Revert Innate Melee Changes

Countless arguments can be made towards why and why not. The question is what sense does it make to change it now? Agnarr is currently enjoying their final progression, ie the reason people chose to play the server, and now get struck with it.

There are guilds that will absolutely suffer from the loss of dps, which could in turn result in loss of population. I for one, am not ok with having cleared all current content and finally getting to a good spot to cruise along, gear up and enjoy just to increase the difficulty at all.

TLP servers shouldn't have ever had the innate lines, but they did, leave it as it was. The argument is invalid when rain of fear banestrikes are added. At a certain point the damage is done, worry about current content balancing and leave old content alone.

Om nom nom tears. Do focus effects next!

PoP is absurdly easy. even if this change is 20% dps loss to all melee characters(which it doesnt seem to be near that much) PoP would still be stupid easy.

I dont know what you are talking about. I cant wait for the 30 min lady nev fight to turn into even a longer fight. Bellowing winds is the best! Spin stun amiright? Barely edges out timed deathtouches as the most dumb boss effect in game.

All kidding aside if these changes are noticable for raid targets then that is bad news for TLP. There are already a ton of fights that are marathons ( vulak, lady nev, tunare, trash clears in Vex Thal, PoE clears ).

But hey at least we have levitate over Plane of Fire and enc pets! >=)

Yeah it wont matter so much in PoP. Now Coirnav though, velious motm bosses on top of a melee dps nerf? son, that's gonna be glorious to read about the six hour AoW and Lady Nev fights.

Or you know try to balance / make things better for the future of other servers or future servers, IE Coirnav will get a better challenge post PoP, Phinny gets a bit more challenge TSS+ and any new server gets more challenging content from the get go if they choose to do another TLP (Which we will know they will).

The melee changes are minimal, they arent going to make or break any competent raid force. Yeah some stuff will be a little harder, you might wipe once in a while if you were struggling before and may actually have to gear up before blowing through end bosses, but in reality as someone who played non stop since Phinny launch this content has been, while fun, weak. I keep wondering when real challenges will come. Classic/Kunark raids were laughable with a 30+ man raid force. Velious AoW was fun cause of MOTM but I dont think any cleric in a 1 second chain agrees. Nev/ Vulak are going to suck regardless, now just slightly longer. Luclin was neat but not overly difficult, VT will be a little longer fights but they werent hard to begin with. PoP TZ is the only semi hard mob. Then MOTM goes away, which did make some NToV, Emp etc raids "hard" by just making them longer.

GoD was supposed to be hard, most guilds beat it in 1 shot. OoW the only way you lose is not clicking OMM masks. DoDH MM with a minimal raid force past raid time was pretty cool, but a joke after that. PoR hardest part was getting people not to go in the god damn trap room. TSS Lethar 2 is the only real "hard" fight.

So yeah, 8% reduction is half the raid, so 4% total reduction in overall raid performance? Sounds pretty reasonable.

Oh and before you say "sure for a hardcore raid guild" I am the leader of LoTA, we finish content as one of the last guilds every Xpack, we are as casual as you get 2 days a week raiding with no raid attendance requirements etc. We have fun and beat up dragons, but beating up dragons has been fairly easy so far, I hope that with this change and future tougher Xpacks supposedly coming for TLP's (others would know better as I didnt play previous TLP's) we take more than a few attempts for mobs to beat them and they actually feel like accomplishments.

Just the other side of the coin since you want to only think about your view and how coasting in PoP must be the most important thing to all TLP's.

PS - I do feel for those servers in Velious, MOTM plus this will make Nev/Vulak a bigger pain in the a$$, however I still dont think a slight reduction in melee DPS will make guilds unable to defeat it flat out, assuming this ends up as bad as the worst people have said, 15%, thats still only a average of max 10% less DPS and approx 10% more time killing these already crappy MOTM mobs.

long fights in velious and luclin is about as old school as old school eq gets. the melee dps aa's should never have been put in at early levels, and i exclusively play melee classes. its a nice addition, sure, but the fact that we still have an innate 24% melee damage AA at 60 is insane.

This does not take into account motm, especially at lower levels. AoW w/ motm and old school AoW are two very different beasts.

