Changes coming in next patch that will affect TLPs

Please just play on p99 and stop trying to get TLP servers nerfed.

Not much replay value in Classic-Velious content after you’ve explored it all so I’ll pass.

All I want is the absurd DPS on TLPs to be brought back into line so that group missions and raid content aren’t entirely trivialized by high DPS. Far too many event sbecome easily splittable with 25-30 toons in era because 10 DPS now counts for 20 DPS in that era. These events are designed to take full or nearly full raids. I’d like to go back to that.

I would definitely be in favor of an EXP increase across all TLP servers though should these changes come to pass. They are all on accelerated timescales and reducing DPS will mean less mob kills and less EXP coming in. They should be increasing EXP on these servers to counter this to keep the EXP rates constant.

So you say you want it to be challenging and not trivialized but then in the same breath ask for an EXP bump....

What does XP rate have to do with making raids/missions more challenging? He's just saying if DPS is 80 percent of what it is now, upping the xp rate to 125 percent of current rate would be good so a level/AA takes the same amount of time it currently does.

This. You seem to be confusing difficulty with tedium.

It should be difficult to do Lethar 2.0. You shouldn’t be passing through 25% HP phases in 1 minute. You should need to keep up tanks for longer periods of time and deal with more death touch, mirrorscale turns, increased time dealing with Selay, more thunder drakes, etc. Extremely high DPS decreases the time you’re contending with these mechanics and it results in less of them occurring and requires you to successfully navigate fewer of them on your path to victory.

An EXP bump is being suggested so that the EXP Rate per hour isn’t impacted by DPS changes. A group currently killing 100 mobs per hour that sees their DPS cut by 20%, should see the same amount of EXP rewarded for before patch when they were killing 100 mobs an hour and after patch where they are killing 80 mobs an hour.

Also lower DPS helps with load balancing. Many zones have a very high threshold for generating new picks and the zones become barren because groups are able to clear so many spawns so quickly. With lower DPS groups have smaller spheres of influence as they are not able to pull mobs far away before respawn occur. This should reduce conflict within some EXP zones. Standard money camps will always be dramafests though.

It seems there is a demand for 2 kinds of TLP servers, one with IDDQD enabled by default (God mode cheat code for you younger people), another one with corpse runs enabled, spells/melee AAs reverted, focus effects removed, etc. I doubt I am the only one who finds God mode boring. I do not see myself playing on any other TLP servers in the future unless they make game fun (challenging) again.

I doubt they would be able to remove all the changes which made players overpowered, it would take too much work. Nerfing DPS by 5% will not achieve anything, content still will be too easy. One viable option for people like me that I can think of is a very fast unlock server where you are forced to raid in gear 2-3 expansions behind.

Is that really how fast people are doing it with full raids? With splitting, with ~25-30 in raid, it is taking us closer to 3 min per phase, pretty close to what it took on Fippy with full 54 person raids. That's pretty insane if it is going that fast.

Right or can we make a super hard server for these guys. Just make their p99 pay server and be done with it.

I don't want classic or things to be brought back in line. I've seen seen some pretty good servers with lots of custom content. That's one guy doing it. Why can we get severs for each taste?

Not all of us want hardcorecquest. Seriously double xp sounds good to me. Please your customers devs, stop coming up with silly reasons not to, you make all your money on tlps now because the high end game is a boring rinse repeat content and fast paced button smashing combat. Give us old lazy bastards our easy mode server and you will never hear from us again. But you will hear from our credit card......

For dgb this should be about revenue. There is a clear demand for a more casual server....fill it.

Not all guilds are alike. Lethar 2.0 is still challenging to my guild. This is partly because most of us never played through TSS. I don’t recall how long it takes us per phase ( it’s more than a minute). We seem to have issues with re engage after movement more than anything else.

My general thought is Phinny is still doing well so the formula is working pretty well. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I think making fundamental changes as proposed by some in this thread in response to the top 3-5 guilds would just end up killing the more casual guilds.

And why should raid mobs be more difficult then they are today? Cuz they were harder back on live? Good, then make everything like it was on live. Corpse Runs and EXP and everything. But you wouldn't want that because then those parts of the game become tedious.

Making content harder in line with how it originally was is different than going back to "patch by patch accuracy". We don't want that --some things weren't right for years, some fixes happened years later than they should have been.

Whether you've played casual on one, hardcore raider on all or something in between with progression servers... the content is not holding up in respects to difficulty. Part of that is we are just too smart as a playerbase.

"Era appropriateness" is a large factor as well. Almost nothing in classic is going to be hard for a group that knows what they are doing. If you can't handle the few spots with healer mobs or fast runners it barely matters because popular places like Lower Guk are so overkilled that you can waltz around and not see spawns in spots that used to be dangerous. That's with picks. Focus effects (some of them at least) probably do tip the scales of "too easy" with them in play pre Luclin.

Tuning down changes that boosted PC dps and efficiency make sense if one wants classic to be challenging. This follows up for pretty much all the eras pre GoD for the group content, and based on comments people are making here sounds like raiding needs it up past TSS.

Another factor is the ease of gear acquisition in the Pre-PoP content. Picks/instances add to this (as does player knowledge). Realistically, if challenge in era is a goal way more loots need to be nodrop. There are other positive benefits to this --including giving a future free trade ruleset more appeal.

