Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

I have a couple concerns about the plan to grant AA. I see the benefit from the point-of-view of catching players up to current content, but....

1. Only gold players can get it. A L85 player on gold can click a button and get...what....4000AA worth of Alt skills? A L85 player on silver can....get stuck at 1000AA. That's it. Forever.
2. Everything gets handed out willy nilly. Players will suddenly get dozens of AA skills with little or no idea of what they do or how/when to use them. Here! Load up your hotbar with all the hotkey ones and click away!
3. Nice idea to have the opt out, though I suspect few will use it.
4. Almost all gold account players will promptly level up to 80+, ignoring AA of course since they get em each level, and also ignoring about 80% of the game. What's the point of having 20 expansions if you can just do Franklin Teek missions from PoK and blaze up to SoD, getting all the AA for free and just wearing whatever defiant junk drops while you do missions?
5. You'll turn all the L70 and under zones into a giant ghetto for players with silver and bronze accounts. Everyone who's trying the game, leveling up, and learning the ropes. Hard to learn the ropes with no veterans around. Gold account players will visit for epic quests, and the odd nostalgia visit, and that's about it.
6. Why are people going to stick around and play EQ when the easy path gets them so much, so simply, and then they discover that to get more past that is very hard and slow, and now they've no real idea how to do anything more than simple missions for EXP?

As an alternative, might I suggest increasing, perhaps radically, the low AA count bonus? Sure, make it so they can 3000 AA in 100 or 200 hours of play (just for example, or whatever the Devs decide is reasonable) and catch up with those of us who have them already. Make it easy to earn them....but make them earn them. Don't just give away the farm for free. Pay them 30AA per hour or whatever, but give them the job...and the pleasure...of earning them.

If you get into the habit of giving away big parts of the game for free, people will start expecting even bigger parts. (What's in my trough today, devs?)

One last concern....the benefit to gold players might encourage more F2P players to subscribe - for one month - but then what are they going to do? Love what they are playing, or realize that this is as good as they're ever going to get without investing a huge amount of time and real money, and walking away?

The only problem is that some of us are max level and max AA right now. Any kind of refund in AA or XP means nothing unless it could be transferred to an alt and I don't see that happening ever. I would much rather see an item like an illusion (You have no idea how much I miss seeing illusion items as raid loot), or unique merc skin (although, I grow weary of them now). Although, I always hoped for a burning scarecrow merc as a beta reward or something.

This. You want to pretend to make things "fair", then make things fair.

When is all this going live?

So basically some people were making money for themselves by disrupting the servers for everybody. I feel their pain. They will have to find some other way to make that money without disrupting the game. No compensation of any kind for their 'loss' is necessary.

My god I want to like this post 4 or 5 times. I just want to hump it with likes. Hump it to death! These are some of the issues I am having with the spread of chain class nerfs.

Please note Gloomfall's post here, and my reply to it here.

Will Headshot be scaled differently among all the ranks (22 ranks) to accommodate this change? or will it just naturally jump from 86 to 99 on the last rank (which is purchasable at 95.) If that's the case your going to have level 95 rangers who can effectively headshot mobs up to 4 levels higher than them - albeit at a much slower rate. You may want to consider adding more ranks to headshot to scale this up. (auto-grant rank 23 at 96, 24 at 98, 25 at 100, make them do level 95, 97, and 99 respectively).

I just cannot believe how short sighted this headshot change is.
really !

Have you considered that it will utterly ruin and remove the ability to pull mobs with archery now?
Headshot proccing while pulling on a level 90+ mob that summons is a DEATH SENTENCE

Its not broken, Headshot already got nerfed to only affect single mobs

If getting XP via Headshot is the problem, then why are you making it affect MORE xp mobs, and not the other way around.

Ild love to see headshot only affect sub xp mobs, and as a ae, while a better single shot, that can be triggered affect xp mobs.
Why not make Headshot into a NEW nuke clicky AA with a 1 min cooldown, and leave the current ability the hell alone.

Considering nothing I said previously will make a spot of difference, will the buttload of AA spent to improve headshot levels be refunded, or you going to be nice and just add levels to it, make us pay for the privilege of losing the ability to range pull.


And bring back the BFG

As an AA reward compensation for players who have already gotten AAs:


Why not tie something in with the AA achievements we get every 250 AAs?

You could do something like a Hastened Bottle of Adventure III that you get with Recruit a Friend for every time you get an AA achievement. Maybe not for the 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 achievements but for when they start at every 250.

