Monk and FD

[Blackstorm]

Yop,

I just talk with and old friend, officer in my guild who have played a monk in EQ and VG from the release.

I remember the monk was useless for several raids in particularly due to the "Feign Death" that was not really like EQ.

I would like to see something like they have defined into EQ.

For example, in VG, mobs are not usually linked but react with aggro range (npc can help another npc if the range match), when you attack a group of mobs and run away, mobs are leaching. (back to theirs positions with an improved run speed and are locked/invul during this state). When you use FD in game, it's doing the same thing.

but in EQ, when you pull some mobs and do a FD, the mods stay few time near your body, and randomly back to their positions.

It's a big advantage for the monk and maybe the only useful skill they can have in game. Monk are usually used to split mobs and make melee dps.
This feature should be enabled only for the monk FD and not for the necro FD which have a pet to pull the mobs ^^

[Jakkal]

I never played a monk to end game in VG, but we used Monks exclusively to 'split mobs' in dungeons, and especially in APW. So I know it can be done. I know it doesn't work on all mobs, which seems reasonable to me, that you can't always use a monk to split all groups of mobs.

[Blackstorm]

yes, "splitable" mobs only, that say if mobs are linked, never a monk (or someone else) should be able to split them ^^ it was like that VG ran this feature.

but in addition of the "live concept", i would like to see a real behavior from mob, wondering if you are really dead, stay near your body, and randomly back to their positions after some seconds.

So i.e if you are pulling a group of 5 mobs (not linked) and FD, then you will have 5 mobs near your body, after a random time, 3 are leaching (randomly), then you have only 2 mobs at your feet, you release the FD and can fight these 2 last mobs.

[Amnath]

Feign Death seemed to always have a really small chance of failure.

In APW, you wanted to flop a good distance from the melee stack. I guess then the mobs weren't truly leashing, they just lost their hate list.

I can't think of anything that was simply immune to it, in the way that something in almost every dungeon could see invisibility.

[Jakkal]

I know Disciples quite often had mobs camping them when they FD'd. I don't know if there was something special about their FD that made mobs bug out or what. But we had that problem a lot since we had a million disciples and no monks for our raids/end game stuff.

[Koralith]

[quote="Jakkal"]I know Disciples quite often had mobs camping them when they FD'd. I don't know if there was something special about their FD that made mobs bug out or what. But we had that problem a lot since we had a million disciples and no monks for our raids/end game stuff.[/quote]

Yup, that was definitely a thing and did not happen on my Monk.

That said, the Monk FD was better than the Disciple one as 1) it had a shorter recast, and 2) it seemed to be more successful.

You could actually split linked mobs using geometry (stairs and such) but it was pretty hard and I only saw a handful of people who could do it (being my main was a Disciple it was too hard to learn due to the long cool down).

I assume the comment about Monk being useless was for EQ and not VG? In VG they're a very hard hitter in addition to their splitting ability.

[Jakkal]

Also, from what I could tell, a Monk could stay down indefinitely. But the Disc FD had a 5 minute timer on it, after 5 minutes they were forced to stand. Not sure about Necros.

[Faux]

I could be wrong, but I think the monk FD wore off after an hour or so.
Necros I believe had 30 minutes to stay FD. But I'm not sure on that.

Monks were totally beast though. I had so much fun spawn collecting the whole Stiirhaad dungeon with my monk. Launching myself across great distances with jump boots and soaring leap combo, while maintaining 45 seconds of 100% dodge that refreshed in like 1:15 seconds with buffs. Mobs that hit for 10s of thousands of damage beating futilely as I ducked and weaved.

[Ratief]

I'm pretty sure that 99.99% of mobs in VG were not linked. Linked mobs were just so very rare (mostly event stuff).

I had envisioned that mobs would use the faction system to assist (or when killing other NPCs). IE, if a mob is attacked then each NPC within /say range (or whatever) would check there factions and if the NPC was allied with the attacked NPC then the NPC would assist them. I think that most NPCs would have one faction (allied with their own faction), but others (like the Khal guards) would hate the random waplings that spawn near the bank and kill them on sight.

[John Adams]

Mobs absolutely were linked far more than 99.99% of the time. Any time you target a guard on the left side of a door and the guard on the right "lit up", that's linked. The NPCs along the paths in Floridel for another example, were always pulled in 2's. This was not faction based, it was linked encounters. I'm sure others can attest to clicking on 1 tree in a group and seeing them all light up their reticule. Either way, linking encounters is not yet implemented in VGO, but it's on my TODO list.

Faction assist (social) is a separate issue and requires a new table (`faction_alliances`) that will tell the world how faction_A interacts with faction_B - and not in a brutal comparison of their values and thousands of individual entries in some faction table. A topic for another thread, and another time as Factions are fine the way they are today.