What happened to FT?

[Rewde]

I was in the bazaar the other day and decided that I was going to see if anyone currently had a pair of boots of flowing slime up for sale, and any other items with FT on them. I finally have a serious lump of pp in the bank and can afford to buy them, and still have a good chunk of change left over. Anyway, instead of typing in boots of flowing slime in the search, I used the drop down search, the one at the bottom, and lo-and-behold, it was no longer in there. Has anyone else noticed this, or have any inkling as to why it was removed?

[cattywumpus]

The Haste category is missing now too.

Wanted to get my tracking bot a nice reward for his help with Black Dire but I'm not up on ranger gear so I had trouble finding anything.

[Lothay]

Those items aren't listed under effects anymore, they're listed under stats.

And Flowing Thought is now listed as Mana Regeneration.

[Verdandi]

From the March 10 patch:

We have replaced the spell-like effects on items which produced the following effects: Attack, HP Regen, Mana Regen, Haste and Damage Shield with actual statistics. The effects on the item have not changed they are just set up in a new way that we hope will allow for more item functionality in the future.

[Rewde]

Woooot. You 2 rock. Thanks for the info. Evidently I missed it. Of course, I do miss almost all patch messages, for some reason they no longer pop up on the big screen for me, and with autoplay enabled, 5 seconds is too short to read patch notes

[Tinile]

eqnews.txt in your EQ directory always contains the latest patch message.

[Tricsun]

I really wished they would stop the dumbing down of the game. I personally liked the focus effects. I mean, Aura of Battle sounds so much better than "Attack: +10 Regen: +2"

[Dunthor Warsmith]

I'm mixed. It nukes the RP and "fun" value, but ups the "accessability" factor and decreases the amount of out-of-game "research" required to mechanically understand your environment. Given the trends of EQ, RP-value seems to be a very low priority, and accessability and in-game info seem to be high priorities.

I'm mixed about how I feel personally. I miss the old names - "Flowing Thought" and "Aura of Battle" and such did give a nice flavor to everything. But it is nice not having to check Lucy every time to be reminded "how many hp/tick is Regeneration? (5)", etc.

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And thank you Lothay Had noticed that the Haste & FT had been removed from the "Effects" listing, but didn't think to check the stats listing, heh. That will take some getting used to, regens & atk as a "stat".

[Ngreth Thergn]

The real redason is not "dumbing down"

The real reason is not to make it easier on the players...

The real reason was to make it easier on the developers.

If they wanted an effect that was +2 mana regen, +4 HP regen and 10% haste... they would have to create a new spell.

Then when they wanted to add +3 mana regen, +4 HP regen, and 12% haste... They would have to create a new spell.

you get the idea.

Creating an item is easier for them than creating a spell. (though balancing an item is another matter entirely but not part of why they did this...)

This allows them to play more with what effects are on an item, without having to create a new spell for the focus effect. It still does not cure them from that, but it allows them more flexability without creating a new spell.

they could even make a new mana robe "Acursed Mana robe" it does not have the effect of +30 mana -60 hp instant with a recast... instead... it is +10 Mana regen -20 HP regen which comes out about the same without the clicking (or make the HP part worse say -30 HP regen to make up for the fact you don't ahve to click)

basically it gives them more freedom.