Wishing for a TLE that would fix 20 year old issues.

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by nostalgicfool, Dec 1, 2019.

  1. nostalgicfool Augur

    Back somewhere around 2001 i stopped playing after trying to convince the Devs that some changes were an absolute necessity, and we were many asking for such changes. But the Devs were so convinced of their great vision (in reality they just had the workforce to implement the MMO that we were expecting, i ackowledge them some originality here and there) that any comment or demand was discarded. Two years later, competition appeared and Eq1 lost 90% or even 95% of its player base within a few monthes.

    So what were the issues, despite some qualities ?

    A) The trivial to fix ones were :

    1- Death penalty, corpse run.
    2- Cleric ultra domination.
    3- Enchanter domination.
    -4 Downtime.
    5- Druids fully broken.

    B)The hard to fix ones were:

    1- Deficient interface (no quest step or journal)
    2- Pathing, ridiculous implementation of climb/jump etc ...
    3- No decent raid window (this has been fixed) .


    First let us look at issues that require probably too much effort to be solved :

    B1 leads to absurdities like player loosing their coldain shawl on step 8, or loosing their ring on the final event (cause someone screw their raid) ... It also led to multi-questing, allowing a level 1 rogue to get his epic, or a sneaking hobbit to " ninja steal" the jboots reward that someone was selling you.

    Solving B1 would mean using a lot of resources, so i don' t expect any massive change there, but minor adjustments could easily be done (like not loosing your current shawl on a failed combine and the same for the ring).

    B2 is more annoying than really detrimental, but frankly even at level 3-4 any player will find that something is really alpha quality when considering the pathing at the entry of crushbone, it is simply hilarious. And I have seen 100 times people asking "how do i get out of the water" ... Considering that Tom Raider 1 was released in 1996, Eq1 avatar control is simply garbage.


    So some efforts would be welcome but i don' t expect much.

    Now let us look at issues that are almost trivial to fix. Those issues are quite related and interconnected.

    Penalty for death (solution requite little work, adding a an xp debt pool and exponential decay of it).

    First let us deal with the penalty for dying. It is less heavy now (no corpse run anymore) but it still exists. The problem is that the very idea of a penalty for dying is dumb in a MMO.

    Back in 1999-2000 i died mostly from A ) internet or server failures B) 10 K falls. Recently Mangler had a roll back and lot of people were killed upon login. I would say that 90% of the character deaths are not due a player fault, cleric may LD on pull, or shaman. When restarting playing i went to unrest and our puller got rooted and died, why would he be penalized for that ? It was actually the mage/priest fault who forgot to buf his magic resistance. And i m not even going to deal with issues such as other groups training you and so on, I never died due to that but some people did. The more you examine the question the more obvious it is that the original developers were fully mistaken, as example if something gets wrong casters can gate but melee cannot; so clearly melee would die a lot more ... And last you play often with people you don' t know and believe I have seen groupmate doing unexpected /exit due to domestic issues

    Still there should be a penalty, but it should be non permanent. Eq1 should use Eq2 system. Death means XP debt, and while you have debt half of your xp is used to repay it . But here comes the non permanent aspect, debt decays with time at some exponential rate. The half life of the debt could be somewhere between 6 hours and 12. |If set to 6 hours it would mean that within 18 hours of real time your debt will be divided by 8., if set to 12 you would need 36 hours. The difference with Eq2 being that Eq1 debt will significant while Eq2 one is actually non existant.

    Quality of resurrection spell will still matter since it will allow to get ride of the debt immediately instead of waiting for a few hours.

    Cleric domination (solution requires minimal work)

    Even if it is a rather easy class to play (in raid you mostly a heal bot with /pause X cast Z macro) clerics are the Kings in Eq1 (queens beoing chanties), what matter for a guild is the number of clerics.

    Cleric dominate since a) they are the only real healers b) they have monopoly on resurrection (i don t count paladins since there are quite few)..

    The changes suggested below should mainly be for the level 1-60 range, as exampl;e druid healing capacity should be improved from the 30 onward (ie when shammie get decent slow and haste). Similarly shammie/druids shoud get a Zero xp ressurection in their teen/low twenty.

    To mitigate (a) one shall turn Druids (usually called droods since they are just totally dysfunctionnal and not because they are bad players) into very good healers. Of course druids should still have quite weaker HPS and Heal per mana (HPM) than cleric, but they will be solid number 2 and a guilds will count them in considering heal chains etc ... There is a little of math to do there in order to make druids heals much better than shaman ones but still quite lower than clerics.

    Considering (b), it is simply a pure scandal, if your group does not include a cleric and i someone happens to die, then it's game over for him. So since most group do include a priest we shall give resurrection to all priests. Cleric will remain the king since they will get better percentage of debt removal. Indeed here it is very simple, shammies and druids should get the same resurrection than Paladins.

