Changes with the February Update: Alternate Ability Grants for Gold Members and Ability Changes

Heh, I find myself wondering if the 19th Century farmer was mad at the 20th Century one because one had a tractor and the other only had the horse and plow.

I agree with Tearsin on this one. I'm all for taking away swarming but no heals off of riposte damage will hurt SK self healing ability in certain situations(ex: tanking multiple mobs during a raid/group instance). If you do this at least find a way to help improve our self healing since we usually take on multiple mobs since we are the kings of AE aggro.

I just recently returned to EQ after 10 years and I think this auto-granting of AAs is an absolutely horrible idea. My only character is a level 65 shaman. I was already shocked to see how fast AAs can be earned nowadays. I don't understand the push to get everyone, including returning players, to the end game. There are 20 expansions out there. Why can't you let people experience them all the way they were meant to be experienced? What is wrong with letting returning/new players experience the game where they left off? I just joined a progression guild to experience the expansions I missed out on starting with GoD. I am quite happy with my 400+ AAs and being able to earn them at a decent rate, and do not want the game dumbed down by not needing to earn AAs until we get to the last 4 expansions!
Why does SoE always feel the need to dumb down the game? You do realize what made EQ great was the sheer challenge of the game, back in its heyday of Kunark, Velious, etc. It seems you have incrementally dumbed down the game to attempt to make it easier for new/returning players to play EQ, but in actuality you are just turning EQ into all the other MMORPG games that hold the players hand through the entire game. Sigh, I guess it may just be a sign of our culture, everyone wants everything as a hand out without needing to work for it.

i personally fully support this auto-granting AA idea, for multiple reasons.
firstly, i agree entirely with the sentiment that AAs are largely a near insurmountable obstacle for new characters (whether they be new players or just new toons), and that AA counts also impact some classes WAY more than others, and in such a way that it discourages playing of certain classes due to that disparity.

i have several toons - i just spent months grinding the daily quest on my mage to get up to about 3k AAs, because i could do it solo. then once i had gotten all the flashy AAs done i basically quit playing the character because grinding 40 levels of mental clarity bored me to tears.
my monk i've almost completely stopped playing, because i didn't have enough AAs to be powerful enough to solo the daily quests and so i couldn't solo the daily quests to grind enough AAs to be powerful enough to grind the solo quests.

this change is going to encourage me to dust off a bunch of alts i haven't played in a while and get me into playing non-main toons in a way i haven't done in years.
i can think of people from my guild who have semi-retired or fully retired and didn't come back due to being intimidated by the AA mountain, and this could get them into playing again.

all around, i think it's a great idea and fully support it.

You must be new too the game, what about the players that pured time and energy into there irrelevant toons?

Imagine this: At your job you been at for 10 years, worked your way up got your promotions and pay increases and all of a sudden the next day, some 20 something still in/fresh out of college has everything you worked for.

Yeah you got paychecks, yeah you had employment.. but your sense of accomplishments would mean so much less knowing that 20 something guy who started last night has everything you do.

You can have as much fun in a year with this game as I did but one day, waking up you know all that ment nothing is demoralizing, depressing and just makes me not want to play anymore.

I love the AA autogrant function.

I try to PUG alot. I like having a larger pool of people to contribute to the groups I try to make.

If you wanted to PL everyone yourself SoE, you could have just asked me for the camp instead..

This specifically concerns me as I am one of those mains that likes to take it easy every once in a while.

• Characters pulling 2/3rds of The Grounds, while people are trying to do quests, disrupts the game for everyone.
• The first time I ever zoned into Field of Scale after coming back from a long break, I didn't even know there was an army of Iksar in the middle of the zone, I honestly thought it always was just a pile of corpses. Until I realised there was always a ranger there too.

To give you an idea, I have at least twelve level 85-90 alts with an average of 2k aa each. I certainly understand some of the frustration in this. That being said those alts will also be more playable now, and new/returning players will have an easier time leveling (and therefore grouping with me). In the pros and cons, ultimately it turns into a pro from my perspective as a player.

Halelujah! Finally freaking mages are getting nerfed! People were farming the heck out of PL, even moving servers when they'd drained one server of kronos and cash.

To the issue of granting so many free AAs- I don't have much of an issue but perhaps not ALL AAs in an expansion or maybe allowing people to opt out of automatically getting them. But all in all it will allow returning players to catch up relatively quickly.

Have to say that the nerfs hits too wide.

