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

Hello,

I lead a level capped Raid Association and our current Cap is 70. The question I have is when we are auto-granted AA's for our level we wont have anything to spend our XP on that we will be earning on our raids. We are already hoarding absene amounts of Essence emeralds from when we have to sacrifice to get back under the cap. We will need something to either spend AA's or some other way to deal with the xp we will still be earning but no AA's to spend them on. I know that we are a very small group of people. Maybe the Glyph of Indeterminate Reward could have its min level lowered?

Whew... A lot to take in and respond to...

Let me add my gratitude for the Devs in crafting such a detailed concept proposal for the community to digest.

Auto-grant AAs: Too much too fast? I think something like the simultaneous Exp/AA gain for earlier levels makes more sense combined with perhaps a reintroduction of the "5150" character creation feature. The AA exp bonus at lower levels could also be enhanced greatly. The system is already in place. Modify it.
Additionally, any character that has recently gained a certain number of levels/AAs in a designated (ie. short) period of time should have a temporary, visible flag added to their name. This flag would expire after an additional period of time has passed. At least it might help separate the PL folks from those who are doing it the old fashioned way.

Rewards for those who earned their AA vs. auto-granted: Interesting idea to give special rewards for those who have played longer and earned their AA. If that course if pursued, please make it more than a useless title. This may start to bump heads with Veteran AA, but the problem there is VetAA do not take into account the unique abilities/skills of each class.

Changes to swarm killing abilities: These skills are a problem. I say this as a Ranger main that has done some in the past, but never when it might have impacted other players in the area. Accidents do happen, though, and whenever they did I would go out of my way to make it up to the affected player(s).
Regardless, it sounds like this is also an attempt to reduce server/process loads due to multi-mob training. On that subject, I wish something else could be used like pull more mobs than you can have in Ext.Target window auto-snares you. Unfortunately, since EQ pathing is so problematic to begin with, mass-train-induced snares would be exploited daily by the mobs. With that in mind, how about mass-train-induced hatelist wipe? I know... there are other problems with that too...

Thank you for letting us know about the upcoming changes since they are impacting alot of abilities.

The auto grant AA seems like an interesting idea, and I can see the reasons behind it. But I also understand that some people want to work for each and every AA.

My suggestion to enable the auto grant as well as to keep those that want to earn each AA would be to add Quests to get flagged for wanting auto granted AA, that after completing the person would get flagged to be auto granted AA while they level. I like the idea of having the quests be giving by starting city class NPC, and having unique quest for each class (but realize that its more work and would be ok with just having some dude in PoK give it out to anyone that asks for it).

In my opinion this idea has several benefits
1) Relatively easy to have some kind of message for returning and new players that the quests exist
2) Another Quest to do
3) lets those that don't want auto granted AA not get them

Downside that I can see
1) work involved in putting in Quests to do this
2) not sure if its possible to have some kind of flag for auto granting AA or not (would hope there would be)

Szan

Your comment does nothing to help.. you need to be more specific. SOE isn't trying to kill their game. They are trying to make it better and keep people returning to the game we all love. We all have different opinions on how to get there.

IF we are going to have instant characters auto granting AA and NO way to tell who played and knows their characters, you will flood the player base with people that dont know how to play these characters at all, and will end up pissing off players that worked for it and know their classes....

Lets look at the AA quantity from both sides at the same time....
--New Players: To many to catch up, effort required nearly impossible...
--Old Players: To many Earned to see given away to others for no effort...

Fellowship Vitality is a path to this... (not enough or issue would be over)
XP Potions Help Catch up.... (But these cost and some can not afford)
Hot Zones Help Catch up... (But are over camped)

SCALE XP Bonus by Individual Level in group....
Using Levels 100, 90, 80, 70's as Examples
-Formula1: (Mob_Base_XP_Value / Your_Level) * Current_Game_Max_Level
...Level 100 Gains 100% Value of Mob
...Level 90 Gains 111% Value of Mob
...Level 80 Gains 125% Value of Mob
...Level 70 Gains 142% Value of Mob
-Formula2: ((Mob_Base_XP_Value * (Group_High_Level - Your_Level + 1)) / Your_Level) * Current_Game_Max_Level
...Level 100 Gains 100% Value of Mob
...Level 90 Gains 121% Value of Mob
...Level 80 Gains 148% Value of Mob
...Level 70 Gains 184% Value of Mob

These are Examples but the lower you are the easier it is for you to catch up...
Additional Bonus on AA's based on distance from top level, incentive for those to fill out their toons at lower level...
Start at L51 Max_Level - Current_level * 10% aaxp bonus... yea the Level 51-60's will probably be able to cap out their aa's while mostly having aaxp set for leveling...

using any form of scaling for those behind to catch up will be FAR better than POOF! here is your instant toon...

or are we looking at next gripe about gear being you should be auto awarded RAID currency for older expansions too...

