Summoning... the long and the short of it...Follow

Summoning.

The process by which more "powerful" mobs instantly warp a player to them if the player is too far away for the mob to engage at melee range.

If you play EQ beyond about level 30 or so, you experience this mob ability and soon find yourself having to be able to cope with it.

Sony devs use summoning somewhat judiciously. (Somewhat!) Not all mobs can summon. Most bosses and mini-bosses, do, but not all. So-called "trash" mobs do and do not summon.. "depending." To allow kiting classes to do their thang, some kite-able mobs, especially animals, do not summon.

Usually a mob has to be damaged before they can summon, thus allowing pullers to practice their craft. There are very rare mobs that "summon at 100%", a design intended obviously to deny the puller the ability to get the mob away from his spawn point. This is used instead of rooting or leashing the mob, other options for devs to ensure that mobs are fought where they live.

It's interesting that mobs capable of summoning will do it even if they're grey to the player. Which means that if a high-level player has a damage shield on and gets hit by a mob while just running thru a zone he could find himself getting repeatedly summoned by trash. This can get real annoying if a pack of summon-capable mobs is aggro'd onto a high-level since despite the pack's total incapacity to hurt the player one whit the constant "chain summoning" can lead to the need to wipe out the pack just to get where you're going!

There is a timing to summoning, meaning that a mob only summons once every "x" seconds. Not sure if this is hard-coded or varies mob to mob, I've never tested it. This means that in the above-described scenario, or even when being summoned by an XP-level mob, it's possible to "run away" from a series of summons and actually make your way to a zone-out, if you can survive the hits that follow being summoned.

I'm not sure if summoning goes back to the beginning of EQ. Anyone remember? Certainly in the classic game nothing summoned short of raid encounters. Dragons also were designed as "belly casters", meaning you could not land a spell on them unless you were within melee range---of their belly, I guess. I guess this was instituted to avoid having to have dragons summon each attacking caster in raid force every time they got to the top of the hate list. Basically, that IS the way summoning works. If you're fighting solo it makes no difference. If you're in a group, then that's why it's critical for a tank to be good at "holding agro" since the moment a different group member tops the hate list, if he's not in melee range of the mob, he shall be summoned.

An elite kyv hunter says 'You will not evade me Sippin!'
You have been summoned!

It's jarring that every damn mob in the game that can summon uses this same refrain. C'mon, they ALL say the same thing, even animals?

In Omens of War summoning really became over-used with every trash mob in these zones not only running routinely at sow+ speeds but being able to summon. Clearly this was the low point in EQ history for kiting classes. I think the devs realized afterwards that kiters need love too and nowadays you can find trash mobs as high as 102 that don't summon. (I should know, I've killed them in mobs of 18 in one kite, lol.)

AFAIK summoning is exclusive to EQ. (If I'm wrong here, once again enlighten me.) WoW coped with this issue basically by not allowing players to outrun mobs, and if a player does manage to get far away the mob just loses interest and runs away itself. Plus there is no long-term snare spell in WoW, at least not the last time I played, making it all the more impossible to mass-kite.

Bottom line, while summoning has its annoying side, I'd vote to retain it since the only way to dispense with summoning would be to make changes that in my mind would hurt the game a lot. Such as eliminating, or greatly reducing, abilities at running fast, snaring, rooting, casting-at-a-distance, etc.

When I sat down to write this post I Googled a bit to see if I could discover if summoning goes back to "Day One" in EQ. I didn't find anything there but I did stumble on a post by Delbaeth from June 2nd on the Sony EQ forums where he nominates Summoning for the "Worst of Everquest Award", in terms of how it's jarring and "immersion-breaking." I guess it could be called that. But I think we've had it so long that it doesn't break my immersion into the game... what about you guys?

He mentions FEIGN DEATH as another "nominee". Many's the time during a long in-game camp in a group with a monk, necro or SK (nowadays add bard, beastlord and the rare shaman---or, heck, nowadays any class using that pricey new potion!) I've made the same argument offered by Delbaeth, that how come every mob in the game, no matter how smart or cunning, will fall for the "clever" ploy of falling down and pretending to be dead? And how come they don't take another swing with their axe to make sure of the job? Or, in the case of mob animals, start feeding on the "corpse"? LOL

Ironically, there are animals in nature who feign death successfully. IMO feign death isn't close to as contrived as summoning. But that's a separate discussion that I'd be happy to engage in!




