Has the success rate of knock-out inhaled poison been reduced. The last poisoner I played was Shazidra with Amaranthe's character competition. Back then, it was easily the highest success rate KO in the game. I just rolled up another poisoner, though, and I just perfected inhaled poison and apply is no time due to an insanely high fail rate. I practice it by finding a mob that starts out always asleep and practice on it. At first, the frequent fails were expected, and the mob stays asleep because the KO kept failing and doesn't provoke a fight on a sleeping victim. But as my skill percentage in both Apply and Inhaled Poison got higher and higher, I noticed that I still rarely succeeded (a success should either knock him out, or if he already has a physical sleep resistance timer, should give the echo "XXXX shrugs off your attempt to knock him out). The first auto-sleeping mob I started on got knocked out successfully once, so I moved on to the second auto-sleeping mob. That one literally NEVER got knocked out, and I only saw the "shrugs off" echo maybe a dozen times in hundreds of attempts. Previously, I would sit there for several minutes attempting to KO against a physical sleep resistance timer waiting to either fail the check (resulting in an echo of "slips out of your grasp"), or the sleep resistance timer to wear off and the KO to take effect.

I'm just wondering if this is a bug, or if poisoners have been silently uber-nerfed since I played Shazidra.

The response on the bugboard was "No changes I could see". Which turned into "You already got an answer prior you didn't like..." when you posted additional info.

I do not know why you have been met with hostility for pointing this out other than maybe they do not know the cause and simply don't want to spend more time on it. As a former development mgr. what matters is not "what the developer sees" but "what the end user sees". I don't know why "we couldn't find changes" trumps all the data you provided and your experience.

Anyway, thank you for the effort you put into trying to help resolve the issue and sorry you are not being taken seriously.

if the dude didn't test his poison skills with poison-resistant mobs.

That these were the same mobs he's always practiced on? So, unless they were changed to resist poison since then, it shouldn't matter.

Since other people weren't catching it when I keep saying the same thing.

There have been times when players have noticed a bug, told the IMMs, and the IMMs "didn't see anything wrong with the code"....at the time.

Cranial is a perfect example It was buggy. Many people told the IMMs it was buggy, certain IMMs said it wasn't buggy like that anymore and that it was fixed, players said "Nah dude, still buggy".

Eventually I died like a chump to that bug, posted the log, and Zulg fixed it

>I do not know why you have been met with hostility for
>pointing this out other than maybe they do not know the cause
>and simply don't want to spend more time on it. As a former
>development mgr. what matters is not "what the developer sees"
>but "what the end user sees". I don't know why "we couldn't
>find changes" trumps all the data you provided and your
>experience.

It doesn't "trump" anything, but to tweak what you said slightly, that was all I had time for. That thief code is some of the crappiest spaghetti code in all of CF's ~1 million line codebase and it's a feature that, to my knowledge, no active coder has much institutional knowledge of.

Nobody is saying OP is wrong or stupid. All I'm saying is that I don't see any obvious changes in recent(ish) history that would've resulted in those skills behaving differently, by design or otherwise. And that's all the digging I've had time for. End of story.

I appreciate OP's logs and analysis, and I'm sure if I sat down to focus on just this one thing for a while it would be helpful. I'm afraid I just don't see that happening any time soon, though.

This response was far more helpful to me than what I was receiving from previous replies, and lets me know that I'm not simply being brushed aside. I do understand RL time constraints always take precedence, so I'm cool with that.

And just to let you know, your post to which I'm replying here was posted while I was in the process of writing my long reply to Saagkri, so please don't take that post as an attack. It wasn't intended as such, and what you've just posted actually lines up perfectly with what I like to see when it comes to addressing bugs.

So thank you for your efforts, as much as you have the time for.

It's reassuring to know that someone is reading my posts with that deeper level of insight and understands the situation, even if it's not one of the people who are capable of directly addressing the issue.

