NPC Spawn Issue: Magi P'Tasa Staff of Elementary Mastery Earth drop rate

[gwideon]

Gnomish Greetings!

Gnomes are known to be tenacious when it comes to their projects, so I ask you to bear with me and please review the following research regarding the Staff of Elementary Mastery: Earth. I believe the drop rate should be considerably better to match the period we are currently in on blue to be about 25% of the time and I think currently it is close to 5%. I could be unlucky, granted. However I have seen a post of a poor mage that claimed to kill 20 Magi without a drop and ended up quitting the class to become a shaman. And there have been calls from other players on the server to please increase the drop rate.

Research support #1
Sometime before revamp of Hate the rate of the Magi staff was increased.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...97563658127824

RE: Getting Close To Completion
# Nov 30 2000 at 9:09 PM
Anonymous
Sorry to disappoint you but the staff of elem mastery earth won't move from Inny, as they gave up the idea of making Inny and CT lvl60+ gods with new loot.
At least the staff seems to have become a much more common drop since the patch that fixed the Elemental Binder drop (reports of inny drops afteer that patch were showing something close to a 50% drop for the staff). So don't worry if u have what it takes to get the crown from PoA, the staff should be attainable now.
Several mages have already all the items but the burning embers, whose location is still unknown/uncomfirmed and that is probably not in game yet (I wish my guild was able to go to PoA island 7th..).

Ektarot, mage 55th.

If Sony upped the drop rate from Inny, they would be less likely to revert to extreme rarity especially when they are in the process of revamping epic quests for many classes. They may have changed it based on the increased spawn rate of the mini over the god. Since the mini would spawn 2 times for a week they may have made it half the rate or 25% instead of the 50% he mentions.


Research support #2
Admittedly this is not a completely accurate picture but it supports the fact that the drop rate is more frequent.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...98802407921501

For Nisumbus
Apr 23 2001 at 6:07 AM Rating: Default

This is just fyi, Shovel of Ponz is the pre-50 earth focus, Mastery Staff is for 50+ pet spells. I looted it Friday night, my first (!) trip to Hate. It is MUCH easier to get now than it was, from all I have heard. Got 2 pieces Apothic also, off the mini-boss ). Good hunting all.

Forte Fortissimo
59 Conjurer
A`dileab de Paegen
Tunare

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...98675622869743

on Magi`P`Tasa now
# Apr 08 2001 at 1:57 PM Rating: Default
Anonymous
the staff noz drop from Magi , a mini boss level 55 . this guy always drops staff and some apothic armor.

While I do not believe that the drop rate is 100%, if the player thinks it is this common he is likely to have seen multiple drops to come to this conclusion.

Research support #3
This poster rates the staff as rare, but notice he bases his declaration on an estimated 1 in 5 drop rate

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...01050875296393

Magi P`Tasa and demis
# Jan 08 2002 at 11:52 AM Rating: Default
Anonymous
I've gone to hate many times trying to get my epic. From what I've seen there are about 10 demi spawns throughout the zone. Each demi is random to spawn through those 10 and do not have PH. They appear to be on a 72 hour timer. I killed the Magi 6 times before getting a Staff of Elemental Mastery: Earth. From what I've been able to gather this staff is very rare. I'd estimate about 1 out of 5 spawns.

Magi loot:
Common drop: Two parts of apothic
Rare: Staff of Elemental Mastery: Earth (along with the apothic)

He estimates 1 out of 5, but other posts support 25%. It is possible he was unlucky that it took him 6 attempts.

Research support #4
This is more antidotal but supports the overall conclusion that the Staff was not ultra-rare. I have seen dozens of posts complain about the difficulty in obtaining the Pegasus cloak and the crown without mention of the staff. The following is a post from 2016, but he is talking about his experience in our era of 2001.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...80946156927777

Still doing this?
# Mar 06 2016 at 10:15 AM
Umbridge
1 post
Wow, people are still doing this one? I finished this one in 2001. It was terrible and costly. The crown and the cloak were the worst.

