I have TDS on 3 accounts 1 is silver, the other 2 are all access, the only thing I do in TDS is raid, as it is more fun to play lower level alts in older expansions. Time will tell if I renew my subs again in 84 days. 3 months should be plenty of time to see if Daybreak intends on giving those max level interesting content again.
I very much agree about low level alts, I live the planes of power and bellow, I Have been known to buy kronos on fv sell them and buy much reusable twink gear, character slots and the like, the good thing about it is its reusable so if you buy something you keep it, and can use it again. I have one higher level character I'm working on, a ranger but am in no rush. I love epic quests the lowers tasks and lore don't you?
Jchan is wrong on the 'we fixed that' part of the pre-100 grouping with the post 100. I just spent 10 hours in east sepulcher killing with a level 89 in the group. She was at 90% when we started. at 1% into level when we finished. 10 hours of constant killing reds to her yielded 10% of a level... I think the problem might be that the devs are testing with full bars of vitality instead of empty ones, maybe?
That sounds very similar to my experience in 2012, in the mid to late 80s level range, playing catch up with a group of 96-100s experiencing in Evantil. Experiencing with high level groups in RoF was terrible experience back then and is now if you're in the 80s imho.
Okay so if that was the case when RoF was current and IIRC I'd heard similar complaints at the time then it's going to be considerably worse now with 101+ characters
I wonder if they are over-blowing this issue. Take swarming. Even before the SK swarming nerfs last year, swarming was already on the way out. As an SK who did a lot of swarming for AA up to level 90 or so, and then used it to level up when VOA and ROF came out before doingregular grouping for AA, the reward for swarming as a mid-tier raider was already rapidly nearing the reward for grouping from level 97 on. The reliably swarmarble mobs were greening out, and the HP bump for mobs in UF and beyond made that pretty dicey for people not in top tier raid gear. It was barely worth swarming at level 99, and it was pretty clear that with the next level increase regular grouping was going to be preferable. Could some guys in top end raid gear still swarm past 100 for EXP in more recent expansions? Maybe. But with equipment and all, they will EXP rapidly anywhere. These players tend to be well AA'd already, and likely if they could swarm, wouldn't be doing it much past the first week or so of the expansion to hit new levels for raiding. Meanwhile, even after the EXP nerfs, I hit level 105 with less time spent EXPing than I spent swarming from 95 to 100 - and I suspect a lot faster than I would have been able to trying to swarm even if there had been no nerfs. I can't speak to what SOE means by 'mass killing,' but what do I see resulting from the nerfs? - Maybe top-end raiders who might have been able to benefit from swarming past level 100 were prevented from doing so. - Even after all the recent exp nerfs, SKs could reach level 105 faster without swarming than they were able to level 95-100 by swarming before last summer's nerfs - As a result of the swarming nerfs last summer which have pretty minimal impact on the 100+ game, lower-level SKs trying to level up are going to need more time to do so - and given the lack of players 99 and below, I'm not sure if making players take more time to get to where 90%+ of player activity is happening is a good design approach for an MMORPG. - As a result of the recent exp nerfs, EXP in groups with players level 100 and under and 101 and up is borked, along with other likely unintended consequences like killing Alarans being a far less effective means for leveling the tear at lower levels. - And lastly for players (like me) who want to go back and complete older quests, now we won't even be able to get enough EXP to make up for raid deaths - much less getting EXP for glyphs, etc. - while doing so. I don't expect/want ROF to be the best place to EXP, but essentially zero EXP is a big break from the past and seems a bit extreme. So maybe top-end raiders had to spend an extra 10 hours to hit level 105 than they would have if the EXP nerfs (or even the swarming nerfs) hadn't been put in place. Was this minimal gain from the design perspective worth all of the negative second and third order effects and negative reaction from the player-base?
What you're describing is the disconnect I feel of the devs not actually playing the game and experiencing the frustrations I encounter every single session. Sure, they might "play" for a few minutes testing something but it's obvious they don't actually log in and spend their day off trying to grind something out.
After a year and half playing solo I ended up making a 3 box. So where does the game go after players are tired of boxing?
A big yes on slowing down content. The TDS content was great for what 1 month maybe 2. After that it was a ghost town with all the raids finished and any players that rushed through. TDS is too little and was finished too soon. This has been an occurrence with EQ for a long time. Content should be slowed down for players to keep coming back. At the same time casual players can enjoy the content as well.
