Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

I am not going to post any further..I am letting my emotions consume me over this. SOE is just trying to make the game fun for everyone. /salute vets who earned it..../salute to the new players who will someday be the vets..may we all live in peace and take out our aggressions on gnolls. Have fun and Good hunting!

So the logic behind this patch I totally don't understand.

We're removing swarming because we don't want players to get a bunch of easy free AAs, and we're also giving everyone a bunch of free easy AAs.

They are removing it because of "server stability". Plus everyone petitioning that people are pulling the zone and lagging them out.

I think the intent is to remove swarming because of the affect it has on the server load and server operations, not because of the xp or aa gain rate.

Except they're nerfing 3 abilities that have nothing to do with swarming or server stability.

I still think its bad long term, and we would have been better served by less auto granted, granting them as points to spend with levels as opposed to auto spending them, and adding other things to make getting exp easier in the level range.

But being able to opt out makes it a moot point for me, so ultimately has little impact on my enjoyment of the game. I just hope I'm wrong about the net effect being negative. Any lost revenue ultimately hurts us all.

Hey look, someone who can form their own opinion on a subject and actually think for themselves outside of just what they're told.

You're my new best friend.

If your hobby of choice was chess, how many hundreds of hours do you think you would have to play to be on a par with the grandmasters?
If you were an artist should we give you a place in the Royal Academy because you don't have the time or talent to earn it?
If you are an MMA fighter shall we just award you the trophy because you find your opponent daunting/intimidating?

You miss the point. What many of us love about this game is that it is *hard*. No-one beats EQ in a year. Or two. When I started I was 2 years behind everyone else. Was that dispiriting? No. Did I think they should help me get to where they were? No. It was a challenge. People still love this game because it is a challenge. The endgame was always something to aspire to after a very long time of learning. Many people were very happy never being at the bleeding edge with the massive learning curves that entailed. They just wanted to play. Do stuff. Not reach the end.

Why do you want to be in the endgame? I'm genuinely interested. Why do you want to get to the finish line without doing all the fun stuff along the way. To me that seems like booking a cruise and then shouting that you don't get home quick enough. Surely the journey is the point?

I want EQ to stay a hard game. Not 24 hour corpse run hard. That's only fun in hindsight. But I do want it to take many hundreds of hours to finish an expansion - that's something that's being lost.

The difference is SOE makes money with one option and not the other.

I worry about two things with the decap/hs/assassin changes:

The first being that during development of new content, you tend to gauge the amount of HP mobs have based on the amount of dps "normal" groups can do. This means that rogues, zerkers, and rangers will certainly not stay "over powered" for long, but when the HP of the mob is scaled using this new plan it's going to be very hard for tanks to do sufficient damage to solo or duo. My hope is that you take this into perspective when you consider how much all of the classes should be doing instead of just having it be a gift to those three classes.

The second is that a dps gap will form, since at level 100 there are quite a few mobs over 100 and quite a few under, wouldn't that mean that rogues rangers and zerkers are only desired in certain zones but not the "better" ones? They're going to run into situations where the group total dps is 100k so they decide to move to a bigger badder zone, where they'll be surprised to find the dps has dropped from 100k to only 60k meaning they'd be better of moving back. I just really hate the idea, as a long time end game rogue, of being less important on a raid mob as I am in a group. Wizards and mages won't have this limitation so they'll always be topping boss raid targets (if scaled right) while rogues would only be topping trash mob parses. Who really wants to do that? Frankly, I would rather have an all-around dps boost ability than be expected to become more reliant on something I never really liked in the first place, upgrades or not.

As others have said, assassination isn't really the reason hardly anyone makes a rogue, take it away and all we've lost is our ability to eek by soloing at a sort of decent rate. Making it more powerful, especially in this way just means our hopes of receiving dps in a form we care about are likely dashed. I'd rather be free of these types of instant-kill abilities all together to be completely honest, but receive non-picky abilities in their place.

As for rangers, I've never liked the idea that one level separates their decision to melee or shoot a bow. I think it would be way cooler if that decision was based on something like armor instead. Arrows pierce through while weapons may not, etc.

As for zerkers, I've never played one, but I have tanked for a few and decap is a tank's worst nightmare for agro. You really need to switch it to melee damage, especially if you're going to allow it to effect higher level mobs. In anything but an ideal group they're going to die or very nearly die twice a minute. Even with a perfect tank, taunt doesn't always work and our agro abilities pale in comparison to decap.

Also as it's been mentioned earlier in this forum... Why is it that zerkers can decap things that don't even seem to have a head, while rogues and rangers are limited to humanoids? I'm pretty sure almost every mob out there has a back, and if zerkers can behead something, why can't you shoot it in said head? lol the whole premise for these abilities is dare I say, a bit dumb.

I am pretty happy with the changes, thanks to all devs for listening to us.