Coasting in PoP isnt applicable to all TLP's , I agree. My argument for Agnarr was that PoP is the be all end all for the server. It simply doesn't sit well with me that literally a patch can change the game negatively and change the exact content we just cleared yesterday even if its only 5%.

Revert spells! Give me back the original Thunder of Karana! You know, the Silence!

Um. Most definetly needed and welcome change. Keep up the good work DBG. Now just fix acct to acct transfers.

I can certainly appreciate your opinion and how it effects you, and I get that you see it as being a bad change you don't like. My point was merely that I feel it is a good thing and look forward to seeing how it effects Phinigel, my server, we all look at things from how they impact us, the devs job is to figure out what will benefit the most people in the best way, its impossible to please everyone and impossible to make any changes that wont hurt some people. I hope they thought it out enough and decided on this course because it will make the overall TLP's better and more fun for more people, hence my counter point to your point that changing something after its been around for a while is bad and negative and should be reverted.

those are two seperate issues. even if the melee aa were removed completely, motm would still be needed. our characters are vastly more powerful based on skill caps alone, without any innate AA.

For sure. Such changes ideally would be on a server by server basis. The greater good in mind, its high risk/high reward but at the detriment of many others.

People always get upset when something is taken away from them.

However it is necessary sometimes for the balance of the game. It may take them a long time to realize there is an issue and act. But at the end of the day they do need to nerf things rather than just boosting other areas of the game. Continually boosting the lowest performing classes makes the game far too easy of a faceroll after a while. Sometimes the classes at the top need to be taken down to reality.

As for Velious... don’t farm all of it every week. You’ll just replace all of that gear without fail in Luclin. Maybe hit ToV every other week if the boss fights are too long for you to regularly manage.

Huh? Don't farm it every week? What's the fun in that... bottom line the game should be fun, making it 20 year old content take longer is a poor band aid...period.

Look, melee dps changes are taking away from the real problems that exist in EQ today. Levitate still needs to be disabled in zones like Pofire.

And instead of dragons in Ntov being rooted with call of the zero, they should be tethered to their little alcove instead. Dain should also be tethered to his throne area.

Putting aside all the worthless trolls gleefully celebrating and calling for more nerfs because they want to play an impossibly hard version of the game that no longer exists and would cause the death of the game from mass quitting if it ever came back...yes these changes should have been reverted and done the right way.

There are some eras where melee are absurdly, ocomically overpowered (OoW comes to mind. On burn fights my monks do around 3k DPS while my mage and wizards do 800-1600) but there are also eras where casters pull way too far ahead (during PoP and GoD for example my mage was consistently beating almost everyone except trueshot rangers)

This change was poorly thought out and even more poorly implemented. A blanket nerf to all melee on progression servers is just inept. In eras like Omens it will have little effect because melee is so absurdly powerful still that casters are still going to be left in the dust and mobs are still going to melt. And in eras where melee are already weak, it’s going to be even worse. Bards and paladins don’t even need to bother attacking at this point. So thanks for that I guess.

The correct solution was to buff caster damage in the level 70 eras and nerf melee only in level ranges where they are actually overpowered

The changes were made because the melee AA's were introduced to fix a problem with lvl 105 melee tuning. In doing so, they broke the game for lvls 65-85 as melee DPS were far, far too powerful. They're *still* far, far too powerful, as they didn't eliminate entirely the innate melee AA or get rid of the SoF raider lvl heroic stats melees walk around with now on these servers, but they're not quite as broken anymore and it's an overall improvement to the game.

Monks trash casters in GoD on these servers. It's not close at all. A wizard burning 7th+FD+courage+staunch etc still can't beat a well played monk. Wizards cant even burn and beat monks on Ukun Bloodfeaster (PBAOE fight, how ridiculous is it--by the way--that someone hitting something with a stick is better at doing AOE damage than someone casting a magic spell?!) Casters peak the first month of PoP, a month in melee have their weapons and a ton of heroic dex and casters are mostly just dead weight in a raid that could be a monk. Sure you need a necro for DMF and a wizard to AOE tl and a mage to give your priests and hybrids modrods and 2 enchanters. The optimal 54-man raid in GoD is gonna have 1 caster group 3 tank groups and 5 melee groups. It's disgusting.