Have been spending a bit more time looking for it, but I definitely remember partials back in the day. Playing a human monk who had worked up faction to travel through Cabilis, the SK guild still hated me. In the event I'd aggro them I would count my blessings if all of their HTs didn't land for full (otherwise it was insta-gib).
Also, they're discussing HT being OP over on the TLP servers -- mainly because it's mudflated to hit too hard for old world content -- and this guy also remembers getting partials having played back in the day as an SK.
Will keep digging.
https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/adjust-harms-touch.186572/page-3
Vasilyevich wrote:
“Several years ago all lower level mob HP was revamped to account for the DPS and power increases of the low level toons, but the raid mobs were ignored.”
Got a link on that matter, BL? From what I recall they only revamped their spell and effect usage - frogs in Guk for example still have the same HP I've got from my ancient notes. And note, I'm positive such changes occured years before the HT and pet revamps - those changes were well in place before Combine/Sleeper - and my gut tells me before Stromm even.
And the biggest problem with HT pre-Velious (and even then to a degree, I'll explain why) - is that the primary way of "giving extra HP" to raid mobs to make them difficult was in fact their regen - Nagafen and Vox regen at roughly 200 hp/sec for example and VP dragons are 1k/sec (or more, been a while) - which is meant to require a phenomenal amount of DPS for the era in each case to overcome but the ridiculous damage value and unresistablity (unlike all other burst DPS currently) of HT really skews the equation quite a bit.
But yes, I would agree in a non-stacking/in a group situation it's mostly "who cares" territory.
Locnar: To be frank, as someone who's been playing an SK for eons now to some level - HT back in those days was irrelevant, it could've been set to 50k and it wouldn't have mattered - the resistability of it was very high in the day, even with a fully debuff Nagafen you'd be lucky to land it for half, full/almost full (talking sub-20) resists after debuffs were quite common - much less one of the fights where the target doesn't have pathetic MR like Naggy