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That Little Demon posted:EverQuest had this sword in Kunark expansion that killed you with its AOE and your party, since it hit everyone and not just the enemy lol Kunark also had the poison wind censer, also known as the one weird trick to leveling a shaman past the extremely dull low levels, same kinda deal where it was a great budget weapon for your alts that abruptly became garbage as soon as you're high enough level for it to proc 
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Sep 23, 2023 01:05
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Those are great pet weapons though, since pets proc like 5x more often than players for some reason, and if you keep your pet healed in some way you can kill it after for your weapon back
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Sep 23, 2023 01:10
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an iksar marauder posted:Those are great pet weapons though, since pets proc like 5x more often than players for some reason, and if you keep your pet healed in some way you can kill it after for your weapon back wayyy too risky for that back in the day lol, pets died from all sorts of random poo poo and most of us were on dialup
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Sep 23, 2023 01:26
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Ueah it’s crazy how the meta shifted with stable net and fast pcs
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Sep 23, 2023 01:34
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How much damage is 75/122 damage to a character high enough to proc those in EQ at the time?
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Sep 23, 2023 04:41
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Not much but noticeable, in ok velious gear a lv60 caster/priest has 1-2k hp, a melee prolly 2-3k, and a tank 4-6k
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Sep 23, 2023 12:54
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my favorite weird EQ item was probably this mid-level dagger that nobody ever bothered to farm: when it procs, a bunch of bandages appear on your mouse cursor and you could bandage up with them (hp recovered based on your bind wound skill, capped at a percent of your max hp also based on your skill level) it owned when I was leveling my beastlord, i'd just let my pet tank for a bit while I bandaged up every once in awhile
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Sep 23, 2023 19:13
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EQ might've been the king of weird weapons/items but I'd somehow never heard of the bandage-summoning knife.
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Sep 23, 2023 19:47
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The Homeland Invasion incident in DAOC. So, each of the 3 realms had their RVR (PVP) zone as half of the same map/zone as the starting one. I.E. one contiguous map with no port or loading. At the 'border' between the RVR zone and the pve only zone there was a huge border keep with a bunch of guards. Really high level guards. And gates - double gates on both sides, and each pair was interlocked so they were mantraps. Mythic thought this was impenetrable. Those guards are level 99! They guaranteed oneshot everybody with a big nuke! Except they did single target nukes, and they had a cast time. So, one day a realm got together, got everybody they could - level 1's could participate here, or level 50s, didn't matter, because everybody's job was to eat up three seconds of one of the guard's cast time by taking a nuke. They mobbed an enemy realm's border keep and charged. Dozens, hundreds of players being massacred by the guards. But, the guards couldn't kill everybody in time to prevent a few players from managing to get into the first mantrap, out of the first one, across the keep's courtyard, into the second mantrap, and out of it - to a zone they were ABSOLUTELY NEVER supposed to get into. As there was no hard "you can't pvp here" code in play, you now had a few level 50s from an enemy realm running around the starter zone, slaughtering every lamb they could see. They shortly thereafter changed the code to force a teleport back 200 yards if you crossed an invisible line too close to the border keep, but for that one day, chaos reigned.
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Sep 23, 2023 21:01
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Groovelord Neato posted:EQ might've been the king of weird weapons/items but I'd somehow never heard of the bandage-summoning knife. the number of bandages it summoned scaled with your level too so after awhile u could poke the mob once and have a full stack to use
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Sep 23, 2023 21:10
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There were a few unintended weird things that happened in WoW that I can remember. I was always a huge fan of the melee items they put in that had magic damage procs that scaled 1:1 with spellpower. The amount of spell damage you had on your gear would be added to the proc. This allowed for some fun gimmick specs like holy paladin running "shockadin" specs with the meteor trinket from AQ40 and the Sulfuras legendary mace. This was more of a bug, but very weird and very funny. A patch during Burning Crusade where they attempted to fix the balance druid treant ability to force the treants to aggro on the mob you cast them near. Unfortunately, somehow, for a short period of time this aggro pulse that went out, went out to the entire zone you were in. Every red flagged mob would come running from every direction and completely obliterate whatever you targeted as long as they were hostile. This worked in duels and was one of the funniest things I've seen in a game.
