The Hidden Forest

Greetings everyone!
Just yesterday I logged for the first time to THF, and Lillu instantly managed to spot me, so I will post a few of my observations for him =)
Before I begin , I like to say that I never played on server with bots before, and having a little mercenary follow me around I can dress up is kind of a fun in its own =)

on Crushbone observations:
From what I can see, Crushbone seem to have a mob level range gap.
You run out of Legionaries to kill at about level 20 (legos are about lev 15-17), and next rank mobs - stompers and champions are like 25+
This creates almost a 10 level gap, in which there is no even con mobs to kill, the champions are almost unkilleable when you under 20, and there are not too many legos to go around to level up on them. I would suggest taking a part of the zone - like mines and make orcs there lev 20-22. BTW, if slaves serve no purpose, get rid of them and replace them with orcs too. (perhaps make orc slavers lev 20-22 and put them all in mine?)
In the castle, I would suggest replacing all lower level centurions spawn there with Legos, and may as well reduce spawn time in castle down to like 60 seconds =)

I do realize that this is a newbie zone which people spend at most 2-3 hours in, before moving on, and there is also Paludal available, but just pointing it out as I go, and I hope Lillu don't take this as a ranting =P

hey again! and thanks for the feedback. keep posting please under this thread anything you think we should consider to tune in any way. we appreciate it and always listen to suggestions.

I hope you'll enjoy your stay!

np =)
I am having fun running around with my personal bot tank and gearing her up =)

few other things to note:

I think plate gear in CB drops a bit more often than that for pure casters (and I think I have seen either cleric/paly/warrior boots on like every 2nd corpse). My necro only managed to get 2nd wrist by lev 35 (ok maybe just my luck, I killed crush/Dvin/Skull a 2 dozen times now - still no Robe, but hell got BST Legs/Tunic 6 times!!! =P) but from what I seen, wizard and druid drops also very few.

On necro 1.0 Epic- never liked that item actually even on live. On live it was only good as mana free darkness back when highest level was 60. I found Fabled Jorneyman Stick in Cb which has almost identical stats to Necro 1.0, not to mention it hits twice as fast, has +60 hp, and 41% haste (yeah I am a meleeing necro! =P). So the only thing on the 1.0 to be valued is the clicky which is 9 second cast time =(
I propose: make cast time on clicky 1-3 sec tops, but put a 1min recast timer on it (if you think that would make it too powerful). So it can only be used once a minute, but at least its going to be as fast as the rest of my spells. Otherwise- it will continue to sit in the bank =)

On City of Mist: I only took a small pick inside, and never made it past the first gates. The teleporter said its a zone for 30+ people, but there is big and VERY RED (to lev 37) golem who is like 2nd mob from the entrance and quads for 250+ =) Killed my lev 37 Sk tank bot in about 15 seconds, while i was running for the exit =) Another golem standing next to him was dark blue, so I am guessing random spawning luck, unless that is intentional.

About Crushbone, all armor drop rates are the same. You can check things like this by going to the AllaKhazam Clone and either searching for your items or the mob who drops it. In this case, lets look at an Orc Stomper who has all armors dropping with a 25% drop rate per group.

On City of Mist, if I'm not mistaken the Mighty Golem should not be KoS. However, there are named there which are much harder - the setup of CoM is a little harder to keep named mobs from popping up in random places. You'll likely be ok though if you bypass the Mighty Golem and go slightly right and then left to that courtyard. Usually no named mobs spawn there.

Welcome to The Hidden Forest! We'd love to especially get some more low level feedback as most often people just rush through and it's hard to get someone posting on the board from day 1. Thank you so much!

Hope to see you around in game. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask me in game (but feedback should still go here).

*Edit* One more thing ... there are mobs hiding around the wall at the Karnor's entrance which everyone dies to on their first pull. Invis through them and then you can either ignore them or pull them from behind with some type of lull.

Thanks for the feedback and welcome!

