To me it comes down to quality of gameplay. EOTD isn't challenging it's just a time sync. Time syncs should not last multiple expansions like this. It's not even a particularly interesting time sync. Your right it's very easy, especially for boxers like me where I was able to move my accounts through eotd in under 3 days but I have high play time, have max aa and have access to a 5 person box team. That aside what about EOTD is challenging or even interesting gameplay? Its flat out a time sync and nothing else. So yes I think it should be removed and that's after having 14 characters go thru it....
What a player considers to be challenging and interesting is purely subjective, not objective. Thousands, maybe millions, of players play online shooting games that they find to be challenging and interesting. I find them to be way too hard for me, and redundant. However you will never find me going to the Halo or Call of Duty boards and asking the developers to cater their game to me- I am far from the baseline average player that the game should be based around as far as difficulty goes.
It aint about the DPS, son. Talking overall damage, and I wasn't talking zerkers. I was talking robes. A fully AA'd and geared Tank(particularly if you have a bard) will absolutely destroy most silk for overall damage in a group context on the back half of the game, simply because they can be on the fight every single second and in the case of the warrior, gain the vast majority of their damage without ever having to hit a button other than auto-attack. Its simply the nature of the beast and has only expanded as melee passive AA got added and gear went nuts. Hate it all you want, its just one of the quirks of the game. It also takes a ton of AA, so there is that. Its also fun if you're trying to build a Warrior. What AA do you get first? As long as you aint dropping dead... Offensive Melee Damage, particularly passive. Why? It'll speed up your overall AA'ing so you can get the rest that much faster.
Well that sort of ignores my point. I'm about as hardcore as they come with 15, 110 chars, I don't raid anymore but my SK main tank is at max aa, max group gear (minus 2 trophies I'm working on since my return) and am hitting 6700 ac buffed. That's basically raid level stats thanks to chase loot. Very few of your so called average wil lever obtain it. But is so much outright lying in this thread. Somebody commented earlier that OT can even kill raid tanks on long pulls and somebody else acted like they are idiots for dying. I lesson burn in ot, gorowyn and sathir. Yet even I'll be the first to admit there are some dots in OT that will kill me dead before I can get back to group in pulls. And that's me sitting at 265k hp buffed - 290ish with cleric aura. Most groupers can't obtain that so of course some of these zones are dififcult. I think in many cases cicelee I agree with you, even before my chase loot on SK I was killing named in Sathir that people complain about. I have no problem with difficulty overall on mosto f the expansion, I box Fell foliage regularly now, but I'll be the first to say, in my opinion, Daybreak messed up on 3 things: - End of empire/fell foliage for progression missions are too hard for average grouper. Hard missions are fine but these should not be part of the progression. - EOTD is just plain mean to not have some backflag in expansion in ROS or some new group mission in EoK that gives it. - OT has some abilities that are way out of wack for tier 1. People complain about skyfire mostly because it's annoying and yo ucan't walk away but there are some mobs there the "average grouper" will never killed named wise.
I would love to be grouped with a tank and see him/her "destroy" me on a longevity group session. Assuming, of course, I am trying and playing my character to the fullest extent...
Totally agree with everything Vaeeldar said above. I'm on Firiona Vie and have the added benefit of having Swordsman's Honor/Reapers Ward and a couple pieces of Vela's to go with my group gear on my sk with very similar numbers. I usually have at least one raid ranger in group as DPS. Fell Foilage and End of Empire aren't missions that we can just pick up people and help through them; often it ends up with people getting dropped from task and the person we're helping being taskadded as they're a class that's not really a benefit in EoE.
I agree EOTD will not end the game and I agree that knowing what the average player is like is important to Daybreak. I just wish raiders wouldn't rely on logically fallacious arguments (taking a request for a small difficulty change and claiming group players want to log in and mobs instantly die and they get gear). I don't see a lot of players defending the group game. I do my best to push the agenda of "what I believe" to be some of the issues of the group game and what I think is best for the game as a whole but I do not expect everyone to agree with that. I just get very tired of the exagerated use of "easy buttons" and logically fallacious arguments attempting to derail things any time someone says they think some part of the game is too hard. MANY times I get things I say myself warped beyond recognition just so someone can prove their point. In my opinion that is foolish and a waste of time.
Luckily for us most group players aren't in that position. They are just asking for reasonable changes in most cases to make the game reasonably challenging. You seem to have no problem asking or expecting Daybreak to cater EQ to you. Again we come back to the question are you the baseline player Everquest should be catering to? You seem to think you are merely an average baseline player. Problem is that once you add in raid gear you would have to say you are a below average player of the group game to fit that description. *shrugs* Just so you know I am not in the top percentile in CoD either and I also don't feel I should be asking for them to make the game easier for me. I can tell quite easily that I am not the average baseline player the game should appeal to.
I'll agree the problem isn't just gear, there is the difference in AA count and achievement awards as well. It isn't necessarily poor/lazy/untalented players, just they have less play time than the rest of us. Getting levels isn't necessarily the hard part its all the AAs etc that come with it. While the high AA count keeps those with a higher playtime happy as it gives them something to do, but it pushes those with a lower playtime further behind. AA auto grant stopped at CotF I believe, since then we have had a shed load of AAs (mainly EoK). There are a lot of achievements which give various different awards which improve your char as well. How much of this do the devs expect players to have? When we had more zones each expansion, no one cared that first couple of zones were easy, no one was worried if the end zone was hard, they had plenty of other zones they could play in, that they hadn't spent the last year in. I remember end zones of expansions with only raiders in at the start of the expansion but by halfway through when the group players had had time to gear up and get some more AA under their belt were happy playing there as well. These smaller expansions are hurting everyone. T1 zones should be easy, the final zone should be hard and need group players decked out in end game group gear. EotD isn't that hard, I boxed most of it with druid and beastlord at level 106/7, but I did need to get some help for spiders in Lceanium, Droga, Chardok, Lab and a couple of other bits. Anyone coming back to the game now without friends to help may have issues getting it done if they cannot find help for the odd hard bit.
