Mercenaries

[Armm]

Still havent figured what causes it. It might be related to grouping because these mercs below are run by a guy who multiboxes/groups...

Anyhow demonstrating the "leftovers"

[Secrets]

Originally Posted by Armm

Still havent figured what causes it. It might be related to grouping because these mercs below are run by a guy who multiboxes/groups...

Anyhow demonstrating the "leftovers"

I'll take a look into this soon; been busy so I haven't had time for mercs.

[bad_captain]

I've been out and busy the last 2 weeks, so I'm going to try and get back into this this weekend and check out some of the issues you've pointed out.

I'd have to look into the buffs. Not sure what's going on there.

Attack and AC are kind of confusing and how they are calculated and displayed are different between clients, npc, bots, mercs, and pretty much everything else. Merc base ATK and AC may be higher than what clients are used to because they have little to no way to improve them. No equipment upgrades, no AAs, etc. Only buffs can be used to increase them. They may still be a little high, as I just guessed when I created them, trying to get them close to high end client values at that level. If you have a specific example of what one should be, I can adjust them accordingly.

#Showstats shows different values for Bots as well, but I'd have to look into it again, as it's been a while since I tried to figure it out. I do remember ATK values being maybe half what they should have shown for bots.

Edit: Looks like that is being added twice. I'll get that removed.

[bad_captain]

I have figured out the buffs issue, I believe. I'll see if I can get it in this weekend.

[Armm]

Thank you.

I agree the attack code is confusiing. Since you asked for a specific example ill give you one with the level 50 scenario above. The example below ASSUMES i know what the code is doing. I am going to leave ATK values out of it because im not sure what is being calced here.

Mob is level 50 Froglok Dar Knight from sebilis who has an AC of 429 in DB.

Level 50 Merc attack the Froglok. Merc has str of 267, and warrior for that level has offense of 210. Running that through formuyla listed above WIHTOUT the ATK added onto it gives you 463 for attack RATING.

Froglok is an NPC so the NPCACfactor rule is 2.25 by default.

else if(IsNPC())
		{
			armor = CastToNPC()->GetRawAC();

			if(!IsPet()) 
			{
				armor = (armor / RuleR(Combat, NPCACFactor));
			}

			armor += spellbonuses.AC + itembonuses.AC + 1;
		}

so the Frogloks armor is AC/2.25 + spells and item bonuses which means his AC before class armor caps is 190.

You can see the problem is that the attack rating is already over 2 times the AC to begin with. Now if you add (im working from memory) several hundred or thousand ATK once or twice you can see that the attack rating to AC ratio is someplace from 3x to 20x.

To be fair , you are remarkably close on your AC settings for mercs tanking NPCs.

[bad_captain]

I removed the doubling of the strength factor & offense for ATK for mercs, and some extra stats added in during stat calculations (I still had bot racial/class stats being added in), which I removed.

I will look more into the attack issue, and see if I can get ATK to be a little more reasonable comparable to group content geared clients. At 50, the highest value in the DB is 1600 for melee DPS (1550 for tanks). At 65, these values are 2080 and 2015. Adding in STR & Offense twice would mean 600-700 extra attack at 65, not really a few thousand. Either way, the calculation will still mostly come out where the attacker's attack rating is significantly higher than the mobs defense rating (when using the NPCACFactor), as mob AC is fairly low, especially at those lower levels.

Anyway, hopefully that helps.

[Furniture]

Sorry - heres my error, latest compile of everything, just cant source this update - 2013_03_1_Merc_Rules_and_Equipment

It stops when it tries to create the merc_inventory table:

[bad_captain]

See my response here:

www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36795

[GurkhaPanzers]

I haven't compiled the source code in a while. May I ask Merc status. Do they work today? Are Mercs clerics and tanks only still?

[provocating]

I am rather wondering the same thing. I had previously sourced in all of the merc SQL statements months ago. Two days ago I did a drop_system.sql and imported in the newest PEQ, recompiled my server source, maybe sure mercs were enabled in the rules table. If I go up to a liaison and right click nothing happens. I went ahead and sourced in the SQL for the mercs again, listed from a previous post and still nothing.

I did read were there were a few problems with ghosting mercs and saw there is a GIT fix request posted from Kimmy have mercs been disabled in code recently?

[Robregen]

http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/sho...t=37086&page=2

[provocating]

I guess I was looking in the wrong direction. I did see where the was a "failed to spawn" error people were talking about but I did not think it was related. RandyMarsh's sql update fixed it for me, yay!!

Thank you so much Robregen, your help to the community is always greatly appreciated.

[provocating]

One thing I did notice today is that I am indeed getting charged the merc upkeep cost, but the window shows 0 pp and 0 gold. Is this possibly just a client issue, I do believe I could had been using RoF instead of UF when I noticed it.

[bad_captain]

I haven't seen this. what level? Verify client if you can.

Thanks.

[bad_captain]

I'm excited to see the newest live expansion, with merc AAs and merc only equipment. Although we may not get a client we can use anytime soon, there's no reason we can't add support for both.