I like playing alts and don't like engaging in obnoxious and tedious power-leveling strategies and just want to play the game, so I have compiled a list of suggestions i think would make the 1-65 level experience much more fluid and interesting. I choose 65, because that seems to be about the time most classes become more complex and interesting and don't need much help in this department. I don't have a lot of experience with or interest in the caster classes so i assume just a flat damage increase would be enough and haven't thought about it much. Damage: Proposition, Improve effective damage by 100% at level 1, scaling the relative level of growth down to appropriate levels by 65 while also adding complexity. IE 100% at 1, 80% by 20, 50 % by 35, etc. Another way of putting it in relative terms: Now: Complexity:1/10 Engagement: 1/10 Effectiveness: 1/10 Ideally: Complexity:5/10 Engagement: 8/10 Effectiveness: 6/10 How: -Accuracy- Missing might be totally fine at max level with double triple flurry max hasted hits all day every day, but at low levels it just feels bad. A base line increase would be cool. I would even accept a stance that increases accuracy but lowers damage since missing feels so bad at low levels. -Increase rate of skill growth: Just allowing a skill up on misses or fizzles would probably be enough. I just don't want to have to stop playing to raise these skills. I Recently got Venom of the Snake on my beastlord. Now I gotta summon water for hours to use it without fizzling? Gross! -Weapon Stances: Lower level versions of the weapon stance AA's, for all melee classes. The purpose is to allow players to specialize at lower levels. A tank stance that isn't just a tiny amount of ac from a shield? Before level 85!? Awesome! Maybe even some new versions like a throwing stance for Berserkers and maybe rogues, and an instrument related stance for Bards as an alternative to Dual Wield. Obviously something like that could disrupt balance later on but it would be interesting. -Speaking of Bersekers: Consolidate the axe summoning reagents and increase the number of axes summoned, let throwing be viable and easy to use, less clutter is better! -Poisons: The rogue poisons usable by anyone (Spider's Bite, Scorpion's Agony) are a nice touch but some tiers of them don't have store bought ingredients. Add those in! And/or remove the level component to the chance for enemies to resist, so the that earlier level poisons don't become completely useless as you level. -Buffs: All buffs should increase the hard cap by the amount they increase! If this is too much, at least this should apply to the buffs that are short duration self only, like the Yaulp Line. Buffs are useless unless you're just not using any defiant gear, and why wouldn't you? -Lower AA Requirements: Many AA's are level and expansion locked, but this doesn't make sense (commercially) since even free accounts get 21/24 free expansions currently, and who cares about changing the power curve?(that's the point after all ;p) -Weapon Augs- Remove lore or add lore-equipped(if that's a thing), and have fewer locked behind LDON, more variety. -More attacks: Separate cooldowns for active attacks. Monks can strike and kick, why can't warriors kick and bash? -Lower level versions of Combat Disciplines: Ideally the ones that involve active engagement, not the 30/60 minute cooldowns. -Lower level mercenary gear: Self-explanatory. -Improved Damage mercs at lower levels: Tank mercs do almost as much damage as Damage mercs, but the huge amount of damage they avoid and mitigate makes them the only rational choice. And they tend to increase your damage by turning the monsters back to you. Even the healer merc is a waste since the tank merc takes less damage than the healer would ever need to heal you for while doing no damage themselves. Buff the non tanks at lower levels to allow more play style choices. Many of these changes would have to be tapered down over time to avoid impacting the late game. Some of them unavoidably do. Thanks for reading! What do you think?
I think this is a real difficult request given how small the audience is and how few resources the EQ team has. This completely requires revisiting every single thing in the game due to the massive shift in PC vs. NPC balance this would cause. The only significant audience here are those guys on TLP servers, but they are there specifically for the experience of going through the lower levels the old way.
Is it really a niche audience, even on normal servers? People still have to play through these levels to get to the endgame content. Commercially it makes sense. Why would I, for example, buy the new expansion (they have enough time for that), if i'm still playing the lower level experiences and don't want to pay for a heroic character? And many of these changes would still help the people who want to box or powerlevel get there a bit faster anyway. I agree TLP servers should stay the way they are. Those are for people who want the original experiences. But shouldn't the normal servers progress in game design? I agree some of these would probably take way too much redesign. Some seem not so much, like improving skill increasing rates, adding in missing poison recipe ingredients. I imagine some of these would just be changing a few numbers in a spreadsheet. Also on the "Massive shift in PC vs NPC balance". That's the point. I don't expect them to make the early game as interesting as the late game, but at least make it easier to breeze through without power leveling gimmicks. If i'm just gonna spend hours autoattack-->kicking through hotzones till the game starts becoming complicated anyway, why not cut that down a bit by altering power levels a bit. Ideally, in a way that makes it more interesting. Also, there are literally Aura's in game already that say things like "Increase spell damage by up to X%" with diminishing returns up till the hardcap. They could just put a few of those in at the appropriate levels if they wanted to be lazy about it.