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Sep 23, 2023 21:58
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there was a thread like this that died towards the end of last year, that had a lot of good reading material in it https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3979819
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Sep 23, 2023 23:54
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Jonny 290 posted:The Homeland Invasion incident in DAOC. Something similar to this happened in lotro's monster play. Someone discovered a section of hill that could be climbed out of and into the world proper, so someone gathered a group of monster players, got over the hills and started slaughtering everyone they could find. It's a shame that game mode became so neglected, it was a lot of fun in its first year or so.
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Sep 24, 2023 02:11
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Noise Complaint posted:Vanguard owned and it's a goddamn shame it got ol' yellered. There's a Vanguard emu out there https://vgoemulator.net/ The "team" that has been working on it for the past 6 years haven't gotten very far at all. You can login and sorta play around but it's kinda broken.
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Sep 24, 2023 02:21
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I swear this is something that happened but I can't find any evidence of it besides my own fever dream, but regardless this post is going to pretend it did- I was one of the first shaman to get the epic weapon, the Spear of Fate, on the Brell Serrilis server. The amount of effort it takes to do this is obscene, requiring many very difficult/time-intensive solo experiences, as well as 4+ raids requiring like 20+ people to coordinate. Like the Plane of Fear/Hate, for example. The effect "Curse of the Spirits" was a spell the spear was enchanted with that you could click and cast on your target. It was supposed to deal exponential damage over time with the final tick giving the largest burst of damage. However, when the spear was introduced into the game, it did the opposite, and healed you instead. Shaman use a staple spell called cannibalize to consume their health and regenerate their mana. This was usually countered with their own regeneration spell, but having a resource-free clickable instead was absurdly powerful offering essentially unlimited mana for heals, DoTs and debuffs. I don't remember them ever fixing this, but all the information on it I can find suggests it was in fact a DoT, so I think it just took them a really long time.
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Sep 25, 2023 03:03
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I just remembered this in the ff14 thread but sword of legends online had a public relationship leaderboard that people could compete on....somehow...and the person with the most relationship points got an "official romantic partner of x" title for the week. Shame the games translation was so poo poo though
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Sep 25, 2023 07:28
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Groovelord Neato posted:EQ might've been the king of weird weapons/items but I'd somehow never heard of the bandage-summoning knife. There's a knife for Necromancers in Chardok that summons bone chips for you to use to summon your pet. Other fun things I can think of off the top of my head are an enchanter item called Writ of Di`zok that melee procs a slow on your target. Now that I think about it, since the spell it procs is Shiftless Deeds, I imagine you yelling out things that make the target feel guilty about its past deeds and that's what slows it. There's also the staff from the Brood Mother that procs a nuke at level 1. It's usable by pure casters (WIZ/ENC/MAG/NEC) and monks for some reason, who have dual wield at level 1. So you can toss two on a monk and then wreck shop for the next 20 levels. Finally there's some fun cleric weapons like Sarnak Devastator and the one mace from fear. The former procs a stun plus damage that's really useful if you want to cleric tank something (and it procs like crazy). The latter procs for a huge nuke to undead that's basically equivalent to your best undead only nuke at 44 or whenever it procs. Fun soloing spectres with that baby!
