WTF is the deal with Harmony!

[Scoresby]

Originally Posted by kaev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Aye Merekai, on live Harmony would work without fail on any mob up to 5 levels about yours (there was the +6 level hardcap on landing spells on NPCs) because it is classed as "beneficial" and so there is no resist. You could still get social agro as a result of mobs being close together, with "how close is too close?" being a function of relative level between the puller and the mobs. There were said to be linked mobs as well, that would always come together regardless of Harmony/Lull/level, but I never encountered anything like that doing group content casually.

On live in Kunark era the Lull line was less effective than here because of it being resisted more and crit resisted more AND because most people didn't know to jack their charisma to reduce crit resist chance. Basicly Lull line was risky as hell unless mobs were at least 5 or 6 levels lower than the caster, and even then things could get exciting in a big hurry. Most people wiped a couple groups early on and then swore off the spells. Between the marginal utility and lack of player knowledge & skill there were more jokes about Lull-line than there were uses of it.

At some point after PoP came out (iirc) they made Lull line more powerful but put limits on its use as well. They reduced crit resist chance to something like 1/3 of what it had been, and iirc they eliminated a hidden increase to resist chance that had been present which had the effect of further reducing crit resists because there were fewer resists that could crit. They also introduced hard level caps for each of the spells to limit their use. At that point any spell in the Lull line above Lull itself became easymode pulling for blue-con mobs that didn't exceed the level cap on the spell (Lull itself didn't reduce agro radius enough to be very useful.)

There were other changes to agro along the way, to the point that a skilled (knowledgeable) player could facepull singles & doubles in a lot of dungeon content without the benefit of agro reducing spells. Interestingly, that made for some damned fine warrior pullers, most of whom had learned their stuff as monks or SKs in earlier days.

I haven't found anyone who spoke about this (or knew anyone else that did this back in the day), but there was a bug with lull where if you stood near max range and chain cast lull on a target until critical resist, you would often get a single mob to come from a pack. I have no idea what mechanic was involved, but I remember using it to pull singles from the king camp in Sol B and in CoM on my paladin. It almost seemed as if your level was treated as max level when casting from range. Definitely buggy and repeatable.