Hmm I guess ultimately it is about return over investment. Lower levels can go really fast in the modern game (live servers), even without power leveling. Whereas it could've taken months earlier, it can take a couple weeks now, even days for those more dedicated players. The live servers have been progressing the game design so that people can get to current content faster, with hot zones, daily tasks, defiant gear, mercenaries, and more I'm sure. Especially heroic characters. That might be the biggest thing here. Heroic characters can make the company more money than what tweaking lower-level EQ for its limited audience ever could given the effort needed to do it. I am of course saying that with heavy, but I think reasonable, assumptions. Even if some of those changes your suggested seem low-effort, they still take some effort, and they are very low priority nice-to-haves while this game already has a GIGANTIC backlog of high priority issues as well as new development. Although it is easy to level and gear up now, there are still people buying heroic characters, as I've gathered from other posts on the forums. As for the gameplay being boring and repetitive in the lower levels, well, repetitive totally captures the essence of the game even at the higher levels. There are just more things to see and make repetitive Boring will depend on what you personally find fun in a game.
Yeah.. one of the downsides of allowing people to pay to skip content is it strongly disincentives improving the skipped content. They might be able to redress this issue by tacking the some of the changes to all access, like they did with journeyman mercs. Dear god I hope nobody finds autoattack-> kick for ~70 levels to be enjoyable, lol. Or maybe that would make them lucky? It might be cool to be that easy to please.
Best thing I can think of to improve the leveling experience is to create a new server that Is locked at level ~100 (or at RoF or CotF) Has a 2x group bonus. A vendor that sells no drop defiant armor / mounts etc cheaply (and anything else that I'd twink new characters with) Allows xfers of any character on or off the server. Has some method to allow players to both find each other and group together, ex: a worldwide summon any group member from any zone. I just leveled from 1 to 65 in the last few weeks (with my own boxed team) and I think I saw maybe 5 other people leveling on a pretty active server (Bristlebane). In my opinion the only way to make leveling better is to motivate players to group up together and make it easy and advantageous to do so.
If you want to play through the game and level to 65 with relative ease start in the Serpent Spine expansion. That expansion seems to me to have already incorporated many of your suggestions. Do the quests that fulfill the Hero's Journey requirements and you'll level up and gain accomplishments that add considerably to your character. You can easily level to 65 and you'll find people in those zones doing the quests and leveling up fairly often. Join the General chat and make sure you have LFG on if you're actually looking for a group. People do still use the LFG or LFM searches. If you start with the tutorial, which usually offers some grouping and meeting new people that are leveling up, you'll have a level 10 character with good equipment and skills. You'll also have the New Players channel which helps find others leveling up the same way. Do the Out of Gloomingdeep line of quests from Secalna Galnor next to Alerynril the Loyal (the loyalty merchant) and you'll have a free bottle of experience, a free house, and be a part of the EQ guild so you can use the standard guild hall with the portal, and basic services.
I'm a little confused, because in my 20 years of EQ, leveling from 0 to 65 on Live servers is by far the fastest and simplest part of the game for experienced players, and generally the most fun and easy to learn for new people. The 0-65 level range has by far the best tutorial and leveling experience in the game. I would say that the real "grind" is from 70-105. There is a ton of game content and knowledge that is still relatively important in those 30-40 levels, but the slower pace and loneliness is definitely a killer. Many of us on these forums have requested that Heroic toons get bumped from level 85 to level 100 or higher. Luckily, DBG sells Heroic toons that can reduce that to just 85-105. But I don't think you will have any luck changing the game mechanics for lower levels, and not just because they are already (relatively) very easy and quick. Any changes to old/lower-level mechanics would a) not likely see any return on dev investment, and b) would likely negatively affect/hamper DBG's TLP cash-cow servers.
You could always choose to make a character on a TLP server, level and gear em up, and then transfer that character to your Live server afterwords.
