FEBRUARY 21, 2001

Patch Day:

Today's patch contains a wide variety of enhancements and changes. Due to the number of changes being made, this list is primarily a summary. Extended descriptions of the changes and the reasoning behind them can be solicited on the EverQuest Message Boards.

Spell and Skill Changes:

Druids, Shaman, and Clerics:

• Superior Healing moved to level 51 for shamans and druids.
• Casting difficulty of Superior Heal reduced (less fizzles).
• New level 55 Druid and shaman spell, Chloroblast, similar to remedy for clerics.
• New Druid spell at level 60, upgrade to superior healing, Natures Touch.
• Created a new spell effect for Celestial Healing, Celestial Elixir, and Torpor. This will allow them to stack with all other spells, save spells of the same type (Heal over time). Prior to this, all heal-over-time spells followed the same rules as regeneration spells.
• Reduced the casting difficulty of Remedy.
• Lowered recast time on Wake of Karana.

Paladins:

• Added Endure Magic spell at level 30.
• Added Resist Magic at 55.
• Moved Guard spell from 49 to 39.
• Moved Armor of Faith from 53 to 49.
• Added New level 53 paladin spell: Divine Glory.
• Added New level 59 spell: Celestial Cleansing.
• Defense skill cap made exactly same as warriors.
• Added Yaulp 4 at 60 and enhanced.

Shadowknights:

• Removed artificially inflated mana cost for pre level 50 lifetap spells. Please note that post-50 lifetap spells never had an inflated mana cost.
• Moved Spirit Tap to level 55.
• Moved Drain Spirit to level 57.
• Added Drain Soul at level 60.
• Grim Aura added at level 22 and enhanced.
• Moved Shieldskin to level 34.
• Pet buff added at 29.
• Added Diamondskin spell at 59.
• Defense skill cap made exactly same as warriors.
• Due to the recent improvements to "Harmtouch", it is doing much more damage than it would before and unbalances PvP. As such it will now do less damage in PvP (68% of PvE, down from 80%). In addition, Shadowknights on the PvP servers were routinely killing themselves via non-XP losing means and attacking other players with Harmtouch immediately upon respawn. In order to address this situation, Harmtouch is no longer automatically "recharged" by death on the PvP Servers.
• The "Lifeleech" discipline now increases hit probability in addition to its other effects.

Rangers:

• Added Endure Cold at 22.
• Added Skin Like Nature at 59.
• Added FireFist at 22.
• Moved Bramblecoat from 49 to 39.
• Added Spikecoat at 49.
• Added resist cold at 55.
• Added Panic Animal at 22.
• Moved Jolt to 51.
• Moved Spirt of Wolf from 39 to 30.
• Added Cinder Jolt (fire-based Jolt spell) at 55.
• Offense and weapons skill made identical to warriors.
• Added See Invisible at 39.

Bards:

• Added new level 20 Bard Song: Cassindra`s Chant of Clarity.
• Bards defensive skill made exactly the same as a warriors.
• Changed it so that the bard spell Denon's Desperate Dirge to increase damage by 10pts per level over 45. Also made it so the spell does 20% more damage using the Puretone discipline.

Magicians:

• Added new level 59 spell: Valiant Companion.
• Added new level 39 spell: Summon Companion.
• Rain spells no longer count pets against total number of entities they can damage (all rain spells).
• Added level 29 spell for Mages: Expedience.

Enchanters:

• Lowered recast time on Visions of Grandeur.

Bug Fixes:

• Aggressive and Defensive disciplines have been fixed. Before they would only affect damage taken and not affect damage dealt out. Now they affect both as designed.
• Fixed the bug with going to the spellbook when the inventory window was up in fullview mode. It should work now. Also, fixed a minor bug where if you were in normal mode and tried to go to the spellbook from inventory via /book or the keymapped key it would not go, and it would make the done button not work properly for the inventory mode.
• Fixed NPC melee ranges to be the same as for player characters. In other words, if you can hit the NPC, he can hit you. This bug was a problem with one dragon that could be hit, but could not hit back.
• Fixed a bug that made it impossible to "Call of the Hero" someone out of water or lava.
• Fixed the proc on the Chilled Scythe. Owners of this item will need to swap it out with a GM.
• The Kromzek Surveyor Scope now fits in the "Ranged" slot rather than the "Ammo" slot as before.
• Fixed a bug that caused the two single-target bard snare songs to break too soon in some cases.
• Fixed a bug whereby NPCs would consider the race of a player prior to the loading of the faction table upon zoning or logging in. This would cause people to be attacked by things that normally like them.
• Players should now be properly removed from the group regardless of how they exit the game.

