Jophiel wrote:
Evacuate North: Evacuates your group to the Northern Plains of Karana. While faster casting than normal portal spells, it is more likely to leave one or more of your group members behind.
"More likely" would imply that traditional ports already have a chance of leaving someone (as opposed to just saying "It has a chance to..". Unfortunately, nothing in the raw data on Lucy is named "Chance to leave some schlub behind" so I can't do a straight comparison. And SOE isn't always exactly ace on their spell descriptions.
I don't play a wizard nor a druid so I have zero experience with casting either. But if we're comparing spell descriptions, we might as well compare the entire thing.
That's a misleading statement though. I take "more likely" to include the chance that someone is out of range of the spell, or under a DA effect, or any of a set of things that might result in someone being left behind.
- Normal group gate: Someone can be left behind if they are not close enough to the caster, or are under an effect that makes them immune to spells (like DA).
- Evac/succor: Someone can be left behind for any of the above reasons *plus* there's just a random chance of it happening anyway.
I have never heard of a group gate spell (portal or circle) having any innate chance of leaving someone behind). In 5+ years of playing a wizard (admittedly only as an alt), I have *never* had someone left behind by a group gate. In all that time, I've never had a group gate spell leave me behind when playing a non-porter, nor have I ever witnessed anyone being left behind.
Those reporting group gates leaving people behind are most likely reporting exactly what I talked about earlier. Some players don't understand the difference, so they use the evacs/succors all the time instead of the portal/circles. They cast faster, right?
I've gone on literally hundreds of raids with my main. I've been ported out of almost every single one. In many cases, we'd have several port groups taking out the melee folks at every single raid. We always made sure to use the group gates instead of the evacs. I have simply never ever seen a normal group gate fail. I've seen people left behind when using evacs and succors many times. If there's a "really really small chance" of leaving someone behind with a group gate, then it's so small as to be insignificant, because I've never seen it.
The day I actually see a group gate leave someone behind, I'll believe it. Until then, I'll chaulk it up to the EQ equivalent of an urban myth...