This reminds me of one of my previous jobs. I got the interview because my brother was already one of the highest paid salaries in the company and he recommended me. I had no "professional" techie experience, but very computer savy and a VERY small amount of coding experience (which wasn't actually a prereq for the job anyway). I wasn't sure why my brother thought I would be a good fit for the job, since I had no techie work experience. He assured me that I had the right mindset that was necessary for the job (Quality Assurance), and that it was the mindset they were looking for the most. So I whipped up a tailored resume, filled out the application, nailed the interview when it came, and landed the job, joining the dev team as a Jr QA Engineer.

The normal process for joining the Engineering Dept was to start as a Tier 1 Tech support in the call center, work your way up to Tier 2 in 6 months to a year, then 1-2 years to reach Tier 3, and at least 3 years as Tier 3 before being eligible for an open position in Engineering, should one become available. Because of my brother's recommendation, I skipped all that and went straight to the Engineering team (earning A LOT of animosity from guys in Tech Support). I felt bad for the situation, and didn't really understand (at first) why I was allowed to skip the normal process of working up through the ranks. My brother kept reassuring me, though, that tech support would have been a total waste of my abilities when they were badly needed to fill the QA role in Engineering so the coders could focus on new feature development. Then I started actually dealing with the guys in tech support and suddenly understood what my brother was talking about.

A major part of my job was to look at reported bugs that couldn't be resolved by Tiers 2 and 3 in tech support, and figure out how to reproduce them with documented steps to reproduce. What I found was that the vast majority of "bugs" were just user error that SHOULD have been caught right away by Tier 2, or AT LEAST been caught and kicked back down by by Tier 3. Instead, the tech support guys who had been with the company for many more years than me and who knew the product's capabilities much more intimately than I did (I'd only been there for about 1.5 months by this point), were unable to figure out what was going wrong, and were escalating the cases to Engineering with little to no documentation of what was going wrong, other than "User says "blah" isn't working. Tried to repro but failed." This was not terribly helpful in figuring out what's going wrong. So then I'd call up the tech support agent who escalated the so-called "bug" and dig for more details. The idea being, if the customer is reporting a problem, then something is not working the way the customer is expecting it to work. There are only two reasons that might happen. 1.) Design flaw (either hardware flaw or firmware flaw (bug). Or 2.) User error. Either way, SOMETHING is causing the product to not perform as the customer expects, so telling me "tried to repro but failed" is utterly useless. If the customer is experiencing it, then there's a way to reproduce it, even if the way to reproduce it is to do all the stupid things that improperly trained customers do. The one thing you NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER do is tell the customer they're full of ****, you can't reproduce what they're experiencing and therefore it must not exist, ignore the problem, and move on to the next bug. That's how you lose customers REAL fast.

In most cases, I was able to gather enough information from prodding the tech support guy to figure out what was happening and 98% of the time, the customer just had a feature misconfigured. I'd spend 5 minutes writing up a Crayola-style how-to for that feature, send it back down to the escalating support agent to be passed on to the customer, and mark the issue as resolved. Once in a while, the agent didn't have enough information from the customer to pass on to me, and I reluctantly had to contact the customer directly, explain that I was from the Engineering Dept and was working on their issue. Could they please explain to me in exquisite detail what it was they were TRYING to do, how they were going about it, and what was happening instead of what they'd expected. About 60% of those instances were still user error, but the rest turned out to be genuine bugs (or in a couple cases, a known hardware issue with an older model that had been fixed in newer models and the customer had simply never upgraded), which I verified by remoting in to their machine from the backend and digging through the logs to find the errors being automatically reported by the firmware. Then I'd go through the process of detailing step-by-step how to reproduce the bug in a way that would generate the same error in the errors log, mark the issue as Verified, and kick it up to the coders to deal with, including my extensive notes in condensed form in the report. Every one of those bugs was fixed within days if not hours and ready to be shipped when we pushed out the next minor release version of the firmware.

Once I started experiencing these things, I realized why they had fast tracked me straight to Engineering. The tech support guys largely were taking the approach of, "I can't reproduce it no matter what I try and I've spent hours at it, so I think this customer is just smoking something. Since I can't reproduce it, I'll kick it up to you and you can take a crack at it, but I don't think you're going to find anything more than I did."

Whenever I report a bug with this game, I try to do the same process as much as I can. Given that I'm doing this now from the "customer" standpoint, I'm limited in what I can see and test. But I still try to be just as thorough for what information I have available.

