Master mercenaries should be available for 1 Krono a month

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by •Obss•, Jan 23, 2021.

  1. •Obss• Journeyman

    This should replace boxing which is dumb imo:

    Master mercenaries become available for 1 Krono a month. Then make it so you can hire more than one mercenary, these mercs could get more AAs than normal, and be group level geared for the current expansion.

    This would remove any unfair advantage by players who are able to get hardware powerful enough to box multiple accounts and are willing to pay for 3rd party software to be effective controlling all those accounts.

    Just my idea.
  2. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    Technically Master mercenaries were a part of the original plan with three ranks: Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master.

    Master mercs were scrapped for some reason.

    FWIW, boxing is not an unfair advantage any more than grouping with your friends or guildmates is.
  3. Beimeith Lord of the Game

    Supposedly they were never made available because they were too powerful...but considering how poorly the journeyman ones are, they might just be tolerable.

    The question is whether or not they were ever upgraded past level 85. Given they never went live it wouldn't have really made sense for them to continually upgrade them.
    Barton likes this.
  4. Act of Valor The Newest Member

    master mercenaries wouldn't surprise me as a future expansion feature
  5. Benito EQ player since 2001.

    Does anyone use an T3 Apprentice merc? (From my understanding, F2P is offered T2 Apprentice and Silver T5 Apprentice).

    If they are creating versions for each tier, they ought to flatten the ranking system.

    Novice (F2P)
    Apprentice (Silver)
    Journeyman (T1 Journeyman)
    Master (T3 Journeyman)
    Grandmaster (T5 Journeyman)

    Though, flattening could break the mercs or create the suspicion of stealth nerfs so I’d be ultimately against it.
  6. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Since the developers plan to not have mercenaries in game that are better than the current ones because they are intentionally much worse than group-level players this idea is dead on arrival.

    Mercs are bad because they are supposed to be, doesn't matter if your server is almost completely dead & you can never find a group anyway the devs want you to group with other human beings, of course that may involve you paying to move server to be able to find some but hey that's capitalism.
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare and Kase like this.
  7. Truesh0t New Member

    The unfair advantage of being able to buy a pentium 2 with voodoo 3 card
  8. Bigstomp Augur


    Mercs are just plain bad. Giving them more stats won't fix them just being bad. They'll just die more slowly. It's not a gear/aa/ect issue. It's just they have a very simple AI and they are dumb.
    You can fix gear, you can't fix dumb.

    As for boxing. I don't use any special software (alt+tab) but have boxed for years. My current (3ish year old machine) handles it fine. Before that I had about a 10 year old generic best buy computer with built in video and it handled it fine.

    Hardware powerful enough to run multiple accounts probably means after I pour my coffee in the morning I let the machine run some eq instances.
    (I was going to use a phone example then realized my phone is probably more powerful than my computer)
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare likes this.
  9. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Buying extra player power for kronos is "pay to win", which is something I am strongly against...:mad:
  10. CatsPaws No response to your post cause your on ignore

    Another mark in the "Pay to play" box?

    No thanks

    You have to realize there is a large player base that does not have access to large amounts of Krono. All our plat goes in to spells or current merc upkeep costs. We cannot farm or baz enough to earn any krono. We pay for the game with cold hard credit card and cannot afford to pay for Krono also.

    This will not make any difference to those accounts you reference since

    #1 they don't use buffed machines

    and most importantly #2 they don't use mercs.
  11. Angahran Augur


    So, basically you want to remove the "unfair advantage" that people with PCs capable of boxing multiple accounts have (basically any off the shelf PC that's less than 10 years old) and give that "unfair advantage" to those with more disposable income ?

    Let me guess, you fall in the 2nd category ?
  12. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    Exactly.

    Mercs are the worst. And that's good. Any better and people would burn through content like they had a full group. Grouping up is always better. Always. That's how it is. That's how it should stay.

    Agreed. Machine specs aren't steep for running EQ.

    For anyone pinching pennies on hardware, if you squeeze EQ visual features down and reduce game resolution to 1024x768 you can run 6 accounts on pretty much any potato computer. In my city, dredging the Craigslist ads for free computers usually nets you something made in the last 5 years with at least 8 GB RAM. Just get yourself a discount Win10 license for $20 and re-image the machine, grab a cheap GTX 570 ($40) or newer and you can run 6+ accounts with little to no lag.
  13. Nolrog Augur

    So basically, you want boxing, but with the computer controlling them instead of you.

    It removes the unfair advantage by players who are able to get hardware powerful enough to box multiple accounts (which is cheap by the way) and give the advantage to players who are able to afford multiple Krono a month.

    As ideas go, this is a terrible one.
  14. code-zero Augur

    You can always spot the people who have poor impulse control and accumulated ridiculous amounts of Krono and who don't know what to do with it.
  15. Nennius Curmudgeon

    And I dearly wish I had been able to loot some of the chase loot from ToV. I could then have helped them to reduce their surplus supply of Kronos. Sigh.
    Xianzu_Monk_Tunare and code-zero like this.
  16. Laronk Augur

    It's no different than people who have hundreds of millions of plat, Krono just hold their value better. That being said, improved merc for krono is just dumb. I feel there's likely less than a 0 chance that the OP's computer can't box and rather he doesn't want to put in the extra work, I don't blame him for not wanting to box though.
  17. CazRaX Elder

    I was multiboxing (3 accounts) with an E8300, 4 GB of RAM and a GT6600 GPU for years, long after they were no longer mid tier hardware. These days even a bottom barrel computer can run 3-4+ accounts without problem, I have even run 2 accounts on my laptop which runs an i5-3227u (1.9Ghz, 2 core 4 thread) and integrated Intel GPU and I'm sure I could do 3 if I had too. Anything made in the last 10-15 years will let you box with little problem so that is not an excuse.
    Gyurika Godofwar likes this.
  18. Nolrog Augur


    At one point in time, I was buying Krono whenever I could for that exact reason. Krono will increase in value over time, but plat will decrease in value as things cost more (over the course of a TLP).
  19. Qelil Augur

    Mercs are working as intended and just got some more AA levels. I doubt we'll see any further development there anytime soon. That said, I agree a new tier is something that could potentially appear in a future expansion, perhaps with a minimum level requirement to go with them. Although another tier of merc armor seems more likely to me as it is simpler and cheaper to implement.

    One simple change regarding mercs that I would like to see is for level 85 heroic characters to start with some level appropriate amount of merc AA so they are better starting off, particularly given how slow merc AA xp rates are. Either that or perhaps some form of limited autogrant AA might be even better across the board to beef them up without overpowering them.
  20. Qelil Augur

    Now that I think about it a little more, I favor the autogrant idea to cover the many times we do get to play with others and so the merc isn't out or getting any xp. Then when you do want the merc, it's potentially well behind where it ought to be for your level whatever it is.