question~regarding reaserching and staff of wheel quest

[enk]

the quest, staff of wheel, for wizards ice comet, gives rune of astral and rune of frost. has this been changed w/ revamp of reaserching? anyone know.

[Ngreth Thergn]

You can still make those runes, they just no longer make ice comet

[Qaladar Bragollach]

They have no other use so its a dead end method of obtaining ice comet (once very very long ago it was difficult to get a scroll of this).

Actually I'll elaborate because ngreth didnt seem to understand the question... no sweat it was a long time before he became an eq dev.

Ice Comet was once a really difficult spell to obtain (think ancient spells) requiring you to get runes from Vox and Nagafen... then you could combine those to make ice comet. Later they put in the staff of the wheel quest that returns (along with the Staff of the Wheel of course) a rune of frost and a rune of the astral.

I believe there were dev comments that at the time were to the effect of they didnt want wizards to go the last 6 levels (we got spells in bunches in those days with mostly vendor spells at 44... ice comet was 49) without upgrading their primary nuke.

Around the same time they added Rend which WAS originally a lower damage spell than ice comet that had identical damage/mana ratio. Rend was available on a vendor and anyone could do the staff of the wheel quest solo at around 16 when wizards got invis (I know the lower guk rod could be real hard at 16 heh but in those days there wasnt anywhere else to hang out for high level's... on a friday night you could step into lower guk and walk down to the lord's room and sit in his chair having a nice chat with the group there without seeing a single froglok along the way).

Man I'm rambling... anyway no you cant use the runes from the staff quest to make ice comet anymore but the reasons for them to exist dont exist anymore either. PLUS they revamped wizard spells along about luclin(?) era and ice comet isnt the big boom long cast time spell that it was (I think until level 60 and sunfire in kunark era it was the largest nuke we got... and even then most wizards didnt have access to sunfire so it remained the biggest until velious era and ice spear of solist which has other issues (much lower mana cost and faster cast time but it has a 13 second recast... or at least it did they may have changed that too))

Wow ok I am really rambling now... than's for reading Ancient EQ History Volume 74: Wizard Spells.