Game Mechanics: Charmed npcs do too much damage

[cyryllis]

hmm charmed mobs for me seem to be doing classic dps- played enchanter all though EQs early years and I never noticed them being stronger in any significant way here (other than the fact that caster pets are WAY stronger here, due to non-classic spell casting AI)

Like others have said, mobs in general may just be hitting for slightly more- so obviously if you charm a mob hitting for slightly more than on eqmac, and send it against a mob with the same hp value, it will die faster here.

This issue will be difficult to address without an enormous amount of data mining, and some seriously deep research into the subject.

[Nirgon]

Charm lasting too long on npcs close in level to the caster can be proven at the same time as running damage parses. Shouldn't take more than 4 nights of parsing and solid EverQuest play.

Furthermore, charming mobs in fear and hate is WAY too reliable even for necros and druids.

[Splorf22]

I would be very curious to see AC logs in general from EQ mac, preferably from a low level player who is not subject to the various AC caps that Verant implemented because they suck at itemization. My gut feeling is that AC is not implemented properly here. I did some AC tests and my enchanter mitigated within like 20% of my warrior. The big difference is that the enchanter got hit way more. 1000AC vs 650AC.

The charm data from EQMac is worthless though IIRC. AFAIK Charm was revamped (and actually made stronger!) in PoP and then eventually charmed pet damage was nerfed because it was getting out of hand.

Realistically I think it's impossible to say much concrete about classic durations unless someone has logs. Nirgon says charm is too good in the planes, yet it's easily possible to dig up posts of people doing just that. My personal opinion (based mostly off of Xornn's Enchanter Guide) is that charm is probably weaker here than live. It would be interesting to try and measure channeling skill though.

[heartbrand]

AC is incorrect here, and I'm really curious to see how it will work with velious

[Handull]

Nirgon: I don't have live experience, but I know charming on p99 and I wouldn't say it is overly reliable *unless* you have tash and malo on the mob, which to me suggests a resist check problem more so than a charm is OP problem. A druid-tashed rat or monkey will often enough result in a fast charm break, less so if care is taken to charm a lower level pet. When I solo'd fear on my druid I could kill 51+ mobs with a charmed pet, but as I recall charm broke enough times and I had to wc cap or die. And charming a 51+ mob in fear/hate (aside from being foolish due to summons on pet breaks) will result in notably shorter charms compared to charming a 49 or 50 pet (level 60 toon).

I think the post Lor made a while ago about ac on a war vs enc show'd conclusively that the problem is pretty big, though I have no clue how to fix it.

[Splorf22]

"AC: 1053 Max: 140 (10.0%) Min: 32 (15.7%) Avg: 79. AvgDI: 80. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.43 ATK: 1857"
"AC: 1016 Max: 140 (8.0%) Min: 32 (22.7%) Avg: 76. AvgDI: 84. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.41 ATK: 1725"
"AC: 960 Max: 140 (12.1%) Min: 32 (18.2%) Avg: 83. AvgDI: 86. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.47 ATK: 1807"
"AC: 874 Max: 140 (24.7%) Min: 32 (8.6%) Avg: 91. AvgDI: 81. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.55 ATK: 1944"
"AC: 1040 Max: 325 (42.3%) Min: 110 (3.8%) Avg: 253. AvgDI: 207. PredDI: 218. Z: 0.66 ATK: 3103"
"AC: 1040 Max: 217 (48.6%) Min: 110 (0.0%) Avg: 192. AvgDI: 169. PredDI: 164. Z: 0.77 ATK: 4515"
"AC: 1040 Max: 325 (50.8%) Min: 110 (0.0%) Avg: 274. AvgDI: 220. PredDI: 218. Z: 0.76 ATK: 4348"
"AC: 1060 Max: 217 (41.7%) Min: 110 (0.0%) Avg: 186. AvgDI: 164. PredDI: 164. Z: 0.71 ATK: 3693"
"AC: 680 Max: 140 (19.6%) Min: 32 (7.8%) Avg: 89. AvgDI: 81. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.52 ATK: 1427"
"AC: 593 Max: 140 (20.5%) Min: 32 (9.4%) Avg: 93. AvgDI: 87. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.56 ATK: 1360"
"AC: 702 Max: 140 (18.8%) Min: 32 (14.1%) Avg: 87. AvgDI: 84. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.51 ATK: 1443"
"AC: 515 Max: 140 (23.3%) Min: 32 (10.3%) Avg: 93. AvgDI: 86. PredDI: 86. Z: 0.57 ATK: 1184"

Those were my results vs the undead foreman with Liia/Qelen BP healing me. The last four (with substantially lower AC) are Loraen, Sakuragi can't even get under 720 displayed AC while naked. So you can see that Loraen gets hit for about 90 on average and Sakuragi about 80. This doesn't mean that Loraen is a good tank though, because he gets hit by about 70% of the swings while Sakuragi got hit about 45% of the time.

