My rebuttal, agreements, and arguements... enjoy...
Malark on Karana
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shadow Panther [mailto:shdwpanther@...]
> Sent: Monday, May 10, 1999 10:30 AM
> To: EQ_Necromancer@onelist.com
> Subject: Re: [EQ_Necromancer] Just a thought..
>
>
> From: "Shadow Panther" <shdwpanther@...>
> f course, we know Necro's don't get anything of the sort.
>
> As for the problems that somebody asked for me to list,
> most of them are
> not Necromancer specific, but general spell-caster/other
> limitations and/or
> annoyances that, after some time, just really started to rub
> me raw. =/
> Take for instance, the MOBs apparently have no sense of UP,
> but apparently
> just horizontal line of sight. Black Burrow is an excellent
> example. You
> can stand up on top of the square block that the jaw is
> attached to, or even
> climb up the wall further -- which would make you a good 30ft
> or more up --
> and they can still hit you, from the ground, through the
> not-so solid rock,
> from _inside_ of the cave. Ridicules. Not to mention their
> ability to run
> through walls and doors.
>
That's area specific. I especially love In SplitPaw slaw rooms with
the five shamans? Stand in the middle of the paw and cast, they all get
pissed, but the pathfinding messes up and they have to run ALL THE WAY
AROUND THE PAW TABLE (which is large) in order to hit you. What do you do?
Before they get there, move three feet to the right, THEN they have to RUN
ALL THE WAY BACK! I've bugged it but its probably one of those level design
things that plays hell with the pathfinding for the AI. I also get
irritated at the griffins that can hit through walls and houses as well as
other things. I do know that its up to the area. Sometimes your skel will
run this massively laong route to get to you and end up bringing a train
with it. Sometimes the nasty red creature will walk through lava and four
obstacles as well as a myriad of other characters to kill you. There are
reasons for some of it, but nothing is perfect. More on this later.
> Another annoying thing that peeved me off was not being
> able to attack
> things in water. Sure, you can cast your spells at them,
> but it has no
> effect at all. If you tell your pet to attack the thing, he
> says that it's
> an illegal target. You actually have to get _into_ the water
> before you can
> attack the thing. Unless your channeling is 70-something,
> you can't cast a
> spell until you sink to the bottom and stop moving, and by
> then you're ate
> up anyway. This is an iffy example, though, as I realize
> there's some
> cases in which it could be 'taken advantage of', but it works for an
> example. But then, why not kill the shark before you hop
> into the water?
> What "mage" in their right mind would deliberately go feed
> the fishies?
> Heh..
>
EQ treats underwater and over water as two different worlds. Wanna
see underwater like you do in the day? Slowly move out little by little
until the water "top" graphic gets thinner and thinner as you slowly sink
lower. Boom, get it as small as possible and you can see underwater
perfectly. You can't target anything still, and you can't affect anything
until you breach that line and everything goes dark again. What you should
do is go underwater just barely enough, then run out. You don't have to
fight underwater. Go underwater, cast, then run out. The monster WILL
follow you. Again not sure of the reasoning for this, but everyone has this
problem not just us, and its not a big problem at all, just stay close to
shore.
> Something else is their apparent psychic connection with
> the planet. I
> mean, seriously, you're completely across the zone from the
> thing and it
> will still....
>
> ...know where you're at, even if you're far under
> ground and
> it's top side _and_ all the way on the other side of the zone...
> ...make its way to you through maze or 'high water'...
> ...and begin pounding the snot out of you...
>
> Blah! That seriously needs to be changed.
