Leveling post 50 is horrible.

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Ultrazen, Jan 18, 2019.

  1. Ultrazen Augur

    I love EQ, I've been playing since release. I've come back to the game more times than I can count, and have leveled probably hundreds of characters to one extent or another at this point. I always end up hitting the same wall.

    There is a fundamental problem with leveling in EQ post 50, and it's psychological as well as mechanical. Simply put, the player doesn't scale with mob inflation. Post 50, your character literally gets worse every time you ding, in relation to mob power. I think this is a huge mistake. When you combine it with the grind you need to do to level, especially post 70 or so, it just becomes more tedious than it's worth.

    I hate to bring up WoW, but, I'm going to bring up WoW. When you level in WoW, your character retains more or less, the same relative power to the mobs as you level. More mechanics are introduced, but the basic power level of your character doesn't go backwards, at least for quest/leveling mobs. WoW saves extreme mode, for raiding and instanced content. This is smart, because it gives players a means to just raw level their character, without it being a fight to death every second. Leveling shouldn't be something "challenging" per se. This becomes more and more of a problem, the higher the level cap is, and the longer it takes to get there. The slog in EQ is just flat ridiculous at this point.

    Go ahead, make raids as tough as you want. Make instances as tough as you want. Make the toughest content ever put into a game, I'm fine with that.

    If you smoothed out the leveling curve in this game, and could make the relative player strength remain what it is at level 50, I will bet you any amount of money that your subs would grow exponentially. You have the numbers, look at when people unsub, what level are their characters? I don't have access to the numbers, but I'll be it's somewhere around level 75.

    It's not just the time sink, and it's not just the relative mob power, it's the timing of things. This game absolutely falls apart post 70 in terms of how long it takes cast, and how quickly people die. I'll give you an example. I was 3 boxing my level 70 somethings in DSH, monk, mage, chanter. Monk was pulling in mino camp, mage and chanter were parked in camp with healer merc, tank merc, DPS merc. Mage got agro from a mino that patrolled, and was dead before the tank merc or the healer merc could even react. This is idiotic, and is 100% the opposite of what's great about EQ earlier in the game. EQ is best when it's not "blink and you're dead". EQ is best when it's a war of attrition, and that's something that gets lost at higher levels.

    Everquest is a fantastic game, and is now starting to be thought of as one of the best, and something to maybe revisit. You have a chance right now, to really rejuvenate this game. I really believe you could have a resurgence for EQ if you worked on making the player experience post 50 something other than torture.

    Your character feeling like it's going backwards vs mob power, for leveling, is absolutely horrible feeling. It's depressing, disparaging, disheartening, and a weird combination of boring and frustrating.
    Risiko likes this.
  2. Dythan Ban Lev in Plane of Fire guy

    You need to stop and gear every 5 levels. That tutorial gear really stops hold in up in the 70's.
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare and Risiko like this.
  3. Alarya Augur

    This is the reason why PLing is such a lucrative business. The ancient devs did not know how to balance very well, so there are a lot of times where you will run into this problem. You can avoid it by hunting in the newer areas and using the newer gear drops, but you will not run into a smooth game play until 85+ (hence the heroic system introduction). If you are on FV, however, then you can easily get twinked out for a 1-75 run.
    Risiko likes this.
  4. Mazame Augur


    With the number of toons you leveled I would think that by now you would understand how to level.
    Going back to the start EQ was always hard to level between the skill level needed to play. the Required grouping and most of all the "HELL levels" it was a nightmare to level back in the beginning.

    Today I would completely disagree with you post. In a good weekend you can take a toon from 1-85 with very little effort.

    A war merc can level any char to level 50 with out a healer. past 50 yes the merc starts to drop off but by that time you should have a good grasp on you char and need to start learning more tricks to help you latter on.

    The first trick would be to learn where to grind and where to go. a few helpful guides is the Heroic Journey quest line. It tells you the level that you can handle those quest and what zones to go to.
    Next is the POK daily quest givers. These quest do 3 things for you:
    1st that give an exp bonus to help you level faster.
    2nd they take place in hot zones so again more XP.
    3rd they give you better then avg gear for your level.

