Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

Discussion in 'News and Announcements' started by Prathun, Feb 5, 2014.

  1. Axxius Augur

    Twincast already existed in SoD, and we already had this exact issue back when Tower was endgame content. And nope, an occassional twincast proc (omg whole 3% chance) didn't cause any failures even back then. Running out of time on this event with lv 100 chars would be nothing but your own failure.
  2. Pullatross New Member

    After reading the comments from Calliope I want to add this...

    There are always examples of people who exploit the game. Cheating, if you call it that, should only spoil their own fun. If you mind your own business and worry about your own achievements without comparing to cheaters, there is no problem. If a player has poor skills, don't invite them in your group. Invite somebody with better skills.

    The same holds true in real life.
    For example if you are earning a good wage for a reasonable job and you are perfectly happy with everything, suddenly you find out somebody else gets more money for less work. Why should you be unhappy? Your income and your life hasn't changed. Stop comparing yourself to others. Jealousy is a waste of time.

    So with EQ we should simply worry about our own game and whether we are happy with what we can do ourselves.

    Thus the reason I don't care how many free AAs other players are given. I only care whether I have some new AAs to achieve myself or what my own character can do.

    How about more suggestions from players asking for what THEY want, rather than comments about what they don't want OTHERS to get?
    Gyurika Godofwar and Blink like this.
  3. alidan Lorekeeper


    here is what leveling is like for someone new.

    "hay, this is kind of fun, i like these zones, now i hit level 51 and a new thing called 'aa' has been introuduced, i wonder what that is?"

    they level some more, maybe makeing it to 65 depending on class

    "wow this game is getting hard, lets look into aa"

    needing to than park their character for at least 1 week if they play allot, to mindlessly kill hundreds of mobs, if not thousands to grind out the aa needed to just continue playing the game.

    "well that was alot of work but now i can finally play the game again"

    gets to level 70

    "you know what, i dont need to keep playing this game"

    or for a experienced player who wants to start a new character.

    "do i really want to play a new class, be at the bottom where i will be forced to solo to level 85 if not 90 and still need to be reliant on myself because most people don't know how to play the game right, while taking a solid week of time (if they can get powerleveled) if not month to get all the exp needed to be at the top of my game... or should i just give up now because the grind will burn out even the most dedicated of players"

    see, forcing people to walk up hill through the snow 5 miles to get to school, than needing to go up hill for 10 milles through a tornado and wild fire to get home only to do it again tomorrow densest make people better, it makes people quit.
  4. Kenton New Member

    Handing out AAs is not the answer. I am myself a returning player. I can back a couple years ago after a long hiatus. The current hotzones at the time were The Serpent's Spine zones. I hunted in those zones almost exclusively to catch up. I fell in love with that expansion from my time spent there grinding. I took my alts there even after the hotzones changed. I took time to explore other expansions that I missed out on. Part of EQ's allure is a sense of discovery as well as accomplishment.

    By dishing out huge numbers of AA, you are trivializing you're own content. Lower the number of points of AA required in order to get new players into end-game content. Raise AA experience bonuses if needed, but just hitting a button and claiming large numbers of AA will be the death-knell of this game.

    My main is a level 100 ranger. Tweak headshot all you want. I have a level 90 shadowknight too. Do whatever you want to mortal coil and my epic. JUST PLEASE DON'T TRIVIALIZE MY ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND YOUR OWN CONTENT!
    Caell, Yinla and Morningdew like this.
  5. Jimbo of Oggok Journeyman

    SKs have been left in the cold for years because of their ability to swarm. So now that you're not just nerfing that, but the viability of using epic against multiple raid mobs, you're going to give them some of these gifts paladins got over the years, eh?

    I'd like to see a pureforge melee disc, some type of tap splash, a banestrike to humanoid models like their undead, reversal of the underfoot dire implication nerf, a tap twincast added to sk spear like the glorious line, a melee attack proc like righteous line, etc etc

    Nerfing mortal coil = nerfing swarming
    Nerfing lich sting = nerfing sks

    Make mortal coil lose the lifetap and instead grant the damage boost from killing spree. There you go. Leave ripostes alone when that self healing does in fact tip the balance against multiples in group and raid setting.

    Or give sks all the things they've missed out on over the years.
  6. Kaenneth [You require Gold access to view this title]

    Yes, life isn't fair, that's why we want the games we play to be fair, to escape from that sucky part of reality.

    The hard part is deciding what is actually fair.
    Fenthen likes this.
  7. Quatreh Elder

    shaman aren t mele but mele love the clicky

    and plz like i asked on original post can you put decapitate proc in mele dmg ( like HS and assassinate ) instead of spell dmg ?
    Thanks
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  8. RaceCondition Augur

    If two players gain AA 100% faster, they both gain AA 100% faster. There's nothing about "dramatically over rewarding" any type of player with modifying the AA curve.