About the Necro Epic - we didn't change 1.0's really beside the Mage one (Powerlevel galore). So I can check and see what kind of dot/cast etc is on it and might adjust it a bit to make it a tiny bit less useless

The level gap is a good point - I will try and fix that.

Cast time of Epic is reduced to 3 secs now (from 9 secs). Reload required.

p.s. started a new thread about Karnor entrance

Koeril, that you for your reply. The thing is, if I am reading the data correctly the 25% on the bracer, is the chance to drop SOMETHING from the bracer table entry at all. But the list doesn't actually show what are the individual chances on each bracer inside that table entry. Which I guess is like 5% each. That so, then we dealing with the evil of EMu RND, which has been long known to produce some very tricky values.
In specific, let say you have 100 item on the loot entry each with 1%. In the order of the items listed FIRST, will have greater chance to drop than the items listed LAST. In practice the first item on the list will drop like 10% of the time, while the last item on the list will drop like 0.01% of the time.
At least that what the people said who tested the RND about the year ago. And so far there has been no fix to this. Creates a problem when you want to have a table entry with large enough number of items, the items with smaller item ID will drop MORE than the others. There was an EXTENSIVE testing sample posted at EMU boards about this- I will look them up later and post the link.

AND - looking the the table list you linked- that is EXACTLY what is happening =) ALL the plate type bracer listed first, which my guess they have smaller item ID number, and umm my necro bracer is umm 2nd before last =)

The way I found to circumvent this issue, is set a drop table differently. So rather than to have a single drop entry for all bracer, (on my server) , I made drop entry per gear set.
So instead of having entry for: bracers, boots, helms etc - I made entry for Warrior set, Cleric set, Bard set etc. Now inside say Warrior entry, I would make sure than item IDS are lowest for less significant parts (like bracers) and higher for things like BP. And them even if you put them all on same %% chance, since BP would be last thing on the list, it would drop the LEAST often of all other items, creating "natural rarity" due to bugginess of the EMU RND (I know specifically in CB BP and legs drop of named, but that's beside the point). Of course items ID reshuffling is out of the question for this server, as it will screw up al the gear that already dropped =)

Another problem RND has, that it produces numbers in CHUNKS.
For example in combat you could observer things when mob would hit you for: 65,64,66,61 etc- very closely placed numbers in a row, specially during QUADS for example, and on next attack you will see: 11,15,12,9.
Same problem plagues the loot drops. If have a table where you have x4 multiplier to drop something inside the entry, the RND will 4 times in a row roll numbers like : 77,78,73,75 - dropping 4x copies of whatever item happens to be sitting at 70 to 80% range in the entry. I have proven this one myself, back on StormHaven server, when in 20+ kills of the same named who had 3x chance to drop any of 16 items, I would STEADY get 3x copies of any given item on the same kill, while by LOGIC (how it SHOULD work) I should be getting 3 different items each time.

Its sad that in all this time, the EMU people still can't nail down this problem and fix it =(
But it something we need to work around and live with.


Tyler, oh thank you for the cast time change- much appreciated =)

Another thing I noted: when you enter Guk there is Chaotic Noble? Who gives quest for chaotic necklace of something. The necklace is great all around, except the Focus - its Mana Preservation I - which expires long before you ever set foot in the dungeon =)
Another thing is that all caster classes already get their MP IV from CB drops, and the only focus that comes to mind which could useful that hasn't been already given on CB set is something like Affliction Haste IV - perhaps this could be a worthy swap? Or anything else that could be useful at 30+


PS> Wheww.. that was a long type - I am tired =) Are you tired reading? =P
Good day to all =)

Very interesting read about the RND or so to say, the lack of the RND

I changed the bracer table a bit, so the lower end stuff (lower = end of loot table) has a 0.25% greater chance to be dropped. Let's see how that works out.

About the Noble Necklace - consider it done, a good point actually. Next reload!

For random testing check out: http://clone.thehiddenforest.org/strategy/test.php

hey guys, I found that original post on RND problems. Apparently I was remembering things not excatly right. But here is full discussion of the problem:

http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/showth ... ndom+items