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

Okay, so removing the effects of lich sting and such with ripostes is pretty much saying SK's, you are now completely irrelevant. We aren't strong enough to tank, swarming is about the only way we have for getting EXP/AA's. Almost all of our AA's revolve around things happening when we riposte. Seriously, we even have double riposte! What's the purpose of that if not to enhance our riposte effects? I mean honestly, even if we healed 100% of the damage we dealt with our epic, how are we supposed to keep up while trying to tank a creature with 3 million HP that hits us for 15k a pop, while we have 100k and hit it back for 3-4k a pop? We are a weakened warrior, and a weakened necro combo. Not strong enough to cast our way through mobs, and not strong enough to tank the higher level ones. Leave our swarming alone. Also, I agree with several others in this thread, though I didn't read it all and don't know if it's been mentioned or not, but why not this: During the initial granting of AA's, how about y'all throw an algorithm in there that scans our current AA's (pre-grant) and everything that we already have, we just get those points banked (and not just up to bank cap, but extend bank cap under that condition). Honestly, it's nice to help out new players, but if you screw old players out of hundreds of hours of grinding, then you're not going to have many new players because, let's face it, this is an MMORPG. Most of your new business comes from us vets who get our friends into the game. Piss us off, make us leave, there goes your new business.

I'm at a loss of words... This game use to be a challenge, but day by day - patch by patch SoE is making this childsplay. Handing out hundreds/thousands of free AA's?????????????? Obtaining those higher end levels/gear/etc. makes you elite and separate's you from the heard and takes commitment and time, you can't just give it away. If your going to nerf, increase the exp% on early AA's and lower the exp% on later ones(as you've done in the past).

If your wanting to help newer players advance quicker... KEEP all the decaps/hs/assassinate/beam/and swarm as it POWERLEVELS them just like your doing......But how does that solve the pathing issue? Simple increase your budget in that department. Yes, that might hurt your pockets , but don't try to fix things that are not broken because it saves you money. I am a contractor and when I sell somebody a service, they get that service. Sometimes there are unforeseen hurdles you have leap and that unfortunately hurts the profit margin, but you do what makes it right. That right there solves all the generic deficiencies that are being implemented.


EQ has been running this long because it's different from any other game(it won't be if this kind of stuff happens, or is that the plan? trying to promote EQnext?)

MEMEBER OF EQ FOR 12 YRS.

Jenn, what is that greenish yellow line that coincides with prime time for the Western Hemisphere?

I understand where you're coming from, I think. In many ways I can sympathize with the feelings. Thing is, there were 4000 AA's at lvl 85. Read that: FOUR THOUSAND. Is all that really necessary, especially since there're maybe a couple thousand MORE between 85 and 100? Everquest didn't even have AA's until Luclin, so are you saying Everquest was EVER-EQUAL until Luclin? AA's don't make a game. And besides after lvl 85 players can start to make different AA choices. See, all that's really being done here is the lvl needed to start gaining aa's and spending them was moved from 51 to 85 to reduce the clutter.

The problem I have with this is the divide between F2P/Silver and Gold. This means if I'm F2P then I'll be capped at 250 and if I have silver then I'll be capped at 1000. If I spend $15 for a month gold subscription then I'll immediately receive up to 4000 aa's PERMANENTLY. For example, if I'm level 80 and F2P and have 250 AA then by buying gold I immediately gain access to every AA up to 80 that's automatically given. This means Gold membership has GREATLY increased in value versus recent past. Isn't there a better way, since F2P players already suffer from other restrictions, like mercenary and prestige item and spell and bazaar and character slot and mail and loyalty and chat and guild limitations. I mean you gave your gold members a large bonus because of a SYSTEMIC change and yet you completely forgot about your F2P/Silver membership players???? I think granting the F2P players all of their aa's up to 75 and silver players up to 80 would fit better with your plan. They should AT LEAST not have to earn/spend the AA's but instead be granted them as they level up to mirror the SYSTEMIC change.

My main Character is an Shadow knight. I dont really care about swarming but as a Shadowknight are role in raids and groups is typically to tank multiple mobs and the riposte proc is key here.They key to swarming is mortal coil and almost any sk would gladly see this aa go bye bye if it meant keeping. our ability to sustain our role in groups and raids. As other have mentioned this is a key piece in an Sk's survivability and mitigation balance. It would hinder the class greatly to remove an ability that has been part of the class balance for so long. Please consider removing mc and keeping riposte for tanking multiple mobs or upgrade our survivability performing basic class roles. At the very list allow up to 3-6 targets to proc on riposte.

There is no sense in just handing over all of those AA's to people. Make a double XP week, two weeks, or even a month if you're feeling extra generous. Let us earn them, but please don't hand them over freely.

