--Sontalak does not AOE damage if he's being disc tanked. Riposte damage with a high delay two hander can be significant, had a warrior do about 3% of his life by himself while tanking for 9 seconds.
--Big race warrior with weighted axe hits about as hard as trueshot ranger due to (bugged?) weapon delay adding to archery hits.
Low man charm kills in Kael
Not sure if this still works, saw maybe there was a charm patch and/or a pacify duration adjustment? Can do a lot of work with Yetarr and Bvellos in Kael. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZfNjvsDRE was a kill to demo low man on Vindi, with a 10 man kill team.
This has generally been explored pretty well by Project Lightning with their AoW charm kill. Yetarr does about 750 DPS to Vindi or 500 to AoW from the side, and has slightly sub-bvellos durability. My only extensions here were to possibly try going down to a 4 man enchanter/enchanter/druid/cleric vindi and killing him with 2 dictate cycles + corpsed box of the void CH necklace healing, or going to an equivalent 12 man AoW with 8 enchanters running Bvellos+Yetarr perpendicular to each other with 4 clerics CHing off corpsed box of the voids.
Pushing Dragons off the balcony in VP
It takes a while to pull Xygoz, Druushk and Nexona all through the zone. Your raid force is FTEd on them the whole way down, and there's lots of time to leash or get hit with a snare or have other problems happen. But if you have 10-12 Rogues/Monks that sneak/flop up to the balcony, it should be possible to pull to balcony, then push the dragon over the edge to kill them in Hoshkar's lair. I used to push a siren out of the castle window duoing in Siren's Grotto when we couldn't kill the icys, same should work here.
Fluxing up through the Hoshkar's lair
Its possible to grav flux yourself up significantly with staggered grav fluxes. Testing in the arena showed that 3 wizards casting invert gravity with a half second or so delay allows all three to land, shooting you up high enough to reach a vertical boost equal to the height between Hoshkar's lair and the balcony. 3 red named wizards and 1 red named bard can possibly race for the three dragons up there by fluxing up directly instead of running the long way around.
Rampage Tanking with Mage corpsed box of the voids
You can rampage tank anything mana free for however long you need with a mage that corpses box of the voids at the fight location. Finalized did this for a bunch of vindis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgD_ACX0vt4 was an example.
One of the things I most enjoyed about playing P99 was experimenting with game mechanics, strategies and plans for things. Some, I was able to work out and did something interesting. Other things didn't work as planned or I didn't have the time and drive to follow through and get enough assistance to work out the issues, or couldn't get the people. Since I am leaving, I will leave my thoughts and plans here; I expect that probably noone will use any of this, but perhaps someone will be inspired to follow up on one or more of these.
Autoriposte damage: There's one form of damage in the game that is uncapped with number of targets, and that is the damage done by a Rogue, Monk or Warrior using an Autoriposte discipline. If you can chain people successfully, its possible to do huge amounts of DPS with a small number of people riposting a group. There's two possible uses for this I've found; first, you can spawn blocks of 8 halflings at the Blam Stick chest in PoM and corner pull them. That allows you to stack them all on top of each other and riposte all of them at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czAd7a8pqoI had 136 hobbits, and the warrior did 9868 dps with a Narandi's lance. You would need 215 seconds, or 24 warriors to kill on average with that setup; if you can land a memblur every second for 5 minutes, you could have 2400 halflings active for about 175k DPS by the riposting members.
Notes:
--Having someone DA earring or corpsed box of the void ring DA to hold the pack stationary between ripostes would probably help stabilize this a lot and smooth the timing significantly
--Monks can't FD to make enough hobbits for this to be worthwhile inside the 5 minute despawn window. Run an enchanter memblur chain while non-monk melees punch the box to up the spawn count.
--No computer problems with 136 hobbits, would need to test stability at higher scale.
If it works, you can possibly kill thousands of level 55 mobs that drop up to crowns with a few minutes of work on a coordinated raid force for powerleveling/resist flower farming.
Blam stick hobbits have the same ratio between HP and their number of attacks as Vulak's guards, which leads to the other possible use. It may be possible to do the same thing to them, which could provide a fast way to farm flurry loot (raid force kills the 6 flurries in 5 minutes, then AFKs to recharge until the next mini raid in 3 hours, repeat) or depending on raid rules could maybe be a way to engage Vulak with a small force CotHing people up on the bridge and engaging Vulak+guards in place instead of kiting them.
Sontalak Archery/Disc Tanking: There are a number of bows that can shoot from outside dragon fear range. Sontalak is a low HP (for velious) raid mob with exceptionally nasty AOEs. Standing outside the AOEs and DPSing uninterrupted allows for doing a lot of damage with a small force and could maybe open up another route to killing him without a pile of wizards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XORm61GB5-I&t=65s was an attempt where we got him to 65% with, IIRC 28 people.
Notes:
--Archery range is bugged, the client doesn't agree with the server and firing from your absolute max range fails. You have to hit a sweet spot or the client will put you on cooldown without firing. Getting this right takes practice and makes a big difference.
--Sontalak does not AOE damage if he's being disc tanked. Riposte damage with a high delay two hander can be significant, had a warrior do about 3% of his life by himself while tanking for 9 seconds.
--Big race warrior with weighted axe hits about as hard as trueshot ranger due to (bugged?) weapon delay adding to archery hits.
Low man charm kills in Kael
Not sure if this still works, saw maybe there was a charm patch and/or a pacify duration adjustment? Can do a lot of work with Yetarr and Bvellos in Kael. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZfNjvsDRE was a kill to demo low man on Vindi, with a 10 man kill team.
This has generally been explored pretty well by Project Lightning with their AoW charm kill. Yetarr does about 750 DPS to Vindi or 500 to AoW from the side, and has slightly sub-bvellos durability. My only extensions here were to possibly try going down to a 4 man enchanter/enchanter/druid/cleric vindi and killing him with 2 dictate cycles + corpsed box of the void CH necklace healing, or going to an equivalent 12 man AoW with 8 enchanters running Bvellos+Yetarr perpendicular to each other with 4 clerics CHing off corpsed box of the voids.
Pushing Dragons off the balcony in VP
It takes a while to pull Xygoz, Druushk and Nexona all through the zone. Your raid force is FTEd on them the whole way down, and there's lots of time to leash or get hit with a snare or have other problems happen. But if you have 10-12 Rogues/Monks that sneak/flop up to the balcony, it should be possible to pull to balcony, then push the dragon over the edge to kill them in Hoshkar's lair. I used to push a siren out of the castle window duoing in Siren's Grotto when we couldn't kill the icys, same should work here.
Fluxing up through the Hoshkar's lair
Its possible to grav flux yourself up significantly with staggered grav fluxes. Testing in the arena showed that 3 wizards casting invert gravity with a half second or so delay allows all three to land, shooting you up high enough to reach a vertical boost equal to the height between Hoshkar's lair and the balcony. 3 red named wizards and 1 red named bard can possibly race for the three dragons up there by fluxing up directly instead of running the long way around.
Rampage Tanking with Mage corpsed box of the voids
You can rampage tank anything mana free for however long you need with a mage that corpses box of the voids at the fight location. Finalized did this for a bunch of vindis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgD_ACX0vt4 was an example.