Everquest is a very personal game with the amount of time you invest into your class-the time spent lives in your toon. Gameplay was at one time so strict you feared death, the corpse run and the items you lost if you were on a pvp server. Why does the development team have to focus on "nerfing" a class vs tuning content. If you nerf a class you inadvertently negatively and personally impact a lot of people. We keep losing so many people and pretty soon we will be down to nothing. Nobody wants to quit EQ but when you see your girlfriend or wife kissing another man you just tend to walk away. Can the development team kindly consider a alternative to nerfing classes and to change their focus to creatively tuning content? Please.
Nah, I say keep the nerfs coming. Let's see who is serious about the game and who can play with SKILL instead of a mechanic that lets you pull a zone and go afk. I'd rather see skilled players than people who think they know their class then die to one trash mob in Lcea. So yah keep em coming. Nerfs are caused by people who make things look OP. Yes the SK nerf is annoying but trust me people will find ways around this. In the future I see the decietful deflection getting nerfed to a mob limit just like mage beams. I play a SK alt and I've swarmed to PL alts but when I do play him I'm normally just grinding or questing, no real need to swarm, unless like I said just to PL an alt. IMO the chanter rune nerf is worse than the leech ability nerf. Runes are a way to keep tanks alive longer on raids stacking runes was a great strat, but now we who love a challenge will now adapt to this. So people need to stop cry-babying about nerfs and just adapt to the game. Like I said in another thread it's not "play your way" it's Pay us or ". Deal with it.
Nerfs are very important. If something is overpowered, you just break things more by boosting EVERYONE else to be just as overpowered. Anyone who says nerfs should never happen doesn't actually care about the health of the game.
Nerfs become an easier way to deal with balance when you're talking about situations where one class far surpasses its competition. Ex: Berserkers right now outshine other classes by a huge margin. You'd either have to bump up most DPS classes quite a bit, or nerf zerkers quite a bit. And if you buffed the other DPS classes you'd make the existing content much easier. I think what is better than nerf vs no nerf is small and continuous adjustments to class balance. It feels like EQ makes massive changes to class balance that people either way for years to have their class corrected or are able to take advantage of being OP for years. Whether this is because of budget shortage or the complexity of EQ I'm not sure.
They might be learning the difference between carrot and stick. Observe the recent adjustments to dailies' experience. Instead of nerfing DH XP, they removed the chance for bonus XP on it while increasing total XP on the other missions they wanted to encourage. Credit where it's due. Glares about enchanter and SK nerfs.
No point to the other missions. I can chain gun HAs with a good group faster than I can complete those stupid missions. A better solution is to get rid of the stupid has and put exp on the mobs.
Yeah this sucks double for me. I came back to EQ a few months ago after not playing since PoP. I was actually enjoying the game with my SK / Enchanter Duo each main characters on both of my all access accounts. How do you think I feel now? Not only will my SK be more of a marshmallow since I am not in a raiding guild or willing to spend 20 Krono on this drop or that drop but my Enchanter won't be able to "save the day" anymore with runes especially when I need that more than ever now. I am seriously considering quitting for good this time. This is supposed to be fun and I don't see how making things that have worked for years not work anymore while ignoring broken things is any fun. I quit EQ before because the raiding was not fun and it was more of a job than a game.They could have tuned things but instead they just used a saw and a hammer all over a few people that were abusing things. Punish the many for the deeds of the few. I actually was working my way to 105 (currently 98) and then was going to buy 2 copies of the EOK xpac which I doubt I will do now. BTW Daybreak I bought collector editions of TBM and purchased a bunch of DB cash and some Krono to get me started when I came back (PoP era gear is worthless in today's game) and now the money is cut off for you if this is how the game is going to be. I am not alone in this thinking. Knee jerk reactions and the loss of Augur? Doubt this game is going to be getting any better from what I am seeing. I came back because it looked like it was moving toward the casual player so people like me could have fun without making ti like a job where you had to have the best gear to accomplish anything or a bunch of people on at your level wanting to do the same things. LFG got so old back in PoP and if I need a group to do anything I won't bother. So many things to really fix that are broken. Like how I can crash 5 times in a row trying to set AG for instance in the advloot system. How I had to zone 3 times last night to get my tradeskill trophy to finally start evolving after it reached the end of one tier and wouldn't budge after 100 more of the same non-trivial only 35 points from current triv combines. Or how my druid with 7 trade skills at 300 can't get them any higher because he is unable to purchase the tradeskill AA despite having over 100 AAs banked and being lvl 82 when it says only requirement is lvl 60 for the AA I need to purchase. This is just last week's broken bugs that have been well bugging me and now I log in and read about this crap I camped to desktop and came here to rant. I already know one SK that is now freeplay and one that probably won't come back at all. I think I will be joining them. Who wants to play a tank that can't tank 3 mobs at a time because their innate skill only works at one mob at a time. Tunnel vision for a tank won't work. I also know some of you out there will say good riddance to a part timer that doesn't "know how to play their class" but many of us want some casual fun and aren't looking to know more about a game than they do than just about everything else. Some of us want lives too, and not part time lives either.
You should still be able to tank three mobs, just use your def tools. The only issue here is when you have multiple pulls of three or higher.