    Enchanter Domination and Downtime (solution requires minimal work)

    I never got any problem with the amazing crow control abilities of the enchanters or with other mind manipulation they could do (stun, meme wipe, charm). This is about active game play. What is not acceptable is to have a class which can limit downtime so much with a passive buff (breeze,c1,c2,KEI)

    One major problem in Eq1 is and was that unless you got some proper group composition the downtime could be enormous. The ones who believed that 15mn to get full mana for a cleric (without enchanter buf or FT item) was sane were so wrong that they lost 95% of their customers. The original vision of the game could indeed be called Everwrong, Neverquest (most quests gave neither xp neither a decent reward, and no quest system was implemented) and Eversit. When Wow came out they introduced out of combat food and drink, this was almos a perfect idea. Eq1 now has a rested state in which power and hp regen faster, this is quite close to a solution. But it still LINEAR. I suggest to let the regen rate increase linearly as a function of the time spend resting. So doing after spending a time T in rested state the regen shall be of order T^ 2 , this will make resting time to be the square root of the mana/hp pool.

    This should not hurt enchanters too much since first combat regen won t be affected, second they will still allow to save quite some regen time.

    Overall a decent goal should be : 3mn full resting should allow anyone at any level to fill up mana and hp pools. The change won t affect Raids encounters as long as all the people in the raid zone are considered in combat during the whole encounter.

    5- Druids fully broken.

    Since I played both i know for sure that

    (a) my shaman from the 30 on (and the gap got bigger and bigger) was way better in almost any group tthan my druid.

    (b) My shaman ever got groups, she would even receive tells to join " red groups" almost on login, my druid was popular till the 40 and considered as a " good player ", from the 45ish on he had either to solo or to join non conventional groups he even ended as an Agro Magnet with flamelick in AA farming group -- he did all thew work, pulling, luling, circling the mobs around the group etc ... and still he got the very same xp that people just sitting and nuking --) .

    The problem with druids can be summarized with a simplified formula.

    A shaman in a group will

    - shorten any fight by a factor around 0.7. (haste, malo, cripple)
    - decrease the incoming damage by a factor around 0.5 (slow cap around 70% but you don t get 70% at level 40, sometimes slow won t stick immediatly, sometimes there are several mob, so i take 0.5)

    --> damage on group is 0.7 * 0.5 = 0.35

    So considering the same group and exchange shaman for druid then the druid need to heal 3 times more. The problem is that druids do not heal better ....

    The story could almost end here, and conclusion could be that druid HPS should be 3 times the one of the shaman.

    But the story gets even worst ....

    Shaman get long time regen much before druids, as example the cloro the 1st one is 23 for shammies and 34 for druids.

    Shaman get torpor which is a super efficient and super strong HOT.

    Shaman get cannibalize, of course the first ones are a bit of a pain but cannu 5 (the one with AA) is just super powerfull and the canni you get before are very decent.

    The gap between Shaman and druids is so massive that either the dev just hated the druid class or they were fully deficient.


    Of course people may say, sure but druid got ????????

    Well what what do they get ?

    Mini open aoe ? that may get you a spot in an aoe group using the broken stun exploit ...sure

    Mini 4 target aoe , yeah you may quad giant or rockhoopers while the shaman does real content ...

    Damage shield --> The value scale so few that is only good to babysit low level toons. The dmg shield value at 60 is a joke, hitting for 90 when wizzie hit for 10 000? --

    snare : of course, snare is the only thing my shaman ever missed over my druid. But well almost any class can snare or stun runners.

    Crow Control ? Well my shaman root was much less resisted than the root of my druid, and slow is anyway a form of CC too , here again the shaman win.

    Good dot ?

    Well the dots are ok, but shaman one are quite close and they get also free dot from their pet.

    Baby/semi decent single target nuke
    well ok ....


    The more you look at detail the more hilarious the situation gets, it is like if the main Devs played shamen and that none in the team ever played a druid. As example shaman debuf most resist, druid just debuf fire and AC. Shaman get Bili which is sow + Atk buff but druid don' t. Druid get attack buff on wolf form or shared wolf form, but wait the dev JOKE here is hidden ;-) Wolf form is outdoor and drop on zoning, on top it overide Sow.

    To me details like the one about wolf form seems to prove that the devs were indeed sadistic with druids. Indeed you get it looking at level 1-4 spells, druid get the ability to summon totally useless things, shammies get 4 slot 100% WR bag (awesome).

    So to be honest the whole class is dumb, a well played druid is certainly going to be a nice groupmate but a mediocre shaman will be better, even if the druid rocks.

    Now for solo ? Well druids are good kiters but they have a ghard time indoor ir facing summoners. My shaman killed her first HG around the same level than my druids did, she first did reverted kiting with pet biting the HG backs. I think she was more efficient than my druid (canni, free damage from pet). Later when she got big slow she could kill things my druid would not even consider looking at.

    Globally druid/shaman is a bit like Germany/Brazil some years ago, was i 7 /0 ?

    So if we look at the whole picture druids should be revamped.