    The AA change completely negates any content that is pre 85. You're trading that off, for solving a possible "psychological barrier" for completely changing the play style of hundreds of players, since lower level content would be pointlessly.

    I know a lot of people agree that the content in EQ for >85 is extremely boring and cookie-cutter and people will get extremely bored with alts quickly, which is a play style a lot of raiders depend on.
  9. Tyranthin Journeyman

    Since your rationale for auto-granting AAs to characters for all expansions up to Underfoot is that they still have to earn those AAs through levelling, I think that it's not unreasonable to expect levelling to be more difficult from 51 to 85 (the AA levels up to the Underfoot cap). Right now, it is not hard at all to get to 85, and piling thousands of AAs on top of that seems a bit over the top. I'm not saying make it 10 times harder, but experience gain in that level range should at least be noticeably slower.

    I would have also preferred that you give more credence to allowing SK lifetap procs on ripostes against the current target as opposed to going to a counter metric. I hope that the initial solution for the number of counters is reasonably small.

    All in all, though, reasonable compromises across the board. My subscriptions are safe...for now.
  10. Annunaki New Member

    I really believe with the SK epic lasting only 1 minute and the cooldown as long as it is, you will not have people with the ability to swarm if you add the hit count to mortal coil. Another thing to consider is the click on the epic is a group effect. Are you going to give each member of the group a hit count or will everything be tallied from the same base number? I know from my experience, swarming is a gamble. The MC proc is fairly unpredictable. To eliminate swarming nothing needs to be done with the epic. Mortal coil hit count will be eaten quickly with a large quantity of mobs (swarm).

    You will never be able to completely eliminate swarming. The current gear even without procs, MC, and epic clicks will not change the fact the game is 15 years old, has 20 expansions and the gear quality for each expansion makes people much more tanky. Also in terms of affecting quality of player experience, there are only a small hand full of zones that are "swarmable". From my experience with the earlier ones, there have been 4-6 hour chunks of time where not a single other player has been in those zones. There is so much content and players are encouraged to play in hot zones for the dailies and experience bonus. With the exception of The Grounds none of the usual places where swarming occurs is a highly populated area. So, who is being hurt by running around in an empty game that is almost a sandbox at times?

    I know your servers are being taxed in brief spikes, but I would imagine when plane of fire was being raided with 64 people with everyone playing the game as intended, the servers were no less taxed then they are now. You can add mobs that do spike damage, summon, knockback, and a myriad of other things that will mess with positioning and have the same effect discouraging swarming while maintaining the integrity of the SK class.

    Lastly, I began playing a SK about 2 months ago. I leveled the character from 1-84 so far with minimal help or grouping outside of playing with a merc. I then farmed fervently towards getting my epic 1.5 and 2.0 quests finished. I parked the character at level 82 to farm AA's and made it up to 2303 AA's in the last several weeks. Now the last two weeks I could have been leveling but instead sat and farmed the AA's to be a successful player as I reached higher levels are being rewarded with no compensation for that time spent and on top of that a fairly deep nerf that will further hinder my progress. I think there needs to be something that rewards the players for the time put into leveling the AA's if you are now going to simply give them away when people reach the appropriate level. I'm all about getting people back into the game. When I logged on after my break since Gates of Discord it was like playing a new game. There is already the defiant gear which is better than most of the raid tier gear until you reach the level where you can begin wearing House of Thule gear. There are mercenaries which help with soloing... maybe too much since finding a group to actually level up is hard to do since everyone seems to still be boxing their groups. I just believe you need to do something meaningful to acknowledge the hard work put into farming AA's so there is still a sense of the time was invested in a meaningful way.
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  11. asgaard Augur

    First, Thank you Piestro for staying online and answering questions. I appreciate that very much. Thank you for the opt out feature on the AA's. After reading the posts I can better appreciate both sides of the issue. I can keep working on AA's for my main and still feel like I've accomplished something. I really do hope the changes help bring in new and returning players. That's all. Just wanted really to say thanks Piestro.
  12. Angry Tacos New Member

    Dear Piestro,

    I understand why u are doing what your doing on head shot decapitation and assignation. 2 procs per minute even with a scale is too few please have yourself and development team consider this if your really care about eq sustainability even with your proposed changes your changes only really effect non raid geared Everquest players.

