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

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by Piestro, Feb 4, 2014.

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  1. mykahl New Member

    I disagree with free experience. Experience should always be earned. Why will people regularly pay to play this game if they can just quit and then come back next year and be the same level AAs as someone who stays and pays twelve months access?

    My plan with this change will be to cancel my Gold accounts (I currently have three), enjoy a full year of free play, work on old /achievements with friends and guild mates, then renew next year for a month to gain expansion AAs granted for FREE!

    Maybe I should just wait fifteen years to play EQ Next. I should get everything fifteen years from now that everyone else worked years to earn.
    tatt2ed likes this.
  2. Atvar Augur

    Yes! It's funny how attached people are to their aa count as a show of accomplishment, but completely ignore the achievement system.

    I wonder if the devs could give us numbers on how many people are actually over 20k achievement points.
    Ramson likes this.
  3. Yukimora New Member

    I'm not entirely sure how the implementation works, for instance, do I gain free ranks in CA/CS as I level up?

    For practical purposes, this will go a long way towards getting newer/returning players back into the game and able to contribute in newer content. Although for actually new players, I can imagine the look on their faces as they are trying to figure out where to put new hot bars.

    For experienced players....wow look at all the QQ....People mad cuz they can't powerlevel for free kronos anymore? They are already soon going to make it so people can start at lv 85, and now they giving thousands of aas(90% of which do absolutely nothing btw) so not much more need to buy plat to pay just to get levels while ur afk. Also nice side effect of drastically reducing the number of people who get hacked because they go to 3rd party places buying levels/aa/plat. Hey look, Sony just saved even more money!

    For toons that are already level 100 we already bought our ranks of ca/cs and weapon affinity and combat fury, or dual wield etc....For most of us this change is going to amount to a couple thousand HP/mana, a couple hundred attack points, +100 to our resists, +40 mana regen(mental clarity) and some cool down reductions on a few useful abilities. I mean honestly they could flat out delete 75% of the aa list and you wouldn't notice a difference. Innate XXX, Crafting mastery, pack rat, potion bar, weapon slots, 3 or 4 abilities that every class has that NOBODY uses. That's a couple thousand aa that have no game effect. Do people with 8000 aas actually feel a sense of accomplishment when they buy rank 15 of innate charisma?

    I think its funny that people are QQing that some people will get something easier than they got it...I'm reminded of how people were freaking out when they took away spellbook medding because the only way they could kill casters in pvp was to ambush them while they were sitting down. Think back....72 man raids, with no voice chat, no custom chat channels, no target halos, no lobby buffs. Being naked and having to retrieve our bodies if we died, which could literally take hours or even days to accomplish. All these things were remedied after our generation sucked it up and survived it all. The anxiety these people are feeling will fade, and the next time they make a toon thats level 85 with 4kaa they'll go MAN I'm sure glad I don't have to pay 2 million plat to get someone else to level this guy for me. And I'm sure glad I don't need to go farm a decade old zone for weeks on end to get my first 2k aas just so I can gain 5 more levels and have to farm anther 2k aas to survive the next tier of zones.
    menown likes this.
  4. Zanmar New Member




    I have said this to my RL buddy as well, say for example a BLords pet can do massive damage to an animal, basically a HS type ability for all classes.
    The problem tho is that the servers can't maintain the large pulls so something has to give.
    I hope SoE really makes the pro choice to get more hardware and keep the game going in the direction that has people coming back.
    Those that have stuck around have fun helping people catch up. Whats more fun than killing a bunch of green mobs. ok well I hate killing anything less than a dark blue. I will do it to help people tho.
  5. Puligimist New Member


    Like its really that difficult to zone for an achievement? Look at all the travelers achievements we got waiting for us?
  6. LostBoy32 New Member

    WHOA Hold on here... I'm an SK... So I'm addressing this from our side... I get the swarming thing... you want to end it that's great more power to ya BUT by removing life taps from ripostes you are completely gimping us in raid/group situations... If you want to stop SK from swarming GET RID OF MORTAL COIL PERIOD. We dont need it. Its a useless ability EXCEPT FOR SWARMING. Take it back! Give us Killing Spree or some equivalent but for Innorruks sake leave everything else as far as SK are concerned alone. Ive been playing an SK for close to 13 years now. The only appeal SK have to raid guilds and even to groups is our ability to survive. When things go bad we can snap up 4 or 5 adds click our epics hit VoD and defensive and SURVIVE and maybe save a caster, a group or even a raid in the process. You break the life tap on riposte that breaks our epics, that breaks our survivability, that breaks our usefulness on raids, that breaks our usefulness in groups and that BREAKS MY HEART :( An SK with a broken heart is a sad thing indeed.