    EQ is NOT WOW where they hand you everything on a stick just for logging in. You have to put some effort into the game and that is why most people that play EQ and not wow do so because we don't want a hand out for everything.

    The next thing to consider is the AA they start around 50 and so yes going from a toon with no aa to having to start getting aa will slow you down a bit but not much.

    IF you do want a hand out then EQ had done so with the heroic toons they take you to 85 past the point you struggle. they give you full gear / AA / Spells / Required attachments live the DoN. This is what you should have gotten when leveling by the time your 85. so Yes if your not farming gear / AA / achievements and just focusing on leveling you will fall behind in power because your not where you should be for the context your trying to tackle.

    Your "mage died"

    ok 1st why where you camping in a spot that had " Patroll" ? For EQ you need to learn where safe spots are to camp these are area where you can set up a group that lets you fight on your terms and not having to worry about respawns or roaming mobs.

    2nd pull mobs to your camp that you need to kill. you have a monk and a chanter both are very good at pulling. you can use the monk to split pull single or use the chanter to pull single or groups and then CC them. Pulling is a big part of EQ that is not in WOW where you just face roll what ever your doing.

    3rd a Mage is a CLOTH wearing Squishy. Yes if a mage get aggro it is going to die. you can fix this with Gear and AA but at 70 your going to need to be smart and avoid getting hit. A merc at level levels can save you but by 70 merc tanks are junk. If you want with your group set up I would look at having your mage pet take over tanking or your Monk. you can then get a 2nd cleric and or a DPS merc to help make things die faster. Also look into doing the Journeyman quest line for your merc to power them up a bit. also you will want to start looking for merc gear as well.

    Is the Game harder from 50-70 then it was from 1-50? Yes but only because you have a lot more to do each level. But it is still way to easy to level compared to when EQ started. If your looking to enjoy the level from 50-85 then know it will take time. If you want to just rush past them then know it will make the level harder and harder until you get gear and AA to mach.
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  5. bigpapa Augur

    is your mage pet on Hold / g-hold < if you get attacked , pet should attack that npc right away and usually get and keep agro?
  6. Ceffener Augur

    I will say level 70 is like hitting a brick wall in speed of leveling 1-69. But 75+-90 (so far) HA’s seem to give a lot of XP. The thing is EQ does drastically change as you level. If you think 1-50 is “the game” (which a tank Merc can solo for you), then you’ll hate the game when you have 4 hotbars of abilities and 10kAA all of a sudden.

    If anything 1-60 should be changed to reflect what the higher end is more like, but when you can complete that grind in an afternoon it isn’t that big of a deal.

    But your mage died because your 3 boxing. In a real group the ench would have mezed the roamer, or the mage would have had pet take Aggro, even with mercs the death in that case is because your focus was on pulling. That’s just a downside to playing 3 characters at once.
  7. Tarvas Redwall of Coirnav, now Drinal

    There needs to be a set of quests (Hero's Journey type) that can take a single character with apprentice merc (cleric or tank) from 1 - 100 with appropriate gear set rewards in my opinion. At 100 a character should be powerful enough to do COTF with an appropriate group. This is based off of the impression that I have that there is minimal grouping opportunities between 1 - 100 and the difficulty of the climb to 100. The devs may have a different understanding of the possibilities between new and returning players who have lost their accounts between those levels.

    My own experience is based off of following the hero journey from 1 - 55 with an untwinked monk.
    Risiko likes this.
  8. Ecchicon Elder

    Which in turn is probably one of the reasons players are complaining that TBL is overtuned.
  9. Quill Augur

    Play on Firiona Vie. Then you'll understand why people play on FV and want a TLP with Free Trade.

    Its like the best twink gear server ever. Things get a lot more balanced and destructive when you can use good weaponry and gear for the level :).

