Bug type: Gameplay : Skill Functionality
How Spirit Bond Max functions:While Spirit Bond Max is active, it has 10% chance to drop a liver, per monster, per attack done.
Each liver that is dropped and looted adds 4 seconds of buff duration to Spirit Bond Max.
Normal Buff duration of Spirit Bond Max is 30 seconds, with a 2 min cooldown. Cannot be extended beyond 2 mins with looting livers.
Brief bug summary: After the v.177 patch, the "livers" that drop that maintain the buff duration for Shade's skill Spirit Bond Max has received a noticeable reduction in either drop rate or buff duration that it adds upon looting. There were no changes listed about this in the patch notes, and also the skill description still says it's a 10% drop rate chance, which is the same as the prior patch.
Now I don't know if this is actually a drop rate issue, or if it has something to do with the amount of buff duration the livers actually add upon looting. All I really know for certain is that after this most recent patch, myself and other Shades have noticed a big difference in the difficulty to maintain Spirit Bond Max with looting livers. I used to be able to maintain Spirit Bond max almost indefinitely while training or throughout dojo, now it runs out rather quickly.
Some things that changed in v.177 that could've caused this:1) We now have the buff duration counter in seconds when a buff is under a minute. Maybe this is somehow the reason for it?
2) Fox Spirits orbs now change their path target to another monster if the monster it was originally going to dies.
I noticed whenever shades first got the change to spirit bond max back in June, and livers started dropping to extend its duration that without fox spirits toggled on, liver drops seemed noticeably less. If that was actually the case, maybe the change to fox spirits path finding messed it up in some way?
Before v.177 Skill Description:
After v.177 Skill Description:
As you can see where it says duration +4 sec, it was replaced with "x"
Basilmarket thread that I made to see if other Shades were getting same issues:http://www.basilmarket.com/Liver-Drop-Rate-Reduced-in-v-177-Thread-b5K3wCharacter name: Shadows
Character level: 230
Character job: Shade
World name: Broa
Date and time of the incident:
Began after v.177 patch.
Comments
Test case 1
17 livers
137 hits from Spirit Frenzy, 89 hits from Spirit Claw, total of 226 hits.
Result is 7.75% drop rate for this test.
Test case 2
27 livers (30 livers because I failed to pick up 1, and 2 liver appear out of no where at the very end)
297 hits from Spirit Frenzy, 91 hits from Spirit Claw, total of 388 hits.
Result is 7.73% drop rate for this test.
Test case 3
42 livers (2 liver were picked up after buff expired when they appeared out of no where
371 hits from Spirit Frenzy, 155 hits from Spirit Claw, total of 526 hits.
Result is 7.98% drop rate for this test (7.60% if you only count 40 of the liver that were picked up during the duration).
Conclusion
-It probably is 10% drop rate (since I cut the video 30 seconds after spirit bond ended, if I waited longer enough liver would probably appear to make the drop rate to 10%), but 25% of the liver drops are invisible for some reason and don't appear until they are 15 second away from expiring (items last for 2 minutes on the ground before disappearing) (this would probably need it own bug reporting thread since it is different from this thread bug)
-If I tried hard enough I come probably make the buff last forever, which mean this bug was (semi) fixed months ago which is why this bug post was not bump any time earlier by any of the people who posted earlier than you (at the time this bug was posted, people had difficulty keeping it up longer than 2 minutes)