The vast majority of the AA are not needed to be decent. You can scratch off the huge count of tradeskill AA. Many of the General AA are fluff. Each class has several lines of AA that do nearly nothing. Some classes have heaps of expensive Focus AA for spells that are never used. Yes, AA do make a huge difference (much more than gear), but the actual counts of what you need is much smaller when you look at which ones do what. The heroes AA from achievements do not add up to a lot. Most of my group geared alts have no more than 1/3-1/2 of them done and perform just fine. They're more of a min/max thing for those that want to eek out every possible bit of advantage they can get. Not having them will not make the content harder.
Warriors shouldnt even be half of the DPS zerkers are. Zerkers can't tank nearly halfway as good as warriors right? I get that you dont want your class nerfed. And honestly I think all classes besides tanks just need a decent sized mitigation bump. Because overall power no one comes close to tanks currently.
DPS has a link with overall damage. If players engaged for the same duration, the player who did the most DPS will be the player that did the most overall damage. Doesn't change anything. Nothing to add to what Cicelee said. Just perfect answer.
Do you have an idea of the difference in baseline mitigation between tanks and non tanks ? Dual Wield stance gives 6 % mitigation. A mob hit you for 20000. You take a hit of 18800 when a non tank will take 20000. Woot night and day difference, I feel overpowered lol. So raise the mitigation of non tanks to what % ? I don't fear any nerf. I have seen my class heavily nerfed on mitigation (Lost 18 % mitigation on Defensive Proficiency and 9 % on DW proficiency in total), DPS (was fair cause we were doing too many DPS at one moment), and most AE aggro tools nerfed massively by 75 % of their value. I'm still rocking and enjoying playing my class. I would be fear of what ? loosing 6 % on DW ? Lol, I have known worst than this. What is fun is that the tank isn't even your main class, and you have strong feeling against it. But good luck on your campaign to raise mitigation of non tanks haha.
To those contending that no expansion has required a previous expansions progression I say: POP - SoF: Artisans Prize OOW: Trials of MM DON: Power of the Keepers Underfoot: Brell’s Aug also includes Velious and SoF CoTF - RoS: All Paragons for Hero’s AAs TDS - Best power source from TDS until RoS came out TBM - Dichomatic spells have ranks based on both group and raid flags/progression And now EoK: EotD so mobs don’t wreck you homie.... In my opinion, all important if you plan to be decent in this game.
It’s my somber duty to inform everyone that Everquest has ended..... Primary cause being the potion belt was removed from the game..
I wonder how the thread went from EotD to tanks feeling the need to defend their status quo in the game. Good thing we got a turnaround to the potion belt.
In my opinion, you could actually complete progression in EQ without any of those, except for RoS where some classes do need EotD in the skyfire mission. All the pre EoK-progression-rewards you list, are merely "nice to have" in later expansions and not actually needed. EotD is very much needed in the skyfire mission. Has anyone actually beaten the skyfire mission with an EotD-free group?
Sorry, but this list is crap, because it is so much beside any point that was made in the context of Essence1. OOW trials and DoN: yes the rewards carry over, but none of them are required to begin or complete progression in any of the later expansions. Underfoot i was not present for, so no comment on that. TDS - yes it yields powersources. But TDS progression is not required for any expansion that came after it, nor does TDS itself require progression in any previous expansion. And similar applies to everything you listed. Yes, rewards carry over and are still valid, some more so than others. And yes, for Artisan's prize you needed to repeat/do some PoP progression (not all, mind you but at most up to ele planes access) and only because of the aid Grimel questline (which was part of PoP and prerequisite of artisan's prize) required it. Artisan's prize itself was an "on top" in EoK though, not part of any progression - so even that is invalid in this context. Really the closest comparison i can think of, and that has been brought up during RoS beta in abundance, is the VoA progression/RoF words quest to catch up on that. Nothing is to be said about tying in old expansions, much the way EoK did with TDS, heading somewhere, do a hail or turn-in and return. But having to do partisans in one expansion to complete another was unheard of and is, as was said above, merely yet another means to piss those players players that hadn't done it already off with yet another time-sink. It's not the end of the game, certainly. Yes, lore-wise it makes "sense" that Kar'Zok mobs are found in RoS as well. So yes, it also makes sense for people to get the immunity. But the immunity could - and should! - simply have been tied into RoS progression for those that did not already have it, e.g. by completing the relevant two tasks in labs to get it, getting sent there at some point from a NPC in OT or SF (e.g. as part of the Gorowyn partisans, that'd have made sense to me). They (Dev's) chose not to do this (it was suggested, not just by myself, during beta and summarily we were ignored or dismissed). Instead, those "unlucky" ones that were not fortunate enough to be there when EoK was current, have to do two progressions "for the price (reward) of one". So now OF COURSE we see complaints about this - we knew these were coming, we were expecting them, it's no surprise at all. And the complaints are - in part at least - justified too. Even if that takes only a week or less to complete, depending on how much help one has, it's an unwarrented bad move and will ever remain an example of a bad design decision. No amount of soft-pedaling can change this, and most certainly neither can't ill-conceived "comparisons" like the quoted ones.
