[Torven]

Lulls

Lull spells before the September 4 2002 patch were almost useless. Similar to bard mez only worse, they were effective at earlier levels then the resist rate ramped up considerably to an unusable level, until NPCs became entirely immune at level 50. Lulls were so bad that players used the spells to pull because the aggro on resists was supposedly low.

"When you can reliably get lull to stick on 3 mobs in a 4 mob pack and pull the last one alone let me know."

"lull is the most useless spell ever. try casting it on any creature you want, doesn't matter if its green even, just wait for the resist message. we get upgrades in this line which you might think would work better, but they don't. we even get an area effect lull at lvl 51, that's the biggest joke of them all. they should just drop that spell and give us another useless spell in it's place like another in the whirl line."

"And when you let him know you had better take a screen shot and post it too because I'm gonna read it and call you a liar. Lull does nothing, I use it to pull in hate since it's agro isn't very high and it's easy to taunt off me."

"I read on a different board once that they should either fix the Lull line or change the first letter to P. /rofl"

"put this one way at the back of your spell book, and do the same with any upgrades should you happen to purchase them. There's a very good reason Lull is usually referred to as "Pull" and the level 51 AE version Wake of Tranquility is usually referred to as "Wake of Train-quility"."

(April 2001 thread on Caster's Realm)
https://web.archive.org/web/20010430...c&f=9&t=004347


Classic lulls had an MR floor that increased as the target's level increased. This variable floor is in the clients so we can know what they were. (it was not in the Feb 1999 client however) This floor was applied after the level difference modifier was applied, like the other floors.

The resist rates for lulls in classic were the following: (assuming the NPC did not have higher MR than these floors)

On targets level 1-14: 11% (10 MR floor)
On targets level 15-24: 21% (20 MR floor)
On targets level 25-34: 34% (33 MR floor)
On targets level 35-39: 43% (42 MR floor)
On targets level 40-49: 55% (54 MR floor)
On targets level 50+: 100% (100 MR floor)

To be clear: this is a tiered floor, not an override. If you cast Lull on a level 1 NPC as a level 1 player, the resist rate would be 26% because the standard MR at level 1 is 25. So even at lower levels the spells weren't that good.

Late into Luclin, lulls were turned into an override of 15 MR. (before level difference) Sony did not mention this massive improvement to the lull line in a patch note however, so the date is technically unknown however it likely was in the September 4 2002 patch. EQ's lead designer at the time, Rich Waters, said this about seven weeks after the September 4 2002 patch:

Originally Posted by Rich Waters, October 2002

Traditionally, most lull spells haven't really worked very well. Lull had a high resist rate and wasn't very reliable. We've recently looked at lulls and improved the way they work to make them more useful to players. You should find that the lull line of spells works more often than it did, though it will still fail some of the time.

The song Kelin`s Lugubrious Lament was hardcoded to be special. What this song did was halve the target's effective resist value, and it had a floor of only 5 MR. This made it the best lull spell by far and the only one that could be used on level 50+ NPCs. It's only a few ticks and I suppose Sony wanted to give bards something unique so that's probably why they made this exception.

Druid Harmony (the level 5 targeted AoE) was supposedly unresistable but I found several comments by players saying that it could be resisted, however it would still never aggro on a resist. I presume that the players are referring to lull immune NPCs. This spell was heavily nerfed on PoP's launch day (October 21 2002), after which the spell was unusable on NPCs above level 40. Rich Waters says this at the time:

Originally Posted by Rich Waters, October 2002

We've had the ability for awhile now to make it so certain monsters were totally immune to being lulled. This is especially common in higher level outdoor zones such as Cazic-Thule, since Harmony would take any challenge out of splitting groups of monsters. Having a such powerful game dynamic with no risk of failure made these encounters too easy, so we were forced to make many monsters totally lull immune to compensate. With this change to Harmony, we'll now be able to remove the lull immunity from many monsters, and turn this ability into a useful spell line that gives great benefits, but with some risk that your spell may be resisted.

Literally the next day after PoP's launch they put in the single target spell Harmony of Nature.

Lull Early Fade Chance

Lulls could fade early in a manner similar to charm and root. This lull break chance was found in all clients and still exists on Live. (it was not removed on Sept 4 '02) I ran tests on Live servers years ago to come up with data so I could mimic it on TAKP.

The clients have a routine in them that appears to be called on a debuff's tick, but only for a handful of SEs. (similar to EQEmu's Mob:oBuffTic()) This function has the break early chance for lulls in it, but it does not have the break early rolls for charm, root, fear, blind. This function shows lulls having a preliminary roll just like root, fear and blind which is a 3 in 4 chance to do a resistance roll. It also has the +4 caster level in the resist function call, so this is a nice verification of that existing. This is the same as Live servers today. However the February 1999 client has this preliminary roll being 2 of 3 instead, so it appears at the end of beta at least lulls were a bit less likely to fade early.