    On a regular server, that stuff is all gated behind raid content that you will not be killing.
    Risiko likes this.
  10. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    To sum up, you want EQ to be:
    • Encouraging
    • Linear
    • Accessible to all
    Go back to WoW. That's the best advice I have for you. Sorry if that's mean. But EQ is what it is. WoW was designed to be the things you're asking EQ to be. Which is precisely the reason EQ players choose not to play WoW.
  11. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    Holy crap, the OP 3 boxes, and still can't handle open-zone content that's level appropriate? Something else is going on here, cause that isn't really anybody else's experience.

    OP, there's something fundamental you're missing, or doing, which isn't how it's meant to be done. Try to get together with another player, or boxer, and see if you can figure it out. Because 3-boxing, level appropriate content in the 70s should be pretty easy.

    Only other thing I can think of, are these F2P accounts (i.e. don't have any/many AAs)? Once you hit the 70s, not having any AAs makes a big difference. And these days, with auto-grant, you can have ALL the AAs available at your level.
    snailish likes this.
  12. Quill Augur

    Also, above and beyond FV for decent gear, if you really find this a problem, get the Defense skill up to par on the casters. That'll help fix what ails you and prevent them from going up in a cloud of smoke.
    Risiko likes this.
  13. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    CA and CS AAs help quite a bit, too. Along with the ones which give you more HPs.
    Risiko likes this.
  14. Quill Augur


    He should have gotten those via Autogrant, though. The more HP stuff doesn't mean squat in his situation.

    Either way, not having Defense up to max is a completely different type of ouch from not having CS and CA, as he will not have his base avoidance for the level until he gets it up to par.

    At that point, CS, CA, and HP AA barely matter.. the toon will get annhilated. On the bright side, he has a mage so it should by and large be academic to fix as dueling the pet should still work, yes? Also, never played a mage, the pet getting hit does or does not count towards Defense bumps towards the mage? I'm 99% sure it does for the person hitting the pet.
  15. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    We don't know if he's F2P or all-access, so don't know if he has them or not.

    And more HPs does mean squat. At max rank (not sure where OP is at), they add 9000 HPs and 23% of total health (not sure how the math works, do you get the 23% bump on the 9000?), so nothing to sneeze at. Unless you don't have 'em.

    Oh, and the little detail that dying is caused by the lack of... HPs. More HPs is more time to deal with a situation.
  16. Quill Augur

    At level 50-70-ish.. which is where he claimed to be, you don't have um, and his AC is probably **** too as he likely isn't well-geared, so he'll be getting max hit a lot in a zone that iirc can hit for 1K+.

    Either way, we're not talking about a 110 toon here. At 70-ish, he'll be barely getting any HP from AA. You get what.. Planar Power and maybe some ranks of Sturdiness? Possibly some ND but I don't know when or if Mages get that. I'm fairly sure at that level you're not talking a lot and will likely be < 500. HP AA come into their own later. IIRC, Sturdiness and the concept of simply giving 100HP a rank started with GoD.

    At the level we're talking about, Its really not. Particularly in comparison to Defense. Keep in mind Defense is like 30% or more avoidance on a Mage. If you don't have it, pretty much most hits of a round will land. IIRC my numbers proper, every 10 Defense is the equivalent of 1% Avoidance. Its absolutely massive.

    The way the game works it takes what you would normally get in other games, strips them, and provides them back in a linear scale as melee skills as you level. But if you don't skillup your melee defense skills, you don't get those benefits that each level provides. This, in turn, is the penalty you take for basically PL'ing a character, and you need to fix it before the toon performs properly in regards to the damage it can take or avoid, for its level.

    Until then... just don't get hit. If pathers are broadsiding the group, find a better camp that doesn't have pathers, particularly if 3-boxing and maybe not being adept with that setup yet. Putting your back to a wall is almost universally regarded as sound practice.
  17. AlmarsGuides Augur

    I have talked about this problem extensively on my website in my leveling guides: https://www.almarsguides.com/eq/leveling/RoS/

    Basically the problem is extremely simple, starting at 65 - 75 they implemented about a dozen different expansions, each one they scaled the monsters difficulty up without providing a level cap increase. You can go from PoP zones to TSS zones and get demolished by the enemies because they hit 3x as hard.

