Mercenaries

[bad_captain]

BTW, about spell lists- a good way to get them for apprentice and journeyman is to do a /testcopy for your characters so you don't have to worry about hiring/ upkeep cost, and gives you access to journeyman mercs as if you are gold member.

[bad_captain]

Yeah, mana regen seemz slow. I think there's a bug with rest regen that I've also fixed on my local machine, but rest regen helps ( if turned on of course). The higher level you try, the worse it probably is. I don't have much data above level 65, and had to guess on a lot of stats.

Prior to my commit with merc equipment, they had no mana preservation or improved healing. The equipment's focus items help a lot. There's still a lot of room for improvement, and tweaking will continue. I'm mostly worried about getting things working, and then making improvements. Especially after getting more feedback.

Let me know about the resurrect spells.

[Shiny151]

Let me know about the resurrect spells.

So I ran the query and I'm getting 'empty sets' returned; which is odd because I ran the 2/18 merc spells update .sql and i can see the 65536 spell line in the update but it's not sticking to my database table. What in the world?

So I ran it again and it's still not sticking; even clearing the table and rerunning doesn't help. Maybe i'll just have to dump all the merc tables and rerun them all from scratch.

[bad_captain]

I just realized the problem. On my 2/18 commit, I referenced the mercs.sql file from the svn folder, which KLS fixed by copying over and adding to a new commit with the spell lists, since I wasn't supposed to reference the old svn scripts.. The mercs.sql file also included a change to the merc_spell_list_entries table, which wasn't copied over.

To fix, change the spell_type column to be an int instead of tinyint. You should be able to run:

ALTER TABLE merc_spell_list_entries MODIFY spell_type INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL default '0';

You will then need to re-run the spell inserts, or update the table create script and drop and recreate before running the spell insert scripts.

I will be updating spell lists this week for dps caster, so I will fix this officially then. Let me know if this works.

[Shiny151]

Okay thanks; i'll try that when I get home tonight. Since i cleared the table and reran the script for merc spells it created about 200+ line items; is this correct? It seemed like the first time i cleared the table there were a lot more lines than this.

[Shiny151]

ALTER TABLE merc_spell_list_entries MODIFY spell_type INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL default '0';

Okay that worked. I'm seeing the sets in my tables now. The next step is to test them out. Thank you!

[Armm]

Things im noticing...

2 boxing 2 chars with mercs... one tank merc, J2 one helaer merc j2 both level 85...

Once in combat, cleric gets low on mana fast, sits to regen, and because i had restregentimetoactivate rule set to 3 the cleric starts getting back massive mana quickly. I assume restregen shouldnt kick in while in combat?

If you suspend the merc and lose/gain a level one of two things happen.

1.)Either the timer to unsuspend counts down to 0, and the unsuspend button lights up again, but you push on it and nothing happens. You try to dismiss and it asks you it you want to dismiss, you click yes, nothing happens.

2.) Or else the timer counts down to 0 and stays greyed out and only the dismiss button is active but doesnt work.

After either 1 or 2 I then zoned. After the zone the merc is by my side again without me having to push unsuspend. Acts normally.

All of the above was true with either UF or ROF clients.

[Armm]

Addition..

I set restregenrule to 18 seconds.

Started fight with 2pc, 1 healer merc and 1 tank merc, all level 85.

Out of five fights, only ONE did the cleric merc not constantly regen 15+% of mana every random few seconds(3-9 seconds roughly).

Cleric merc never runs out of mana in this state. Kill a 500k hp mob with just tank and cleric merc going at it.

Cleric casting frenetic renewal every 3-5 seconds(checked in logs), default recast on that spell should be 30 seconds... Are they meant to adhere to recast times?

[bad_captain]

Yes, they should only regen while out of combat.

Yes, they should respect spell recast timers.

Both work correctly for bots, so I just need to figure out why not for mercs.


I doubt there's any check for losing or gaining a level while suspended, so I'll check that out. Thanks for the info and keep it coming. I'm sure there are plenty of other issues out there.

[Armm]

Update-

With 2 PC, 2 merc group(like before), if the PC with the healer DOES NOT damage the mob being fought by the other PC and merc. THAT is when the healer regens mana like he is in restregen mode. If the PC with the healer engages in combat then healer never enters restregen mode.

[bad_captain]

Okay, that helps a lot.

I wasn't seeing it in my tests, which makes sense because I only usually run 1 PC. There is code there that seems like it should accomplish what we want (get the npc on the merc's hate list to make him Engaged()), so I will take a look at that.

I will fire up a second PC and test this out further.

I'm just trying to come up with a basic spell list for caster DPS mercs (they cast so many different spells on live, it's taking a while to get live-lie, so I'm just doing a temporary generic list for them), then I will commit what I have.

[Armm]

Upon thinking about it i wondered if this is because mercs act like mobs... For example when you are fighting a mob with a PC, you can have another mob heal the mob you are fighting without aggroing or joining the fight?

Check your PMs from me BadCaptain please.

[Armm]

Update-

I can trigger the restregen with one PC.

One PC had level 85 J2 healer merc. PC sends in pet and causes no dmg. Merc healer heals pet down to 20ish percent mana, then soon after that whenever they sit down they trigger restregen for mana. It stops the moment i do any damage with PC.

[bad_captain]

That may be a related, but somewhat different issue. I may be wrong, but there may be an issue of hate transferrence from pet to owner ( I know it's not 1:1, but if your pet is killing an npc, the npc should be adding some hate for you). I will try to test this out some on live and on my test server.

I did change how the mercs have npcs added to their hate list, but didn't get to test last night. I will try it tonight. Having 1 npc on their hate list should be sufficient to keep them from going into rest mode.

[Shiny151]

One thing I did notice with rezzing now with the cleric mercs is that they will only rez their master/hirerer. My experience is that if someone else dies in the group the merc cleric will not rez them.

Just offering additional feedback.