Misc Changes:

• Added text labels to the fullview inventory window "body" slots (Available only to Velious Subscribers).
• Added the ability to toggle those labels on and off. Use /invwinlabels [on/off] (or no arguments to toggle). This is saved in the eqclient.ini file in the [Defaults] section with the key InvWinLabels=[TRUE/FALSE].
• Increased the pre-50 bind-wounds cap for rogues and warriors.
• Pickpocket now works to a max of 5 levels below you, or level 45...whichever is greater... You can pickpocket NPC up to level 55 if you are level 60.
• The mouse pointer will now move at a multiple of its normal speed when you adjust the MousePointerSpeedMod setting in the eqclient.ini file. You can set that multiple on-the-fly with the /mousespeed command.
• The "AutoHelp" feature that can be set under the options menu has been enhanced. Spell casters in particular might want to turn it on and try depressing the ALT key. It's perfect for refreshing your memory in regards to your spell lineup.
• If you are interrupted while trying to cast a spell that uses a component, you will no longer use that component. Jewelers should be very pleased with this change.
• Reduced the casting difficulty (fizzle rate) of all spells over level 56. Spells have always previously been set up so that it's usually more efficient to use a spell from a previous circle than the current one. The formula did not take into account the fact that everyone stops at 60.
• Changed it so that players will now lose experience when they die in the Arena in Kael Drakkel. It seems that people were fighting giants in that arena in order to avoid the death penalty.
• Naked PC corpses that have experience and are above level 30 will now last 3 hours instead of 3 minutes.
• Avatar and Focus of Spirit should now stack.
• Raised the pre and post 50 bind wounds cap for paladins, clerics, druids, and shaman.

Item Changes:

• The effect on the "Frost Giant Beard" can now be used at 35th level rather than level 50.
• The Wurmslayer will now fit in a bag.
• Iksar can now use the Ashenbone Shield.
• Changed Crystallized Shadow leggings to rentable.
• Changed Gorilla Hide Leggings to show up as leather, was cloth before.
• Changed Envy from a piercing weapon to a shield so players could Bash with it. Envy is a parrying dagger.
• The Shralok Pack is now LORE. It was set to pending-lore some time ago.
• The Guardian and Sentry Armor bracers are no longer LORE.
• Donal's Breastplate can now only be used on any individual target once every 7.5 minutes. This addresses some of the balance issues that became apparent given the existence of a mana-free complete heal.

Trades and Crafts:

• Fixed the Gator Roll baking recipe.
• Repaired the notetext instructions for creating a Mixing Bowl with pottery.
• Repaired Holgresh Fur Cap and Holgresh Fur Moccasins tailoring recipes.
• Made it so that the file is returned in addition to the hammer when a character fails to forge any of the various chain jointings.
• Repaired Recipe for Enchanted Tier`Dal Adamantite Bracelet.
• Made it so that the Dwarven Smithy Hammer is returned on a failure to forge Brellium Chain Jointing.
• Repaired Field Plate Boots smithing recipe.
• Changed the name of the smithed Enchanted Cabilis Scale armor to Imbued Cabilis Scale armor for naming convention reasons.
• Repaired the recipe for converting 3 Enchanted Large Adamantite Bricks into 1 Enchanted Block of Adamantite in the Tier`Dal Forge, it was previously only possible in the Oggok Forge.
• Made it so that the Bread Tin is returned upon a failure to bake bread.
• Mithril and Velium Bonings will be stackable.
• Mithril Studs will be stackable.

NPC AI - Hate:

We've made a number of changes to NPC AI, specifically to the section dealing with target-selection, or what's commonly referred to as "Hate". It is not so much that NPCs react differently to hate now than before, but that we've changed the way that hate is awarded.

• We reduced the amount of hate that can be caused by a proc. Due to the high proc rates at upper levels, the amount of hate generated from procs, and the spells that were selected for those procs, made keeping the attention of the creature much too easy a task for the tank. Simply, it nearly eliminated the challenge of keeping a foes attention at levels above 50.
• We've redressed the amount of hate generated by heal spells. Previously, and *partly* due to a bug, the high level heal spells such as superior heal or complete heal would generate no more hate than greater heal. In fact, so little hate was generated by these spells that it made controlling NPC aggression trivial. Heal spells will now generate an amount of hate more in line with the number of hitpoints actually healed. Due to our desire to leave the lower level game more or less untouched, two separate caps have been placed for targets level 50 or below, and 51 or above. Heal spells will generate significantly less hate for targets below level 51 than those at or above that level.
• We've also re-evaluated ways that players have to reduce their own hate. While spells in place to allow this are OK, the Evade skill (possessed by rogues) let them out of their damage too easily. A rogue that successfully evaded would immediately drop to a level of hate lower than someone who was in the awareness range, but hadn't done anything to really upset the creature such as damage it or heal its foe. This problem was exacerbated by the increase of the size of the hate list implemented with Velious.

Tracking:

Tracking now works in full view for all classes that can use it, and sports a nifty scroll bar that allows players to see everything on the list. In addition, the /trackplayer setting is now saved to the eqclient.ini file.

The following options have been put in for Rangers only:

• /tracksort [normal / distance / consider / rconsider / rdistance]
• /trackfilter [red / yellow / white / blue / green]

*/tracksort options beginning with R are reverse order.

Hybrid Casting:

Hybrids that cast spells in combat were taking double penalties at higher levels. The casting times of their spells went up, and the amount of melee damage they do per second went up. This results is having to take longer to cast spells, and losing more damage/second for each second taken in casting. To help offset this, Rangers, Paladins and Shadowknights casting non-beneficial spells that have casting times greater than or equal to 3 seconds, now get a 3 % reduction in casting time for each level over 50. 3% at 51, 6% at 52, etc., to 30% at 60. Again, this applies only to non-beneficial spells.