To me the nerf to exp for level 101+ just is a symbol of what went wrong the last years. Devs were so intent on telling us what we should do for fun, making decisions which FORCE us into the new content instead of offering us interesting content in which we actually LIKE to play. This is a game and it should be fun and WE should decide what is fun for us, not the devs. Make interesting zones with good quests (no, I won't mention the "hail"-desaster), with nice rewards exp-wise and gear-wise and people will go there automatically. Make the exp better than in previous expansions when the mobs con higher, but do NOT nerf the old zones, because that just screams "we don't have a real reason why you should play in TDS, so we force you to do it". PS: Imho the push towards making old content generally obsolete is also a symptom of this. In previous times it was natural to still be raiding in older content, because things like focus degradation were not such an issue and the gear didn't make huge jumps. EQ has been making its own biggest asset obsolete: its huge mass of old content which is now "dated" when it's a year old. Yes, the newest zone should always give the best gear and the best exp, but that does not mean the old zones should be worthless. I know other MMOs have the same approach, but that does not make it right either and EQ used to be different. We should not try to copy other MMOs, just because something worked there doesn't necerssarily mean it works in EQ.
This ^^^^^ Daybreaks top priority should be unwinding the XP and HA nerfs. It was a poor decision from the get go. I don't want to hear that "it's not easy" to unwind it. It was easy enough to do it.
You cant really slow content down. Its not possible. First you have the raid geared peeps who will blow through it then followed by the hardcore group players. Then the average group players followed by the very causal group players. Then a small group that will never get through it. You slow it down for the first groups you make it extremely hard for the following groups. Casual players will never be able to enjoy content that has been slowed down for enough to keep raiders in it for months. This would just be tuning content to raid geared toons which would kill EQ. Short of putting a timer on the content only allowing people to progress to one tier a month I don't see any way to keep everyone together in content.
Roll what I consider and "experience nurf" for leveling to 101 back. Please allow experience to scale up without any arbitrary drop off once someone hits 101. FYI I paid full fare for RoF. Why should what I paid full fare be taken from me?
This guy with 160,000+ AA needs moar RoF experience! What's taking so long?! This guy would've already hit the 200k mark, if it weren't for you meddling devs! But in all seriousness, this guy is Case Study A for why EQ experience should be nerfed across the board.
Yeah.. he's maxed AA, you're maxed AA.. he's the reason it should be nerfed because he's spent 150k aa that did absolutely NOTHING to increase his characters abilities. Jealousy is never a valid reason for a nerf.
Relax, my experience loving friend. I am hardly jealous of his AA surplus. If I could give half of my AAs away to people complaining in this thread, I would. One-third of my AAs provide little to no value, and I really don't enjoy being AA capped. I would like for there to be a purpose again to grind out some exp with buddies on non raid nights. Inflating my spent AAs counter just for shiz and giggles isn't something that interests me. Silku, do you really believe that it's good for the game that someone has 163,000 AAs? Is the game healthy when people are 105 and AA capped the day after the release of TDS? EQ has somewhat been a victim of its own prolonged success. The mudflation that has occurred throughout the years has turned Everquest into Instantquest. Now, maybe it's a product of an evolving consumer. We now live in an instant gratification, attention span of a goldfish, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat culture. But there are plenty of games on the market that can provide that instant gratification. This is supposed to be EverCrack. Corwyhn was right when he said that you can't slow content down and keep the casuals happy. However, EQ was never a game built around casuals. Casuals don't want to hear that, but it is the truth. The game was originally designed around the power gamer. The gamer that would play 40+ hours a week to get to level 60 and spend 8 hour sessions farming Seb, or countless hours farming Giant faction in SoV, or farming Emp Bane weaps, Emp Keys and VT keys. I understand the demographic of the EQ playerbase has evolved over the past 16 years. People are no longer in their teens and 20s and now have jobs and families. But EQ has lost a lot of its identity. I'm not saying make a full return to 2001, but some of the grinds need to come back to keep people hooked, including the experience grind. Everquest was an immersive world all about the adventure. Now, it's a race to the finish. And then what? Grind 145,000 useless AAs? A common fallacy that I keep seeing repeated in these RoF QQ threads is that they have taken away content that you paid for. That is just a flat out lie. RoF has a ton of great content with a ton of great rewards. Experience is just not one of them. But as Hiladdar illustrates, is experience really that big of a deal in today's Everquest? If you want RoF for the great content, great augs, and unique itmes, nothing is stopping you. Nobody took that away from you. If you want quick easy xp, go run some CoTF HAs. Or head to Thuliasaur or Combine. Or grind in Neriak 4th Gate, or Argin Hiz, or Tower of Rot. But I know, I know. It's Shard's Landing or bust.
So take them to run some Gribble HAs? Or to ToR or Argin Hiz? I've seen it said numerous times in this thread alone that CotF is easier than RoF. If that's the case, then why not head there for experience grinds with your returning group mates?
I thought the xp nerf was pretty crazy. I went back to RoF this past week and was playing at chapterhouse hoping for oaths of marr. I had two toons, a war (who needed no xp) and a clr (not max xp yet, so working on aa's). Every 3 mobs, the cleric would gain 1% to aa. So 300 mobs (that's a very serious xp group grinding like mad for hours and hours) would be 1 aa. That's a little excessive.
