Spells: Full audit of class spells for timeline correctness (all casting classes)

[Dolalin]

I suppose I've started to mix up my purpose in this thread. It started out as a simple "when did classes gain and lose spells?" and then drifted into also "when did spells change significantly?"

It's hard to do a list like this and not drift into the latter tbh.

[Dolalin]

I found a very nice post on EQNecros explaining the necro changes.

-->B. lvl 29 Vampiric Wave - AOE lifetap
-->E. lvl 49 Lifetap AOE
-->Removed as it made us too powerful
These spells were not removed for that reason. In fact, they were never removed at all. These spells never made it into the game. The game went live and these spells still weren't functional. You could scribe them into your book, but nothing would happen if you cast em. Eventually, Verant got around to them, but changed them to Lifetap-DoT spells before they ever went live. Personally, I think they are much better than AOE Lifetaps anyway.

-->D. Dead man walking
-->Changed to floating
True this did happen, but it was at the request of the Necromancers. Gasp! Yep, you heard me right. DMW's fourth effect was a fatigue regen. Since you were done meleeing by the time you got this spell, it seemed really pointless to have this effect, even though it was in-character for the undead to never get tired. The Necro community really wanted to be able to levitate, so we reasoned that levitating was kinda undead-ish, as ghost/spectres/wraiths/etc. float around. So, Verant actually changed the spell, and renamed it, and all because we asked them too! Imagine that, Verant actually listened to Necros back then.

-->F. Umbral Messenger
-->Never could get it to work. Removed it.
This is not correct at all. UM was a level 16 Necro spell, that worked just fine. The bad part is, it was ALSO a level 5 Druid spell by the name of Winged Courier. Now, being as old as I am, I don't quite remember if this happened during beta, or very shortly after public, but I definately remember WHAT happened. At that time, very few people were level 16, but there were plenty of level 5's. So when I logged in one day to see the message that both of these spells were being removed because people were abusing them, I knew right away it was the Druids that were doing it, as there just weren't enough level 16 Necros around to be to blame. I never did find out how people were abusing these spells though, as just as is their policy to this very day, they don't say HOW the abuse happened, just that it did. I bring all this up for historical reasons, as several of the nerfs we recieved later were because some other class found a way to ubuse something, and Necros happened to share that ability, so we got indirectly nerfed, but nerfed nonetheless. Incidently, neither Umbral Messenger nor Winged Courier were ever replaced by other spells. Given Verant's current ability to carefully define the parameters of spells, I bet it would be easy for them to put the spells back in the game and take away whatever property made them abusable, but alas, this will probably never happen.

Now as far as the removal of Charm and Beguile, this is quite true, but as was pointed out we were given Screaming Terror instead. And although it is also quite true that ST was really screwed up when it was first introduced into the game, and it STILL doesn't work as it originally was intended to, I still prefer it to Charm and Beguile, as the level limits of those spells compared to the levels we got them made them pretty much just fluff. ST, even in its current state, actually is quite useful comparetively.

So all in all, A-E is really a list of _good_ things that Verant has done for the Necromancer class. F is the only one listed there where we really got screwed over. Now, since I'm playing the venerable ol' historian here, I may as well point out that at one time, we also had a spell at level 4 called Corpse Bomb. Yep, way before Diablo II had it, EQ had Corpse Bomb! Well, kinda. CB never actually made it into the game, even though it was on Verant's spell lists. It's really too bad we don't have this spell. maybe then we would have a way to be useful on raids? [evil grin]

/pet attack
Necro casts corpse bomb.
Jobober explodes sending bone fragments flying in all directions, causing 2400 points of damage to your target!

[sigh] Beats the hell out of twitching. [Hangs his head in shame thinking about what Necros have become, compared to what they could have been.]

http://web.archive.org/web/200107301...al+Discussions

So basically, the level 29 and 49 lifetaps should be broken until June/July, when they are fixed and renamed, and finally Circle of Death should be renamed again to Bond of Death in August/September 1999.

There is also an explanation for how the 16th nec spell Umbral Messenger / 5th dru spell Winged Messenger worked, didn't know about that one.

Just to clarify things a little further. Umbral Messenger was long gone way before the message delivery/bard guild quests were in the game. (And as far as Necros were concerned, these bards are just convenient mobs to kill anyway [grin].) But either way, I think your point was that quests like this would be too easy. However, Umbral Messenger only worked in the same zone you are in, and it also only worked between players. So I think the exploit _probably_ was really more of a harassment thing. Unexpected and unwanted trade windows popping up and that sort of thing. This really was more or less just a fluff spell anyway [cough-voice graft-cough], so we really didn't loose anything from its removal. Would be fun to try to talk Verant into giving it back to us though, but with our balance issues, it can certainly wait.

[DMN]

I think that guy might be mixing up memories from beta with early release. Umbral messenger wasn't in release. And I thought winged courier was actually a shaman spell, not druid, which also wasn't in at release but was identical in function.

I don't even remember the level 20ish AoE lifetap even existing. But that might just be because the spells were so useless.

[Dolalin]

These necro spells are really fuckin doing my head in. Verant messed around with them so much.

29th lifetap was in as variously Wave of Enfeeblement (according to June patch message) or Vampiric Wave (according to EQLizer).

EQLizer: https://web.archive.org/web/19990508...cromancer.html

Patch Message: https://wiki.project1999.com/Patch_Notes#Spell_Changes

This of course now raises the question, where did Leach come from? It's not in EQLizer. So I missed that one. Shouldn't be in at launch? Or was it? Fuck sakes, I'll dig more.

[DMN]

Ya unfortunately necros were constantly being modified/changed even up to a year after launch. 90% of the time either a flat nerf or fundamentally changing the function of a spell. SKs, due to being necro's red headed step children similarly were all over the place.

[Benanov]

That also raises the question about whether we're going to get bugs that were fixed the next day, or an idealized, smoothed-over classic experience.

I sort of hope #2; it'd be hell on the team to do #1.

[DMN]

Well, obviously I have nothing to do with their decisions, but I believe they have said they are going to be doing monthly patches. If one wants to argue the "classicness" of an ability/bug/feature hanging around or not existing on a monthly basis, you'd probably just nerf/change stuff unless it existed for longer than two weeks.

[Dolalin]

My goal with this is just to present things how they were as accurately as possible, and the dev team can decide what to do.

[area]

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

I think that guy might be mixing up memories from beta with early release. Umbral messenger wasn't in release. And I thought winged courier was actually a shaman spell, not druid, which also wasn't in at release but was identical in function.

Winged Courier was definitely a Shaman spell. No idea if it was a druid spell or not. I never played a druid nor knew any before the removal. The spell was in game at launch. It was used to send an item or coins on your cursor to a person you had targeted. I don't recall it ever really being abused because it was in zone only when it was supposed to be anywhere. They couldn't fix it to do that or knew that would be a bit too overpowered, so they just removed it. Then again it is possible that it could have been abused by a dupe bug by unscrupulous people but they'd have never admitted or told us that is why it was being removed.

[Dolalin]

In other news I've found a Japanese site that has all the beta patches and lots of missing early 99 patches. Lots of interviews and letters from Smed and Brad too. Click a date range.

http://web.archive.org/web/200010061...i/news/old.htm

Translation view:

https://translate.googleusercontent....EZoZUwIzhkc-Bw

Been adding the patches slowly to:

https://wiki.project1999.com/Patch_Notes