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Oct 11, 2023 18:54
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i like the paladin hammer that procs an invulnerability that prevents you from attacking or holding aggro
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Oct 11, 2023 19:25
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oh hey, this thread again! reminisced on another esoteric FFXI thing recently, so good timing. tonberries are classic final fantasy monsters, and they usually have an attack called "Everyone's Grudge" that does damage based on how many monsters that character has killed. in FFXI, tonberries were introduced in the first expansion rise of the zilart. they still have everyone's grudge, which does 5 damage per tonberry that character has killed, and notorious monsters instead had Everyone's Rancor which does 50 damage per killed tonberry (a character at the level 75 cap had on the order of 1000 HP) - your "tonberry hate." even without high tonberry hate, they're pretty powerful, so people usually didn't fight them, but some rare tonberries dropped extremely valuable items, in particular a knife for thieves that made rare items drop more often. there was a quest to pay a tonberry priest NPC some gil to reset your hate, so players would do that occasionally to not get splattered while farming those items. in the second expansion, chains of promathia, the game introduced a type of undead called fomor. they had a similar hate system. if you had never killed one, they were passive; if you killed a few, they started to aggro based on the usual undead sound/low health triggers; as you killed more, their aggro range increased, eventually becoming huge. an npc in the region would tell you a vague message based on your amount of fomor hate and you could decrease it by killing local orcs (who had killed them 20 years previously). similar to tonberries, fomor were pretty powerful and not worth EXPing on. but there was a set of notorious monsters that each dropped an extremely powerful +haste belt that could only be spawned if you had maximum fomor hate, so there was some reason to interact with the system. the third expansion, treasures of aht urhgan, introduced a monster type called apkallus. they're basically green penguins - weak, non-aggressive and non-linking. on expansion release, players were confused by a weird system where some of them were NPCs (green names) instead of monsters (yellow names) that you could trade fish to, and they'd follow you around and sometimes change to attackable monsters, but no one figured out what it meant and nothing came of it. a couple months into the expansion, I was looking for new camps for EXP. at max level when doing merit point parties (everquest AAs), players quickly coalesced around four or five easily accessible spots with relatively weak mobs that were always full, and a new camp was nice to have just for variety. when I found a rocky beach deep in the undead-filled and poorly explored Arrapago Reef that had nothing but high-level apkallus and figured I had hit the jackpot - a bunch of weak, non-aggressive, quickly respawning mobs, and the hassle of getting there would mean no one would be competing with us. so I gathered some friends and we headed out. at first it was easy enough - they'd only do one special attack called Yawn, that put you to sleep - but only if you were looking at them, so you could turn around to avoid it. then they started using other moves that we hadn't seen before, with more powerful status effects like stuns and paralysis, but we figured it was just random. then they started reacting violently to cure spells - even the smallest 30-hp Cure 1 would make an apkallu stick to a mage like glue regardless of how much threat anyone else put on it. then they started aggroing on sight, taking less and less damage until even our hardest hitters were doing zero, hitting harder and harder until mages would die in two or three hits, and even running away when attacked to link other apkallus. confused, we got the hell out of there and I posted about it on Blue Gartr, one of the bigger fan forums. to my knowledge we were the first people, at least in the english-speaking community, to discover this. turns out apkallus have a zone-based hate system, where as more and more of them die in a zone, they get stronger and stronger as described, and it gradually abates over time as people stop killing them. but the net effect was that nobody messed with those penguins - none of the few apkallu NMs drop anything particularly valuable, so though their spawn methods may be related to apkallu hate, nobody really cared enough to experiment and find out. some people did find out that apkallu hate increased much more quickly if you killed them while one of the NPC apkallus was following you, but to this day nobody is sure what controls their swapping between NPC and monster or if having one following you has any benefit.
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Oct 11, 2023 21:53
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When you examine the spawn point for the Fomor NM you get a different message depending on your hate level (the interaction point was called "Stale Draft") and this let you know if you could trade the pop item to spawn it. The max hate message is "Your common sense tells you to leave as quickly as possible" which I think is just a badass line lol.
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Oct 12, 2023 04:00
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FFXI had so many incredible design decisions. I’d hand over a big sack with a dollar sign on it for an MMO today with a similar ethos but a slightly less intense grind than it was back at 75 cap. I’ve never enjoyed any game as much as FFXI and now this thread is making me want to log back in to my retail RDM I capped during the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020. I’d been waiting since I was 13 to finally unlock Bard and I still think FFXI’s Bard/WHM and Bard/NIN or the other more esoteric combos is one of the most well manifested classes in MMO history. Even the little songs their instruments play were perfect
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Oct 12, 2023 14:24
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Jonny 290 posted:The Homeland Invasion incident in DAOC. This was the lurikeen uprising. They mainly went to make funny names on a rp server. Fun fact, you could just jump and hold down print screen and your character would just float over the border keep walls since read/write was so slow back in the day. The lurikeens later went off and died to a single group of I want to say mids, over and over again, and after that the devs let lurikeens become champions.
