Feldon As we posted earlier this week, players have been experiencing an issue with hotbar icons being replaced in random ways as they level. Abilities on hotbars have been replaced with different spells entirely, for instance a group heal being replaced by an apprentice combat spell.
After the jump, the latest update on this frustrating bug.
Players have made no secret of their frustration about this issue, and questioned the need for even adding this feature. Many players (including myself) sequester new spells and combat arts to their own hotbar until I can login one of my (nearly) max level Scholar tradeskillers to produce spell upgrades. An Apprentice spell is almost never an upgrade for an Expert or Master.
But the issue being corrected in the meantime is hotbar slots being replaced by *different* spells. SmokeJumper chimed in:
We haven’t updated (this thread) for a bit, so here’s a new response:
Basically, this bug is being a rat bastage. We *have* had devs dupe this issue, but we can’t seem to get it to dupe while we’re in the debug environment (even QA isn’t finding duplicatable steps), so we’re having to trace code logic and try to figure it out that way.
We’ll get it, but we don’t know what it is right now and it certainly isn’t happening to everyone…so it’s tricky.
I know this isn’t the answer you’d like to hear, but we’re actively pursuing this problem and won’t quit on it.
After a player suggestion to copy one of their characters who always see this issue, Gninja responded:
We have copied characters that had this happen and that didn’t recreate it. Very elusive issue :/
SmokeJumper posted this a while back:
Once they fix the bug where it’s replacing the WRONG spells, how would this change the way you do things today Feldon?
If you upgrade your spells to Expert each tier, then the new apprentice ones would still be added to your hotbar just like they are today since they aren’t supposed to replace Expert or above. You would still be able to sequester them to their own hotbar just like you do today. That is, unless they coded it differently than they claim to have coded it.
Other than the bug of replacing the wrong spell (which is REALLY bad), I’m not really seeing the downside of this change. Now if they replaced my Expert or above with an Apprentice, THEN I’d see a problem.
When I’m bringing up a low level alt that levels every few minutes, it will be nice to just put the spells where I want them and have them upgraded as I level. I usually don’t bother with Expert level spells until the 30s or 40s. For those lower levels it will be nice to only see the actual NEW spells instead of the system telling me this: “Here’s 3 new Apprentice spells that replace 3 existing Apprentice spells. You’d be a fool not to replace them on your hotbars. I know what the spells are and where they go but I’m going to make you move them around anyway just for fun.” 🙂
Sorry to say this but while i was testing eq2x alpha they already implemented this feature and it works there like it should.
Replacing a spell with next tier one works if the next tier one is a higher quality in the meaning of does more damage or heals more than the previous tier one. Saying an expert or higher spell never gets replaced with an apprentice spell of next tier. I had my doubts so i tested this extensively while i was testing eq2x alpha. And, if you have an apprentice spell of a certain spell and upgrade the previous tier one to expert it was replacing the higher apprentice spell with the lower tier but more powerfull expert spell.
Thats not wishful thinking but what i noticed and tested in the eq2x alpha when only active subscriber got access to it.
maybe check if you / the persons with this bug are using custom ui or eq2map or any other additions to your game and also let them know if your char ever did a server transfer or if you play on different language servers too or have toons on multiple servers.
Ot and a side note. I always get error message too short if i post via mobile optimized theme of this site. Never if i use the regular pc web browser theme