Sell us AA's for plat!

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Stageguy, Nov 16, 2020.

  1. Nennius Curmudgeon

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  2. KrakenReality Augur

    Emotional, bad take. You could just use the Krono to pay for a PL in GD or the various other places. Purchasable AA sound outrageous, but it just cuts out the middle-man, which are the automated bot crews operating in the 50 different picks of ST.

    Precedent has already been set with the original game offering skill point training for platinum and gold. It’s not really a new concept and would cut down on the bot farmers.
  3. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

  4. Kaenneth [You require Gold access to view this title]

    10%-25% bonus XP potions on a vendor wouldn't be the worst thing.
    Leerah and Sokki like this.
  5. Bigstomp Augur

    Already on a vendor. And you can generally get a few free every month.
    Skuz likes this.
  6. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    EOK focus lines are 25 / 30 / 35 / 40 for a total of 130 AAs.
    RoS adds another 100 AA rank
    TBL adds another 100 AA rank

    By switching to everything but most recent 2 expansions, you would get all of those, rather than just EoK. I think it is very important to shift the autogrants to this style because of how much of a mountain these AAs are to obtain. It is easy to mention how mobs award 1-2 AAs per kill or lesson burns can easily get you 50-100 AAs, but those are small numbers compared to the tens of thousands of AAs you need to reach current era viability.
  7. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    While you make a good case for going to current - 2, I'll make a case for current - 4 (the "current" (sorry to be redundant) situation)....

    I'm the quintessential scrub/introvert/way-behind the curve EQ player. When each new expac comes out, I'm earning auto-granted AAs, every time. I accrue AAs slowly, probably average about 350-400/month. For a benchmark, my main currently has ~26000 AAs.

    What I find is, after I rank the AAs unearned yet, and have grouped them into ASAP, good-to-get-soon, not-bad, and meh, I find it doesn't take all that long to get all of the ASAPs and good-to-gets, mainly because, there aren't all that many of them. Then the rest I fill in as I can, without any real urgency to go out and grind AAs.

    I think a lot of the "not-bads" sound really good, but when you see what the incremental gain is, they're really not that urgent. For instance, new ranks which increase some ability from 25% chance to 27% chance. It's nice, but not earth-shattering. And there are a LOT of those.

    Someone mentioned the focus AAs. Yes, it's a lot of AAs to fill out all of your focus AAs. In my case, I have almost half of them done. The other half? I rarely use the spell lines, so getting those focus AAs never got to the top of my AA list. And then, this fall, I saw one line I thought might be nice to start working on. And then realized it'll be auto-granted soon. So I just chose to wait.

    Personally, I think current - 4 is a pretty good spot to be in. Even the slow XPers will get everything essential fairly quickly, and those who XP fast will certainly be down to the "mehs" sooner than you would think. Current - 2 would probably allow most everyone to approach having every AA. I think it's fine to let the top X% keep that as a bragging right. I'll never get there, and salute those who made it.
  8. Tegila Augur

    I was never pro-autogeant, but bc of autogrant the as mountain IS huge for returning players. Some classes have a lot less to worry about than others either bc they're pure melees, or dps classes that don't raid. Other classes, like knights, have a much bigger mountain to climb because those aas are necessary for current content to do our jobs. All hybrids have bigger aa mountains, and tanks or raiders that are also hybrids, need even more of them to be useful.

    The autogrant system really does t give you that much anyway, so why not make it -2. There's still a big mountain. As an SK who was previously way beyond max, I'm now 30k+ aas in the hole(60% missing). That's like having 800 aas in RoF(about 40% of SK aas at the time) We all know no one would recommend a tank try to tank at 100 with only 800, muchless a knight, we tell people at 75-85 is when to go gold bc 1k aas won't cut it anymore. Gotta think in proportions here.
  9. p2aa Augur

    10 k plat for 1 AA ? given how easy it is to get 1 AA who is going to be fooled by such price lol ?
  10. Tegila Augur

    taths like 200aas for a krono, which...is a lot better return than the ppl selliing xp for kronos i guess. but like for 1 krono i can buy an average of 100 collectibles in baz, which works out to about 10 collections, or 140ish aas, so still a better deal if you think about it that way. That doesnt mean i agree with it though (i can definitely see how if youre spending your aas and you have something that cost 55 and you have 54 wanting a quick fix..but..meh. may in THAT sort of case if you could only buy 1 aa a day, at 10kpp each...it wouldnt mess with game balance or be selling powerlevels so it'd be ok, ist just isnt something thats needed either.

    there are some ppl that have hoardes of kronos too, wehre if you could get 250aas for a krono and itd be like 120 kronos for 30k aas...they wouldnt blink an eye if htey wanted those 30k aas, either bc they have it, or they llgo buy them off illicit sites for half price (the kronos) people already work the krono market bouncing servers, especially TLP servers, and when it comes to things like TLP..starting the game with dozens or hundreds of kronos, and then being able to buy everything with them...for some people its that power rush and they dont care whether or not theyve earned it. others see it as having earned it regardless, because they worked for the money or they worked thesystem in tehgame to get the kronos or whatever. i dotn see it that way at all, but there are ppl that do, so dismissing the idea bc no one would be crazy enough to spend that? would be silly. we all know at least 1 person who would if htey could, and others that could and would, whether we know we know them or not.