This is minor enough so it's not ungodly game breaking and possibly major enough (for people like me who have 11000+ AAs on multiple characters) to get a little love back. A player (at the most) would get about 50 potions which at most would equal 1500 minutes (25hrs) of 50% xp. Since we're already max'd AA we most likely wouldn't be using them initially but when the next expansion came out you'll be hearing a lot of...

"Man, thank SoE for giving me all these potions, it took the anger out of leveling!" from veteran players that don't buy 100% exp potions anyway.

Then you can just leave the potions in and as players level up normally and get AAs it will be a "Hey, dawg, we heard you like getting XP, so here is some more XP for your XPing!" type deal.

I'll be honest, I haven't thought of that. I was more afraid of Berzerker/Rogue aggro when they decap/assassinate a mob that doesn't die, and having instant aggro. Rorce suggested no aggro or severly limited aggro from these procs. Perhaps the new Headshot can only proc from mobs below 95% health, to be fair to Ranger pullers?

EQ2 basically redid a zone, or added one I forget, as a new tutorial at their heroic character level range. It would be a bad idea to do that here as well, but likely adding in a zone rather than redoing one for obvious reasons. But this would be a rather large task simply due to how complex most classes are now and how much they can do.

Proposal: AA Achievement Reward (Encourage Normal Progression)

To encourage players (especially casual players) for AA progression, an achievement should allow players to receive a piece-meal (toy) item or title. For instance, on a theoretical scheme, a player receives an special illusion, house item, teleport, potion (xp), or title, based on a checkpoint (earned AAs at 2500, 5000, 10k AA, etc.).As an alternative, you can create a charm-slot item (similar to LDoN charm) that scales to earned AA. This should actually encourage continuing Gold Membership and alleviate discouragement by auto-grants.

Lots of significant changes incoming to most classes.

Once the changes hit the servers, I would like to see then tracked to insure that they produce the desired effect of lowering server load, eliminating swarm pulling and associated negative player behavior without crippling classes. I recommend doing a reassessment in a few months and to revisit class balance issue. With so many changes there are bound to be secondary unintended consequences.

Regarding the AA bit, I do not recommend auto granting of AA. I do recommend making it easier for returning players to catch up in a reasonable amount of time to the end game. Auto granting of AA cheapens the work that some put into their avatars.

What I do recommend is the inclusion of multiple alternate zones where a player can do Teek's quest. Maybe have 3 different zones and quests for level 90, and 2 different zones and quests for level 85 and 80. Keep the 18 hour refresh on those quests. This will ensure that there should be enough mobs for a specific type to kill for various kill quests. One other option, is to not have Teek send players to do the kills in what is not the current hot zone for that level. This allows for players to experience / grind in one zone, and not be bothered by someone chasing after a specific mob and clearing part of their camp.

Assassinate works like HS and does little in the way of aggro. The zerker one acts like a nuke and is different which is why they get aggro.

Anyhow if these abilities are changed to something like 1-2 ppm they need to kill whatever they hit for obvious reasons. If it's a trash mob then it's not a big deal, but yeah for bosses and named we'll have to do something else to pull, obviously.

Pretty much. It didn't take many of them to screw it all up, either. Its a huge market, all fueled by people wanting AA without having to actually earn them because there are so many or they just don't feel like it. Swarming was the engine driving the whole racket...at least currently. That train will hook up to some other locomotive but perhaps one that causes less harm to the player base and the server hardware. Basically granting AA kills off a black market the same way that legalizing a controlled substance does.

The nerf to SK will not only effect mass pull but also tanking in normal groups. I use 2.0 when i get multiple mobs in a group for added healing. A lot of this healing comes from riposte. This will make SKs less effective tanks. Something that i think could be done instead is lowering the time mortal coil lasts to say 30 secs and have mortal residue proc every time.

As far as I knew.. the scaling was a bit different on those abilities as well unless that has changed.

45, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85..

With 22 Ranks of Anatomy I was pretty sure Rogues capped out at 85 at their max level. Was pretty sure it was around one level behind Headshot.

Considering Rogues had Assassinate back during Kunark before Headshot or Berserkers even existed.. it's really sad that they have the most difficult to use, most expensive, and weakest ability out of all 3.

sounds like its a done deal, but i guess once everyone gone gold for one month to get the shiney new aa, then gone back to silver as wont be anything the following month, sony will have to come up with a new shiney to make pple go gold for one month.....

Piestro: Is there a firm date for these yet? Everyone on my server says there are sure it's the 12th, seems unlikely to me given it's still in development. Do you know?

Tearsin: I am concerned that your massive ownage of this thread and the subject in general might be causing server lag. You need to quit owning every single dumb person's post, and leave some for the others.