I see a growing trend from the developers in merging and consolidating AA lines. Some of which don't really make sense from a user perspective. I can only guess what their goals are with regard to these changes. However, I assume that they will continue to do so and may or may not take player recommendations, but I feel it would do us a great disservice to not try to make suggestions that make these changes work best for us. My hope is to do/maintain the following ideas with my suggestions. You can agree or disagree but I'd like to see it spelled out what you want so if a developer reads our comments they can assess if it fits with this month's flavor of "the vision." 1. Streamline things we already do in sequence. 2. Take fewer debuff and buff slots without impairing current stacking norms. Or maybe even improve them as a pipe dream. 3. Keep reuse times 10 minutes or less. I want to be engaged in play, not constantly waiting for abilities. I am okay with the idea of making more permanent buffs with a 20 minute reuse as a death penalty. I envision this particularly for abilities that we have near 100% uptime when chaining current abilities. IE Zan Fi for monks, elemental arrows for rangers, ro buffs for wizards etc. 4. Keep balance close to where it is currently without serious nerfs or boosts. 5. Point out that with the recast times, mana costs, etc that they have added to AA that the only benefit for some abilities is it isn't on the spell bar, and we should just make the AA strong and stop upgrading certain spells IE debuffs. So as for the suggestions themselves. CLERIC/Paladin Make yaulp a permanent buff equivalent to the spell with a 20 minute reuse. Discontinue the spell. Most clerics use this for the mana regeneration in my experience. Death penalty sucks but apparently that is a thing they want and I'd love to not have to manage it. Cleric/Paladin/Druid/Shaman I am thinking it may be time to streamline resurrection and calls. My proposal is to make more ranks of the abilities but of one line. Make rank 1 call, rank 2 a 90% rezz, rank 3 a 96% rezz, and rank 4 a cleric only rank with 96% rezz with either a % or flat rate of mana/endurance added. The only reasons I can think to use call at all is for corpse stashing for expedient recovery, and for the small amount of mana you keep. Paladin, druid and shaman can all rezz 96% outside of combat and 90% in combat with a clickie, and Paladins can rezz 90% directly if I remember correctly. Honestly I don't see a reason to restrict priests with regard to rezz any more, and with the quiet miracle nerf it seems like a nice little gimme to make taking a cleric rezz a little nicer for getting back into the fight, without it being some huge amount of mana returned. Could also use the rezz cost to help balance the effect if necessary. Shaman/Enchanter Make Turgur's Crippling Deeds, and Turgur's Expansive Crippling Deeds an AE version of the same. Make the AA always do the cripple portion, and make the slow portion a toggle. On occasion people may not want the slow from the combo buff due to wanting the dps of ripostes, and the occasional mob that gets powered up by slow. It will save on activated abilities for both classes and improve debuffing stacking head aches for both classes and end the long term minor quibbles about nearly non existing differences between the two at the top end. I also would like to see the effects of festering and ethereal added to the effects of Malo and Tash respectively to reduce total debuff slots used for debuffs. Monk Combine Zan Fi and Infusion of Thunder. Make it a permanent buff. I am okay with making them slightly less effective to obtain the permanent uptime. Adds 30 seconds to Zan Fi and a couple minutes to Infusion. Okay with a longer reuse also as a death penalty. Pipe dream to add Drunken Monkey to this ability also. Can add 20 minutes of endurance cost of the skill. Combine Two Finger Wasp and Five Point Palm. I always use them together for the boost to palm. Increase the buff/debuff duration on Two Finger to account for the increase in reuse time if matching to the Five Point Palm timer. Please don't reduce the damage on Five Point if reducing the reuse since we tend to use this as a spike ability. However the reuse time on Two Finger pairs well with bard and shaman epic. Druid It would be amazing if we could combine the effects of the druid attack debuffs and Ro. Preferably into a single debuff. Again with cast, recast, and mana costs I don't see why we can't get a quality of life improvement on the debuffing front. Also we still would need to use the old spell skin to seedlings unless the developers wanted to miraculously add it into this debuff for us. It would be nice for them to be 1 debuff also to save on using so many total debuff slots. It may be nice to combine Spirit of Bear with Wrath of the Wild other than sometimes not wanting the damage shield. I have a bunch more too but will add those later.
Beastlord Invis abilities, they get a self only invis and a targettable invis both on different timers, and I don't want the class to be less capable with invising, but maybe combine those to one aa and reduce the timer a little bit? Heck make it 1 second refresh, or even instant refresh.
Rogue Nothing that I can think of to combine. However... An AA for group hide/sneak would be cool (with SoS protection). Course, that would probably be too OP. But imagine the plat I could make escorting groups to camp areas in dungeons and such
The bard and ranger weapon mastery AA could probably be merged/streamlined. Enchanter I always use chaotic haze and calculated insanity together, so those may be good to merge. Berserker I usually use Savage Spirit, Reckless Abandon, and Juggernaut Surge together. As long as we keep the reuse on Savage Spirit the same I wouldn't mind seeing these abilities combined. Would be a more important one to make sure is combined correctly to make sure there isn't a nerf involved.
That would create more problems unless druid/shaman rez could be used in combat. The 90% clickie is a pain in the butt to get. Dedicated raiders will most likely get it, but there are plenty of druids/shaman (including those that do raid) that never will. Even if everyone had the clickie, there are people that will complain and even refuse to take 90% rezes. It causes additional drama from people that can't bother to spend 5 minutes (including travel time to a zone with exp) gaining back the exp difference between a 90 and 96% rez.
