Game Mechanics: CHA seems to be impacting charm durations on P99 far more than it did on Live

[Torven]

Charm's precise mechanics are not 100% certain, but I know this:

I had found some old enchanter posts of people who had done charm tests at varying CHA levels and the results indicated either no change or so small as to be within the (albeit significant) margin of error.

I did a lot of charming on animals on my druid on Al'Kabor, so I have a lot of data from it. Charm duration was ~5.5 minutes average using 20 minute charm spells. This was the case on both green mobs and dark blues. (using animal tash as well) Halfling druids have low CHA.

A charm test (an overnight log with automated casting) I did on Live using a level 25 enchanter with significant CHA on a level 1 decaying skeleton in 2015 resulted in a very similar average duration. (~55 ticks)

Daybreak recently stated that charm (and root, blind, fear) have a minimum 5% chance to break per tick. So that explains why the spell can break on level 1s with max CHA. However if it were 5% chance per tick every tick, it would break far too often compared to the observations. So that leads me to believe that the Daybreak dev omitted another roll that determines if the save throw is even checked. Currently this roll is 25% on TAKP. (total domination AA reduces it)

The Daybreak developer was explaining what charisma does for the player:

how much merchants will charge you
bard fizzle chance
Chance of an NPC aggro'ing you when you cast pacify
Chance for SPA 63 to successfully blur your target
Chance for DI spells to heal for their full amount
Chance for SPA 22(charm), 31(mez), 34(confuse), 63(blur) to be resisted, you hit this cap at 200 CHA
Note SPA 3(movement rate?), 20(blind), 22(charm), 99(root) have a minimum 5% chance of breaking every tick regardless of how much CHA you have. (only 22 gets a CHA bonus)

note: I added the ()s except the last one; that's copied from our code comments that I put above our logic.

So that post says that charm, mez, confuse and blur resist rolls have a CHA modifier when the spells land. Then it suggests (I'm not 100% sure on that, it's a little ambiguous) a bonus for charm tick saves.

I think the most likely conclusion given the available data is that CHA merely helps (if at all) charm hold when the chance to break is above the 5% minimum-- i.e. the NPC's MR is high enough to resist above 5%-- such that if the target is zero MR then CHA does nothing to help. Achieving that minimum is also easily accomplished with tash on the target for common NPCs and tash is not even needed if the NPC is a low dark blue.

Incidentally I made the chance 6% on TAKP since 25% * 5% seemed too good in my simulations vs. the data I had. 25% is a guess anyway and it's possible rounding errors or comparison operators (> vs >= etc) might explain the discrepancy.

[derpcake2]

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

Another possibility is that CHA did factor into the per-tick break check, but there was an effectiveness cap that was fairly low, like the vendor price CHA cap, which I think is 100-130ish (so says EQTraders).

That would actually align pretty well with past EQ dev posts on the subject vs these results.

You've seen my previous post, and since you didn't refute it, I'll be waiting for the answer to the first question.

You already broke magicians, without a second thought beyond achieving your goal, the community can do without your agenda-feedback.

I understand you said "sorry" for that, and I don't care, because you obviously haven't learned anything from the situation.

Did you consult Haynar before going onto a crusade which resulted into no mage pets? You claim to have sources you can rely on, but went on a 50 hour quest which ended up by staff having to undo previous work?

You should at the very least be flagged for providing feedback that should be taken with some buckets of salt.

[Dolalin]

Thanks Torven.

Given I just saw Haynar had made some changes to Enchanter charm in 2015, maybe P99 is already using rolls similar to TAKP?

In which case the first test I posted from that p99 Enchanter might be obsolete.

[cd288]

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

Charm's precise mechanics are not 100% certain, but I know this:

I had found some old enchanter posts of people who had done charm tests at varying CHA levels and the results indicated either no change or so small as to be within the (albeit significant) margin of error.

I did a lot of charming on animals on my druid on Al'Kabor, so I have a lot of data from it. Charm duration was ~5.5 minutes average using 20 minute charm spells. This was the case on both green mobs and dark blues. (using animal tash as well) Halfling druids have low CHA.

A charm test (an overnight log with automated casting) I did on Live using a level 25 enchanter with significant CHA on a level 1 decaying skeleton in 2015 resulted in a very similar average duration. (~55 ticks)

Daybreak recently stated that charm (and root, blind, fear) have a minimum 5% chance to break per tick. So that explains why the spell can break on level 1s with max CHA. However if it were 5% chance per tick every tick, it would break far too often compared to the observations. So that leads me to believe that the Daybreak dev omitted another roll that determines if the save throw is even checked. Currently this roll is 25% on TAKP. (total domination AA reduces it)

The Daybreak developer was explaining what charisma does for the player:



note: I added the ()s except the last one; that's copied from our code comments that I put above our logic.

