Patch Notes, Sunday October 3rd

[Lazortag]

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

Uthgaard: The following guards are now on a 6 minute respawn timer: The guards of the Karanas, the Deputies of Misty Thicket, the Bouncers of Feerrott, da Bashers of Innothule, Guards Colin & Valon

Just curious, but why are the guards in Feerrott, Misty Thicket and Innothule now on a 6 minute timer? I thought that the changes to guard respawn timers were supposed to affect "newbie" zones, which I'm fairly sure Feerrott, Misty Thicket and Innothule count as.

edit: Uthgaard at some point said that it was only supposed to affect cities, but I believe that's incorrect, and it was supposed to affect newbie zones too. If not, then I guess that makes me happy since I always loved killing the guards in nektulos.
edit 2: Evidence:

As we are sure many people are aware, there are guards that exist specifically for the purpose of giving new characters a place to run in order to be saved from a certain death. However, as many people have mentioned, these guards are frequently either dead, or engaged by players choosing to hunt them. This makes things very frustrating for newer players, and with the large influx of new players due to the release of EverQuest: The Ruins of Kunark, we decided that a change was warranted.

Though we do not have a problem with players choosing to hunt guards, the newbie guards themselves, specifically the ones at the gates of cities and in the vicinity of newbie zones, need to remain alive under most circumstances. To that end, we have buffed up these newbie-protecting guards, made them immune to magic, and given them some pretty good healing properties, in order to make them less attractive to people hunting them.

In addition, though we have left the guards inside cities as-is from the perspective of power, we've also found a problem with the respawn rate. Previously they were typically on a six-minute timer, making them spawn much faster than an equivalent NPC would in a dungeon. We have normalized the respawn time of guards inside cities to bring them in line with dungeon NPCs.

Okay, so I guess this slightly contradicts what I said. Guards in newbie zones (or at least the ones directly outside cities?) should be stronger but according to the patch notes, their respawn timer went unchanged. The reverse is true for guards in cities - their stats went unchanged but their respawn timers were upped to twenty-something minutes.

[Rufus]

I should probably know this, but what was /tgb?

[Uthgaard]

On live, the two newbie guards immediately outside of city gates got stronger. That was it. There are three live patch notes that address guards.

/tgb is targetgroupbuff

[Puyen]

Nice large amount of patch notes. Highly appreciate the dedication of your team.

One question about the guards though. You mentioned healing capabilities, that means they will all be able to cast heals on themselves or just regen faster