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Oct 15, 2023 07:04
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Much more recent than most stories here but still cracks me up every time. This happened around the first couple of weeks after Guild Wars 2 launch. Harathi Hinterlands was a mid level zone near the human start and home to very popular meta event culminating in a fight with the centaur tribe leader Modniir Ulgoth. He summons a massive pair of hands out of the ground that you have to beat before the timer runs out and then you get to fight Modniir Ulgoth himself, pretty straightforward. But a rumor popped up that you could get the event to branch through a different, more lucrative path if you left the hands alive until the time ran out, this wasn't completely outlandish since branching on failure wasn't too uncommon for the event system. The rumor gained so much traction that a sizable part of the players there (including me) would try to keep the hands alive but the timer was ~20:00 minutes and people would get bored mid-way and complete the event normally. But one evening we'd have enough true believers to sit through the whole timer looking at the rock hands for 20 minutes. And as the clock hit 0:00... Nothing happened. The realization that we're all gullible dipshits is one of my favorite MMO related memories.
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Oct 19, 2023 14:37
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One of my favorite little oddities from the jankfest that is Star Trek Online is an item called the singularity projector. Back when the Romulans were first added to the game as a playable faction, one of the endgame Romulan ships came with this item. If you see the singularity projector now, it's a funny item but nothing special. What it does is, when clicked, fires a miniature black hole that moves in a straight line forward from your ship, dragging in and damaging enemies as it goes. However, back at the launch of the Romulan faction, the singularity projector was remarkable because it was the first ship item in the game that spawned a thing in space that did damage. Previously all abilities that spawned entities like this were just straight player abilities, and all required you to have an enemy targeted to use them. Due to the game's coding, abilities you use on enemies can't cause friendly fire. But the singularity projector doesn't target enemies, it just fires. The anti-friendly fire code thus did not kick in. For a few glorious (or nerve-wracking) days, whole wings of players would line up in their warbirds and fire their singularity projectors at clusters of player ships in social hubs like Deep Space Nine and Earth Space Dock. One singularity projector? Annoying but not that dangerous. Six or seven singularity projectors? Everyone in the line is dead. Cryptic fixed that bug unusually fast. 
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Oct 20, 2023 19:15
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City of Heroes eventually spawned City of Villains in 2005, and with it came full PVP zones where heroes and villains could fight each other in (and in one zone, anyone not explicitly in a team with you), as well as a shared social zone where powers worked but everyone was marked as friendly. The actual specifics of this next bit are more speculation than me actually doing it, but: -There are a few powers that do Confuse as a status effect, which reverses who you can target as an enemy or as an ally -A fully-slotted Confuse power at max level can last like 30+ seconds -Status effects still last even when going to a different zone So a dedicated team set up where multiple members have the Teleport Ally power can have a single member (typically a blaster, who has a character-centric AOE power that does massive damage at mid-high levels) get confused by a an opposing PVPer who's in on the trick, zone into the regular PvE zone, get teleported to the tram stations/zone transitions (to minimize travel time), and get into the social zone - whereupon they run into the largest group of people and (while still confused), explode and wipe out a minimum of half a dozen folks who have no idea what just happened and were just chatting around a bar counter. They never did get PVP into great shape in general. But they did shorten lockdown status effects (including Confuse) down a lot.
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Oct 21, 2023 19:36
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That reminds me of hunters in wow, fighting baron geddon in molten core and dismissing their pet after it becomes the bomb. Only to bring it out later at the auction house to nuke everyone in it.