So that post says that charm, mez, confuse and blur resist rolls have a CHA modifier when the spells land. Then it suggests (I'm not 100% sure on that, it's a little ambiguous) a bonus for charm tick saves.

I think the most likely conclusion given the available data is that CHA merely helps (if at all) charm hold when the chance to break is above the 5% minimum-- i.e. the NPC's MR is high enough to resist above 5%-- such that if the target is zero MR then CHA does nothing to help. Achieving that minimum is also easily accomplished with tash on the target for common NPCs and tash is not even needed if the NPC is a low dark blue.

Incidentally I made the chance 6% on TAKP since 25% * 5% seemed too good in my simulations vs. the data I had. 25% is a guess anyway and it's possible rounding errors or comparison operators (> vs >= etc) might explain the discrepancy.

So just to clarify these are all tests from an emulated server in the PoP era, Live EQ today, and statements from Daybreak as to how Charm works on their servers today?

[Torven]

No, my druid charming was done on the Al'Kabor server which was a Sony server that was essentially EQ circa November 2002 as far as mechanics goes. Not to be confused with The Al'Kabor Project which is the emu I help to develop. I'm sure p99 devs took a lot of data from Al'Kabor when it was up; it's the most legitimate source the emus had for a long time.

Unless Al'Kabor's server code is leaked, you're not going to get definitive answers. We can only make best guesses. (even then charm could have been changed between 1999 and 2002) I spent a lot of time parsing AK logs to get average charm durations to compare with logic that we've implemented on our server. I favor log data above comments and even dev posts.

I spent a great deal of time working on EQ mechanics and collecting data on Live servers. I can say that much of the underlying logic was left intact and that Sony tended to build on top of it instead of scraping it and redoing it. (although lately they tend to be changing more of it) It wouldn't surprise me if charm's CHA modifiers had remained the same all these years-- particularly when the dev says the cap is 200 still.

[Wurl]

Thanks a lot for the good research in this thread, Dolalin and Torven.

[cd288]

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

No, my druid charming was done on the Al'Kabor server which was a Sony server that was essentially EQ circa November 2002 as far as mechanics goes. Not to be confused with The Al'Kabor Project which is the emu I help to develop. I'm sure p99 devs took a lot of data from Al'Kabor when it was up; it's the most legitimate source the emus had for a long time.

Unless Al'Kabor's server code is leaked, you're not going to get definitive answers. We can only make best guesses. (even then charm could have been changed between 1999 and 2002) I spent a lot of time parsing AK logs to get average charm durations to compare with logic that we've implemented on our server. I favor log data above comments and even dev posts.

I spent a great deal of time working on EQ mechanics and collecting data on Live servers. I can say that much of the underlying logic was left intact and that Sony tended to build on top of it instead of scraping it and redoing it. (although lately they tend to be changing more of it) It wouldn't surprise me if charm's CHA modifiers had remained the same all these years-- particularly when the dev says the cap is 200 still.

So the test was done on a server that is Luclin era mechanics? (Luclin was December 2001)

[cd288]

Dol, also have an additional question for you on this. How do we square this with the statement from Brad McQuaid on the Wiki about Charisma (copied below for reference)?

"CHA: affects amount you will be paid for goods by NPC merchants, and how much they will pay you; affects the saving throw on certain bard and enchanter spells (charms in particular)"

[Dolalin]

Originally Posted by cd288 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Dol, also have an additional question for you on this. How do we square this with the statement from Brad McQuaid on the Wiki about Charisma (copied below for reference)?

"CHA: affects amount you will be paid for goods by NPC merchants, and how much they will pay you; affects the saving throw on certain bard and enchanter spells (charms in particular)"

I've been mulling this over and I think Torven's interpretation, namely that the CHA save on charm breaks existed but was only significant against e.g. even cons where you weren't already at the MR resist floor, does fit the data. We wouldn't have expected to see any CHA bonus for green and blue con charm break tests, but that's what everyone seems to have been testing against because let's face it, it was safer.

The problem really is that there's so little data on even con+ charms and we're never going to get any more.

Maybe Haynar has already coded up something resembling TAKP's charm logic anyways on P99 and this thread has nothing new to offer. Always good to discuss though.

[Keebz]

This looks like PoP(?) era, but this guide suggests "Charm does an initial check that consists of a level of caster vs level of mob modified by MR.
Charisma affects this by adding a modifier to the MR approx 10 percent of your total charisma.. so a 300 chr enchanter gets a bonus neg 30 check. After the initial charm land..theres a per tick check based off the server clock."

It is unclear to me how noticeable the difference between say 100 and 200 CHA would be if this were mechanism and whether it jives with the log data.