Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

My main is a shad and I gotta say it's kinda funny how all these posts are so angry because they feel they will no longer be able to handle 7 mobs at the same time? How about joining the rest of the tanks on this. How many can a warrior full def discs or a pally full def discs handle? Not raid geared group geared, as raiders are not the only players in the game! Being able to handle them long enough for your cc to take control is one thing but believing it is our right to be able to tank 7 or 8 start to finish is kinda silly no? Just wondering as I am only lvl 91 atm, am I really to expect to be able to tank 7 or 8 mobs at 100? Sweet and so OP it is amazing we haven't been nerfed before lol.

<p>As in life, you either evolve with your surroundings and live or don't evolve and die. &nbsp;I personally like this change. &nbsp;I always look for ways to make the best of what I have.</p>

You have to play to progress. That's the leveling portion.

No, there won't be until we are closer. Still targeting the week of the 17th.

Play a metric ton and get lucky. They'll need to do a massive amount of research first as well. It's not anything we would consider in any way typical. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's unlikely.

Rangers:
It's worn haste, overhaste, weapon delay and quiver haste, plus hDex. I described that in the post you quoted. Just a note, keep in mind that bows only work at range, and bow DPS is generally subpar compared to melee dps, so most of our raid based HeadShots will come from arrow spells, which are all on timers that strictly limit the number of arrows per minute. They are all less than 100% accurate, but have to hit to proc.

Berserkers:
It's the same as Rangers less the quiver haste. Low delay 2Hr's are going to proc more; Berserkers will be able to improve the proc rate by acquiring low delay weapons and building hDex. If Decap works on throwing skills, then, if I recall correctly, obtaining low delay throwing items is another way to affect proc rate.

Berserkers will proc from melee as opposed to throwing almost all the time. Does this mean that they will be proccing more often than Rangers or Rogues? It's an open question on Rangers as it depends on whether an archery model or a melee model is the basis for the 2 procs per minute assignment. If we are tuned around Archery, then in our most common role in either groups or raids we will proc less than either Berserkers or Rogues in the same situations. We will learn to live with it.

If the developers do what they say, however, they will not proc any more often than Rogues in either group or raid situations, but for the humanoid restriction on Rogues.

Rogues:
I get that your proc rate is based on a different mechanic than Rangers and Berserkers. Perhaps you should focus on getting that switched over to the same mechanism as Rangers and Berserkers so you could get benefit from a constant proc rate OR you could attack from behind (as you should anyway) and mash your Backstab button a lot (also as you should anyway).

Solo

I doubt any of the three classes will rely on these skills for soloing after the next patch, so I don't see the point of worrying further about it.

Depends what you mean by 'mobs'. Most SK swarmers swarm LB mobs. Could a war of the same level/aa handle that many? Absolutely! And double it. The mobs might die of boredom before the war killed them. A pally likewise - with his heals hell would freeze over before he died.
I'm sure you at 91, if you have the AAs/full group gear/augs could do just the same

I get it that we want players to be able to get to the "current" end game quicker, but what I don't understand is why we are discounting the value of the "old" end game content. There is nothing wrong with the expansions that came out before the current one over all. It's a ton of great content.

My suggestion to solve the issue is as follows...
When an expansion becomes 4 expansion old, do the following:

1. Tune the group-content to molo capable
2. Take the time syncs for that expansion out by making the gear/weapons/augs be droppable by mobs rather than be the reward of a quest or token collection system. The time syncs are the problem. Not the content. People shouldn't have to have a spreadsheet to keep track of what quests they have completed, what npcs they have faction with so far, and collect endless tokens from completing quests to get the gear upgrades they need for that expansion.
3. Greatly increase the AA gain for all AAs associated with that expansion. By greatly, I mean that you should be able to gain the AAs for that expansion with in a couple months or less of soloing/moloing that expansions content casually. If you do it with a group, you will get the necessary AAs for that expansion in a week or less. Powerleveling in that content would get you the AAs for that expansion in a day.

What this would do is keep the content in Everquest "easily" solo-able / molo-able from level 1 up through the level cap / AA cap of the expansions that are four expansions old or older. Then when the player gets done with that expansion, he/she is ready to move right in to the harder group-based content of the three newest expansions with the rest of everybody.

That's not necessarily a bad idea, we'd have to talk it through to make sure but it could potentially work if we were going to go that route. That being said the amount of time you're talking about (from a code and design perspective) is absolutely enormous. Thats saying no new content for a while because we're going through and retuning Depths of Darkhollow for the current situation. And when we finally did retune all existing expansions (looking at every quest, etc.) we're going to develop content much more slowly in the future because we have to design everything with this sort of scaling in mind. I don't think that is a win for the player base.

Raiders have a tiny bit more haste, and small amounts more of hdex that impact procs. The difference won't be significant.