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Oct 21, 2023 20:50
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Elblanco posted:That reminds me of hunters in wow, fighting baron geddon in molten core and dismissing their pet after it becomes the bomb. Only to bring it out later at the auction house to nuke everyone in it. ok, lol
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Oct 21, 2023 21:43
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blatman posted:my favorite weird EQ item was probably this mid-level dagger that nobody ever bothered to farm: Same zone, same mob, common drop: Magnetic Dirk of Distraction. A decent little poker with the curious ability of "Magnetic North". What's that? Well, in a game with huge zones, no maps, and generally either forested or barren landscapes making finding POIs hard, players had access to "True North" which faced you North. From there, you could generally figure out where to go if you had reasonable zone knowledge. Magnetic North worked the same way except it was a proc. on a weapon. which you were swinging around. So if you weren't facing north when the fight started, you probably were within a few seconds. Very...distracting. In general, Velious was the classic expansion where the EQ devs let their hair down and went a little nuts. Plane of Mischief, Pirates that learned to be pirates from reading a book in the library, a 3 way faction system, the literal BFG 9000. It was a wacky time. My favorite expack. Edit: There was another item that dropped from the end game raid zone in Velious called the Spinning Orb Of Confusion. It was a pretty good range slot item, with the right click effect of spin the bottle which just harmlessly spun you in a circle.
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Oct 22, 2023 04:40
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Elblanco posted:That reminds me of hunters in wow, fighting baron geddon in molten core and dismissing their pet after it becomes the bomb. Only to bring it out later at the auction house to nuke everyone in it. And with that same method, the Corrupted Blood incident. Instead of a bomb, it was a DoT, and it would not stop spreading. The number of bodies laid out in Ironforge was hilarious. I only remember it being around for like a couple days but apparently it kept happening for a few weeks.
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Oct 22, 2023 21:59
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More FFXI poo poo~ there were numerous attempts and successes to kill AV in 75 era, some outright leaned on exploits and got people banned, most did take several hours to days to do. there was the "wall of justice" where AV could be nuked by blms over a barrier it couldn't cross. and there was an exploit to tank him while in a cutscene that did some funky stuff with hate control and tank invincibility. Early zeni nm drop systems were not 100% on drops to do the next tier. probably closer to 10-25%. So the first Pandemonium Warden attempt was several months after the event came out. They went to the wrong mark and spawned a "ANM Test" goblin with 1 hp who didn't drop anything but did eat the pop item. There was an exploit called "Salvage duping" that went around during the salvage/wotg era. In instanced areas if you were to go in as an alliance of three parties, claim the Boss that dropped something and then broke the alliance into the three separate parties before killing him, each party would get their own pool and if one thing dropped all three parties would get their own copy. When SE came down on this they came down hard, banning hundreds of people. Anyone who ever got a drop. Entire linkshells would have their leadership executed. There was a crafting exploit where modifying data packets would let you equip gear on slots that it shouldn't be on, even multiples of pieces could be equipped. Crafters found out that they could put +craft skill gear on all slots and break tier on HQing hard crafts. They later found that swapping between floors in your moghouse could interrupt crafts that would not HQ without item loss, since the packet coming in that said craft result happened immediately at the start. Taisaijin and Shikigami weapon were all part of a single patch with just absolutely "gently caress you" levels of bullshittery with all NMs. Most focus on those two, but there's also Overgrown Rose/Rose Garden/Voluptuous Vilma. if the placeholder overgrown rose was left alone for 10+ hours a rose garden spawns with a tiny chance at vilma's ring. If rose garden is left alone for 10+ more hours, Vilma spawns. Players knew about Vilma for years but it took one player escaping containment on the test server during an event and seeing Vilma up at spawn to confirm. My favorite fight in the game is one that is pretty obscure and not done anymore due to obsolescence. "Maddening Radiance". It's gimmick is pretty strange, you face off as an alliance against two NM Caturae, think Giant chess piece golems. kill one and the others gimmick gets a power up. you're ~supposed~ to kill them together or take down the worse of the two. The one boss