To start off with I am a ranger and neither of these pulling methods were ever in my tool set so this is an outside looking in view point.
The first "nerf": All this is going to do is increase paci pulling or prox pulling. FD splitting will eat up a lot of time as the puller will have to wait for mobs to split up via pathing. Hard raid "trash" becomes harder to split out dragging raid times out by a considerable amount. Over all it makes FD pulling less of an option which is what SoE has been planning for a while. Back in the GoD to OoW era A dev made a post saying that FD was never intended to be a pulling tactic but as a way to drop agro if the monk/necro/sk built up to much.
The second "nerf": Back in the PoP days there was a patch where pet pulling was "broken" or not working any more. The devs found the problem and fixed it so players could pet pull again. Now they are saying its an exploit and is being fixed. So this is an "exploit" that they have knowingly kept in the game since the PoP era (4ish years) and have fixed in the coding to ensure it would work again at least once. Now they come out, say its an exploit and say it will be fixed. This leaves me confused as to what really constitues an exploit anymore. If the dev staff is calling this an exploit then at any time any feature the devs have put into place in the history of EQ could become an exploit next week/month/year.
As a ranger this is good because I will get groups as a puller again. But then again in any indoor zone (or zone with 71+ mobs) anyone with good avoidance, timing, and the hp to get the mobs back can prox pull. All this recent nerfage makes me wonder why I still have my EQ accounts active. I guess its in hopes that TSS makes up for the 95% hatred for the PoR expansion.
Changes to NPC Aggro AI
Rashere breaks the news: "Pet pulling" and "tick pulling" will be strategies of the past come September 19th. From EQLive:
Over the course of beta, we've identified and corrected a number of issues that have been around for a while but were being exacerbated by the downtime changes we are making. There are two particular changes with the "call for help" routine that I want to draw attention to since they close loopholes that allow some questionable tactics that some of you may be using currently. I want you to be aware that they will no longer work after our next patch to save you the potential deaths from attempting them. These will also be in the patch notes.
- When most NPCs call for help, they will only call for a small, set number of NPCs to respond to keep from swarming people with dozens of NPCs at once. There was a problem in the call for help routine that caused an NPC to not call for help again for a few seconds if it had already called for help and enough NPCs responded that they had met that maximum number the first time. This is what was enabling the so called "tick pulling" phenomenon whereby you could aggro an entire room, drop aggro, then immediate re-aggro a single NPC and it would come alone. This is now fixed and NPCs will now properly call for help every time they are aggro'd from a non-aggro state.
- With the above problem fixed, we also had to address another bug in the same area to prevent just shifting the loophole form one tactic to another. This one had a similar effect, although for an entirely different reason. When a player sends a pet in to attack an NPC, the NPC uses the pet's leader to determine how the NPC reacts. In one part of the "call for help" routine, this check was missed and it was causing an NPC to not call for help if it was attacked by a green con pet of a PC. This particular bit of code is there for NPC vs NPC combat to keep NPCs from ganging up on each other, but the missing check for a PC leader caused it to not call for help if a PC sent a green con pet to aggro it. This is now fixed and the NPC is properly using the pet's leader for this check as well.
Again, both of these fixes will go out with our patch next week.
Rashere