The floors do apply in the resist checks done on the lull's tick saves, so even if lulls were to land they wouldn't have lasted very long. The spells may have a listed duration of multiple minutes but practically speaking they were extremely unlikely to last the full duration on anything but the lowest level NPCs.

Incidentally I did find a January 2000 post mentioning that critical fails occurred back then: https://dbsanfte.github.io/eq-archiv...tml/13483.html

The critical fail chance in PoP and Live was and is: 90 - CHA / 4. See my other thread for where I found this. I can't say if it was the same in classic but if I had to guess I'd say yes.


Spell Resist Modifiers

The resist function had the hardcodes for individual spell resist modifiers. These were all hardcoded prior to September 4 2002, and after that patch they finally put in a proper spell field for it. This is the 'lure' number everybody checks for in the spell data. Some of the spells prior to that patch weren't just a simple negative number however. Classic era lure spells I explained earlier were more complicated and so are a few other things in this section. I will also include some other non-lure related resist modifiers here.


Wizard DDs

Wizard DDs gained their micro-lure (-10) behavior on January 20th 2000. Sony simply subtracted 10 resist on wizard DD spells in the resist algorithm to do this.

The qualifications for spells to get this -10 are simply: the spell must be MR, FR, or CR; it must be level 35 or higher; and if it's a MR spell, the first spell effect must be 0 or 79.


The Charisma Resist Modifier

Some spells got a resist reduction to them if the caster had high charisma. I mentioned this in my Charm, Root and Lulls thread regarding charm. Most people have heard about this but I found some more information about it.

First of all, it applied to all classes, not just enchanters. NPC casters were excluded.

Secondly it applied to Charm, Mez, Mem Blur, and SE 34 which EQEmu labels as 'Confuse'. SE 34 seems to be an unused and abandoned SE.

Thirdly this did apply to charm tick saves in classic from what I can tell, but it of course did not take the resist below the floors. The floors made charm much worse back then, however this charisma modifier working on tick saves often removed the need to keep tash on the pet.

The formula is the same in all clients: reduce the resist by 1 point for every 8 charisma above 75. This reduction is capped however.

The reduction cap was not always -25. The cap was -10 until some time between September 2000 and November 2000. The September 19 client has a -10 cap and the November 15 client has a -25 cap. This means any charisma above 155 did nothing for resists until late Kunark.


Damage Spells Penalty on Yellows and Reds

There is a resist penalty when casting damage spells on level 17+ NPC targets above your level. This penalty is level_diff * 2 and can be debuffed away.

For example: a level 60 caster attacking a level 70 NPC will suffer a resist penalty of 20 added to the target's resist value.

This penalty is only applied if the first spell effect ID is 0 or 79. So it may affect spells with a stun component and such if damage is in the first slot.

This penalty was mentioned in the Prathun pseudocode post, so it seemingly never went away.


Other Spells With Micro-lures

Six spells had a -10 micro-lure applied to them like wizard DDs. In the case of charm these did apply to tick saves.

The spells are:

Enforced Reverence
Call of Karana
Thrall of Bones
Fascination
Glamour of Kintaz
Boltran's Agacerie

All six were in the March 2000 client.


Fear Spell Modifiers

For spells Invoke Fear, Panic the Dead, Terrorize Animal:

If the target was higher in level than the caster, the resist adjust was -5.
If the target was equal to or lower in level than the caster, the resist adjust was -(caster_level / 2).

For spells Trepidation, Repulse Animal, Dread of Night:

If the target was higher in level than the caster, the resist adjust was -15.
If the target was equal to or lower in level than the caster, the resist adjust was -5 - caster_level / 2.

All six of these spells had an MR floor of 5. These are all found in the March 2000 client.

These resist modifiers are why fear spells have the same or similar durations and cast times but cost more mana and are obtained at higher levels, although the resist reduction isn't really worth the increased mana costs, channeling benefits of lower level spells and reduced fizzles.


Harm Touch

Harm Touch was hardcoded to resist less but it wasn't a resist value adjustment. Instead it was a mitigation reduction done after the partial damage was calculated. This means that Harm Touch would still fully resist every time at 151 effective resist value but at 150 or less the damage would hit for full damage much more often and mitigate less.

In the February 1999 client this reduction was only 15%. In the March 2000 and later clients this reduction was 45%.


