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

Auto-AA: I approve. I have 10,000+ AA. I recently leveled a mage from 1 to 100 (and around 2100 AAs) and it was a -lot- of work. Now, I was motivated to do this because I wanted to stop using a mercenary tank (badly). Had I not had a dire need, I honestly probably would have given up. I think the developers are right -- the mountain is too large, and for the health of the game, it needs to be made smaller.

Swarming Changes: Swarming ~10 mobs -- whatever. Swarming ~200 mobs -- that just hurts other players. I've been in super-laggy zones where there wasn't an obvious reason why it was laggy. I've been run over by a swarm team clearing an entire zone (just once). This behaviour needs to be corrected.

I think some of their changes might be a bit overzealous. Some of the classes whose abilities received changes were highly unlikely to be doing any kind of swarming (like my own class of Shaman, for example) but they probably just wanted to make sure everyone felt the pain so that one specific class didn't feel singled out. Also, if you're going to do something unpopular, you might as well do it comprehensively so you don't have to later do something ELSE unpopular.

PLing: I don't think this is the death of PLing. Things will go back to the way they always were with regard to that; damage shields.

No, I think the people most affected by this will be SKs that are simply trying to solo some experience.

This may sound extremely "noobish," but maybe someone can provide an answer or two (the answers may even be provided in the 70+ pages preceding this post, but I'm certainly not going to be the one to sift through all of the whining to find it; props to you if you do!).

If you're going to auto-grant everything up to the Underfoot expansion, how exactly is that going to work? With the quoted text, I'm assuming the moment you hit L85 you're going to have all of those AA spent for you automatically, yes? Or will they gradually be automatically spent for you when you hit L51 and, from there, be spent automatically each level until you reach the max level of whatever the "fourth-from-the-last" expansion is at the time?

In terms of just the AA portion of this thread, I particularly could honestly care less; it won't affect my Cleric that I've been playing for years and years and years and I don't really care for alts. For those that are whining it'll give them 68,019,108,393 AA points and they'll never have another thing to do ever again in the entire game for the rest of their lives, my question is what happened to Heroic Characters?

Instead of making this something that fits every single character that falls under a gold subscription, just make it so that the Heroic character you purchase receives the automatically granted AA. If you want that many AA given to you, you're surely not going to find 70+ pages worth of ways to whine about getting 85 levels with that, too (assuming Heroic characters will start at L85). If you don't want either of them (particularly the AA), then just don't buy a Heroic character. Problem solved, no?

Maybe I'm just not fully understanding how it works, but if you had the option to do it you'll probably cut down on approximately half (or more) of the responses that this thread has already.

Hey folks, I'll get back to reading and responding to the thread shortly but I wanted to update you all first. I'm just back from a meeting with the team where we discussed a number of these issues and we have made some changes to the current plan:

• We've eliminated Spell Casting Subtlety from the grant, along with the tradeskill AAs. This should prevent any negative impact for those that don't want these AA.

• We will be lowering the level of the Glyph of Undetermined Reward (name approximated) to 51 and removing the Alaran Language requirement. This will allow anyone 51+ to level lock by diverting their experience to AA and using it to buy this glyph.

There are other potential changes from the meeting earlier today, these are the ones we can tell you about now. We're meeting again this afternoon to discuss more topics related to this plan that have been brought up in this thread. Thank you for your feedback, and please keep it coming.

All jokes and complaints aside, we all appreciate the updates and responses that you guys keep sending out. So thank you for that.

You should discuss the problem at-hand, which is zone lagging. Shining Armor, Assassinate, Decap, Headshot, etc do not cause zone lag from too many NPCs moving at once.

1. Beam kiting
2. SK swarming

Those are the two you should be discussing.

1. You already fixed mages - max beams at 12 NPCs at a time
2. Figure out a different way to handle Shadow Knights that will not affect their raid usability. We may as well trade them in for Paladins at this point, since that's really their only utility.

You grant I go

No discussion no argument, just a fade to black

I was a little beside myself, I almost reported you
Thanks for saying that, Aegenor.

This is actually something we've talked about quite a bit. With swarming in place we couldn't do a lot of cool stuff for SKs because it would end up benefiting swarming more. With swarming resolved we can actually grant the class more cool abilities.

The rogue changes are silly, we basically don't lose anything almost, but still the class sucks at soloing.
The poisons were supposed to help, but mob DPS has gone through the roof.