Sorry but why the assumption that people have to / want to rush to the current content ? Current to me just means whatever I am currently doing - not what you are currently doing. I for one have played many years in this game and have no chars above 82 by intention! And just to make that worse yes I box so leveling to 100 would be easy. I totally accept that people run to different agendas, have different playing styles, some raid , some can't - and the high end game is personally the most boring place I could think to be for my circumstances. But not to worry there is still a massive amount of content in the game for me still to explore without even thinking past 85. Like I say that's my playing style that suits me - but too many posts in these threads seem to assume that everyone wants to be at the top end for some reason - I play for the fun. One bonus I suppose is that Heroic chars are not likely to affect me in any way.

• I have all AA's purchased now except all of the innate charisma line. I would hate for CHA, INT, WIS to be auto-granted to leveling warriors and count against the 4k AA curve. There are much more valuable AAs they could get.
• Is it possible to have the AA grant turned off and players choose to buy the AA's they choose to the 4K plateau and then click the auto-grant and then be close to max AA? I know many AA's have prerequisites but they can certainly get a good deal of nice ones then top them off with the grant.

I've never posted here till now, but I though I should lend my voice to this topic, as it's important to me too. I have been playing EQ since May of 2001, and this game is important to me.

I personally think the 'free' aa grant is a terrible idea, and although many other players have voiced their reasons more eloquently than I ever could, I'd like to spell out my personal reasons for being against this 'gift' anyway;

a. It wasn't something that was asked for - by anyone.

Although I realize a number (perhaps a fair number) or players leaving the game in the last few years may have cited 'steep aa requirements' as a reason for quitting, forcing this upon everyone will create problems (I'll elaborate in a minute).

b. The bonus is too massive.

I could understand if it was something like reconfiguring the aa experience 'curve' to start out with a large bones, then slowly drop off to nothing as you closed in on your 4,000th aa. 4k aa's is excessive and it will sharply affect the interest many hold in this game.

c. There are people in any hobby that will race toward the end content - devouring it - usually, that's ok. but by allowing newbies to create 85 lvl characters with 4k aa's in one fell swoop, you risk two other problems;

1. A class of players and guilds that will not accept you unless you have 4k + aa.
2. Newbies (legions of them) with high level characters, thousands of aa's...and no idea how to make sense of it all (incompetence).

In short, people who decide to 'opt out,' risk being basically smothered by the ones who don't. In a world where such huge amounts of 'talent' can be gotten nearly at will, those who try to play 'honestly' - WITHOUT the aa bonus - risk becoming second class citizens. This could fundamentally change the grouping and playing in EQ.

Or as another player put it, simply allowing us to 'opt out' is not good enough. People with no real game experience could have extremely powerful characters, with stats they do not deserve and did not earn. In closing, I'll simply rehash some points and ideas some other players have made;

a. Allow the free AA's to only apply to one character per account, or one character per server.

b. To flag a character for the AA's, you have to pay separately for each toon.

c. Flag those that took the AA's - allow them to become 'recognizable' by the other players in some way. This was the 'wuss flag' option somebody mentioned. Maybe make their name tag pink or something.

d. Make the aa bonus more like 2,000 aa's up to level 75 (instead of the proposed 4k til 85).

e. Instead of free aa's, change the exp. CURVE of aa's gained; low aa's = much greater exp. bonus, slowly tapering off as you approach 4,000 aa's. At least that way the aa's would be technically earned.

f. Create a server where no free aa's are envisioned or allowed.

And thank you for allowing us to voice our collective opinions on these issues beforehand.

They are removing swarming because it's killing the servers, which cost $$$; this is about Expense, not Income.

It's also not super fun to be in the middle of a raid encounter where suddenly the event freezes; but the fail timers keep running because someone in another instance on the same hardware did a mass swarm, and 54 people get an hour wasted because of it.

Some form of compensation for those of us who have been playing since '99 and already have these AAs that are being given out to level the playing field.

Piestro said you are not refunding those AAs for those who have already earned them.

Read the first post in the thread maybe?

People aren't making rogues, there are a few alts around but quite frankly the rogue population is tiny. It's entirely due to the lack of melee power in the current game and what little utility we used to have no longer exists. There aren't many main rogues left, they've made necros and wizards or switched to other classes because they got tired of the top melee dps class not even being able to do that. There have never been many berserkers, but they suffer from the same issues. In addition to the fact the game is heavily skewed towards casters.There are a crap ton of rangers, they can at least marginally tank some content and have spells and ranged DPS. At least we used to have some solo functionality before this announcement.

I love that the devs responded to the complaints in a positive manner. Alot of people expected they would not be heard and in fact were. Kudos to the devs.

Sorry but I personally don't feel that a 5 ta 15 percent hit on a mob that will turn around an kill me is useful in the least. I made a serker for specific purpose of decaping an was quit happy getting my 50 to 70 kills a hour in lb mobs, because they didn't kill me almost outright when i proced, on the lbs that still took 2 ta 3 procs ta kill it was constant an in no way was swarming an i have ta say about the same pace if not a hair slower than a caster casting 2 ta 3 nukes in what 15 ta 20 seconds ta kill a mob, you want ta fix serkers swarming take decap of the reckless disc an leave it the heck alone