On Fri, 22 Oct 1999, Reece, Tom - 25IDL G4 wrote:
>
> Earlier this week there was a thread discussing how Pixie Strike was broken.
> In one of the posts, someone also mentioned that Lullaby didn't seem to work
> as well either. Last night in Unrest I had a first hand experience that
> leads me to conclude Lullaby has either been secretly nerfed or
> unintentionally broken.
I don't think it was nerfed. I think they just botched a
change to the internals of how it works. If you use Pixie
Strike on yourself, one of three things happens.
1) You resist it. Nothing exciting there.
2) It works (it really works). You get the "You are stunned"
message, the hand icon shows up, and you are stunned. When
the effect wears off, the hand icon disappears, you can move
again, and you get the "You are unstunned" message.
3) It works (but does nothing). The hand icon shows up but
nothing else happens. When the hand icon disappears, you get
the "You are no longer stunned" message.
Note the difference in wording. That indicates to me that two
different subroutines are being called in case (2) and (3).
For argument's sake, let's call (3) the "old" function and (2)
the "new" function.
I think the original Pixie Strike (and likely Lullaby) called
the old function. About a month ago, Verant for some reason
decided to change the code governing this and wrote up the new
function. For good measure, they disabled the part of the old
function that was causing the problems (mainly the part that
does the stunning). But somewhere, somehow, this old function
is still being called, especially when fighting high-blue or
higher mobs, leading to the song not being resisted but having
no effect. Nobody caught this in testing because both
functions still generated the same "eyes glaze over" message,
which was assumed to be coming from the new function.
To find out if the same thing is happening with Lullaby,
you'll have to go to the Arena and test it on a volunteer
(about the same level as the bard to maximize the incidence of
this bug). That person should understand the above problem
and the two different messages, and watch for them with the
Lullaby song.