I cannot and will not comment on if a Palidin could do this, but I been playing a warrior for 10 years, currently have 9708 aa's and decent gear, and I HIGHLY doubt I could survive 10 light blue mobs pounding on me, maybe if I hit fort, maybe, but than I have a slight downtime waiting for fort to re-pop.
But to insinuate that I can go around solo and tank these mobs without any help be it merc healer or something is absurd. I will be honest, I never tried it, and I will go try it tonight after work, but I just do not see this happening as easy as you say it would be. yea, green or grey mobs, no prob, but light blue? I am not going to call BS on this right away, but no way can we do 20 mobs without some form of healing. Maybe I don't solo enough?

All LB mobs are, ofc, are not equal. Yes a war would probably need to pop a disc for that many - just as as SK would need to use epic/clickies/maybe a disc and a pally would need to use heals (and goodness knows what - I know next to nothing about pallies, but I have seen them deal with a lot of mobs quite happily).
And there are cooldowns for other classes too

Pallies and clerics can swarm, yes clerics, know some that swarmed off of Kaesora easily, not really sure I know how they do it, never did it myself, but some in my guild have before. Never bothered to ask how they did it. Is more classes then SK's that swarm kill, we are just most famous for doing it.

I don't know if it is 12 hours exactly, but I did the heroes journey through gorukar mesa (multiple times on different chars). I got to the 30s in just a few hours. 50s came not much later. I did it on a double XP weekend and got into the 60s. I actually 3 boxed that one and leveled the 3 chars together. That was fun. I'm an alt junkie though.

BTW, I was agreeing (not disagreeing) that it was unlikely for a new player. I have done it many times and I get faster at it each time. I have no idea how long it took the first time.

Interesting info.
I agree, the change for the game servers is probably less with the changed abilites. I would still be in favor of a design change that minimizes the change for the players and really solves the root cause of the problem, i.e. avoids trains.

How about you place invisible "Trainspotters" into zones. These would be placed so that anyone trying to make a big train inevitably aggroes one of them. Once these Trainspotters get aggro they determine the size and composition of the aggro list, the duration of the train and chance for player survival. One can then make a decision whether this Player should proceed with his actions unharmed or be punished a little bit (e.g. dot, slow) or be killed right away. For extra intelligence keep a cache of players per zone that have recently pulled a train, include that into the decision and include disconnect and banishment into the potential punishments

This would not change existing pathing code. It is an incremental change to the game and can be live-tested in zones. I do not assume that each and every zone needs to have these Trainspotters as only a few are used for PLing. The NPCs can hopefully be designed to be able to be placed unchanged into many existing zones, maybe even automatically appended to zone tables.

So let me just get a clarification here.

The nerfs to PL classes and the AA welfare grant have nothing to do with:

1. Heroic level 85 characters being added soon for SC.
or
2. SoE getting a fast money influx from Silver accounts going Gold for 1 month in order to receive the AA grant.

As I understand the current position of SoE Devs, the PL nerfs and AA grants are only because of server instability and helping new players catch up respectively. Do I have that right? The two things have nothing to do with the items I listed above and they are certainly not related to each other.

Let's assume this to all be true for a moment. Let's assume that PLing AA's by players being replaced by SoE directly PLing AA's for everyone within the same patch is pure coincidence. No one who has been playing this game as long as I have, and seen the history dishonest tactics used is going to buy it, but let's suspend belief for a second.

Please tell me how changes to Headshot and Assassinate help server stability? If you go into the Grounds or other such zones, are Rangers and Rogues rounding up 100+ mobs and lagging everyone out? No they are not, because that's not how their abilities work. They only work on single targets. I left Decapitate out because I don't want to misspeak, as I don't play a Zerker. I believe the same holds true for them.

The bottom line is that if these nerfs are being done solely to help server stability as has been stated, the same thing could have been accomplished by enforcing play nice policies already in place, or at the very least using a scalpel for the nerfs and not a machete.

Dexar.

Whle considering levelling speed a couple of things that need looking at are skill gain and Leadership XP.

Leadership XP especially is a huge pita but everyone likes/needs to have Inspect Buffs to see what debuffs land on mobs and of course HoTT is useful. Leadership XP takes up a ton of regular XP and, for example, gives just under 1 point if you have it turned on throughout levels 1-25.

Skill gain I think has been looked at in the past but the XP curve is now so far away from what it was originally that skill gain is pretty much a broken system. Most classes have to spend a fair few hours semi afk spamming spells to make a lot of spells schools, for example, usable mid game.

These questions have been answered previously:

Similarly I've posted previously about how giving players abilities to swarm and then telling them not to swarm isn't a good strategy. The better strategy is to reduce the abilities to not encourage the behavior.

Thank You very much!

It has already been officially announced that Leadership AAs will be granted as UI functions for all characters; if you're behind on grinding them out, I'd rely on those you know who aren't - until those changes go live.

I don't agree with the removal of LAAs - in my opinion, they were a good idea to encourage grouping. However, things like spell awareness, inspect buffs, /findpc, and HoTT window should ALL have been included in the baseline UI as soon as code was written for them to exist at all.

I wish they'd consider bolstering the other benefits, like hp / mana / attack boosts. Grouping should appeal as much as possible, in an MMORPG.