I'm not really sure how I feel about the AA change. I'm ambivalent about the nerfing - the zone disruptions needed to be stopped somehow.

As I reflect more on this, I think it comes down to a question of why do you play the game? Me? I play the game for the distraction mostly. I have three level 100 characters each with thousands of AAs. They and the newer content bored me, so I picked up some old alts several months ago and have been working on quests and progression through older content. I enjoy revisiting all the content I did when it was new, but it's become so easy to level and gain AA now, the old content is trivialized before I can finish it. Giving me all the AA for my levels, that's just going to trivialize it even faster for me. Without diverting some of my experience to AAs, I'm going to level way too fast.

This may not be why the average person plays EQ. The people so eager to jump straight to the end game must have their reasons too (I'll try not to pass judgement on purchased PLs and the alleged lack of finesse or depth of understanding of your class). This change will help them to a certain extent, but in the end this might not turn into the boon they think it will because of what so many of you have pointed out. You're going to have all the AAs...great, many of them are trivial anyway and add little to no value to your character. Now, unless they change the rate for AA earn more generally, it's just going to be harder for you to get the additional AA you need for those last four expansions because you'll be earning those with no bonus outside of Lesson of the Devoted or experience potions.

If I had a vote to offer, I guess I'd jump on the crank up/extend the AA earn rate or cut down the AA cost for the more expensive AAs at the lower levels rather than an outright grant of free AA. I'm also not convinced the "just give me a set number of AAs at each level for me to spend the way I want" adds any more value than just the outright grant. Unless they increase the carryover cap, you can't save very many of them to buy at the next level anyway.

I'm so close to 85 anyway and I've already bought all the AAs on my new crew that I needed to be successful, this change might not impact me too much other than it will slow down the AA earn rate for the stuff I actually want post 85. It will definitely change the landscape more should I ever want to bring up any new alts and not in a good way for the way I enjoy playing the game. <shrug>

invest time in their character?

This explains everything, you don't think people play the game for fun.

I would like to take a brief moment to thank all of you people for having a voice and standing up for yourself's ^_^

I appreciate you,
your truly,
Efrog of povar catnip is my fave

Let me start off by saying this is EVERQUEST NOT INSTANTQUEST

That being said..... I have probably 8 to 10 years of my life invested i n this game, and I can say that I
had a feeling something like this would happen, gear increasing and making the earthshaker a viable mass-killer.
If this is truly to help prevent the server lag problems then why not have sony upgrade their servers on
the millions they make off of us players.

I have personally spend years of my life leveling gearing and aa'ing my characters. Gifting aa to people
will remove the ability to tell a players skill by their aa count. Within 20 min of them being in group
you are able to tell if that aa count comes from a power level or the real deal.

Most of the people I know all run box crews because of all of the people that do not know how to play their
class. It seems that an ok boxer is often better than hitting up general chat quite often a game of russian
roulette.

What about us players that are maxed out? the thousands of hrs and years of gold status paid for, what do we get?
How about a permanent gold status?

This entire problem WAS CAUSED BY SOE!! The Krono has caused the "PL for PLAT" dramatic increase.

The way to kill off swarming of any kind is add in a "swarm trigger". Let me elaborate. When more than 10 mobs
of the same type are all aggroed on the same person the damage should increase exponentially. Done properly
it will put the tipping point in the areas where players will get stuck around 30 mobs or so, enough to not make
the server spikes an issue. Elaborating more on the exponentially, at 10 mobs each mob should get in an extra swing,
at 20 mobs then get another swing and increase damage by 10%, 30 mobs another swing and increase damage by 25%, at
every additional 10 mobs would increase the swings allowed by mobs by 1 and another 10% damage increased to their
current output. Proper implementation will allow only the most skilled players to swarm, of those players it will
make swarming something not worth their time.

The nerfs that you are proposing will cause a large number of regular players, that keep comming back after leaving
for years to loose their way of playing.

Just a side note AND hopefully there is a dev still reading at this point it may be useful to put a max limit on
what a krono can sell for in game. I have seen pl for plat people spam from the increase of price of kronos going
from ~150-175k each to around a half a mill each in a lil less than 12 week period. Now people are trying to
hustle and pl for an entire month to barely afford another krono. Impose a maximum price tag of say 200 or 250k plat
per krono. If people dont need to pay so much for a krono you will see fewer pl for plat people.