    I don' t want them to be buffer or slowers so ....

    - they should be much better healer, the formula should be 2/3 cleric HPS + 1/3 Shaman one..

    - they should bring something nice to a group, so regen Mana, druid could get half the regen mana of chanter (from level 20 on).

    - Their HP/Ac buf should be again like 2/3 cleric + 1/3 shaman .. Currently another dev joke is that shaman talisman stack with most buffs while druid skin are blocked by almost anything (ie mage shielding and so on).


    Druid definition would then be : Very good healer not that far from clerics, bring decent mana regen, bring decent Hp/Ac buf, do have decent nukes, snare and dmg shield.

    NB: Dmg shield (mage, druid) should be revamped, if at level 5 1 hit of dmg shield is (as example) 1% of a mob health it should be similar at level 60.
  2. Machen New Member

    Every single thing on your list gets fixed if you just keep playing until later expansions. The devs literally addressed everything you asked for, you just don't want to play those expansions.
    Ulrin, Boze, Rasputyn and 5 others like this.
  3. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    I thought druid skin included mana regen.
  4. WaitingforMoreEQ WaitingforTBC

    a TL; DR for those of you that don't have time to read a novel
    1) OP hates Classic EQ and wants to play on live
    2) OP doesn't play on live because he wants to play with other people and live sucks
    3) OP doesn't know how Druids work or what abilities they get despite claiming to have played them
    4) OP want's all classes to be bland and boring and way to similar like modern WoW and EQ
    DeseanJackson and That0neguy like this.
  5. Punchu Augur

    This is what prescription amphetamine abuse does kids.
    Ulrin, AcemoneyFV, Xhartor and 2 others like this.
  6. Hateseeker Augur

    Having played Selo where it started Luclin and one expansion opens up every month, meaning we get a quick review, yea, most of those things get addressed way before Live if people are just willing to play the mid-era expansions. Well, downtime isnt fully addressed til TSS...

    When the selo run ends, gets too close to live or just plain runs out of population to make it worth playing there, I certainly hope there's a Selo 2.0, with maybe an OoW start or TSS start. And has open trade loot the way MMOs should.
  7. Bobbybick Only Banned Twice

    bruh
    Ulrin likes this.
  8. sumnayin Augur

    Was this a school project? Who would possibly write so much nonsense while expecting other people to read it? Two things I refuse to read are bad grammar and pointless novels.
    AcemoneyFV and Duder like this.
  9. Barudin_Phinigel Augur

    Yikes...
    Dythan likes this.
  10. Karthos Augur

    Have you attempted to play Miragul? As has been said a lot of balance issues have been fixed. I believe the Ro line of druid debuffs actually works better than shaman slow at reducing mob dps. Druids are a really good class these days with the dot revamp. Its a shame so few actually play them.
  11. HoodenShuklak Augur

    Mercs at oow would be a step in the right direction to curtailing the precipitous population plummet post-pop.
  12. yober Elder


    Has it tho?
  13. Guzzle Augur

    You should check out Shards of Dalaya. Fixes a lot of these problems without the insane stat / ability / content creep.
  14. Nolrog Augur


    It does, starting with Protection of the Cabbage (level 59 Luclin era spell).
    nostalgicfool likes this.
  15. nostalgicfool Augur

    I wonder how many languages you can read, English is neither my first nor my second language, hence the mistakes. Reading a long text is probably a bit hard for you, and anyway the content, even trivial as it is, is probably beyond your understanding abilities.

    Lat i m quite sure that if the suggested changes had been made back in 2001-2002 Eq1 would had kept a solid player base, instead of sinking in the sands.
  16. nostalgicfool Augur

    Too late since for me the game ends around Gates of Discord.

    I m not interested into playing a game (post PoP one) in which any mob runs at selo speed, quad and stun any non tank for 500% of his HP pool, is immune to snare and slow and has the size of a skyscraper.
  17. Nolrog Augur


    I'm going to stop you right there. If you haven't played in 18 years and since the Shadows of Luclin expansion then you need to go into the game and see what has happened to the game. Many of the issues have been addressed in one way or another.
    code-zero likes this.
  18. weebly Journeyman

    It sounds like you think "Live EQ" is gates of discord before it got tuned, and the game has continued exactly unchanged since 2004.

    This is not the case. Gates was *15 years ago*. EQ is very different now, and they made literally all of the changes you're asking for.

    But if you want to play the game in its older, highly nostalgic but badly designed, unbalanced, broken and frustrating state, that's what TLPs are for. They will never make major class design changes on TLP because people *want* a slightly friendlier version of old EQ.
    Skuz and Nolrog like this.
  19. That0neguy Augur

    So halfway through what you consider to be the game is "too late"?

    You are talking about the Efreeti in Sky here right? Or was it the blobs in VT? Cuz for a minute I thought you were describing mobs that you don't consider as part of the game. But that would be silly.
  20. AcemoneyFV Augur

    After reading the first sentence...

    [IMG]