A HUGE mistake

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Danille, Apr 24, 2013.

  1. Falos Augur


    Luckily the pet focus earring mob is extremely easy- one of the easiest named mobs in the zone in fact. However the best int caster 2 hander drops exclusively from the hardest named mob in the history of EQ group content (at least dating back to level 80)
  2. Loratex The Ridiculous Necro

    Plenty of reason... It's a raid item. Want more ac? Use it. That choosing thing is a real smack down sometimes. Much like the low hp/primary I use for effect.
  3. Gnomeland Augur

    The gist remains the same - RvR way out of whack. In the same way you're never going to create 54 men content that drops group quality loot, you don't create 12 men content that drops group quality loot. Quantity does not scale linearly with difficulty in RvR. It takes a great deal of effort to gather two groups of people to fight a mob. Group quality loot isn't enough to entice others to come, and nobody keeps a clique of that size around when the grouping game has been 6 men for dozens of expansions.
  4. BoomWalker Augur

    This is a EQ forum not a WoW forum...12 man content? Seriously? Are these new raids too??? Sigh...
  5. Daislet Augur

    Did this named with a group and a half for a wizzie guildie.

    Went fine, no problems. Just long.

    The shield dropped. tbh I was pretty surprised at the stats. Same AC as T2 tradable group shield and the heroics didn't seem much either. The other downer is the Spell Damage was 10 (if i recall), I've got the raid shield from Aaryonar (warrior) but that has 27.

    I think the stats could def be bumped up a lot on this shield (not sure about what else he drops)
  6. Falos Augur

    No.. there is no reason for group shields to have less AC when the shield drops from a mob that has higher DPS than "raid mobs that are significantly weaker than group named mobs, and despite being 5 years 0ld still drops shields with better ac.

    I'm not sure who decided it was ok for HP/mana to inflate so fast while leaving shield AC in the dust but it is not ok. Group gear from 2012 has the same hp/mana as low tier raid gear from 2011. Group shield AC from 2012 has LESS AC than raids from 2008.

    There is nothing ok about that.
  7. WDWolf Journeyman

    NM
  8. Daegun Augur

    Shield ac has intentionally been stagnated because of how it works (ignores softcaps). I'm fine with group shields having 205-210ac. Why? Because content is tuned for a 205-210ac shield. If you put more ac on the shields, the content will simply be up-tuned to compensate ... effective making your 'nonshield' ac more worthless. The net result would be content that is even less tankable with anything but a shield - and much less tankable by other classes in a pinch in general .As long as it is balanced for the content it drops from - it's a wash. It doesn't need to be as good as xyz raid loot from however long ago. If the raid content is that easy; go do it and quit whining.

    My gripe with these monsters is that for the people that this content was designed, the monsters are stupidly overtuned without sufficient reward to make the effort worth it.

    This isn't about raiders vs groupers - this is about balanced content for it's target audience.

    I haven't raided in more than half a decade. Raiders SHOULD have a massive advantage over groupers in all regards. But ... groupers should their viable upgrade paths without having to get tons of "groupers" together. Especially when said content contains specific "onlys" for some classes while other classes get their "onlys" from appropriately tuned content.
  9. savrin Augur

    Just improve the gear to something better than t3 is what makes most sense. There is a precedence set for difficult group named. Walls of Slaughter has shadowhunter and the other named that paths near the MPG zone. They required more then one group in the day and dropped better than normal gear.
  10. Falos Augur


    Pretty sure content is not tuned for that group shield ac like you are saying.. that may be what they want players to think in a perfect world but it really is not. Tuning is not nearly that precise.
  11. Loratex The Ridiculous Necro

    That was always the difference between raid gear and group gear. Sod gear was over powered to begin with especially the "hard mode" gear. Bad comparison really


    A 2000 f-150 has a higher resale value then my 2009 Kia spectra even though my Kia has technology. It sucks but I deal with it.
  12. Falos Augur


    I may not clean pools in real life but even I can understand that. The shield ac argument isn't even a big deal to me. I'm a mage, in a DPS setting mages use 2 handers. I'm saying this needs to be changed because *it needs to be changed* it makes no logical sense in its current form that group gear focus effects replace raid focus effects from prior expansions, HEM from current expansion group gear equals low tier raid gear from the prior expansion, and shield AC remains on par with raid content that is roughly 5 years old.


    Talk about making the group game inaccessible to group geared warriors.. a class that is already hurting.
  13. Kreugen Lorekeeper

    Or just don't tune group mobs to kill a tank in two rounds - something that never happened in the first ten years of EQ but for some reason became the norm post SOD.
  14. Loratex The Ridiculous Necro

    Walls of Slaughter were BRUTAL for groups... for a long time. People tend to forget about these mobs.
  15. Talif Augur

    Anyone else remember pre-nerf Kod`Taz? Holy brutal.
  16. Mykaylla Augur

    The problem with that line of argument (and it has been used quite a bit), is that the difficulty of the content is the smaller part of the issue with it.

    When gear resets began was, realistically, Secrets of Faydwer. You went from TSS group gear values hovering around Qvic-Txevu raid gear, to TBS group gear values being almost up to Anguish, to SoF group gear hp being on the level of TSS to Solteris- a jump of 3-4 expansions at once, after already making comparatively bigger strides in the previous two expansions (PoTime used to be the benchmark for what something was better or worse than, for ages, and Quarm in particular, because that was what governed whether something had a type 7 or a type 8 aug slot, not whether it came from group or raid content). For a caster, if a slot didn't have a focus you needed, many considered Crystallos group gear *better* than ANY previous raid content, due to the introduction of heroics and mod3s and a huge jump in h/e/m.

