Just because we are all thinking it...Mob HPs in TDS

I don't care about mob's hp but I do care if I can finish a HA/mission/task/named under 30mn ish as my playing time is limited. It is the case in TDS with a normal dps group?

the first HA (temple) took me, my cleric and a SK 30 minutes and we spend 10 of that looking for the area where the sirens are because I'm blind or something so it wouldda taken us 20

I think once everyone is 105 with new weapons and spells etc, the mobs HP won't be as big as a deal. But take you longer to kill a mob but also seems more XP per mob, so evens out more IMO.

Guys and Gals, clearly we need to see this from SOE's shoes.

Running a few select CotF HAs and killing many mobs quickly is not fun.

Killing fewer mobs at a much slower rate in static zones crammed with people, that is fun.

You could be attacked by every mob in the entire vanilla game at the same time and u wouldn't see numbers like these. Eq has gotten so statflatedly-stupid.

Good!! - because as it sits now people are reporting the same thing in General chat. ie that TDS experience for kills and completions is just not there.
-R

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/30/technology/sony/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

lol
I warned Eric (Piestro) about all of this, last year. Not much later, another round of Layoffs and a few months after came shutdown notices for games.
EQN won't be their savior either, as they're tackling it from the wrong angle. Landmark seems strong (fir the target audience) but you can tell from the 66% discount on EQN:LM packs... It needs help.
There are several reasons for SNE's floundering. Lack of innovation (across the board) is the major player. For SOE, specifically, they keep trying to "do it all."
Micro transactions: MICRO means small, not $5-$35 USD
Stop trying to appease everyone. Target your demographic.
EQN: ignore EQ/EQ2 player input. You need new blood, not current members splitting out across games.
Landmark: push it out already. Many of the target demographic have not heard of it or barely know about it. Offically launch as an EA title, drop the "beta" tag.

Obviously, there is much more and more detail not listed.. But I'm typing on a phone and lazy.

Smart eyeglasses..... holy , things are bad...

Maybe the SOE side will be spun off or sold soon & things will change for the better.

The Mobile division of Sony is the reason they posted losses, the game division was profitable (which SOE is a part of)

^^this

whether the TDS haters like it or not. SOE will be around awhile. the majority of us who still play EQ play it because we have for 15 years and we dont want it to die.

sure people quit over stupid stuff but its still going strong. and no matter how crap of an expansion they put out they will still get my 3 gold subs every month as long as EQ is around and they will get my money every year for expansions.

I know you picked that up frim the "related articles" link at the bottom of the page. That is simply the cause of them dropping so far into the red. The portions of Sony, keeping it afloat at all, are the music and finance divisions. Last year, Sony's gaming division loss was over 8 million in the 2nd quarter. they have an increase of around 80% from last year's earnings, in the gaming division, but overall net loss 5x greater than last year. Simply, the gaming division doesn't have a huge impact on their 20 billion dollar company and Q1/Q2 stats for the gaming division are obscured by the PS4 initial sales & massive staff/product cutbacks in Q1.

Sources:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/13q1_sony.pdf
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/14q1_sony.pdf
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/13q2_sony.pdf
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/14q2_sony.pdf

I have played eq since march of 1999 and have played a Necro since 2004. I have never gotten yelled at in a group because of my dps. I am now level 105 and for 85% of that xp I did it in DH with a full group. MY swift dots swarm pets and reg pet mean on average I do 24ishk dps. I am not a wizard I do not expect my dps to be 50k. You ( ie the Devs ) however have shown your understanding of the Necro class to be very small. This becomes apparent with the statement you just made and the constant nerfs you employ on our class on a yearly basis. You say Necro DPS is were you want it to be yet are insistent on Nerfing/putting and end to our epic.

The real problem here is XP in the TDS expansion in the lower tiers is Horrible it was in Beta we told you this and apparently we got ignored. I do not care if a fight last 3 minutes I care that the XP for that fight be appropriate for the time I spent doing it which in the TDS expansion it is not. You nerfed xp in all xpacs pre cotf because you wanted to hide the fact that TDS xp is Horrendous but yet again you forget Most EQ players have been around playing and understand the game far better then most of the Devs.
You ask for player input yet take very little of it unless we load you down with meaningless stats. Stats can be skewed to show what ever the person doing the stats want them to show. SO for once Listen to your player base increase the Xp for the TDS zones to be appropriate for the time it takes killing that mob. Thankyou and have a wonderful day

Here's my problem with mob hitpoints.

Mob has "normal" amount, my paladin takes it head on, holds aggro (that's all I really do, cast aggro/stun spells and reciprocate nuke-heals), let mercenary wizard Burn it. If all goes well, I'm alive, mob is dead.