in there, Wazir, Gets an aoe charm that applies two effects on charmed people, A costume of the boss and a encharm effect. The whole front row gets charmed and then chases down all the mages and back row, hitting them and charming them as well. Pure chaos followed by silence. I am directly responsible for one of the biggest content 'exploits' of the 119 era, Conduit burn and its eventual brutal loving nerf. At some point SE gave all jobs a second 1 hour ability, Summoner got Astral Conduit, which for 30 seconds removed all recast delays from bloodpact abilities (the bread and butter of summoner abilities both offensive and defensive) and then got job points to make astral flow and astral conduit pair nicely and boost damage. They also added a new weapon set called Aeonic, which is similar to relic and mythic, etc all. The biggest roadblock to these weapons were the 'helm NMs" a set of 7 secret bosses that were extra difficult for an alliance to do. Arguably the hardest was Schah, a Caturae. His gimmick is chess based and was that every 30 seconds or so, he'd spawn a pet, starting with the queen, then down thru all the other pieces. While he had two pets up, he would get 99% damage reduction. The way the fight was supposed to go was that he'd spawn, queen would spawn and get held off to the side as the rest of the alliance kills the rest of the chess board as it comes out, making this a brutal endurance fight that took most of the 30 minute timer to do. I figured out that in the first minute of the fight he wasn't invincible and would take damage normally, I was also one of the very few Summoners in the game that was well geared (it was an unpopular job for a long while.) We threw together some testing and found that three+ summoners, a Tank, a Geo and a healer, with the summoners fully buffed, could astral flow/conduit and kill schah before his second pet came out, turning what was once a 30 minute fight with 18 people into a minute fight with 5. Nirvana, the summoners mythic staff (and all around broken weapon) went from the middle of the pack mythic to the most made mythic weapon by over 500 users on ffxiah. Of the seven Helm NMs, six can be conduit burned. The subsequent nerf of conduit is still loving brutal and has an effect on summoner in almost all events that came out after. They started applying a sort of cumulative resist to bosses where back to back uses of bloodpacts would be progressively resisted. first would do full, second half, and third a quarter, subsequent ones being like 1/1oth resist. frodnonnag fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 23:41
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Yeah the salvage duping ban wave was immense. I didn't even do endgame back then but I knew people who got hit.
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Oct 23, 2023 01:56
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Someone mentioned Vanguard and I have been summoned. But seriously, i love MMO threads like this with all the weirdness, lore, and general chicanery that comes with the genre. Since Vanguard's diplomacy card game was already mentioned, I'll talk about a couple of the raid targets that fit the thread (one a bit literally). First, on the south end of Qalia (which was inspired by Africa and the Middle East, so lots of desert and some tropical jungles), there was a zone called Shimmering Shallows which was nothing special geographically other than a large island in the middle of the region with some coastline to the east. The zone was full of level 50ish elemental trash mobs that could be soloed. For a long time, the zone was only used to help solo xp post level 50, to try your luck at some of the really rare drops, and to farm powders for the quests in a nearby zone (if desperate for them). But one day, rumors started going around about something else spawning on the island. As more and more people saw it, word got out about Arachnidon Sunshine. This thing right here (thumbnailed for the arachnophobes):  At first, nobody knew if it was meant to be an actual raid target or if it was some wayward mob that had escaped its pathing in a dungeon hidden in the zone, but it wasn't always spawned and the devs kept mum about it. It wasn't until an event on the test server where a GM or dev killed it and people saw it had actual loot that it became clear that it was meant to be raided. It took a while to figure out the spawn and combat mechanics because it required killing a large amount of elementals and it had a respawn timer of like 8 hours too. On top of that, it was one of the hardest targets (I think it was still top 5 at sunset, not counting Cave of Wonders or Syranoth) and would despawn after 2 hours, even if engaged. As time went on, the devs significantly lowered the respawn timer, making the spider much easier to find and farm. But it was VERY funny for it to suddenly appear, scare the crap out of everyone, then demolish anyone in the vicinity. As you can see in the pic, this bastard was BIG too and players were only about half the height of the bottom leg segment. The fight itself was mostly standard tank and spank, but