Imagine doing this quest when it was current content.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...m9771274768235

RE: Peggy Cloak
Dec 18 2000 at 8:18 AM
The cloak is definately one of the rarest items to get for a mages epic quest seeing as how its still a great item for other classes as well hence its killed on sight whether its for a mages epic or not. If you're a nice person, obviously help a mage out if you come across Quillmane.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...97369041223648

RE: They hate our class
# Nov 08 2000 at 8:33 AM
Anonymous
They hate our class cause we have to Kill Phiningel Atropos ? Where's the Problem to kill him ? We went him down 5 times in one week with 12 to 18 ppl I think this was the easy part of the quest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

the quest is possible but not so easy like the rogue quest for sure but if I ever held myself the mage epikquest item I think I m very proud.
A rogue cannot solo his quest and a mage for sure not but thats a quest not all can finish.

the only part which really sucks is the pegasus cloak : to camp a rare random spawn in a very big zone is more then boring and not able for a mage to do that cause without track you ll never find her but it s a part ok so I try to catch her and be lucky when I do so that s a part of the GAME.

All of these posts, and many more, were complaining about the Pegasus cloak, which can be a pain, but it is nowhere near as difficult to obtain on p99 as the staff. Mages here would laugh at someone complaining about the Pegasus cloak given the difficulty of obtaining the staff.

Research support #5
This supports a 25% drop rate. It is a post from 2004, but he specifically mentions that he got his staff before the hate revamp when the staff was moved to revenants. It took him 4 full Hate raids and he thought it was significant enough to explain how difficult that was.

https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...10384267182270

RE: The whole 46er
Dec 23 2004 at 5:58 PM
MrFuzzah
I understand where your coming from, but you must realize this epic was made in the Kunark Era. At the time, this was the most difficult of all epics to complete.

The magician epic was a HUGE time sink. The entire quest is made up of rare drops from rare spawns, whereas most guilds were competing for the same mobs at the time.

Phinigel Atropos took 16 kills before i recieved a staff. Magi P'Tasa took me 4 full out hate raids (Before Revamp), A 3 Day(Yeah 3 day long) PoSky raid to get to the 7th Isle for my crown. Torch of the Elements used to require a full raid through CoM(before revamp). And Quillmane took me over 100+ hours of camping for the cloak. All are rare drops from rare mobs.
Its not as if most of these were soloable at the time, either. Phinigel took 18+ people to kill him safely. PoSky we were looking at 50+ for 3 days, before the raid function was available.

If your looking at this from a PoP or Omens standpoint, all epics are easy to complete. If your looking back to the times when it was useful, it was rare and almost impossible to get.

He is calling the item rare when it only took him 4 attempts at the staff and he is also emphasizing the difficulty of the other pieces of the quest. It also shows that this mob was not as contested as it is on P99. If he is doing full raids on the zone it is unlikely that there were hit squads that are targeting specifically this mob if they are clearing the zone. This was also my experience on EQlive; you raided the entire zone of Hate.

Other reasons
This is a bad situation which has the potential to become much worse. There have been posts on the trading forums about the earth staff MQ selling for 700k to 1 million platinum (down from 1.5 million). Most players will not see this much platinum and I hope inflation never makes this the norm for the health of the economy. This becomes a prime candidate for RMT types to obtain for MQ if they can score huge amounts of cash or platinum for an item of this rarity. It could tempt normally honest players to do something against the rules. This is not good for the health of the server. It encourages some people to break the rules, which they are doing now by camping out in zone to get this staff which will lead to others doing the same. Since they are camping out in zone they are not just taking down Magi, but many of the other named minis which is also leading to other classes bottlenecks.

My personal experience on P99
My mage was created in October 2014 and made 60 when chardok AE groups were popular well before the change to limit AE. I knew the difficulty of the Mage epic was high and that it wouldn’t fall into my lap. I chose my guild(s) based on the ability to reach island 7 in Plane of Sky and regularly raid the planes. I attended every Hate raid I could knowing that I needed to get lucky to have a chance to complete this epic. As you can probably guess, Inny and later Magi were never up when I took this approach. I signed up for bat phone etc. However, today Hate minis are not most guilds primary target and no one in our guild was tracking them on a daily/hourly basis. So, I made a second ranger and levelled him up to 51 later in 2018 with an eye on more actively tracking my target specifically for this purpose. It turned out he actually did spawn but was very short lived (haha). I amassed and held the top dkp in my guild so that on the off chance it did drop I would have a chance to get the staff. I am regularly in the top 3 – 5 in dkp accrual, always the top mage and pass over many drops because of my obsession. My tracker kept dying to pulls and to small hit squads that chose to fight the mob close to the tracking spot at the most inopportune time. So, I leveled a guild cleric from 30s to 50 and we got him an epic so that we could recover quicker and not lose prime tracking spawn time to send people up to hate to recover the tracker. I have killed Magi 10 times so far, and with how contested this spawn is I consider it lucky to have had that many chances. I have seen other groups kill Magi multiple times. I have yet to see the staff drop. Yes, I know players who have their epic; they know they were extremely lucky. As I hope this communicates, I many and others have put considerable effort into getting this item. I am not just throwing up my hands and saying it is impossible. Mages should not have to go to these extremes to have a chance at their epic.