I let my sub lapse last month due to travel. I won't be coming back after reading the SK nerf. Good work Daybreak
Not much of a carrot. The t1 and t2 TDS HAs are a waste of time. You get about 3 AA running them and about 2% of the currency required to buy anything of use, including the TDS Merc gear. Even the t3 HAs require about 18-20 runs just to get enough currency and are pitiful for exp. The carrot of Gribble exp is still better. The TBM HAs are better. Not overly tedious and good currency rewards. However, the exp still sucks for time spent. The currency was a great carrot when TBM was current. Its value is diminished with EOK. The EOK HAs are back to tedious mode, give little exp for the time investment and the currency has very little to buy in relation to how many times you need to run the same three HAs to buy anything. The reward is too minor for the investment. They keep trying to engineer people away from three specific tasks without looking at why people continue to bore themselves with them. It's a design issue with the other tasks that's the problem. On the other hand, they've done a fairly good job with open world EoK zones and they are enticing.
Something that's become a common issue with nerfs is that they're not targeted at the real problem. In the case of this recent SK nerf it was an over-step on an ability that made up a small percent of what exactly is used to pull that many mobs. Allow me to lay out these abilities and what role they play in swarming... Lich Sting, Mortal Coil, Dark Absorption (the nerfed ones) - Makes our ripostes (consisting of bashes and swings) heal us for roughly 81% of damage done. This is a large contributor for trash mob in the 1-10 range, however above this the charges tick down very quickly, particularly from Lich Sting, and with a large amount of mobs residue will proc which prevents us from getting additional mortal coils. This makes it pretty unsafe to pull above 8 or so without substantial dps to back us up. Unholy Guardian (not nerfed) - Lowers our melee damage in exchange for 36% mitigation and the ability to proc a lifetap on each bash (which we do a lot of from ripostes) or block and isn't limited by counters, it's a song icon so it stacks with most everything when activated in the right order if you cancel the discipline and open another one. Visage of Decay (not nerfed) - Increases our spell damage pretty substantially, when combined with Unholy Guardian allows for our taps to keep us alive versus almost any mob in the game. It also makes our harm touch and thought leech about to virtually one-shot mobs in order to trigger potential early chances at mortal coil procs. Shield Flash & Deflection - Allows for us to have plenty of time to get our first kill utilizing Visage of Decay, Harm Touch, and Thought leech, hoping that we get an MC proc, if not then we'll definitely need unholy guardian to survive after these fade. It also allows us to get a fresh cast of Vizat's Skin before the damage starts rolling in. Vizat's Skin - Allows us to ignore a fairly large percentage of hits incoming until 40+ charges depending on the rank have been used up. Without this we take as much as 40% more damage, so it's pretty important that we keep it up. When pulling an amount of mobs over 10 or so it becomes difficult to keep Vizat's skin up due to its large recast time as well as its cast time which can get you killed pretty easily after multiple interrupted attempts. In order to survive without it and over 8 mobs we pretty much need Unholy Guardian or we're dead very quickly. ------------------ So as you can see, it's more complicated than just mortal coil and lich sting. The main boost that allows us to swarm honestly is Unholy Guardian with Visage of Decay. I've survived many pulls that I figured I would die from using those two and never receiving a proc of MC or Lich Sting. Those two are more of a helpful cushion. If Unholy Guardian's song effect had counters for each bash/block that allowed for us to tank at the very least similar mobs to the amount warriors' comfortably tank then it would solve the swarming issues without crushing our grouping performance. It's also worth mentioning that although MC and LS no longer help us on ripostes on non-targeted mobs, the counters still go down as if they do meaning that our epic fades very quickly compared to how much it's helping us for no reason. My point here isn't "boo hoo, Shadowknights shouldn't have been nerfed", it's more to the effect of "if you're going to issue such a giant nerf on a class, at least understand the mechanics that make the overpowered class do what they do and make it a TARGETED nerf." We've seen a lot of nerfs lately that not only address the problem in a minor way, but also ruin a key aspect of the class due to their methods and lack of research as to what's really going on. In some ways it's partially our fault, we always deny needing nerfs when it's clear that we do... If you would have asked me before the patch I would have said a nerf would make a lot of sense, but the nerf they gave us is simply generic and represents the problem of 5 years ago rather than the problem of this expansion.
Game integrity trumps all, and hopefully the "vision" remains intact to provide a fun, playable social game with a sandbox style that you can solo a reasonable amount of if that is your thing. Gentle tuning is better when possible compared to a larger-scale pruning. Anticipating of unintended consequences and testing is important, as well as open communication. We have seen other games make bold, sweeping changes to classes very successfully... (generally works better in the games with spec systems so you can at least switch to a not-broken spec) and fail causing classes to become unplayed. EQ has always danced between the two extremes. The exponential complexity of the game post Luclin as far as added abilities, stats, effects, level power increases, etc. makes the whole thing very complicated for the devs I would suggest. Ironically, a massive nerf to rebalance and simplify everything would probably be the solution if peak dev resources were still in place (and it would be massive as the entire item database would be broken for progression servers to do this right... so it is never going to happen). If the specific example of swarming is the issue, then the dev team needs to be precise about what their issue with it is. If swarming drains zone resources and leads to server instability then remove the ability to swarm. If it is inconvenient to other players and causes drama put reasonable limits on the abilities and/or implement some zones that are such a "swarmers candyland" that you create the space in other content. Think of the Murkglider camp in Noble's Causeway... great for a kiter or kiting group, kind of silly to take a tank and spank group there as there are better spots in nearby content. If the problem with swarming is too much xp too fast, or some other issue, be precise. If a specific issue with swarming (for example) cannot be quantified then a change is not needed.
Should never have had that as an ability (how long has it been since shakerpaging was an actual thing, which is EXACTLY .. the same deal with the Sk's .. proc's off of repo's of mobs not targeted.