had a couple of neat wrinkles. First was that it would get a "Well Fed" buff at about 60% or 70% HP that caused it to regenerate and if it healed more than it was damaged, it would "eat" a random person in the raid by teleporting them to its "stomach" elsewhere in the zone. This could be a real problem if it "ate" one of the tanks and there wasn't a backup. Once in the stomach, the player was stripped of all buffs, could not use any spells/abilities, was drowning, was attacked by stomach parasite mobs, and to make sure they died and weren't stuck, a mob called Death was there to insta-kill them. The other nefarious mechanic in the fight was the "Cacoon" (which should've been "Cocoon" but someone didn't know how to spell). At 20% HP, only pure melee damage was allowed for the rest of the fight because Sunshine would cocoon any player that hit it with spells, causing them to no longer be able to act. This was pretty much a guaranteed wipe at that point because after about 30 seconds, the "Cacoon" would despawn, turning the player into a large and uncontrollable spider that attacked other raid members, and also spawned about a half dozen little spiders that scurried around attacking everyone. It happened way too fast and all the new mobs hit way too hard to effectively deal with them. The only way we ever found to mitigate it was that some abilities could kill the "Cacoon" itself before it despawned, which would prevent the smaller spiders from appearing and the player from transforming, but the player would still uncontrollably melee attack people. I did find that the PVPish mechanic of the situation could be abused to target and kill the player during this time, but it required typing commands and wasn't convenient enough to always stop the murder spree. Now, the next one I had to snag a screenshot of from YouTube so it's a bit crap looking. I bring you Sparkles the Irritated:  This large turtle was originally in the bamboo forests in the Tomb of Lord Tsang on the east side of Kojan (inspired by the far east, so lots of Japanese, Chinese, and Mongolian influence) but was moved to Troll Coast on the south side of Thestra (the Euro-centric continent) because Tomb had 3 drat high end raid targets and lag was ATROCIOUS if more than one was being engaged simultaneously. Sparkles was designed by Silius to be the hardest target in the game with lots of bullshit mechanics like destroying gear so tanks had to repair during combat (the devs later removed this because it was loving ridiculous), turning the screen into pea soup so nothing but the hot bars were visible, flipping the screen upside down, anyone infected with the blindness/upside down screen would also be afflicted by fear that forced the player to run away and could spread the infection to anyone else within range, and also a punt that went off at timed intervals during the last 10% that sent flying whoever was currently tanking and insta-killed them with no exceptions. You know, FUN. But the real reason I wanted to mention Sparkles is because of his main mechanic that lasted most of the fight and is based on his "lore". Sparkles starts as a large non-agro turtle called Sparkles the Stranded with a quest that basically explained how they had gone swimming, got lost, and are now too hungry to figure out how to get home. So the quest objective is to fetch Sparkles' favorite food: dragon meat. The only place to acquire dragon meat was as a random quest drop from named dragons in a high end group area collectively called either Shores of Darkness (the main entry zone) or KDQ (Kamelot Daily Quests, based on the name of the gnome company that provided daily, repeatable quests in the zone). Now, the story of these zones is that Kamelot Inc.'s airships were mysteriously shot down over these zones and all the tamed creatures they had onboard escaped and were turned aggressive by an evil presence buried deep beneath the island. This means the dragon meat that gets collected and fed to Sparkles is tainted as well. Sparkles is a bit too hardy though to just die from rotten foodstuffs, so the next worse thing happens. He gets the shits. Sparkles the Stranded despawns and respawns as the malevolent Sparkles the Irritated above. At 90% HP, he would wipe all debuffs and DoT's, becoming immune to all damage for a few seconds using a buff called "Breather". Once Breather dropped, he would spawn an undulating black diarrhea slime-like creature that was immune to damage and basically represented a big pile of poop. After a few seconds, the pile would spawn between 1-3 large tapeworms called Waste Covered Parasites that moved fast and hit hard, then the poopstack would despawn. Sparkles would put up Breather and plop these turds about every 1.5 minutes, then at 50% the timer would reset but Sparkles would spawn TWO poo poo piles each time thereafter. And at 30%, the timer would reset again and THREE piles would spawn each time for the rest of the fight. And yes, that meant toward the end of the fight you'd be potentially dealing with upwards of 9 tapeworms spawning from each bowel movement. And that's definitely some weird MMO poo poo.
