Underfoot changes for Phinny?

PoR roadblocks were different.

That was an issue of a few mobs spawning in open world that only one person in your guild needed a drop off of so that they may request the raid.

These keys however every person in the raid needs them.

It's more comparable to the thing in PoR they actually did fix, Theatre of Blood Inspirations which everyone needed to zone into Deathknell. They instanced this.

However with ToB you were able to Key into the final zone after three cycles, which yielded 18+18+18=54 Inspirations.

In Underfoot you are getting less keys per cycle and there are multiple tiers where you need to repeat the process. So it takes a run of the mill guild rolling with 54 characters, not splitting, around 3.5-4 months to Key into Convorteum, when the expansion is planned to be only 2 months on TLPs.

This is the key and i think it bears repeating as much as possible. I strongly believe that the "standard" approach to beating the expansion (e.g. doing everything weekly without splitting) should at least be completeable in era if you don't fail any encounters.

I don't even mind if it's balanced so this approach would take 6 weeks out of a 2 month expansion (because splitting and raiding on lockout instead of weekly is still an option), but it taking 4 months out of a 2 month expansion is going to be a really bad experience.

Grudge much?

Also they did end up instancing Relic as well.

Just because I havn't seen it mentioned yet, time gating starts in SoF. This is only 2 expansions away for phinni, and would be horribly prohibitive! To get into Crystallos, it works as follows -

• Tier 1 - Need a page from both
  • Big Bynn - 12 drops
  • Deepscar - 12 drops
• Tier 2 - Need a page from each
  • Clankwrench - 12 drops
  • Spindlecrank - 12 drops
  • Mining Behemoth - 12 drops
• Tier 3 - Need Meldrath's crystal
  • Meldrath the Malignant - 12 drops

Quest Links - MMM - http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4344
Crystallos - http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=4364

That means each tier would take 4 weeks (48 keys + 6 piggies) to key through, assuming a nice static 54 man raid. Without some heavy splits (which very well may be possible I'm sure) it would take 3 months to get into the endzone... right as SoD unlocks.

Easy solution is to simply have these bosses drop 2-3x their normal amount of flagging pages. Would love to get some sort of a dev response on this, SoF is only about 4.5 months away!

No, it doesn't take that long.

Both Vulak and Fippy, the top guilds cleared the whole expansion in under a month.

You do not need to complete Tier 1 to do the Tier 2 raids, so you work on both of those at the same time. So effectively it is 2 tiers you need to work through.

36 flags is plenty to kill Meldrath, could probably be done with 24.

So if you kill each raid once a week, 15 days to get your first meldrath kill (clear the tier1/tier2 raids on day 1, 7, 15 for 36 flags.) Then Day 22 for 2nd meldrath kill, day 29 for 3rd meldrath kill, day 35 for 4th meldrath kill and into Crystallos with 54 members.

For guilds that clear on 5 day lockout, it is day 1, 6, 11 for tier1/2 and first meldrath kill. THen day 16,21, 26 for second, third, fourth meldrath and into Crystallos.

Casual guilds that don't have players showing up every week might take a few weeks longer, but everyone will easily finish it within 3 months.

I am not sure what the harm would be in doubling the drop rate of the flags. This flagging system was designed with a year between expansions in mind not three months. Guilds that raid on lockouts will still get to the end faster but it won't demoralize the casual guilds.

That being said he SoF port should have its own thread to draw attention to it.

I have consistently argued they should increase the rate of the flags on all expansions from SoF onward.

But, SoF isn't the one we really need to be concerned about. It is really Underfoot and the 2-3 after it that will be a problem. SoF and SOD will both be beaten by casual guilds in era with no changes.

Well that's comforting. But we're already getting closeish to the ~6 month timeframe we need to give them to actually get things done on Underfoot+

It's fun to see many people thinking the problem will be number of flags because they think they will destroy Underfoot + expansions beating all raids on first attempt like they did on earlier expansions.
Many guilds will get an unpleasant surprise when they are there, will be fun to watch the drama inc then.

The guilds that roll into it with 45+ mains showing up to raids likely will destroy it, except for maybe 1-2 events. With the huge DPS boosts since we played through it on Fippy, AND a big AC boost that incidentally only takes effect at level 85, the content is going to be far less challenging than in the past.

I said Underfoot + and I put a s at expansion. Yeah Underfoot won't kill every guild on the server. It will start to thin the number of raids guilds. Then Veil of Alaris last tier of raids will kill another round of guilds. At this stage, starting with The Darkened Sea, there won't be any easy expansion. In fact, each expansion is harder than the former one. RoS harder than EoK which is harder than TBM which is harder than TDS. Underfoot will look very easy compared to these expansions. 45 + mains won't destroy stuff there.

Even the version that Fippy saw was nerfed 4-5x per event from the original versions of the events.

I suspect Underfoot will be like most TLP experiences, a nice reminder but no real challenge presented to guilds fielding full forces. It's not the 5-10+ wipes while you figure out events anymore.

They really ought to just change Underfoot to 12 weeks. SoD+UF are good enough to spend 12 weeks each in, and gives every guild that farmed tower a legit shot at beating UF.

12 week xpacs:
Classic / Kunark / Velious / Luclin / PoP / OOW / TSS / SoF / SoD / UF / HoT / VoA / RoF / TDS / RoS

8 week xpacs:
GoD / DoN / DoDH / PoR / TBS / CoTF / TBM / EoK

XPACS THAT SHOULD NEVER BE RELEASED AS STANDALONE XPACS ON TLP SERVERS EVER AGAIN:
LDoN

There probably will be a few events that will still take 5-10 wipes for most guilds. It won't be every event though.

I think there is some merit to proportioning the time on progression to the time on live.

In other words, when expansions switched from 6 months to a year on live, they should also increase in duration on TLP.

I don't see the point in rushing through the last couple expansions and suddenly catching up to live and having to wait a year if you want any more content.

It should be adjusted by how long the expansion will actually take, if anything, not how long it took them to release it. The yearly released expansions are for the most part not any larger or more content than the semiannual expansions. Even the first few, SoD-->HoT, aren't any bigger than SOF or TSS. And the more recent expansions are considerably smaller, often just a handful of zones and raids, as they were produced with a much smaller dev team. There is no reason to stretch an expansion with a month of content into six months, just because live players had to put up with it for a year.

For quick comparison purposes, the last semiannual expansion--SoF--took twice as long for us to beat on Fippy as the first annual expansion--SoD. If I had to pick one to be stuck in for six months, I'd take SoF over SoD any day.

they should just change all phini releases to either 3 or 4 months imo

Flagging systems should allow a single clear of a tier sufficient to move on the next tier.

You shouldn't need to farm a single tier for several weeks to progress into the next one on a TLP server.

Exactly.

Would really appreciate a Dev response here. The current silence is deafening.

I don't want my Phinny adventure to end in a few expansions.