    The weapons, however, despite having inflated hp, had worse than Anguish damage/delay ratios, meaning that half the playerbase (note: this isn't an exact number, but rather representative of the classes that rely on weapons and those that do not rely upon them) was still using something with almost half the stats of current group content if they had EVER raided in the past four or five expansions, otherwise they would be taking a downgrade, because the important thing about a weapon for one who swings it in combat, is how much damage it does, and how fast. It also meant that to span the gulf from moving from grouping to raiding as a melee, you needed to go back to old content, or have a guild carry you as an app, or go to a midtier guild (many of whom completely fell apart at this time because of the obsoletion of old raid content in one fell swoop), use them to gear up, then leave for a higher progression guild. Half of a raid force needing to do old raid content, wherein most of the gear will rot, and half of the raid force getting nothing out of it, was not healthy for the game, and the demise of those guilds demonstrates that.
    And what do you know, those SoF weapon ratios were adjusted up. Again, SoD had some retuning, then Underfoot caught group weapons up some more. Now, group gear and armour is about equal when you compare it with old tiers of group gear, and old tiers of raid gear, so that from era to era, you reach an obsoletion point where a returning or retired player is not so sharply behind the curve if they jump into raiding again, or for a grouper to make the transition to raiding- because there is no benefit in raiding beyond the previous expansion due to gear resets, the current expansion has to give a suitable baseline, for foci, for surviving AEs, for bridging that gap. And it does that... except that shields are extremely out of line with the rest, and just as a weapon's primary function is its' damage versus delay, a shield's primary function is its' AC.
    That is the problem.
    Kerafyrm's shield (with caster-oriented stats, btw) was finally equalled in AC by exactly one House of Thule type 3 only tank shield. For most people (i.e. all other classes), it wasn't until tier 3 Veil of Alaris that it was finally equalled or eclipsed in AC. In comparison, the Shortblade of Prismatic Destruction, which was by far the best ratio 1HSlash weapon in SoF with a ratio of 2.88 was almost equalled by the group Molten Blade of the Smelter in Underfoot at a ratio of 2.86, and eclipsed in House of Thule T2 by the Waspwing Slicer. The HoT T4 group Adamantine Spellblade is a higher ratio than Underfoot T6 raid Hive Custodian Blade. Convorteum's highest ratio 1HS, the Runemuse Hatchet, is eclipsed by T4 VoA group weapons like the Shorn Ut'len Tentacle, Axe of the Exalted, and Finalizer, the Record Master's Assistant. Weapons and armour have a shelf-life of two expansions, tops, in their functions; shields you're looking at 3-4, and going back to older content that is obsolete for everyone else is not a carrot to persuade most people.

    The developers have already said that the design of things like the necromancer epic is bad, that being tied to something that long is bad, that having one aspect of an item so desirable at ALL times (unlike a slow proc weapon, for example, which you only use until it sticks and without someone better equipped around) to the point that upgrading is not a sensible option, is bad design- hell, the development team say that caster focus degradation is important and not going away BECAUSE not upgrading consistently is bad game design, in their view.

    I don't like the gear resets. I don't like what it did to the game. I don't like how many guilds disappeared into it. I don't like how the subsequent Seeds of Destruction expansion rushed everyone to Tower, allowing bypassing, and got many people burned out on farming it, contributing to the extremely cold reception to Underfoot, because every time you change the paradigm and set a new standard, you can only add to it, you can't take away, or people feel nerfed, so now everyone is smooshed into two expansions (Realistically, those two at the moment are RoF and HoT, for the latter still having blue con mobs to mow with ease, and free to play being able to get something out of it). But they're here now, and it would take monumental shifts that rock the boat to change that- me saying I don't like it means diddly to that- it's just me having a difference of opinion. Gear resets every expansion are here to stay, standardized spell effects, standardized aug upgrades... and those resets should be standardized across the board for all items.

    (Yes yes, I know, TL;DR. It's what I do!)
  17. Mykaylla Augur

    Ah, ye olde days of the Holy Trinity, when clerics healed for three to four times as much as a druid or shaman with one button, and warriors were wanted to tank everything, because that DI was so brutal, and knights had no mitigation disc. How quickly we forget!
  18. Axxius Augur

    Not really that quickly. It was 9 years ago. ;)
  19. Mykaylla Augur

    Young whippersnapper.
  20. Kreugen Lorekeeper

    A funny thing about that gear reset destroying the mid tier raid guild - its intention was to give them good enough group loot to at least do low-tier current raids instead of ignoring current content in favor of raiding several expansions behind. But in reality, a majority of those players in lower tier raid guilds are dead weight that just want to show up to a raid, socialize a bit, and try to win a /random. Only a small core actually cared about getting group gear and keeping up their AA etc while the rest did group content next to never, despite all the loot upgrades that were available to them, because grouping takes much more effort than just showing up to raids and rolling for items.

    So what actually happened when group loot became better than old raid loot is the social-oriented, "just show up to raids and /random" types were left standing around in the guild lobby because the core of active players got their group upgrades and either moved on to better guilds or stopped raiding entirely. The dead weight got left behind to fend for themselves.

    But to get back around to the topic: those lazy people I'm ragging on do have a point: actually getting a group to camp items you need is a whole different problem. One that a large number of people solve by being their own group. A solution to this problem would be a token system - kill rares, collect tokens, buy the loot you want. Now every named is useful to everyone and pick up groups will be less painful to form. Overtuned named like Huge Mistake won't block people from their class specific items, instead they'd just be worth a lot more tokens. (I'd estimate about 9 out of 10 of you will absolutely hate this idea)