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Oct 24, 2023 17:36
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A weird personal thing that happened to me in an MMO. I've still never figured out how this happened. I had a level 7 or so Wood Elf Bard back in classic EQ. I couldn't find a group so I was soloing goblin camps in Butcherblock mountains. It was extremely slow but reliable XP and okay loot - cloth armor, backpacks, the occasional cracked staff. Out of nowhere an item dropped that I had never seen before. "Box of Abu-Kar" https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=2369 It's a box with giant size capacity (which means any sized item fit) that gives 100% weight reduction (a huge deal back in EQ where encumbrance was a struggle). I loot the box and close out of the game to research it because it was impossible to alt-tab out of the game at the time. I look it up on Allakhazam and the various EQ forums and realize this thing is rare and highly sought after. So I log back in and head to East Commons tunnel and /auction WTS Box of Abu-Kar and suddenly I'm flooded with offers. I ended up clearing a couple thousand plat. It still blows my mind that this super valuable item dropped off a random level 6 goblin in Butcherblock Mountains. I still have no idea if it was some kind of bug or if it was a completely random drop and I was super lucky. The crazy thing is, everyone to this day says it is only supposed to drop off high level monsters. My working theory is that somebody traded the box to the goblin for some reason and I happened to come across it at exactly the right time.
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Oct 25, 2023 20:09
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wrong! it was a bug or oversight
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Oct 25, 2023 20:25
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Yeah there was an oversight where the box was given an extremely small chance to drop when it shouldn't have if I remember it right.
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Oct 25, 2023 21:12
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I love it when the eq devs completely botch itemization, occasionally you'd have a raid boss drop cloth hats for the first kill and things like that I don't know if I posted this in this thread or the old one but I bought a used car after a weekend of farming trash mobs in one of the starter zones of the Claws of Veeshan expansion when it came out, there was this fairly easy camp with mobs that dropped every mob-dropped crafting component in the expansion (usually one of each per kill, sometimes more) and a fairly decent chance of a max-rank group gear token. The trick was that the group gear tokens needed a player-made box to turn into gear, so for every gear token you sell the loot rights for that's one box that has to be made and well whaddya know i'm selling the components to make them at a huge discount! I made a loving fortune and immediately RMTed all of it. edit: it also got nerfed the instant the dev team got back from holidays, because the expansion launched and they immediately all bailed for vacation at the same time blatman fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Oct 26, 2023 |
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Oct 26, 2023 01:46
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Darkfall online had a really bad implementation of of a skill based system where they levelled up as you used them. So actually going out and playing the game was actually very wasteful early on when your skills were too low to be a threat in pvp or kill anything that dropped anything worth using. Literally afking against a wall and letting your clanmates beat you up, being one of the people beating up afk people, or afk swimming while macroing self-cast skills was the name of the game early on. A week or two in, this developed into people making literal pyramids of players that would have weak aoes and heals cast on them to level up their defensive skills. After awhile (after all the clans with dev ties maxxed everything out) the devs made it so that most skills required you to learn them in PVE, which basically meant new players and players who didn't obsessively spend time afk levelling were hosed.
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Oct 26, 2023 16:19
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Deki posted:Darkfall online had a really bad implementation of of a skill based system where they levelled up as you used them. So actually going out and playing the game was actually very wasteful early on when your skills were too low to be a threat in pvp or kill anything that dropped anything worth using. I remember when people figured out a certain earth aoe spell procced defensives but didn’t do damage so for a few days there were a mountain of people doing this in the vindicators city. Also the icp guild that robbed like a dozen or two different guild banks. Early darkfall was wild
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Oct 27, 2023 04:02
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Groovelord Neato posted:Yeah there was an oversight where the box was given an extremely small chance to drop when it shouldn't have if I remember it right. There was a trend, early in the game before they changed the coding to make it impossible, where high level players would go to newbie zones and trade valuable gear to random mobs to make a sort of lottery system for new players. It was usually common drops that didn't sell for much like Shiny Brass Halbards or Skull Shaped Barbutes. Still a cool thing that eventually got taken away because people started using it to exploit no drop items.
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Oct 27, 2023 16:07
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Another EQ item, the BFG: I actually think this is a post nerf version of it, and I believe it eventually got removed? I can't remember. What I do remember is that initially when this item was found it would launch poo poo across the zone when it proc'd and was hilarious; we did some PVP poo poo with it and had a ton of fun. I believe there were folks abusing it to solo raid bosses somehow.
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Oct 28, 2023 19:35
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