As far as this poison stuff, working from a "customer only" standpoint, I can't tell whether what I'm experiencing is a bug or the result of a change. The response, "I don't see any noteworthy changes" suggests that it's not the result of an intentional change, but does not explain the observed change in game function. This leads me to believe there's a bug at play here, somehow, somewhere. Or it could be there was a change to SOMETHING ELSE, that is indirectly affecting this. With only a customer's perspective, I can't determine what the underlying cause might be. I can only tell you what I'm observing, and that I am doing EXACTLY what I've always done, which has ALWAYS given me the same repeatable results for years, but now is giving me DIFFERENT results.

My guess is that savechecks against poison resistance were tweaked with the introduction of venom shamans. So here you go, different behavior against poison resistant mobs.

Not that it helps your case in any way possible

However, if so, it would not have been immediately upon introduction of venom shamans, as I distinctly remember playing a poisoner in at least two different cabals post-venom shaman intro and having cabalmates asking me to concoct various antidotes for them to carry around for dealing with the enemy venom shaman. And at whatever point that took place, I had still not experienced any change in inhaled method success rate.

That being said, your suggestion might still be valid as a later tweak post-venom shaman intro, and sometime after my last poisoner (whenever that was).

G

This is the exact same mob I used to perfect inhaled poison with Shazidra, and the other poisoners I played before her. In those cases, though, I practiced it on them when I was 6 levels lower than I am now, and still had a way higher success rate (they considered as "hooded" with Shazidra, and consider as "razor-sharp" now) After I was done perfecting it, I even tested on some mobs that were "few lucky blows" with same results. Something's definitely different, either an intentional change, or a bug. I'll post it up on the bug board when I get a chance to do it again and log it this time, so there's something to witness.

asd

So it can be in the queue to look at. What I experienced last night while practicing it, and testing it afterward was DEFINITELY not normal. Inhaled KO poison has always been the most reliable KO method short of food/drink KO poison, but the % success I saw last night was worse than weaponbutt blackjack.

58% success rate with 22 dex, 100% in all related skills,
level 28 character, level 28 poison vial against kobolds. Imms, please see bug board.

Your target was resist poison so that's a noticeable drop in chance alone.

You also used cave fisher dung which is the lowest quality sleep ingredient I ever came across by a huge margin.

What you were doing was likely the equivalent of trying to zap a dwarf with a level 5 poison wand, you should expect really low chance to succeed.

Cave fisher dung isn't the lowest level ingredient. It gives a poison vial equal to character level. Opium packet is the lowest quality, and that is what I have always used for perfecting Inhaled Poison and Apply on moudrillar monks. And yet, in every previous poisoner thief I've played, I've always run into:

apply knock-out monk inhaled
<monk's name> shrugs off your attempt to knock him out.
(1 round lag)
apply knock-out monk inhaled
<monk's name> shrugs off your attempt to knock him out.
(1 round lag)
apply knock-out monk inhaled
<monk's name> shrugs off your attempt to knock him out.
(1 round lag)

when trying to perfect it there. This time, that never happened. This time, I got the "slips from your grasp" echo almost every time, so clearly, SOMETHING has changed. A skill doesn't go from working one way for years, and then suddenly start working a completely different way without a code change being involved. If I had a log of my previous characters spam practicing Inhaled Poison on moudrillar monks, I would submit that for comparison. But unfortunately, I don't log all my sessions, and certainly not my spam practicing sessions.

I don't know why, but they are. Or at least I'm something like 75% sure they are based on past memory of using poison weapons on them.

nt

in the decrease of how KO poison affects them. Previously, I had high success. Now it's very low success. SOMETHING changed. Maybe they do have poison resistance, but I'm sure they had that before, and yet my success rate was very high with them before, and now it's not. My success rate vs PCs was just as high as it was vs the monks before also, and now I'm failing more vs non-poison resistant PCs than before. Something HAS changed.

And how the code does the "equation" to see if you succeed?

BTW, when are you basing your original findings off?

2005?

2010?

2015?

If it's any but the last one, there could be like 100202012010201 different things that may have affected it.

n/t