Conclusion
These posts show that that the item was not as rare on EQLive as it is on P99. What they considered rare probably seems ridiculously easy to P99 players. Based on the evidence provided it seems a rate of 25% would be closer to what was on live at this time period. I would argue it should be more like to 50% to account for the backlog of many years of pent up demand that is out there, but I know that is not how P99 is determined. The rarity is not healthy for the server, and is tempting for RMT to exploit.

This took considerable time to research for every pertinent post I had to wade through hundreds of junk posts, broken links, and unrelated information. I ask that you please consider this for correction as it is a real problem.

Thank ye kindly!

[gwideon]

Please also review this post about the necessity of adding a FTE message on Hate minis:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=356452

[Pringles]

Some of this other than drop rate could be fixed by disabling that portion of the quests MQ capability. At the very least it would put a hamper on those hit squads who stay up there 24/7

Really extrapolate that out to all essential epic quest items and it would go a ways toward leveling the playing field of those who have been here 10 years vs some poor guy who started a year ago who will never be able to accomplish his goals or even get to enjoy a classic journey. I would also argue that the new guys experience is more important than a lifer whom is paying the rent with MQ's. It's just a matter of what philosophy you want to run things by, creating a classic experience for EQ fans or catering to people whose joy for this was hollowed out a long time ago.

[Izmael]

Mage epic is too OP to be common.

[Pringles]

That is an absurd statement. By that measure so is the cleric epic. I have no idea why this was changed to 3 day spawn. It seems to be based off one post on Usenet while we have a very well written guide to the contrary. Not to mention if you take the time to read the sources nowhere is the staff talked about as being hard to get. QM being the rarest due to less knowledge back in.

@OP See what you can dig up on http://www.magecompendium.com if archive caught enough of it

[Pretzelle]

Good luck in your quest to achieve Elemental Mastery, my gnomish friend.

[Pringles]

So the drop rate was increased in early 2002 according to patch notes. So lets speculate it had a 5% drop rate off the magi who spawned every 12 hours. That's an epic piece every 10 days versus 60 days with a 72 hour spawn. Only having a few epics on each server during the xpac just doesn't add up for me personally. There is plenty of evidence of people whining about how rare it dropped but nothing to support an absurd 72 hour spawn. Phinigel had a 12 hour spawn in this era and I have seen a couple references to magi and him being the same caliber of bottleneck.

[gwideon]

Why do I feel I have stepped into the middle of someone else's argument? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I saw the thread in the general forum, and the response was that was not the correct forum; post in bugs. I also saw that it should be based on research (which I knew) rather than opinion; so I dug in and did the research. I think the research supports what everyone knew, that the staff was too rare to match the era we were playing in.

Please keep in mind my intention in this thread is to establish a bug fix to match EQLive era 2001 rather than a non-classic proposal. When I was reading the threads doing background research they were already talking about MQ of the Pegasus cloak, so that is classic for this era.

Thanks for your comments.

[Pringles]

Everything you have put out has already been seen by the staff not to mention archived materials you do not have access to. It's a matter of swaying hearts and minds when no smoking gun is found. Good luck with your bumps [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]


edit: i mean you are using a piece of evidence from 2004 which is past the January 2002 rate increase to begin with a critique. this is not my fight at all but do not spurn help when given, kinda silly.

[Ligma]

By that measure so is the cleric epic

If mage epic still hits for 81 then it's literally OP considering it's supposed to hit for like 67 and was upgraded later because mages don't get a pet in luclin.