Edited, Jun 11th 2014 9:21am by Sippin

Frankly, I'm having a hard time remembering any Kunark mobs that summon. The dragons can banish but they don't summon, IIRC. Probably cuz they're belly casters, anyway.

Last week I went thru Veeshan's Peak for old time's sake. Everything aggros and sees thru invis and I had damage shields on and while I had trains after time until I stopped to deal with them, I don't recall anything summoning me. But that was just trash, no major nameds were up.

One post here on Lord Rak`Ashiir in City of Mists says he does summon. Can't confirm myself.

I know Naggy can summon I have some lvl 52 toons that I use to kill him every so often. I know the tainted cyclops for the druid epic 1.0 summons because I remember having a time soloing him for my druids epic back when they first came out.

The dragorns at the zone in of Old Bloodfields will summon you even if you do no damage to them instantly.

It can be very annoying when your trying to run through greys to get to something but Im sure it would be declared as "Working as intended".

Summoning: The single lamest mechanic in EQ's history.

Don't get me wrong, I have no issue with named/special mobs summoning, but trash should NEVER be able to summon. It's just lame.

Tat

Not a fan of the summoning mechanic on non-named mobs.

Not particularly a fan of it on named that aren't raid bosses.

Always felt it was something that should be dropped from an expac's non-raid-boss mobs as that loot became less desirable. That is to say, no reason for 4+ year old mobs to summon. This would be part of my preference that content scale towards group/casual use as it's raid appeal is gone.

If the mob (for whatever reason) shouldn't be kiteable, then make it resistant to snares. Summoning is actually a pretty cruel mechanic to make mobs unkiteable since it tends to kill the squishy casters trying to do it.

You saying trivial loot code is lame?

Arguments can be made pro and con but I think trivial loot code has a lot going for it, such as preserving some loots for level-appropriate players who can actually make use of it. Probably me playing on FV has an impact but frankly that should make me against trivial loot code since I could in theory pharm nice items from "trivial" mobs and sell them. But I try to favor mechanics that encourage growth of the game over those that encourage the growth of my plat supply. What good is plat when the game is gone?!

Put me firmly in the no trivial loot code camp.

I hate tribute too, much preferred a bazaar full of lowbie junk. WoW (I know...) has a system with tabards where you build the faction by gaining xp while wearing the tabard, and often the faction unlocks things. A city-based version of this (with rewards such as "set home city to this city") would have been so much better than the failure that is the current tribute system.

For the same reason, I dislike augments attuning to gear (if they bound to the item slot, I would have no issue). It killed the rotating weapons for fun that used to occur before you got to raid-ready status.

global loots with no vendor value (which they thankfully have started to address) is another "yuck, why must this be like this?" thing for me.

...I could make a longer list, however there is lots I like about the game too. Original trilogy lore is pretty great for example. I've even gained appreciation for the alien-kitten madness that is Luclin.

Recently I have been doing the planar progression and you don't actually kill the gods. They basically test you by having you fight a projection of themselves from what I gather?

I really disliked the trivial lootcode although Everquest 2 still uses it (well sort of if you kill a grey mob it won't drop a chest which is what has loot in it). I don't care for tribute mainly because I can't keep up with it and burn it all up when Im not actually doing anything.

I like the idea of removing the summon ability from trashmobs that are say 3 or 4 expansions old AND that are grey to you (minus boss mobs).

Not in my opinion. Overland zone mobs that aren't named don't carry such great stuff that they need to summon. And all it does is force kiters to the same small areas to solo in.

Same problem with the Druid animal charm spells. They're awesome, but severely limited on where you can use them. To the point that you can rarely get those camps.

Want people to use more of the how-many-hundred-plus zones that exist? For one, get rid of summoning.

Tat

First off. I have no problem with the summoning mechanism for named/boss mobs. I've always thought it was kind of a cool way to deal with them, and made encounters with such mobs additionally tricky/scary. And frankly, it's less nasty than deathtouch(tm). Now, for trash mobs? Not so much.