    As far as the AA's are concerned ... Im not feelin it. You wanna give away 4000 aa? Everything up to underfoot? Everything I spent the last 13 years working my butt off for? The ONLY way I would even consider that fair is if you refund all the AA I spent from Underfoot back and let me spend them on things after Underfoot. That's my hard work you are giving to people for free I EARNED those AA. They are MINE. You want to SIGNIFICANTLY change how they are distributed then be FAIR about it and GIVE ME BACK the ones I EARNED and let me spend them on things that matter to me...

    And how about responding to the folks that dont agree with these changes as opposed to only addressing the people who do... just sayin

    Respectfully a SAD SK :(
  7. a_cleric00 Lorekeeper

    The swarming nerfs are welcome; no matter how you do it, tons of people will complain. People will always find a way to PL, they'll just look harder. In fact, all they have to do is think back to how we used to AE kill entire zones, and you'll see AE groups pop up again (1 chanter, 1 cleric, and 4 PBAEers, doesn't take much to figure it out) like back in the days of kunark (chardok/OS) to luclin (FG). I don't like seeing the HS/decap/assassinate nerfs though, I really think they make a lot of sense since of course your beefy level 95 should be able to exploit weaknesses of level 88 mobs (using 95 instead of 100 since that was the level they stopped updating the AA's...) and should perhaps be introduced to other classes (magicians get an elemental only one, druids get an animal/plant one, nec/clr/pld/sk get undead... you get the picture) and updated.

    But I must say, I really like the idea of linking AA's to "completion" of an expansion. Once you get all the achievements for an expansion (maybe even add achievements for this), you automatically get all the AA's for it, or do it progressively as you work on completing the achievements. You then have the choice to grind out exp or achievements. This could get complicated when older expansions are incomplete (therefore the AA's aren't unlocked) when a newer expansion is complete. The best solution to that would be to not grant the newer expansion AA's until the previous ones are ground out or otherwise obtained.
    Leeroy Jenkins and Zanmar like this.
  8. keebler1113 New Member

    All of you people saying they will quit if it turns into pay to win. Well guess what it has been pay to win the whole time with beam kiting. Buy a krono, sell in bazaar, buy a beam pull guess what you had to do absolutely nothing to gain all your AAs.
    Tezzoro likes this.
  9. Havokk New Member

    I was talking about achievements based on progression in that Expansion, not simply "zoning in". And sure people should get awards for exploration as well, but obviously actually completing quests/killing certain numbers of each type of mob in a zone etc would be more rewarding than simply zoning in.
    Ramson likes this.
  10. Ramson New Member

    So everyone got their AA's by paying for them? No one did it the old fashioned way, in that they EARNED them? Just because you may have got your's that way doesn't mean everyone did.
    Leeroy Jenkins and Atrocitas like this.
  11. Htaeda New Member

    My raid main is Shadva, lvl 100 cleric with over 10K AA's that I've earned the hard way. I've been playing on The Rathe since 2001 when hell levels were around and before AA's were so easy to get. When people were banned for using exploits. Blanket nerfs have never been the answer. Punish the people actually causing the problems rather than taking the nerf bat to people and/or classes that aren't the problem.

    I've been adversely affected by mages beam-kiting in open zones. It's a known exploit and the people doing it should be banned. I'm not saying that all mages do it, I'm saying that the ones that do should be banned.

    Rogues have already been pummeled with the nerf bat. Assassinate only rarely works on humanoid mobs that are on the lower end of the blue con spectrum or lower and only on 1 target at a time.

    Ranger headshot was nerfed previously so that it only worked on blue-con mobs or lower and only 1 mob at a time.

    Clerics got royally screwed by the addition of mercs then merc AA's. Try maining a cleric and trying to get a group. Most folks use thier mercs instead of a live cleric for groups. Nerfing the shining line only really hurts raiding clerics and thier raid guild.

    SK's NEED thier lifetaps to tank efficiently and don't cause the server/zone-wide lag issues that exploitative mages do. If you find an SK that can swarm 80 dark blue, yellow AND red-con mobs, by all means, shake thier hand then ban them.