>
Why? You know how easy it would be to abuse things? Check out
Feign Death. A lot of people complain about the monsters coming back to
kill you as soon as you get up even if they are half a zone away. What
stops us from waiting for them to get a decent range away, cast another DoT,
then Feign Death again right there? The point is in order to make it so
people can't use bad terrain or other things to cheat kills. Hell people do
it now. Check out Najena. You see little cheater wizzies and clerics do it
all the time. In Lavastorm there are those double doors to Najena. Train a
monster up the left of the door wall then just barely fall into the door at
the top. The monster will continue to try to go THROUGH the wall higher
than the door, which it can't. Now you in the doorway can turn around and
cast spells at it all day, killing multiple ultra red elementals all the
time. Everytime I see that I peition and take screenshots. One person had
the balls to tell me it wasn't cheating but strategy. The point is there
would be infinitely more ways to cheat if the monsters didn't have total
zone knowledge and a hatelist that doesn't go away till it dies or you zone.
You might argue that Verant didn't do a good job with the AI or something,
but seriously, it had to come out SOMETIME. As a developer I understand a
bit more that you want to add everything but eventually you have to put out
SOMETHING. And I'd rather err on the less cheating side than the more
realistic side.
> We're spell-casters, not fighters. It seems like varant
> is doing their
> best to stop us from being so. It's not like we could make our selves
> untouchable, as our spells have a certain range and if we can get "up
> there", so possibly can they.
>
There are several ways. Use your pet as a shield, use others as
shields, don't go nuts with spellcasting, conserve! I think the current way
is quite good and that spellcasters have a definite advantage over fighters,
especially in PvP. I dueled an 18th level Shadowknight and won because all
I had to do was move forward and turn around, and move around a lot. He
could only hit me when I was in front of him, and he spent a lot of time
reorienting on me. Now that SUCKS. It might have gone different had he
been in 3rd person view though.
> Just a bunch of the stupid little things like that which
> really, really
> peeves me off 'bout the game.
>
> There are Necro problems as well, though. Varant
> seems bent on
> making Necromancers research their spells, to the distance of
> not giving the
> player any choice. Sure, if you want to do that then the
> option's cool,
> but incredibly annoying to us folks who don't. Most of our
> 20-ish or better
> spells are not only on NPC's on ridiculously out of the way
> places (on an
> island, from an island, which you have to swim out to), but
> on NPC's that
> kill us on sight. Deliberately putting _our_ spells on incredibly
> aggressive NPC's/magician vendors that are near impossible to
> find. That's
> just plain stupid.
>
You think WE have problems? We at least get our pets to the 34th
level I believe. Mages have their 24th level pet in the middle of nowhere
and after that its straight research. Believe me that every other
spellcaster class has the same if not worse problem that we do. Besides,
its not as bad as you think. The frequency of component drops was increased
by 300% and believe me I can see the difference. I get Words of Tyranny and
words of Elemental all the tiem off green elementals in Lavastorm, and Runes
of lava crawlers. Trading will be necessary but I don't think its all that
difficult as you make it out to be. I'm confident that it should work out
alright. Might be annoying, but I don't see it getting impossible till
somewhere after level 34 when even our second book doesn't contain the
spells.
> Then there's the Necro guild in Neriak. Why, oh why
> do the ghouls
> attack us? Different deity? Big deal, they're both evil
> deities and I
> don't remember reading anywhere where they hated each other.
>
Yer lucky you even get that far. I know just about everything isn't
allowed into Third Gate. I'll bet that's a bug anyway but I think you HAVE
to server Innoruuk to get into The Lodge of the Dead. Most guards are
agnostic so they don't have a problem, but all Dark Elf Necros HAVE to serve
Innoruuk, and if you aren't with us, you're against us. Its that simple. I
think you'll probably find yourself KOS in the lodge itself too, but you
never know. Besides, Invis to Undead is like a 2nd Circle spell, you should
have this already.
Yer done. In my opinion you have some valid arguements. EQ is
definitely buggy and the complaints you had about buggy things were valid.
You have to look at it from a business perspective and a developer
perspective as well too though. The more realistic you make a world and the
harder it gets to implement. You HAVE to stop somewhere. They are working
on a lot of these problems too. I think the longer you stick around the
better it will get. I already think they've done ten times better than
Ultima Online did. ;)
MAlark on Karana