I would like to add that I have personally done every kind of mass killing you can do, and should you like to end the
overall problem you need to adjust a few things. First things first, completely kill off swarming and you will piss
off way too many people. From years and years of testing I can tell you that zones lock up around 125-150 mobs
running all at once. You must only partially kill off the swarming, reduce maximum aggro to 50 or so mobs, have
them drop aggro from the first mob pulled when the 50th gets aggroed. Dont think that this is a number I pulled
out of the blue, this was a carefully chosen number from the many years of slaughtering. In raid zones it will
still allow for wipes, in low end zones it will make it so that the higher players cant take all the mobs from the
lower players etc. Due to the number of mobs in the zone and the number of zones in the game this will allow the
load to spread out significantly. One final note, given what I know, when i mass kill I keep the numbers low to
prevent bothering other players, if other players cant do this we need to have the server watchers start reporting
the disturbances and get them banned or suspended to teach them to be nice to others.

That was my 2nd post in 12 years. That shows how ridiculous this is

Forgive if this has been mentioned, the thread's moving too fast for me to keep up with atm, but...

What about something like granting xx AA for every 5th level achievement in addition to any other work done? Something like 300 AA would give 2100 AA to spend if it started at 55 and ended at 85. The AA would need to be spent appropriately and wouldn't negate the bonus or eliminate the ability/potential to earn AA independently.

Lower the Glyph of Indeterminable Whateverness to 55, so people that do so choose can blow off the AA.

Keep the Swarming nerfs. KEEP THE NERFS!!! This PL' stupidity just chruns out people who don't have a clue how to play a class.
Go ___ ____ _____ on the AA's for everyone (gold). That is the most idiotic idea I have ever heard. SOE continually strips everything in this game that is worked for. THIS is what set EQ apart from every other game. I hope SOE realizes that once you upset enough of the core players....they aren't going to EQN.

That's my point. This is a database performance issue. Not CPU. Can be optimized without hardware. Nerfing on the basis of a performance issue is not sound logic. I think it's an Oracle back end but could be anything these days.

...and I'm spent To any of my Dev kindred out there, please check this out:

http://sqlserverperformance.wordpre...gnostic-information-queries-for-january-2014/

I think taking away from players is such a negative thing to do. How about upping the rewards in quest and group content so much that it just makes more since to do that instead of swarm. Instead of taking things away make the rewards compelling. Kinda like the OMM missions. That was the thing to do then so people went out and killed less.

not a bad idea

I don't care about the swarming aspect; however, I have to say I am unimpressed with the auto-granting of AAs, to the point of feeling the need to evaluate other games. That's not necessarily an "I quit" statement, but I'm terribly disheartened. I have read posts about auto-granting Lesson of the Devoted, increasing the AA percentage gain and other ways of negating the "need" to swarm. I certainly hope auto-granting AAs is abandoned and / or made optional ...

I intended to go with explanations ... honestly, this just takes the wind out of my sails. Auto-granting AAs defeats the entire purpose of why I play EQ.

why would you change a cleric down based on a shaman you allready have druids and shammy's on the same power lev as clerics now clerics are suposse to be the best healing class ,and mercs have allbut killed the cleric class as is , Why not just double the mana cost of the spells and leave the prox rates the way they was ,, i been playing this class for the last 14 years and sorry to say this maybe my last year you all have not a clue how to make a game fun you only see how to make money __ hey lets offer power levs to people and make them pay for it -- bad ideal ,, why not make people work for it a lev 100 thats been PL'ed is worthless in a raid they have no clue how to play and no clue what spells do or what aas's do --- it just seems like you all want to chase people off from this game well keep it up you will and they will head to another game that Sony does not make ,,,,i have 90 days on my 6 accounts when that expires so shall my game play at this rate ...and at least 100 other people on my server are looking at wow or elders scrolls

All right, I can go with this, except in one scenario I see arising, Say I'm grouped with someone or even out soloing with my mercenary and I get two level 100 mobs on me, your saying I can't use my epic as a save button any more or my Leech curse discipline will now be useless as saves on multiple targets because one mob will have unrestricted damage on me because I am only getting life returns on the targeted enemy.

Thousands of AAs for free is great and all, but up to UF? The grind from 85 to 100 is the longest, everyone who's been there knows that. It's THAT level range that forces all the beam kiting, swarming, etc. Below 85, the game is pretty fast already.

Instead of auto granting AAs, what SoE ought to do instead is to simply up the AA gain rate / lower AA costs. The rate of AA gain hasn't gone drastically up from VoA to COTF, but the costs of individual AA have increased. You nerf the best abilities for gaining AAs, but then do naught to address the ridiculousness of 18/21 AA per rank costs in COTF. How's that going to help you retain customers, the bulk of which aren't under level 85?

For the mass killing nerfs... Heh, told you guys before - especially the SKs, berserkers, and clerics - not to complain endlessly about beam kiting. Now you've done it and SoE is coming down hard on all forms of swarming. Have fun, we mages don't need swarming, but YOU do.