Assasinate only works well with counterattack, which is only up every X hours, and it requires a humanoid zone. So no, rogues have no ability to swarm in any form.

Rogues made their class because they like to be good DPS in groups / raids or because they like the idea or being a rogue. One of the few fun toys we had was assasinate when we were bored.

It takes part of the fun of the class away, so that's a shame. I hope they give ppl fun alternatives to play with. It's not the nerf that is annoying, really, we're not SK, we can't swarm, it's just a fun aspect of being a rogue.

Go back and make the older ranks of aa's cost less!~

Don't just be like..oh all aa's through UF...autogranted!

We've pulled a few out of the autogrant now (like subtlety). Please let us know about any more that would create a negative effect on your characters.

I keep coming back to this, but it is really bugging me, so I just can't shut up about it. LOL. We have a 100 mage in our guild who regularly solos CoTF HA's. You say you are trying to remain fair to all classes (to "balance" them, as one of your devs said), but casters (esp wizzies and mages) are so ridiculously OP already compared to melee dps. I really, really, really can't say enough that IMO you need to leave zerkers, rogues and rangers alone. It is already unbalanced, pls stop making it so no one wants to play a melee class.

We're aware of both new accounts from new IPs, and new accounts from IPs that are already posting in this thread.

I 100% agree with the changes you plan on the aa's (swarm killing abillities) and Im very happy with that you do NOT try to solve this by making mobs summon. That would be a very poor solution for all the players that dont swarm but hunt by kiting or rooting mobs (1-4 at the time) - like me.

The only use I see for those swarm killing abillieties is to swarm killing so fix the fails in those skills and dont try to adjust the zones/mobs to those skills - and hurt the other of us.

That was what I liked about the comming update What I dont like is you want to give away all the aa's for free.

1. I dont understand the crybabies that find it a barrier to work on your character - xp has never been easier to get. I simply dont understand why it should be possible to max out an character in a week. To me its the journey towards the 100 that is fun by slowly but steady improving and learning my character.

2. I understand that there is different play styles and that other people play differently that me - that the cool about EQ you can choose your own style! But the atleast give people like me the choise to spend the free aa's the way I like instead of just force them all down my trout. If you you cant be convinced to drop the free aa's then atleast give them in a way for each player to choose if he wana spend them. I may have an unique play style but I actually try to play all my characters as original as possible progressing them through each expansion with the gear that expansion original offered and sammed with aa's and level - let me continue to play that way while you still giving the oppotunity for others to get the free aa's.

If that by any chance is possible to develope I'll be still going strong fan of EQ

Keep Norrath a place where different play style can meet and dont try to force an avarage style on us all!

I think that completely removing life tap procs from ripostes is too much. I think a limit would be much more sensible. For example, if I have 20 creatures attacking me, my ripostes would proc a life steal effect on only 12 of the creatures rather than the whole bunch.

You're going to need to grant those when you take away the SK's role in raids.

Log into servers and watch chat. There's loads of discussion going on. From talking to my friends and guild mates you've pissed a lot of people off. No one much seems to care about beaming going away, mages have plenty of solo ability regardless of beaming. You've managed to piss off a lot of SKs by breaking how the class actual does it's job regardless of swarming.

And the chain class community you've made quite furious. I know more than a few that have already cancelled accounts or will in the future because of decisions you make. We do not believe you will keep any of those 3 abilities useful. Headshot is very low risk and is a bit of a different situation than decap and assassinate. Berserkers and Rogues require healers to be able to do either. We're at a loss for why out of no where you're trying to take away our ability to do mediocre AAs for ourselves. You've designed content and encounters we cannot survive hits from, our alternative is going to 3 expansion old content and kill mobs 12 levels below us to be able to gain AA on our own. So what precisely is it you expect us to believe you're going to do to make it effective? For that matter you're going to have to increase the rate of assassination if you remove the ability to trigger it on riposte to get UP to 2 per minute.

You should think very carefully about the decisions you're making, it's not going to have the effect you're looking for.

They already did that with increasing AA experience.

It's the psychological barrier that prevetns a newbee from progressing. The idea that they need to make 4000 AA.

Why not come up with those "cool" abilities and introduce them first. Why must you piss off everyone, then start backing down? My jaw is on the floor at how bad you guys are at communicating with your players and the obvious lack of foresight these poorly thought out plans exude.

I'm really interested in these cool abilities..... None of which have been stated or thought of before you claimed you were taking swarming out. Because if you did you might not have nearly as much backlash as you do now