Game Mechanics: Issue with Bard songs and missing notes.

[Lazortag]

This has gone on for long enough that I know it just can't be coincidence. I have my singing skill past 200 and find that I'm missing just as many notes as when I was level 1. I'm not sure how often I miss notes when I actually have an instrument in hand, but I know that when I'm in a group (which usually means I'm dual-wielding), I miss notes so often that it's become quite difficult to consistently 4-twist songs. This doesn't mean I never 4-twist, or that I don't succeed in 4-twisting the majority of the time, but that I'm unable to consistently do it because of the annoying (and now predictable) missed notes I keep getting.

There should probably be a more noticeable difference in the number of notes I miss with a singing skill of 200, unless I just misunderstand what a singing skill of 200+ is supposed to be good for?

Also I've heard Cha affects missed notes, but my Cha is at 134, which doesn't seem so low as to affect the number of notes I miss this badly.

[mmiles8]

Missed notes are essentially fizzles by game mechanics. I can't say with certainty for p99 without looking at the code, but it should take the higher of your dex or charisma, and every point of dex or cha will reduce your chance to fizzle by 1%. You can never have higher than a 95% chance to fizzle or lower than a 5% chance to fizzle. So, at best you're going to miss a note one out of every 20 songs.

So on a sliding scale spanning 90 percent, a sufficiently high charisma or dexterity would overcome a low instrument skill, or vice versa.

I went through and looked at the spell data for every song. Everything below 38 has a 15% fizzle adjust attribute, 39-40 are 6%, 40+ are 0%. So lower level songs will have an increased chance to miss notes than higher level songs. (I believe the fizzle_adj attribute was implemented in Kunark, to overcome the problems with increased chance to fizzle spells close to the level cap, there will be a patch note mentioning this somewhere)

I don't know what point in the math the fizzle adjustment is calculated in here. But if you took a large sample of song starts, you could probably identify the point of error, if there is one. (If you eqclient.ini:LOG=TRUE, they're great for data gathering)

I don't have a high level bard myself. But if you want, I could help you get some workable diagnostic statistics on this in a matter of probably 30 minutes.


Edit - Found the patch that I was talking about, and its addendum:

Misc Changes:
Reduced the casting difficulty (fizzle rate) of all spells over level 56. Spells have always previously been set up so that it's usually more efficient to use a spell from a previous circle than the current one. The formula did not take into account the fact that everyone stops at 60.

Casting Difficulty:
The patch message mentioned that the casting difficulty for spells above level 56 was reduced. The actual value is spells of level 51 or above. These spells should fizzle less than they did before.

[Lazortag]

That's all very fascinating and when it's not so early in the morning, I'll look at what you said again and respond appropriately. But just so you know I did read it. Thanks!

edit: also I'd say I probably miss a note around 5% of the time when carrying an instrument, but when dual-wielding it's definitely more than that. I'll actually test myself exactly how often I "fizzle" even with both Dex and Cha at over 100. I'll try and do it over a long-ish period of time so that it's actually statistically significant. Also, <--math major.