i don't think they realize

[Jolran]

I was playing in PoN today and was interrupted 5 casts in a row trying to heal warder dont have any of the aas for interruptions but I do know that has never ever happened before.

[Otuol]

All this happened because the Devs, as always, put in a knee jerk repsonse to something they didn't think was balanced.  They are such idiots and Rashere leads the pack with some of his, they seem okay to me, comments.  The devs can be truly pathetic sometimes.

[Kanan]

I went to C1 last night over in pofire and played around a lil bit.  Mebbe killed 10 mobs total.  I did not consult my parsing to check, but I guess some of it is learned behaviors.  I was being missed/not swung at enough that one of the few times I was interrupted by only a single hit was when I got a resist on the pull and intentionally held my cast until I started to see the swing graphic.

I've got c1 down to such a reflex now I guess that I have their swings timed so that i'm getting my slows/nukes cast in the interim time.

Now, I doubt that would work as effectively over in MPG or most GoD zones where the mobs swing far quicker.

Obviously Rash is going to be changing it.  I just wish he wouldn't be so damnably "hi! surprise! we changed something without putting it through player testing again!" and actually put it on the test server so that people can run the millions of lines of parsing that would be required to properly decide what's tolerable and what's not.

[Taiglin]

All this happened because the Devs, as always, put in a knee jerk response to something they didn't think was balanced.

Actually the interrupt math that should increase your casting success while being hit (via AAs) was implemented incorrectly - backwards in fact. Everyone started with a 100% success rate and the more AAs you bought the worse you chances became to get that spell off while being hit. It is that they were investigating which lead them to the discovery and correction to the way the game had been designed. The reality is this has been bugged for years and people and the devs are used to it and would venture to say some content/progression/balance has been designed with something that was "broken" as a backdrop (ie Pally's aggro management via stuns).

There has been no indication from what I have read that this was changed to target X class from being able to do Y thing. What drives me nuts reading a few different boards is how some people think the motivation to change the code back was exactly that though. "SoE doesn't want SK/Pally/Bst/Rangers/etc to be able to tank" or "SoE wants to remove the nec ability to tap tank" and on and on down the line. Did this fix affect those things - yes. Was it the motivation for the fix - no. Has the game changed in many ways since this was originally broken - probably yes. Given the state of the game now vs how the game was when this originally became broken did this change game play worse then they probably figured - yes and so with today's patch it is getting reverted back to the "broken" state.

Don't get me wrong this affected me as well and am not particularly happy about it. Rashere also said expect a revamp in the near future so this issue will pop up again. What drives me nuts though is EVERY class thinks SoE's whole job is to nerf, maim, destroy, or otherwise make their class unplayable. I mean seriously look beyond the end of your nose.

[Bengali]

Obviously Rash is going to be changing it.  I just wish he wouldn't be so damnably "hi! surprise! we changed something without putting it through player testing again!" and actually put it on the test server

According to the official threads, they DID put it on the Test server (but not in the patch notes) and they didn't receive any complaints about it (Rash said the only people who said anything were some low level players on the progression server, and the effect is supposed to be more profound for them anyway).

[Skanda]

In the new patch notes;

- We've reverted the fix to channeling made with the last patch. After much discussion, our general feeling is that channeling has been broken for long enough that players have come to rely on that broken behavior as expected gameplay. For the time being, we've reverted back to that broken behavior and will address spell interrupts in general at a later date.

Round 1 goes to the "OMGZ nurfs" crowd.  :-P

[Grbage]

Obviously Rash is going to be changing it.  I just wish he wouldn't be so damnably "hi! surprise! we changed something without putting it through player testing again!" and actually put it on the test server

According to the official threads, they DID put it on the Test server (but not in the patch notes) and they didn't receive any complaints about it (Rash said the only people who said anything were some low level players on the progression server, and the effect is supposed to be more profound for them anyway).

This doesnt suprise me at all. I started messing around on the test server about 6mos ago after one of the devs made a request for people to go there and test a change. Don't play full time there, generally only log on when I have less then an hour to play because you get all the vet aa's and you can easily PL yourself.

My point is that Test population is not very high. You can log on during peak hours and find maybe 20 people hanging out in PoK. If you find more then 20 in people in the bazaar in trader mode you are lucky. Check the LFG tool and you might find one person on it if you check the show all box. Otherwise, not much testing is getting done so it would be easy for something like a change to channeling to sneak through.

[Bengali]

Grbage hit the nail on the head.  SOE doesn't release completely untested content per se.  They always put the code on the Test server first.  What happens, however, is that changes go unnoticed because the testing environment isn't very robust, or unexpected things that occur when the population is high don't ever pop up on the sparsely poplulated Test server.

[maxawesome]

I think the devs are seeing that they might need to design content with more agility -- and perhaps revamp the testing system -- such that making a "fix" to a piece of content does not drastically alter gameplay experience for everyone (yes, this change affected Melee, Hybrid, and Pure Caster alike as in group we all rely upon each other for success), and such that testing can be done painlessly without a huge amount of time investment.

My question about testing is this, and please bear with me as I haven't played on Test for about 3 years:

They have implemented the shroud system, giving us the ability to take on a variety of classes, at almost any level in the game, right? Why not let us "shroud" to any race/class/level combo on the test server between patches and then just destroy the toons each patch?

I would be more apt to test before patches if it didn't mean cutting significantly into my regular game progression.

The other option that I can see is that they adopt another feature from WOW and let us "copy" our toons to the Test Server. I would be happy to copy my 70 BST to Test to check out a "new fix for channelling" so that I could give them LOUD feedback PRIOR to the patch. I'm sure many of you would have done the same. It took me 15 minutes of boxing with my druid to identify that the "jig was up" in terms of 100% channelling success.

For the time being though, I applaud Rashere and the devs for "re-breaking" the code to cater to the customer for once, rather than "game balance" or "intended functionality". I think they may after 7 years finally be getting the picture that the customer is always right, even when he is dead wrong, cause we're the ones paying their car payments and sending their kids to college.

[maxawesome]

Did this "re-breaking" of channelling go in effect today as planned? I haven't seen a patch message on any gaming site yet, and won't have time to play til tomorrow, so I'm curious if it did go in today.

Th4nx0rz

[Taiglin]

Yeah. Last bullet on the patch message.