Instead of using a surgical nerf and nerf where you can see the problem is, you do a sledgehammer nerf.

Personally I would have done a nerf beam first.
See how the situation would be after, would it still give spikes or was they not more.

If they were no more, problem solved.
If they were still there, see which class/classes then causes problems. And then go for them.

The result of the nerfs you do can make some classes extreme bad, here I special think on SK, since their tanking abilies depend on their life taps.
So SK can very well be a class thats impossible to tank with anymore, in the degree they did b4.

this is another way of stating the very big issue with this change, and it's a good way of stating it since it well highlights the issue.

is it possible to code something like "lifetap from weapon damage heals for full on riposte but only for the first X number of hits per second"?
like, say in a 1 second period you could get up to say 40 hits where riposte heals you - that would be a full round from 10 mobs, which maybe i have a totally skewed perspective on the game but that seems a reasonable number to call a big pull, but not a swarm.

personally, i would consider that to be a great compromise that i could happily live with, if it's possible to do.

Beaming type mass killing, sure.....nerf that....everyone knows its lags the zone.
As for Nerfing Decap, Headshot...etc......what an ignorant move...these ablitys do not give Zerkers or rangers an advantage considering a 100 zerker/Ranger is limited to mobs 88 and below. It would take me 100 mobs to get an AA using Decap with light blue mobs being max aa...its basically a Novelty we enjoy. I see EQ.......becoming as irrelevant as phone booths. If your going to "Phase out" all yer long term players.....Congratz, you have made the right decision. As for convincing your player base to buy and play EQNext.....your working backwards. Im the #1 Zerker in the game atm...my first 4k aa's were a grueling effort.....that you just crapped on. I must admit, the Dev team really has proved, that you hate this game as much as your players are about too.

Again with the strawmanning btw, you literally put something in quotes that no one said and attacked that stance that you yourself fabricated. Read my other post and you'll see this is definitely not where I am coming from, but don't let that stop you from arguing with your own imaginary self.

I am just now returning to the game and have been with Everquest off and on since its release. Clearly, my life has changed immensely since the best armor in the game was merchant purchased plate armor, and I've gained some "grown-up" perspective.
I have invested a lot of time and money into Everquest. Probably too much. I watched a level 80 SK pull what looked like half the zone in PoF and tanked it like a champ solo with no merc. (I had a flashback of some old trains in Blackburrow. I thought the guy was fleeing.) No one in their right mind can believe that grinding was ever intended to be that way.
I like the idea of granting the AA's, and I understand people being upset with feeling like all of the grinding that they have done is wasted. However, I think it's a good move for the financial health of the game. At the end of the day, Everquest is a business. This is as much about customer service (you'll never please everyone) and server health as it is about balance. The original intent for Everquest was class balance. I'd like to see it go back to that.

Two questions: 1. Will AA's that have been spent the hard way be refunded to the character since there's an obvious duplication (I think that would help make those that have already worked hard on AA's happy)?
2. Will all characters owned on an account and future characters (appropriately leveled, of course) receive their AA grant provided one is Gold?

Wolf Silverstryde of Rodcet Nife

If the aa grant takes place i will cancel my 5 accounts and move on to some other game. as aplayer since 2001 or so i had to bust my for everything in this game i have gotten and now some snot nosed kid is complaining its to hard or its not fair i cant do that! this is utter BS! leave it how it is. I agree some SMALL changes may need to be done but as someone stated alot of SK,zerker, rangers,mages use the swarm method to help returning friends players catch up with the main forces and get back into the game. I for one have done that on numerous occasions and you know what my friends are playing and have opened multiple accounts and giving you money again! omg! so suggest just sticking with things the way they are or going to have a core group of your players fed up with this all and stop playing....

I don't even know where to really start, I'm recently returning, and have a account that's maybe 230 days old, I have a level 100 necro with 6.6k AA! further more if you are saying people cannot get leveled as fast as desired then maybe they are not doing the franklin teek daily, as I get 100AA easily when under 4k AA, I can honestly say I have spent a few hundred dollars on PP for pre nerf ornaments like ancient ssraeshzian, and money for sc for ornaments, I mean its been a blast, but if you put this MASSIVE nerf in place so many classes will become obsolete ie no sk swarming, no sk players., I basically mean start your necro toons now, like I have, but just wait because the 4k AA will help you start up in the newly KILLED community..... P.S id like to add while the account is 230 days old, total time played is 1 month, if you cant expect people to put in 1 month of play time on a mmo rpg then I ****ing quit