Just recently SOE removed a hard-cap of level 52 for fear (ie, an NPC above level 52 couldn't be feared). After doing so, players reported that when NPC's feared them, the fear seems to stick a lot longer than it previously did.
http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/...cending&page=1
Here's what a dev had to say about it:
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Originally Posted by Lead Designer Rashere
So...here's the interesting part. The way fear is working right now is actually how it should have been working all along which is what has made this such "fun" to track down.
With the last patch, we removed the hard cap in code that prevented an NPC over level 52 from being feared and moved the restriction to the PC spells themselves. That is all we changed that affects fear. The hard cap is really simple piece of code and no matter how long we stare at it, there's no check in there that affects PCs.
This is where it gets fun.
When a PC gets feared, the server takes control of their character to force them to run away. Fear is built so that it can break at any time, so it checks resistances every tick. Previous to this patch, what would happen is that a PC would get feared and the server would take control of them. The next tick, they ended up looping through the NPC hard cap code for fear (because they are now under server control) and if they were over level 52, fear would always break . Essentially, no one over 52 could be feared for more than a tick. When we removed that check for NPCs over level 52, it caused PCs to not immediately break out of it after 1 tick too.
Since the way its working now is how it should have been working all along, we are currently going through the various NPC fear spells and making adjustments so that high level fears are once again appropriate for encounters that have been tuned around the fear only lasting a single tick.
...and anyone who ever wondered why something that seems like a simple change often isn't, here's a great example.
Rashere
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Fear mechanics discussed on EQLive forums
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