    Zerker decapitate DOES need to be modified. Try limiting the mob type and lvl.

    As it stands, I've seen mage pets tank more mobs in higher level zones than a single SK or zerker can and my rogue hasn't tanked ANY blue con or higher for longer than the duration of counterattack since she was about lvl 10.

    Granting 16 years of expansion AA's? Rediculous. It's bad enough to get PL'd idiots who don't have the first clue about how to play thier class. Now you want to solve the PL'ing for cash/plat problem by giving away a bunch of free AA's that they won't have any clue how to use. This will adversely affect the entire population. If you want to benefit everyone, lower the over-all cost of AA's. Some of the AA lines require 18 or more AA's per level and have 20 or more levels. Make the cost a bit less daunting, don't give them away for nothing.

    If you're looking to solve the PL for cash/plat problem, reinstate bans for doing it. Ban the specific people exploiting the mechanics and causing server/zone lag rather than doing blanket nerfs just to give yourselves something to do. If you need something to do, fix taunt, pathing, mob warp, etc.
  12. Puligimist New Member

    I agree .. totally wrong for them to take what was earned
  13. menown Augur

    "be FAIR"

    There it is again. This game is not all about you buddy. Sometimes gifts are not earned.

    I will say I like the AA exp curve to be reevaluated or lock the AAs behind achievements instead.
  14. Jade New Member

    Please don't change anything!

    If you want to give out free AAs then let it be as a reward after maxing out a char or as a vet reward. Don't kill the game...

    Swarm Pulling is a ability that people learned, it's just game strategy, what is wrong with that? A person was smart enough to come up with this game strategy, isn't that what gaming is all about? strategy...

    I don't think we should punish char that have learned a game strategy. They just know how to play there class, better then some.
  15. Nullyn New Member

    To appease both the "we need more AA to be able to play current content" and the "we have already grinded the AAs handing them all out isn't a good idea" crowds, would it not be possible to do something more middle ground than granting all AAs from UF down?

    What if instead it just granted all of the AAs important to that class' role from UF down. That way a class would be able to have the "core" AA that they NEED to be able to progress, while not having all of the AAs that the vets have spent time grinding out.

    An example of this would be Warriors would get the UF and lower versions of:

    Combat Agility
    Combat Stability
    General Sturdiness
    Delay Death
    Natural Durability
    Planar Stamina
    Armor of Wisdom
    etc etc. for all of the "tank" related AAs

    This would allow a warrior (or whatever class it may be) perform their function, in this case tanking. While still leaving other "important" lines unfinished that the player still needs to work to obtain. While the player would be able to have the core tanking AAs, they would like dps and still need to put in the effort to obtain AA lines such as Combat Fury, Flurry, etc. in order to have a well rounded character.

    While this may still leave people in a position of saying "there are too many AA to grind out!" at least the characters who are saying this will be able to have the basics done so they can go about trying to get the other AAs that they are still lacking.
    Deavirtus, Leeroy Jenkins and Ramson like this.
  16. Zanmar New Member



    Yeah it is that way, but atleast a player benefits from it, someone who worked many long nights to be able to PL someone. Instead of it being a bribe for a nerf.
  17. Havokk New Member

    I agree, although keep in mind we would still be able to purchase AA's normally as well. The unlocking would basically be rewarding people with AA's based on progression, they wouldn't even necessarily need to spend them on that expansions abilities.
  18. Hatsee Augur

    Auto grants are fine, we were done with those aa's long ago but I'd say you're still aiming low.

    The nerfs are awful, so much changed, so much looked at, and so little accomplished.

    You could have asked me what to do and my answer would have been delete Mortal Coil and put a 8 hit cap on the mage beam spells, really that was all that was needed.
    Ramson likes this.
  19. Rubidium New Member

    I have a 88 pally with about 3700 AA which I've been building over the course of the last year (no PLing), using a crapton of SC XP potions. While I wasn't always "having fun" grinding those AAs, I felt the progression and knew I would need them later on. Not even once I thought it was for nothing. Up until now.
    Recently I made a second (gold) account for my newly created bard box.
    I won't be renewing my subscriptions if the change comes through as it is, without refunding even 1/4 of the amount gathered (to account for AA XP bonus).
    Youou and Ramson like this.
  20. Puligimist New Member

    some mage pets out tank Warriors also in raid environments!!
    Leeroy Jenkins likes this.
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