Changes with the February Update: Alternate Ability Grants for Gold Members and Ability Changes

Swarming PLing make harder and harder to get a group.It's not too late to Nerf them to save the game.

It gives people who did work for them to feel betrayed. Right now im thinking why play at all right now when I can wait a month or so to get more AAs, but why play after getting the AAs when they can grant more AAs/levels a few months after that?

i wouldn't think so, and it wouldn't make any sense.
come febuary, the system is going to go: "are you gold? okay, you get granted any AAs that you don't already have up to the Underfoot expansion".
it wouldn't make sense for you get free spendable AAs for AAs prior to underfoot you already earned and have been using since you got them.

I am for the AA grant for new players wishing to catch up or move on to raiding, etc. But really my only question is will there be an opt out available? The AA and exp carrot is what keeps me going. I don't want my alts to have 2000 aa when i log them on next, i want to work them like my mains and play through different content.
Thanks

When are you going to start auto-granting gear too? Since you just want to make things easy.

The achievement of earning all those AAs is the edge we have over people who have not earned them. They are taking away the edge we worked so long and hard to get. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a wonderful change. I will probably try out some other classes. I got a druid on another account that is level 71. He is silver so, I'll def buy him a month of Gold for the AAs. The I can 2 box him with my main. The only reason I hadn't done that is because I didn't want to spend all the time earning those AAs.

Great change, imho! But I need something for my main who spent all those hours earning AAs. Throw him a bone. Give him AAs to spend. Give him plat. Something. I don't know what.

Some of don't care if you or someone else is auto granted them (other than concerns about the effects long term in subscriptions, which is a philosophy thing and arguable), but we DO care about it being forcefully given to us effectively removing much of the game we enjoyed.

Make it optional via character flagging (like veteran rewards are) so we can play with alts like we still do.

And I will be forced to level all of my alts 80+ since you are no longer allowing me to grind AA before HoT. Wow, just wow.

Auto granting AA's is ridiculous. Why can't the aaxp gain curve just be increased? By auto granting all these AA's, you've just trivialized all the time I spent in earning my 12K AA's.

So EQ is now about easy mode right? Should I just go play WOW instead?

The nerfing of all the classes listed is drastic and rather heavy handed. I can understand the server issues and all but dropping the iron hammer on almost every single class is just going to be more detrimental to the game than any benefits you can get from it. Instead of killing off the ability/skills or spells, why can't smaller incremental changes be made to balance what was, and what needs to be?

As someone said above, maybe you should look into how the server recalculates mob movement than making drastic changes to the game.

It might also be time to upgrade the servers and memory.

They are humanoid only abilities, so they are only really able to do it in a small corner of most zones. I could see changing Decapitate to a more specific mob type, instead of proccing on just any mob. But to complain about headshot and assassinate is just silly. They dont lag a zone like beaming, and they dont claim an entire zone like beaming in City of Bronze or large areas of a zone like decapitating berserkers sometimes do.

Beaming needs the nerf, decapitating could use a small tweak, assassinate and headshot are fine. If it aint broke, dont fix it.

So, here's a thought. We have heroic adventure development mechanics now. These tend to grant decent AA. The daily missions grant the best aa.

You could kill multiple birds with one stones if instead of a 14 expansion pack dump of AAs, you use the code already existing and use the daily missions combined with these instanced zones. Tone the instances down for solo or duo play (Without mercs), make players do missions, give an unholy amount of AA for completing these daily missions. If you want EZ mode, make these daily missions super easy. Put the zone in guy right in the POK so it is easy to go in them.

You have group instances already created for many of the newer expansions. Is there a reason why you can't reuse these instances to make daily mission instances where players can gain a lot of good aa together?

Increase the multiplier of how many AAs someone gives based on the number of live bodies in the mission. Maximum AA gain granted with a full group, etc. You already have sliding code on the number of aa gained.

You want a very simple way to increase AA gain so people can spend aa like they want but catch up fast? Remove the cap on how many banked aa you can receive from a single daily mission, as is done in Beta from that one PC when you ask him. Bang, an hour of work, multiple hundred aa for low folks, and maybe 10 aa for the higher aa folk. You give the high aa folk a reason to help their buddies and group together. (I'd do an hour long mission for the kill xp and 10 aa...) plus you possibly encourage people to actually *play together*.

There are a lot of ways you can make aa gain at early levels really satisfying and fast, while earning things for your character, like platinum or items.

Make it a part of the game.

Don't take away the love of playing from those who enjoy playing lower level, lower aa characters.

If you rolled in a level increase on these aa to 100 with the nerf it would be more acceptable. Promises of improvements are little comfort in the here and now.

Why are they dumbing down the game via the 4000 AA auto-grant ?

Auto-Granting 4000 AA's is not the way to go. As now a player does not even read and learn or pick their AA's, which is important to learn their class. Just bump up the bonus to AA to 1500% at zero AA's and extend the AA bonus spread to 5000 or something along those lines.

That system worked and the player base has become accustomed and has accepted it. While players still had to earn their alternate abilities as they go along.

After 8 years of playing casually I feel that I have earned the 5800 AA's on my main. This method of auto granting 4000 AAs' just makes it all feel like a devaluation of effort and sacrifice over the course of years..

Instead of autogranting AA, which in effect can be unfair to players WHO has not used their AA bonus to full effect.

How about let those people get the AA in the bank AA, which atm has a max of 70.

So example at Februar, give people some CLICK item that give you example 50 AA, 100 AA, 250 AA, 500 AA, 1000 AA.
Then people can themself choose if they wanna spend them or save them, til they got their 4 K AA through the normal bonus.
If they spend them, thats their choice, if they dont, thats also their choice.

If you're going to do this you should consider removing SK swarm abilities especially the epic and mortal coil combination which lets them kill as many mobs as beam kiting. Headshot and decapitate don't even come close to killing that many mobs and those are being "limited" so I fail to see why the SK stuff is not being considered.

2 Procs of Decap per min, for level 88 and below mobs....is not useful

Please explain, as it would be faster for my 85 ranger to melee down 2 green mobs than to root/arrow them for the proposed 1 minute.

because increasing the rate of AA gain for people who can't gain AAs in the first place really doesn't do anything whatsoever to help the game, help new players, or address the issue they're trying to correct of enormous barriers to entering upper end game play?

how? they're not retroactively removing the years in which you've had these AAs and been using their benefits - they're just making it so that the guy coming up behind you doesn't have to spend the next 12 years working on it to reach that point himself.

how anyone can cry about this change just baffles me.

No kidding nobody said it. I assume you are familiar with literature. Try it in that context.

My argument to you has been the same. You are mad because someone is getting something you worked for and you feel it cheapens what you did over the past year. That is the entirety of your stance. My counter is that this happens often throughout life and across generations and it doesn't do a damn thing to diminish the joy or sense of accomplishment one has.

So if I downgrade from Gold to Silver, do I have to buy massive amounts of AA Limit with SC to gain another AA?

Personally, I don't like the idea much, as it is part of the game and fun to find and choose "best path" for each character.

How about changing it similar to AA Exp bonus system?

For example, if you try to buy 12 point AA ability at total 0-100 AA, you consume only 1-2 AA points.
And you consume 3 AA points at 1000 AA total, 6 AA at 2000 total, and 12 AA at 4000.

Even if you give AA for free, please make it Optional and let me choose which AA I gain, not Auto-Grant All.