On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, Reece, Tom - 25IDL G4 wrote:
>
> Last night, I was grouped with a necromancer in MM. There were only a
> handful of people in the zone so we decided to pull the mobs back to the
> zone and fight there. On one occasion, I pulled two familiars that we were
> handling just fine. Out of nowhere, a flouting gargoyle appeared. None of
> the other people in the zone were nearby so I know for a fact they didn't
> lead the gargoyle to us. At the time the garg appeared, the necro was over
> 75% health. In an instant, he got zapped by something and was killed. He
This is a well known Mistmoore bug. Every once in a while you
will see a skeleton standing near the zone. Clicking on it
reveals it's the pet of a high level mob somewhere inside the
castle. I assume "inside the castle" is right behind the zone
wall. If you attack the pet (or hit anything inside the
castle with an AE spell/song through the walls), the stuff you
can't see will aggro on you.
> I am inclined to believe that our deaths were a result of a bug, which I'm
> told sometimes occurs in MM. First off, the gargs spawned right next to the
> zone, which I am almost certain shouldn't have occured. Everyone in the
They didn't spawn, they teleported. People were exploiting
safe spots to kill mobs while the mobs were "stuck" trying to
path to them. Verant fixed it by making it so if the mobs
couldn't path to you after a short period of time, they just
teleport to you. So you hit something through the walls, the
gargoyles were close enough to go aggro on you, couldn't find
a quick route to you, and so teleported right on top of you.
A side effect of this is that Screech is no longer as
effective in dungeons if you have a long run to the zone.
You will scare off a bunch of mobs who run the other way, and
20 seconds later they all teleport on top of you.
> bug. Second, the text messages did not indicate I got hit by a spell, which
> could have accounted for losing 60% of my health in one shot. Even if I did
> get hit by a spell, the damage that familiars can do in one shot (usually
The casters were behind the wall, and since you didn't have
LOS, you got no "mob begins to cast a spell" messages. You
should've gotten a "Your skin freezes over" message or
something, but I've not gotten that several times. Maybe LOS
has something to do with it. (It's high time we got messages
indicating how much damage we're taking from spells anyhow).
Don't use AE around the zone point (truth be told, there are
only about 3 or 4 places where I *would* use AE in that zone),
and only attack stuff that attacks you. The skeleton pet on
the wrong side of the wall will not join in your fights at the
zone unless you hit it first.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...