    If you guess really want to bring it to current pace and keep each of these classes relevant 2 peoc per minute isn’t going to cut it double that and u keep our classes relevant u keep eq healthy and scale up the mobs we can kill higher level mobs higher hit points but the classes your affecting have trickledown effect on population of eq we are the one killing for hours on end while a player who dumps lots of cash into game via station cash their sub and the krono’s that they buy to be at work and get power leveled.

    We keep the game rotation with fresh new level 100 that other people group with raid with and explore contact with if you truly care about eq’s don’t take away these classes abilities to do what your doing by giving 4k aa away but instead of us giving away aa we are level people while their lives are more demanding then they actually have time to play evquest.

    I mean the real problem and no one has addressed we live in a instant gratification world and 80+ is the wall that many players are stuck at until they farm enough play or buy a krono from soe to pay someone to power level
  13. Hatsee Augur


    I would guess it's kind of like spell casting subtlety in that you can't toggle it without a lot of code work which isn't worth the time.
  14. Coldmouth Elder

    This game is 15 years old.. who isnt a "veteran player?" I keep hearing that word a lot in these threads. We all did the grind at some point, whether it was Planes of Power or Reign of Fear... who cares? I bet half the people complaining about having to "put in the hard work" got huge exp boosts to get where they are at. It's not like AAs are an amazing achievement. It takes some people a few days max to get 85 and 2k meaningful AAs, you realize that right?

    Demanding a returning player to "put in the hard work" and be YEARS behind in progression with nobody else to play with is absolutely silly.
  15. Aeonblade Very Hungry Vah Shir

    I don't think it's troll handles as you put it so much as 90% of the game's players have never posted on these forums and are now taking the time to do so because this issue affects them, as they perceive it, negatively.
  16. Kolani Augur

    Bad ranger is bad. Headshot can proc off Focused Storm, you know.
    Detra likes this.
  17. Htaeda New Member

    As a main raiding cleric (Shadva, The Rathe), I can tell you that when I cast Shining Bastion on a tank during raids, the base timer on it with maxxed buff extensions is about 8 minutes. Depending on the fight (single or multiple mobs) it usually wears off in an average of about 90 seconds because of the massive damage done by current raid content mobs.

    While we're on the topic of cleric nerfs, can we PLEASE decrease cast timers on our current "fast" heals? They currently take (with maxxed hastened) about 4 - 5 seconds vs. the original 1.5 second cast timer. Raise the mana cost a tiny bit if you need to but those extra seconds are killer. Unfortunately, the mercs and merc AA's did a great job of killing off about 70 - 80% of the old cleric army because we can't get groups. This means fewer raid clerics doing more work.

    Now, back to the granted AA fight. I really, really, REALLY think that such a large AA gift is detrimental to EQ over-all. Not only are many old veterans feeling abandoned because there's no big reward for the years of loyalty but, with the horrendous cost of higher level AA's, there's still a huge AA wall to climb. Plus, you're creating a complete mess with folks not knowing what the AA's actually DO since they didn't have to figure out the best way to use thier AA's for thier play style or class. Yes, you may generate some new short-term gold memberships however, once they see the cost of the remaining AA's, most will do as they did before and simply walk away.

    I offer a compromise. I've suggested part of it at least twice in the old thread. Lower the over-all cost of AA lines. I know that, for myself at least, seeing a high level AA line that requires 18 - 21 AA's PER LEVEL just makes me shudder and cringe. Cut the AA "gift" down to 8 expansions below current max and cut the over-all cost of AA's by at least 1/3. This helps new, returning AND veteran players as well as lowering the cost of future AA's to a less daunting amount.

    Now, about that nerf bat... It's not a steamroller. We get REALLY upset when you flatten us with it. Think more wiffle ball and less steamroller.
  18. Behelit Augur

    toss an HP limit on all 3 (Decap/Assasinate/Headshot) so they can't trigger unless mobs below 90%, no early proc aggro, no summoning issues, fixes multiple problems at once.
    Fenthen likes this.
  19. SoroxDrinal Elder

    I was under the impression someone could pay for one month of gold status, get their free 4000 AAs across potentially multiple toons, then return to free-to-play or silver and keep their free AAs.

    The group game will be PLing to 85, heroic adventures to 100, buy all AAs that are not tied to a dependency chain from last 4 expansions using low AA count bonus, click the magic free button and get 4000 AAs through UF. There's not going to be a huge amount of farming to do... A few augments, a few clickies. This would take what, a month or three to have a 100/8K toon?!

    Do you think this change is going to continue drawing people into the game 6 months from now? Or will they play for 1 to 3 months, have nothing to do but the same set of HAs with nothing to buy and quit?

    You will need more content from the weekly/monthly patches...
    Badname0553. likes this.
  20. AlmarsGuides Augur