Quit trying to take my buttons away! Do you want EQ to just be 1 button press or what? That's what separates good players from bad, those who learn their AA's and burn sequences versus those who choose to just auto attack and press a couple buttons. Or do you just want to help bad players do better?
Enchanters bleed mana like rangers/beastlords. Calculated insanity increases mana costs, so they need control over when they are using it.
I agree with most of your points. But I believe most raid guilds call the bolded people "ex"-raiders.
Mages: velocity and second wind ward These are both long-term buffs you always want on your pet. Or better yet, permanently increase pet speed and get rid of velocity altogether. General Casting: Fury of Magic and Destructive Fury: Both are passive nuke damage increases, and high priority purchases. Just make a single line. Critical Affliction and Destructive Cascade: Passive dot damage increases of high priority. Easy to combine Healing Gift and Healing Adept: Passive heal increases that everyone buys. Make these into a single line General: Combat Stability and Combat Agility (maybe Armor of Wisdom too) Easy to make into a general defensive increase General Sturdiness and Delay Death Both slightly increase you hp cap, wouldn't be hard to combine Melee: Combat Fury, Veterans Wrath (Maybe weapon affinity) Passive melee increase, easy to combine
The problem with combining many of the passive things together is it screws up people that are leveling up or now getting AA (people switching classes or returning players). It takes away the ability to prioritize the biggest bang for the buck purchases to help you get stronger faster and earn exp/aa faster.
I want for my playing my character to matter too. No I don't want a one button and I win game. But knowing to click ability A and ability B together like every class write up explains doesn't make me a good player. It makes me basically informed about my class as a starting point. Which is sadly an achievement for some. To me good players show themselves by knowing their events, how long things take, optimization of available tools, and maximizing total output while dealing with issues and emotes and coordination that occurs on the fly. It includes more than just pairing A and B together but when, and what spells and other abilities should go with it and the focus to keep up the good performance once the glory moment is over. Combining a few things won't suddenly make a crappy player good. But it may remove some tedium and good knowledge judgment calls. My point here is... I am sure they are going to combine stuff going forward. So I want to help decide what parts they simplify and reduce stupid things I find annoying. Instead of be shocked how they ruined core unrelated abilities. Segap I envisioned the rezz as being in combat usable. With the aforementioned things and loyalty token rezz's in game already it really seems like it has been farmed out and the suggested change a quality of life improvement. A person with the click and rezz AA can still rezz more faster than someone without. I know enough of those hopefully ex raiders that won't take calls or 90% when I do them with my druid and shaman (yes I have the Staff of Resurrection both and a cleric) that I do find it unnecessary annoying. In groups you can just pop a mercenary for it. Let's remove the annoyance factor of stupid people and make the cleric version a little special again.
Reducing 5-6 hotbars to 2-3 would be MAGICAL. Plus, with so many less abilities, there would be room for new ones.
Need a toggle button for levitation effect. So that you can still have the buff on you, but don't have to click it off to stay on the ground. And you don't have to block it to keep it from making you float.
Call of the Wild returns you to your corpse with your current mana/endurance level (just confirmed on test) so having that replaced for Druid/Shaman with a rez that doesn't do that would be a nerf.
Not necessarily. They're running out of design space. That is the things they can give us to improve things are limited not by the number of existing AA or the number of buttons, but by the actual effects they can give. Combing 4 things in to 1 still results in something using all the same slots as before. The stacking issues don't magically go away. Yes, they can give more things that give the same boosts at different times, but eventually you'd wind up having all the boosts all the time, so might as well just give something passive that always gives everything always.
It's actually about knowing when not to click ability A and ability B together because of circumstances. As in if you have such and such adps, you're better saving B for later. Or if you're doing something that requires multiple bursts under the refresh time of your normal burns, you might want to lower your peak dps and save things for more spikes. Combining things that might be used together 80% of the time takes away the smarts of knowing when to not use them together. It's reduced options and really does make it more of a flow chart of always click this, then this, then this regardless of situation.
Exactly - some if not most - make no sense. At least not without knowing where they want to go with this or why they're doing this. This, together with the server-issues makes it very tempting for me to simply go inactive again for a year or several until things have settled down :/ As a Warrior, i can not think of any AA lines i'd want to have "consolidated" really. Changed yes, added yes. but put together? no. I prefer to have some way of stacking my abilities (or not), depending on the situation. While at the same time keep my endurance-usage under control. I'd REALLY hate for some agro-abilities to be "consolidated" in a similar way the shaman dots were... you know... more agro/same agro as from several abilities at one button-press for more endurance cost. Now THAT would suck bigtime. And as i came to know them, that's going to exactly be what they'll do. For my casters i'd rather have some more spells as AAs, similar to the slow/AE slow for Shaman. And i am still very angry about the QM nerf for my cleric. But sure: Have them consolidate things down to one button for "short burn" and one for "sustained DPS"... At least then some no-brain buttons to press to do their part and can go on watching TV during raids.
Agreed. My aggro abilities I need them spread out to react. I'd honestly be ok with some dps buttons being consolidated, but leave my aggro and tanking buttons alone.
I think reason for all this it that they will be better at controlling the dps tank heal of players and it will not flux as much. But also faster having to decide to add new ranks to 10 abilities than 100. Also i think the cost of new ranks will be a lot higher where they have consolidated 2 lines into 1 than adding new ranks to 2 lines. I am NOT sure there will come many new lines in expansion beside focus lines. I am pretty sure of level going to 110. And i think necro 106-110 dots do not stack with earlier dots when in same line.