    You have a few options to circumvent this difficulty,

    1. Get current x-pac gear. Defiant just doesn't cut it post 65.
    2. Start boxing. Honestly I have never met a single player who solo'd 1 - max level. Ever. If anyone did accomplish this monumental task it would take 6+ months based on my math of killing enemies 12hrs every single day. It's absolutely nuts.
    3. Hang out in extremely easy zones and level in those, you should choose your zone based on the expansion it came from (like my website shows you). You can hang out in PoP zones until 70-75 and then move onto easy mobs in DSH, then to easy mobs in Oceangreen hills, then to easy mobs in House of Thule etc etc. There is a path you can follow but you need to know a lot about EQ to know the proper path, hence why I wrote my guides.

    That's really all you can do to overcome this insane mob scaling issue that EQ has. My website beats this point into everyone as they're leveling. I tell people when to upgrade gear, what to search the bazaar for or how to obtain gear at that specific level range (I need to add more to my 70 - 90 section for this stuff)... But I basically try to alleviate this exact problem as best as I can. It's a shame I don't see people recommending my leveling guide when people ask in general where to hunt - because I guarantee most people who don't use my leveling guide won't hit max level. They'll hit a wall and quit the game; I have seen it happen hundreds if not thousands of times.
  18. Bigstomp Augur

    Find some friends and gear up. The game is not hard. It does stop being an absolute gimme once you start to level up closer to modern.

    A no tank, no healer group is also generally bad. Yes, your chanter can be amazing sometimes, other times not so much.
  19. bigpapa Augur

    you should not have problem 3 boxing ** depending if you have very few aa's on each toons **.

    with your mage you got tanking ( pet) pulling ( via coh ) and dps .
    your chanter is good at cc and can do some dps. and can pull as well,
    and with your monk you can pull as well and dps .

    if you are limited on your aa's , put some aa;s into pet defensive ability , it will be better than your tank merc..

    btw what server are you playing at? in FV ( firiona vie you can level 50% faster than other server with a permanent 50% xp running } , I could help you with TBM armors and augments ( and more * free* ) if you play there as well.

    = it is easy to level in EQ now , a lot less if you stay FTP all the time , that will catch you soon or later, specially with the lack of aa's ..
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  20. snailish Augur

    3 box with 3 mercs with at least defiant gear should relatively easily be able to get to 75 in TSS zones. With some setbacks as you learn which ones suit your setup (i.e., Icefall Glacier has some great kiting).

    But OP isn't wrong that 51-65 can be a boring grind. You can have that 1-51 too, just wear the original intended gear you earn for the level. AKA since early days almost nobody does the low content as intended, probably because it would take too long. Often killing in a light blue hotzone will level you faster because it is safer... basically negates the mob power increase in the 50+ content.

    OP is absolutely correct that the game has moved away from one of the greatest features it has: tactical combat. Every game now is twitchy/bursty. Coming from a necromancer background... weaving and using the toolkit of abilities to drop a hard mob in 2-3 minutes is more fun than a 20 second spank that you have time to do one thing (removes all the nuance and reason for class utility from the game) BUT... we follow the XP. They can't just make everything 5x harder to kill if it means every 1% of xp is also 5 times harder --that balance has to remain.

    Luclin content is a good example... most places mobs have way more HP than comparable Kunark zones. Luclin zones with really good ZEM, decent spawns and friendly mechanics are used to level in and the rest of a great content expac is ignored (see progression servers for modern proof), if it was baseline XP across all level 40-60 zones you'd be crazy to use Luclin at all (outside of a quest reason or loot drop).

    The point being, what they could do for future content is up the mob survival time when tuned against an expected level-appropriate group... but also turn up the ZEM to keep the XP-per-hour ratio at least as good (ideally better). Even if some zones were done this way... you could then choose between twitchy and tactical content. A bigger sandbox of options.