Misc Modifiers

Three specific tash spells (the Enchanter MR reduction line) are hard coded to reduce the target's MR to 2/3rds before landing. This appears to be vestigial because tash spells are unresistable. Sony oddly left this in for a long time. (it's in the November 29 2000 client)

Lycanthyropy spells (SE 44) get a +30 resist adjustment to them, making them easier to resist. Only one spell in TAKP's spell data uses this, which is the 'Lycanthropy' spell. It appears to be some kind of unfinished effect as the debuff seemingly does nothing in the TAKP client. Google tells me that later versions of EQ (after TAKP's time) seem to have made this functional.


Resists in PvP

PvP resists were the same as NPC resists for the most part, but there were some important distinctions.

PvP damage was reduced and this reduction was handled outside the resist function. There is a Test server patch note from August 26 1999 which mentions a 60% reduction for the teams server, and a September 13 1999 patch note says: "All damage spells cast in PVP combat will do less damage to the PC than the same
spell would do to an NPC" so that may have been when it went in. I don't know the specifics of when the mitigation went in or how it may have changed. Solar got the precise PvP mitigation percentages (it varied depending on level and class) from one of the clients and I think these numbers were in use for the vast majority of the older eras. I'll outline it here:

Hybrid (4 classes) spells were all 80% of normal.
Caster+priest spells obtained before level 14 were 88% of normal.
Caster+priest spells obtained in levels 14-23 were 78% of normal.
Caster+priest spells obtained in levels 24-38 were 68% of normal.
Caster+priest spells obtained after level 38 were 63% of normal.
Harm Touch was 68% of normal.

Harm Touch was changed to 68% in this patch:

Originally Posted by February 21 2001 Patch Note

— 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%).

Before October 8 2001, a major difference in PvP resists compared to PvE was that the NPC partial damage modifiers only applied to NPC targets, so higher level players didn't resist DD spells more and the lowest level players didn't resist less like NPCs did. See the partial damage section for details on these modifiers.

The first significant PvP resists patch that I'm aware of was May 31 2001. This patch made debuffs 50% stronger in PvP:

Originally Posted by May 31 2001 Patch Note

- Resist-debuffs will do 1.5 times their normal value for PvP
encounters. In other words, if the spell did -60MR in PvP before, it
does -90MR in PvP now. PvE (combat versus NPCs) remains unaffected.

Late Luclin, the September 4 2002 patch radically changed the PvP game because resists essentially became half as powerful, and you needed twice as much resist value to resist at the same rate as you did prior to the patch. This angered a lot of PvP players. (I quoted some of these players in the first section of this document) Sony responded by changing the resist scale for PvP resists. This PvP scale is bow shaped instead if linear such that resists under 200 made spells resist more than they would in the linear PvE scale but the resist rates ended up the same near 200. This new scale was put in a few weeks later:

Originally Posted by September 26 2002 Patch Note

- The recent resist changes have been adjusted for PvP. They will not
be exactly as they were prior to the resist change, but they should be
reasonable now. Please let us know if you feel they need further
adjustment.

For TAKP I mimicked this PvP scale by doing this:

// PvP
if (caster->IsClient() && target && target->IsClient() && !use_classic_resists) {
	if (resist_chance > 1 && resist_chance < 200) {
		resist_chance = resist_chance * 400 / (200 + resist_chance);
	}
	if (resist_chance > 196) {
		resist_chance = 196;		// minimum 2% chance for spells to land
	}
}

With that PvP scale patch, Sony introduced a bug. If players had very high resists, north of 300, then the resist rate started to go down. The cause seems to be that Sony's PvP resist curve was parabolic and they failed to prevent higher resists from using this curve, which peaked around 275 then went down. The problem was so bad that at 500 resist value, the resist rate for all-or-nothing spells was about equal to that of somebody with about 50 resist. I parsed this on Al'Kabor and I also found some old comments about it. I don't know when they fixed it but it was seemingly after June 2003.

This Graffe's thread from June 20 2003 was started by a player who noticed spells landing frequently with very high resist values:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030829...ID=27020.topic

An April 2003 patch put a cap on DD spells in PvP:

Originally Posted by April 8 2003 Patch Note

- Direct Damage spells in Player vs. Player combat can only do up to
75% damage of the target’s maximum hit points in a single hit. This
modification is done before resists are taken into account. For
example, if a player has 1000 hit points when fully healed, no single
direct damage spell will do more than 750 damage to him in a single
hit.

That patch was particularly important for Harm Touch because prior to that Harm Touch could do 4896 damage to players in PvP. (7200 * 0.68 )

In August 2004 Sony added more PvP related fields to spells to allow them to land on high resist payers.