I don't think it's quite that simple though. Ultimately, the problem is that EQ allowed for kiting in the earlier days and enough players were sufficiently attached to the tactic by the time the devs got around to addressing it, that they couldn't just implement changes that would prevent kiting entirely (like changing the mob AI, for example). Among several different things (root/snare immune mobs), they included adding summoning to trash mobs. To be fair, it was a mechanic they already had in the game and they could then choose to only put it on some of the mobs, thus making it more difficult, but not impossible to kite. You just had to know where and what was safe to kite.

As to the loot issues, I think part of the problem was the introduction of global loot. So suddenly, being able to kill large numbers of any random mob in the zone, in addition to being good for exp (and PLing), makes for good loot acquisition as well. Add in random tradeskill components to the mix, and there's still a heck of a lot of value to mass kitting for reasons other than just exp.

The real solution should have been to fix the mob AI so they don't allow you to kite them. Of course, the folks who kite would scream about that. So we got what we got.



/shrug. I'll ask you how you'd like a trade off of eliminating all summoning and snare/root immune trash mobs, but in exchange mob AI is improved such that they will realize when they can't reach you and will take cover behind geometry and force you to come fight them face to face when that happens (or retreat, or some other behavior that would effectively make it impossible to kite). Would you make that trade? If not, then you kinda can't complain that some trash mobs summon. It's the tradeoff to allow characters to kite at all. Yes, it's one silly thing offsetting another, but that's what we're stuck with.

Edited, Jun 12th 2014 1:39pm by gbaji

Think it about, gbaji. Sure, it would require fine-tuning. And, of course, the drops would have to be rare. But the key is that the items do NOT drop unless the entire group fighting the mob was level-appropriate. If I was a dev, I'd make it so if even one point of damage was done the mob by a higher-level player (say outside of group) or even one point of healing, the item could not drop.

Think about it! Say a really nice 3000hp/mana piece of gear is a very rare drop from an already rare level 60 named in The Hole. Let's say the PHer type mob is known (or becomes known) but that type spawns all over the zone so nobody can hog the entire camp. The item itself drops rarely and ONLY if the entire encounter with the named involves only players for which the mob gives XP. (It could be made even more challenging by requiring the mob to be no lower than DB to every player in the group. Or, better yet, if it's a named, it has to be yellow or red to every member.) Any outside assistance would disable the drop mechanism.

When the item drops, anyone in the XP group can acquire it. They can't use it themselves since it's intended for say level 95 minimum. It's no-drop but also heirloom so it can be moved via shared bank to a 95+ toon on the same account.

Wouldn't YOU want to roll a level-appropriate toon, get some friends to do the same, and go out and camp for this fine item? I sure would!

Yeah, the whole thing would have to be tested, tinkered with and fine-tuned to ensure a reasonable drop rate and no unintended exploitable mechanisms, such as mind-blurring the mob after it's been nuked by a high-level and other unsportsmanlike efforts by clever players always seeking to get around the rules. But I think it would do wonders for those old zones and revive grouping at sub-90 levels.

You say: "Turn every low level zone in the game into a farm."

So? So how is that a bad thing? Right now they're farms without any farmers. Or players whatsoever. EVERY zone in EQ is ultimately a farm. Players are mostly motivated by loot, right? This would just use this natural motivator to encourage people to go back and experience older zones, and with toons appropriate to XP in this zones.

Personally, I see very little downside to this except PERHAPS annoying raiders who feel that all "ubah" loot should only be awarded to those who participate in 36-54 man encounters against boss mobs in end-game raid zones. Frankly, Sony tends to cater to those players and that might be the biggest reason they'd never institute my suggestion, or if they did the loot wouldn't be worth the effort. With the exception of occasional oddities such as the Crested Mistmoore Ring and Ancient Cloak of Flames, it's almost unheard of in EQ for a groupable mob to drop anything even approaching current "Augment Type 8" gear quality.

I say why NOT!?







Edited, Jun 12th 2014 8:04pm by Sippin

Oh hi, griefing level 100 monk tossing a throwing knife at each mob...

No special reason. Just picked a specific example to illustrate the point. I think your idea is an interesting one.