    And its obvious tehse people exist, or this thread wouldnt
  11. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer


    I know of someone with 999 krono, and max plat. He literally cannot gain any more. He stopped playing. :(
  12. Tegila Augur

    and most people would see that as..ok i won eq now to go live real life (good for them bad for game) others would be like oooh kronos..lets go start a new toon on antoher server and use them to get ahead..and others yet are like oooh blackmarket make $$ yay. lol. the only thing better IMO than quitting bc its so maxed out, would be staying and giving away teh excess while imparting knowledge and time to help others (we have some ppl like that, its jsut not that common at that stage) Id take those 990 kronos, split them up with my accts, add a couple more fulltime for bazaar since i always forget to set one up, and not have to worry about my subs, but i have the bulk of 7 years to catch up on, not max everything already. and if i were to start a new toon over bc i was maxed, itd be the exact same one (or 4) and id be my ow nxerox...not all that exciting either lol

    BUT at the same time. NO ONE can ever complain about that. if they have too many kronos, it is absolutely no ones fault but theirs. kronos dont jsut fall into your lap, you gotta work the system to get that man, so if theres a point that its too many to ever use just have to deal with it or start handing them out at xmas lol
    Corwyhn Lionheart and Nennius like this.
  13. Bard to the Bone New Member

    Like it or not, P2Win already exists in game as mentioned above. And I am pretty sure it is not only limited to "Millennials". Buy Kronos or use your hard earned plat in game to pay someone offering PL services and collect 30k AA, or 115 levels, or both.

    People with expendable cash already contribute a lot to the game and provide additional revenue that, if you hope to still be playing this game 10 years from now, are very important to the longevity of EQ.

    Doing it this way would add a nice plat sink into the game which is not a bad thing. They tried removing plat with Nobles but it did not go as planned.
  14. Monkman Augur

    Just up the cost of mercs... 1k plat every 15 min at 115.
  15. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    Lets use a level 105 Druid coming back after quitting some time in TBM. So they will be autogranted all the AAs up to the era they quit in. This means EoK, RoS, TBL, ToV will remain buy only AAs. As has always been the case, level is the most important stat in the game so this person would grind to 115 before worrying about a bunch of AA grinding.

    For druid the total numbers per raidloot are 11,658 AAs for EoK, 5,547 AAs for RoS, 3,840 AAs for TBL, 8,525 AAs for ToV, for a total of 29,570 AAs if you wanted to go from auto-grant to max.

    Its worth pointing out a solid chunk of the EoK AAs are only tradeskill AAs and a decent chunk of the other AAs as you mentioned may be fairly useless AA lines or minimally impactful ones.

    Lets look at Focus AAs alone. A base 8-15% amplification on the raw value of a spell for spell reliant classes like priests/casters especially is a huge increase. For druids, it is pretty common to use 3 DoT lines, 4 nuke lines, and 5 heal lines. That is a total of 12 focus lines you want to keep up to date. Not having them up to date means your max level spells don't benefit from the line specifically for the focus ranks obtained in level increase expansions.

    So in EoK a druid would spend 1560 AAs, RoS 1200 AAs, TBL 1200 AAs and ToV 1200 AAs to unlock the level 111-115 spell and another 1200 AAs to unlock the maximum base value increase. Getting all of these core spell lines that I use every single play session from autogrant to actually working on current level spells, means I am sinking 5,160 AAs into these lines alone, with another 1200 possible to get that extra 3% increase in ToV.

    On top of this you have a bunch of other smaller increases but ones that directly add to your raw power like Abundant Healing, Healing Gift, Healing Adept, Destructive Cascade, Destructive Fury, Enhanced Maladies, Synergy, Wrath of Forest Walker, Gift of Sylvan Spirit, Spirit of Great Wolves, Gift of Mana, Nature AA nukes, Mnemonic Retention. These account for another roughly 5,000 AAs.

    So throwing out all the defensive stuff, most of the activateable things, half of the focus lines, all the tradeskill stuffs, the base stat/hp/mana increases etc. you are still talking about 10,000 AAs to get from autogrants to decently effective.

    Trimming that list down to only the most recent two expansions makes jumping in a lot more reasonable for most players. Especially those who aren't coming in with a premade group or box crew that can effectively grind AAs.
    Tegila likes this.
  16. Monkman Augur

    Easiest fix for the focus for spells would be to just allow each rank to impact that spell line as opposed to a specific expansion based spell. It’s been tossed around on the forums but never picked up much traction.
    Tatanka and Jumbur like this.
  17. Accipiter Old Timer


    Man, I wish. Maybe when Phinigel hits live...
  18. Bazuker New Member

    Any group of 2+ players can leisurely earn 70-80 AA per hour by killing single-pulled mobs in ToV. That equates to about 140 hours of playtime. 2 hours per day (most people play more on average) would take 10 weeks. Basically, 2 relative slackers can earn those 10K AA in less than 3 months by a casual grind. (Yes, a single toon will have harder time)
    How much quicker than that does one want to " get decently effective" ?
  19. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    Focus lines definitely should be set to include every spell in that line regardless of the AA rank.

    But as any druid/shaman can tell you, it was constantly an issue to get the new version of our Survival/Intervention emergency group heals included in the focus AA that hastened them. If they had a way to automate it so that it is automatically added and doesn't need to be handled individually by adding each new spell group to each AA that would be of great help.

    But again, players who are returning to the game have plenty of content to work on. Not just AAs. Going back for progression/hunters to get Heroic AAs, Artisan's Prize, augments spanning several expansions usually, not to mention normal gearing and progression for current expansions. Giving them some help on the AA front will make tackling the other areas more easy and allow them to jump into the current content more quickly which is where they will find what remains of each server's population, increasing the likelihood they stick around if they are to find a guild or a group of friends.
    Tegila and Kaenneth like this.
  20. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    EoK will auto-grant in less than a month. That was part of my calculation. I'll fill out the lines I need after that.

    Granted, not every person will feel the same about AA lines. For me, it's not that hard to keep up with the lines I actually care about.