Experience gain is kind of a different thing entirely. Harder to beat NPCs that give more XP is a better formula. If you can solo a red con it should be worth the time to do it, though a big bonus for grouping is reasonable too. More tactical combat that uses the EQ ability toolkit. Accounting for 3 months in the content (versus the original year+ for some content ranges) is a valid point as well. I would make future progression servers higher XP off the hop than anything we have seen so far (and potion sales would still be brisk).

I agree with this all the way. Phinny is still an extremely popular server because many guilds can beat the content without a full raid. The more hardcore guilds get their challenge by split raiding as much as they can. The original challenge of these expansions occurred when these expansions first launched, we all know the strategies now and can plan ahead which makes things easier.
People keep saying the hardest expansions are yet to come, so I don't see any reason why anything else needs to be done to make the content "harder". If you want a more challenging game, play something where every nook and cranny of each event isn't already known.

The hardest expansions are yet to come, but based on how things have played out to this point, they aren't going to be very hard either. It's a lot more satisfying to beat content when it takes superb teamwork and a flawless effort. You are right that guilds can challenge themselves by splitting, but personally I'd rather raid with my entire guild instead of split raiding every encounter every time.

There are ways to reduce melee dps to ramp up the difficulty that doesn’t involve DBG, if that’s what you are looking for. Impose your own weapon restriction to an expansion, ie PoP and earlier. I’m sure you’d get 5 or 6 other guildies to buy in.

And yet there are many guilds that like things they way they are. They like being able to actually gear up for the next era by splitting instead of being forced to raid your way. Your proposed changes make everyone do it your way. It make smaller guilds incapable of doing the content. It forces tanks into the next era with half their gear out of date since there is not enough time on a TLP to gear a full set of tanks out in 12 weeks with 50 people sharing the pie.

How about instead of making us form larger guilds and raid teams you cut yours down until you find it challenging? The game has already been made far longer and more tedious, with the alchemy changes, the trickle of xp on coirnav, the ZEM changes, the melee AA. The pendulum has swung this way far enough. You are discussing further nerfs before the most recent round of melee changes have even hit live.

I’d be down with corpse runs if they could swing it. They really aren’t that bad and they add some amount of risk to your travels which is a good thing. Plus by DoN you can just corpse summon them anyways which negates most of the problems you run into on corpse runs.

I think a much more realistic solution would be to modify the resurrection Debuff though. Resurrections would bring back a character with no gear and 20% of their innate HP. However current resurrections do the same thing, plus 100% of your geared HP. This is why most people Rez in at 80-90%. Basically it makes battlerezzing into encounters a realistic option. Whereas in classic you had to drag them to safe spots or time them inbetween AEs and have heals lined up. I’d be in favor of something like Rez sickness capping you at 20% of your base HP then increase 10% per tick. This way rezzing mid fight is much more of a risk.

That's because you had to loot your gear after a rez. so you actually rez'd in with base HP but by the time you looted everything you were at 30%.

DoN is a long way off if you are starting from a new TLP. And yes, Corpse runs were a disaster. I remember having 2 sets of gear so that if we wiped trying to break into fear you had a 2nd set of gear to try and corpse recover with. I remember guilds loosing corpses in fear because they couldn't break in, or they had to wait till another guild was able to break it.

The point I am trying to make is that everyone cry's foul and says they want the game to be more "challenging" so nerf DPS and make fights tough. But they don't want the rest of the stuff that made EQ "challenging"

I get your point and I know you threw out corpse runs as hyperbole but I tend to agree they belong on the servers prior to SoD. That is part of the risk you run adventuring deep in dungeons. I could understand the counterargument that they are tedious and short timeline TLPs don’t jive well with corpse runs as you may end up spending too much time corpse running and not enough EXPing and doing content. I just happen to think they should increase the EXP and add them anyways to offset the lost time so a player can still max level in era even after spending an hour recovering a corpse at juggernauts in Sebilis or constantly waiting 30 min for PoP zones to graveyard corpses etc.

Well some of the old ways weren't fun at all. Some of them were just time wasters and as a whole EQ players are much older and don't seem to want to waste as much in-game time on tedious things. Epics remaining a standout example of "do I really want to bother" for some classes for the tedium that remains vs. the epics usefulness.

MMO combat seems to have gone very twitchy whereas EQ was more tactical in the early eras. It took longer to kill things unless you had an overpowered group --this was as true in Crushbone as it is Lower Guk. So many abilities to lull, memblur, root, snare, charm and mez spread among many classes plus the ability to speedbump with pets and/or offtank... but we don't use hardly any of intended skills because we are too smart and too strong. You basically need to find that really bad player that brings adds somehow and have people afk to get into trouble on progression.

Tough fights that are rewarding (this is mainly provided by good XP, but if loot is correctly era-tuned then more loot has appeal too) is more engaging. If you want mindless easyquest 1-75 you play on any server past SoD and let the merc go to town in hotzones. If that didn't exist, then maybe arguing for easy progression would make sense.

I heard someone say there is the option of reducing the allowed raid sizes --but people are streamrolling this content with especially small raids already.

Snail slow XP doesn't make sense on progression either though.

TLDR: the trick is balancing accomplishment for time input. Fast killing 100 mobs and getting a level in an hour is great... but working to kill 20 mobs in the same hour and getting that same level is a more-engaging game over time.

For what it's worth, as a pet class I still loathe dying because of having to re-make, re-buff, and re-gear my pet.