I am glad you gave an explanation for nerfing the classes, an i appreciate that. I have been playing for years and took a break, came back. I think the AA give away is crap. I invested a lot of time to get the AA's that I have and now you just going to give them away, that is a slap in the face to those all of us who earned them by putting in the work to get them.

This is my biggest grip about the Auto granting. You are going to give me AA I wouldn't buy until I was at the end, I mean the VERY end, and make me work 4-5 time harder to get the ones I NEED. NOT GOOD! In fact, this just might make it not worth playing anymore. I had it figured out I only needed about 4k WELL PLACED AA, to be good at what I am doing (boxing 3 toons). Now, maybe I will go check out R... I could chase augs and gear while I was earning them and better augs and gear when I had them, still working on others that are more fluff. But now, you will make me work much harder to get what I NEED.
I also think it trivializes the work of those that have EARNED them.
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I don't see anything about the cause of the Universal Chat service going up and down (down a lot) and a fix going in place?

One thing that might be good, would be to block traders in the Bazzar. Why? Because by default a lot of characters auto join General, but most traders are just sitting there doing nothing or worse, spamming server wide about their wears that we can find in Alt-A. They really don't need General etc... as a trader IMO. On our server that might be 100 - 200 characters that aren't taking up space in the Universal Chat.

AGREE WITH THIS 100% , Piestro needs to read this and report it along with other feedback, it will RUIN the game.

I REALLY dislike the auto-grant of AAs. I have played for 15 years, and enjoy the gradual accrual of skills. With the increased percentage at low totals, it really does not take very long at all to get a good number of AAs EARNED. In fact, there is really no reason to try to earn AAs until like level 85 now - since all of them would just be given to you. So, instead of enjoying previous expansions for the fun that they did offer, it is simply a race to exhaust an expansion with straight XP gain, and never really play the content that the game is based on.

You say that viable ideas are being taken into account, but i think that limiting the amount of riposting on melee effects is more than reasonable, and i saw someone say the if Beams will affect 12 mobs then all "PL" classes should affect upto 12 mobs. i have noticed most don't say crap about SKs I as an SK dont care about the "PL" part of it but let it be stated again that out ability to leech HP for Damage done will hurt our overall ability. So limit not the leeching from riposted life taps but the number of mobs to be riposted or the number of mobs that riposted life taps work on. Another point practical swarming, at least for an SK, is about 30 mobs. IF you have to pull more than 30 mobs you are not getting good EXP.

everyone has pointed out that the big problem is mage beam kite due to the fact that they can pull an entire zone worth of mobs and cause problems with everyone, side note i have never noticed server lag, leave alone the ranger HS, zerker Decap, and rouge Assassinate. Again limit the number of mobs on the SK swarm and mage beam not the SK life taps on riposte

What he said

I think it's a good idea, people are crying not to auto grant AA's but still crying wanting a bigger xp boost to getting AA's. .../Boggle. All my toons are 6-9k aa range so don't think I am posting this to get free aa's. All I see all day are people buying Repo taskadds and PL's for level andAA gain...why not just give it to them It's a great Idea most all AA's 90 and under is just filler to get to the beef anyway...but yeah I would feel robbed if I couldn't dump 400 AA's into innate crap.

Addendum:

Forgot to mention that you would need to put in a way for players to BYPASS the auto-grant system. At reaching 51, a pop-up window should ask if the player wants to be awarded AAs automatically with each level. This could be a permanent decision (petitionable if they made a mistake).

I am assuming that a toggle would create too many problems...

I'll be adding 1, maybe 2 gold accounts after these changes as well as purchasing the new expansions. The thought of being able to add a couple characters to box with without the daunting task of knocking out the extra 5k autogranted AAs before being useful to me is nice.

Looking forward to it. I will pretty much cancel out at least 1 crybaby ragequitter.

there's no game if there's no one there to play with them....grinding out 5k AA on your own isn't my idea of fun...maybe if the lower levels were alive and kicking you'd have a point

why would newbees join EQ to play on their own if they can play another game that just came out with other ppl....the gap is much too big

I have a solution and I pmed this to the devs.

Auto grant the AAs you want up to 85 you're making them free so remove the cost of them. So all the AAs you auto grant cost nothing so none of them will eat into the bonus AA xp.

If the Devs can extend these lines to more current levels as a result of these changes, it may have a positive impact. Headshot only works on low level mobs currently that are becoming less and less relevant. This gives a potential upgrade path.

Agreed that swarming is overpowered, and can't argue with the server-strain issues. But eliminating the riposte damage on things like Mortal Coil or Lich Sting makes them almost useless... 90% of my usage on these abilities is to save the group when multiple mobs are in camp, and without that extra healing from ripostes... well, there will be a lot more dead and unhappy people.

I like decap/assassinate, headshot, and swarm because it allowed me to log on for an hour and be able to make a little ground. Now there will be no point to log in unless I am able to get a group grind session which I would need much more time to make it as effective as those mass kill abilities. So you are helping casuals with the AA but also hurting just as much if not more by taking away the ability of burst exping.