[Nirgon]

I gotta tell you man, people didn't charm shit unless it was green at 40+ on live. That means in seb or otherwise. I've also played a 60 enchanter here pretty extensively and gotta tell you about this charm problem, it turns the enchanter into a god compared to others. My charmed dar knight with mage swords out parsed a decked out 60 monk, I kept the group hasted/claritied/group MR'd and had 1-3 mobs cc'd no problem at a time. No enchanter was doing all the dps with something charmed like this with enough mana to do all of the above listed.

Charming something in fear/hate was completely pointless. They've definitely hit the nail on the head here making mobs more resistant but.. druids charming shiverbacks for regular duration (tashed/malise'd or not) ain't right bros.

Side note regarding planar npc resists:
I was around during the time where the great complaints about mage/necro pets (esp necro pets with fs daggers) on planar raids existed and when mana stones were usable there. Iirc the -10 resist modifier and then ice comet was added to wizards and was barely enough to make us competitive with mage/necros on planar mobs. I could drop my 4 ice comets and maybe get a few partials on it as a lvl 50 with a rather rare full hit. At 60 this greatly improved even without lures (I'd sunstrike shit then, for a rare resist, occasional partial and suprisingly high chance at full dmg), but even at 52 I wouldn't dare use anything outside lure of frost on the planar side.

[pharmakos]

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

I gotta tell you man, people didn't charm shit unless it was green at 40+ on live.

people are ballsy-er in general on P99, but i think it has more to do with the fact that we have a greater understanding of game mechanics now.

[koros]

NPC and PC hits should probably be more normally distributed, with npc's having local maxima at min hit and max hit.

PCs should be similar, with the mean being weapon damage x 2 + damage bonus and slight peaks at min and max hit.

NPCs here hit max or near max all the damn time on other npcs, it doesn't look very normally distributed.

[Nirgon]

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

NPCs here hit max or near max all the damn time on other npcs, it doesn't look very normally distributed.

Koros def one of my fave posters and totally agree here

Originally Posted by Splorf22 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm sorry if you don't like it Nirgon, but when you have a game where the mobs are stronger than the PCs, a skill like charm is going to be OP as fuck. If it were up to me a spell like Allure would cost 800 mana. But it doesn't. Based on what Xornn wrote if anything I think charm is too weak here.

Charm was certainly a powerful spell and it should be here. But the risk/reward isn't quite in line. I'll read through this Xorn posting but I did group with enchanters who had all their sky/hate gear, buffed their CHA and had their epic. The advice of them that I succinctly recall during the time was "find a good green and charm it".

Having a dar knight charmed, even at 255 CHA for more than 4 minutes is crazy. I think its more to do with the resists than with the CHA duration.

IE: Huggie I think it was came by the necro guardian house and saw me with said charmed dar knight and was like seriously how the hell do you have that thing charmed that long. To which I responded, yes this is not classic.

However! I think with high CHA the values are rather close but again, full duration charms for druids in plane of fear are just crazy. Highly resistant mobs should be just that and break charm very easily.

In seb on a 60 wizard I can spam root without resist really ever on a krup or illis knight here. On live, bok and above would definitely get fairly regular resists on root. At 57 I solo'd seb entrance with my wizard epic on live and based on my experience here on a 60 wizard, I noticed 2 things:

1. I didn't regularly resist force shock type spells NEARLY enough (140+ magic from a blue con source, it should literally not land once) and cold nukes from shamans and fire nukes from wizards even at 180ish range were hitting for quite a bit (even back to back to back full damage hits) whereas at that resist range from a blue con caster on me should rarely if actually ever land one of those spells on me.
2. Root landed every single time I casted it on blue cons.

I stand by this as something I do exactly remember as I did it for many hours, across many weeks in my playing and have in fact tested it here.

I further stand by my assertions on Sirran being dictated here and that mage sword procs need to go away in this time line based on the facts that we should be at END (last day) of Kunark on our time line and SK bash for epic and mage sword proc on unsummoned from pets fix was in in the same patch.

That's all for today~

PS: Shit is getting classic from the recent wave of fixes I saw which does indeed include Sirran. Let's tie up mage sword procs + necro heal retro being dispellable.