Other mobs with huge hitpoints, my mercenary won't Burn. I have to use Balanced... but because of its hitpoints being significantly higher already, the fight takes twice as long or longer. 20% less damage doesn't mean much to me when what would've been a 2 minute fight now takes 4-5 minutes. Even worse, if the mob is stun immune, I'm in full faceroll of abilities to stay alive each and every time. First mob in Cavern of Endless Song, I used Armor of Reverence line disc and it refreshed (7 min 30 seconds) to re-use before the fight ended.

Since my paladin has stagnated so badly, I live up to an old joke I used to tell others: I don't kill stuff, I out-live it.

mobs in dead hill have roughly 2 million HP

just in the siren - degmar zone, mobs have over 3 million HP, a ~33% increase compared to CoTF dead hill mob.

mobs in thuliasaur go up to 7-8 million HP, a 400% increase compared to CoTF dead hill mob.

haven't visited arx mentis yet.

We don't need to test out result with new spell / weapon / AA to deduct the outcome : not a single DPS class got a 33% dps upgrade. In fact, alot of classes got nerf ( or fix...wathever you call them, the result is the same) aka rogue disc on the same timer, or wizard arcane fury fix.

While the XP in degmar so far has been decent ( or maybe, since the only XP'ing i've done in the past year + has been in PoWar, i'm used to suckyness .. atleast the bar is going up. Definatly slower than in DH).

What I don't get, SoE does all this new stuff that people are suppose to love, 6 hour lockouts on HA's, mobs with 3x+ in HP. But it seems most people are complaining about them but we are still told it is good for us. Like right now I could only afford TDS for 1 of my 3 accounts, so when I 4 box I am stuck in CoTF, only thing worth doing there anymore is HA's getting my necro some xp, but now I got the 6 hour lockout timer and its like well what am I going to do now, Either I kill all mobs in the instance and then leave it before completion or finish it and my favorite one is down for 6 hours.

But in short, like the old saying don't #(%( down my back and tell me its raining. I know several that cacenelled their alts accts over stuff that SoE has done in TDS but we are still told we will have more fun this way.

I think what gets me the most about this is you spent a lot of time in beta dealing with necro issues. First, there was dot tribute. Then there was we want to do something about the necro epic. Shall we cap it at 100, at level 80? We'll have to do a lot of work and retune things to compensate.

Why couldn't you, when you were looking into all these other very time consuming issues - like adjusting base dot damage - come up with a way to make necros relevant in groups that didn't involve raising the mob HP all around?

I think that SOE often sees the trees, but not the forest. They look at individual "problems" (trees) and then "fix" them without looking at or understanding how that is going to impact the game system/forest/"their world"/whatever.

That doesn't mean that some of their approaches and solutions can't be very elegant, but tends to result in a lot of second and third order effects. Like the increased mob HP letting necros use their DPS, but resulting in far lower experience per hour for everyone. Or their efforts to slow down post-101 experience: HA lockouts and nerfing all experience in ROF and below for toons >100 - neglecting that there were readily available methods to bypass those. And, judging from the sense heading discussion, their answer is to nerf HAs even more for everyone even more, despite the fact that their proposed 'solution' will still leave holes, and most of COTF's content was HAs by design. And forget trying to get ROF mob experience un-nerfed.

Which I guess is par for the course - I don't get a sense that many of the developers play current content in EQ, and I imagine that it is difficult for someone not playing the modern game to visualize how it all comes together.

That's the most charitable explanation I can come up with.

I suspect this is core of the balance issues, some or most devs simply don't play EQ on a regular basis. Awhile back a dev (who shall go nameless) was confronted with the question why he was playing other MMO's after work rather than EQ. He responded with how many of you enjoy working after you get off work. So as you can see, some devs view this as work, they don't seem to be having fun anymore. Certain professions require a certain level of mindset and expectations. For gaming developers, you are expected to love what you do, and you should want to play the games you help create.

When devs don't enjoy playing the games they create, sad to say it shows, the players feel it through content design. Just ask yourselves this, if after working an 8 hour shift, maybe some overtime, would you want to go home and login to EQ to play for 2-3 hours? If any of you devs say no to this question, then something's wrong. You have to want to play your game, you have to enjoy the game you design. If you don't find these long battles fun, then how are players supposed to find it fun?

This is where I've always had the utmost respect for Blizzard developers. They play the games they create, they're proud of the games they've designed. When players confront them with balance issues, they're quick at saying "through last week's playing, my dps meter showed this & this & this, and I was wearing i560 gear". They play their games and they know what players see, so they can better relate when players are unhappy with something.

I won't pretend to know who on the dev team plays EQ and who doesn't. But I just vividly remember the response given by this particular dev and found it disturbing enough to remember it. By the way, the whole MMORPG genre is moving towards faster action, faster combat. Now I don't mind EQ being a bit different, it's afterall why some of us keep coming back to this game from time to time. But there's a fine line between fun and not fun, exciting and boring, hard and tedium. I find that EQ has always had issues defining that fine line, and that line has changed so often in the past many years even the players are confused by exactly what the devs are trying to accomplish.