It would have helped a lot of have the same kind of one off XP rewards in CoV. I've been helping a returning player get raid ready and we made it to 110 fairly quickly. At 113 now and only have another 10-15 hrs of grinding to do before we can jump through the heroics and hit 115 then start on the 30000+ AA's which is about 600 hrs ...
Fair enough. I have my good share of deaths, and Overseer always keeps me capped at 99.999% experience, so I never have to worry about it.
Once I got 3% into level 115, I switched over to 100% AAxp, and earned the rest of level 115 with overseer alone. Even with all my deaths/raid-wipes, I maxed my level without any problems. TIP: if you have your merc out when you select the XP-overseer-reward, then your merc also get good xp.
ToV was without a doubt where the devs wanted to change a lot in the XP gain department and they clearly built ToV with Overseer XP in mind. The XP per mob in ToV is actually comparable to the XP per mob in prior expansions, however what changes is the amount of XP required per level - in that regards the amount of XP each level needs is escalated a huge amount over prior expansions, hence why mob kill XP is a very low % of the total you need per level. You really should leave your AA at 100% & get level XP from missions/partisans/mercenary achievements and yes, Overseer. You ARE being forced to play in a way you are not used to & that's what the devs wanted, if you are feeling railroaded, well yes you are being railroaded, so may as well accept that and start getting used to it as I think how ToV is will be how EQ will be moving forwards. Personally speaking I hated being railroaded & I hate how buggy the tasks are in EW so I quit, at least for the time being, maybe once the game is a few expansions beyond ToV with this XP model they will review what they are doing and how it completely destroys the open feel EQ used to have with the game being vastly less open now than it has ever been in its history.
I feel the same as you, I don't like the forced theme park style of having to complete all the quests and missions. The quest system in this game is really, really terrible, and with as few quests as there are they should be bug free. More than half the tasks are just straight kill mob type tasks. Also not sure, if you encountered it yet but in ToV, some of the location update spots have a re-use timer on them of a few minutes until they update for another player. Tangentially, having to complete all the achievements for evolving items sucks. I used to like just being able to log-in to a raid, and have that be my gameplay loop but the evolving items made it that you have to complete everything. I hate tradeskills. I hate camping some corner waiting for RNG to reward me a rare spawn because it's on a list. Collections are simply the worst non-content to ever exist in a game. The argument will be that you don't need the evolving items. However, this game is about a series of compounding minor improvements. I used to feel I owed it to the rest of the raid to make my character that extra couple percent better, because it adds up across 54 people. It always come back to the echo chamber in these forums in regards to design dissent, "You're going to do that stuff anyways." No, I wasn't and many others weren't going to either.
Hmmm... hadn't thought of that. I did turn on AAXP on my bard to get enough for the Insult line focus AA and I was caught off guard by how quickly it went. I hear you. I'm not terribly motivated to play, I'll admit.
Its working as intended. We complained over and over about leveling being a joke, so they decided to make it take more than one afternoon to max exp. AA exp comes just as fast as before. It is just leveling takes longer. And no, you don't have to do the missions if you don't want to and don't have to do overseer. It definitely makes it faster. Overseer for me was more for merc aa to be honest, I have claimed so much wasted character exp on my main just to grind out merc aa. Alts do collection items they may have missed and ts items. So has been great. The "echo chamber" is people sick of having people come on here and complain about being "forced" to do exp a certain way, when they aren't. If you want to do 10%-15% of a level in a grind group in a few hours, go for it, it is what you had to do for like 40-50 other levels in this game.
I just think people forgot what a "hell-level" was. It has been ages since we had that last time, so It came as a surprise in ToV.
a hell level is not the same as 5 hell levels in a row. apart from that the fact that the items you loot on your journey can only be equiped at 115 really sucks balls, especially for alts. i too dont like the set up to have to do progression in order to get the levels in a reasonable amount of time ( it doesn't have to be like 1 day to hit max level again ). but in ToV the balance is certainly gone between mob xp and task/achievement xp. Give us the choice imo. i know we're a small group now on the last stages of a tlp server, but the must to get a group together to do all the tasks and missions, is hurting badly. such a shame, since we're so close to live now, we can almost taste it.
True, in level increase expansions, they should be a little more flexible regarding item level requirements. And it was actually 108+, so 7 hell-levels in a row, iirc(at least if 108-110 was earned in RoS) I wouldn't mind if they adjusted the level-curve a bit, or increased the xp from kills. But I guess the Devs wanted each level to take a week of grinding...At least you can skip grinding to max 115, if you use overseer.
A) It’s forced, if one path is over-incentivized. B) Where else would you expect people to submit feedback and complaints? “Hell” levels typically came before a significant step in character progression for example 59 to 60. Leveling in the early era of EQ was the focal point of the game, so it made sense to drag out the process as there was a wide swath of content and players to fill the leveling pools. In modern EQ, a level increase represents a character setback and obstacle to normal gameplay. There is no gameplay changes from 111-115 just attempting to recover your character’s relative power level.
If I had my druthers, the couple minutes I spent in the Return to the Return to Crystal Caverns to buy stuff off vendors would have been far more time than I ever wanted to spend in that zone for the rest of my life and then some. Of all the things we keep getting to revisit, THAT place? Twisty, headache inducing bright white colored nonsense corridor zone?
Leveling in Kunark 51-60 is pretty comparable to leveling in ToV 111-115 purely from grinding. Doing quests/missions just offers a fast pass option for those so inclined. In a game titled EverQuest, I don't think that is the worst thing in the world. Overseer also allows a fairly passive bypass route. If you just log in every day and run 5 Level 5 12hour missions every day, it will take you about 3months to get to level 115 with no other inputs. If you are more active about it you can log in twice at the beginning and end of the day and run two sets and cut that time in half.
The thing I found most infuriating about playing on a TLP server is that the dev team keep making the same mistake over & over. That mistake being that they make changes for the live game that they do NOT take into account for the TLP servers later down the line, they don't think about them, they don't plan ahead or around them, they wait until players are screaming & complaining about them & then they maybe do something about them, everything is after the fact & even then if they don't fit into their schedule well tough cheddar, your TLP will just have to put up with it, the next one might have to as well, maybe even a few TLP will have to and they'll get around to it long after the original complaint was raised & after a bunch of paying customers had to deal with the crappy situations caused by that. The XP paradigm of ToV is just the latest example of that same series of failures to plan & adapt TLP properly. On Live servers, players have 12 months to progress their characters between expansions, that's 12 months to earn money for next year's spell & tradeskill costs, 12 months to gain levels & AA & 12 months to gear up. Over on TLP they half-a** it, sure we had with ToV double loot right off the bat, but that was the first expansion other than Underfoot to do that, all the others we had the same loot drop rate as live had but 1/4 of the time, we had to fight to get currency rates bumped up. XP, AA rates on Phinigel at least were the same as Live but with 1/4 of the time to gain them. Now we have ToV which dramatically raised the XP required to gain levels & yet Phinigel TLP gets the same XP & aaxp rate as live yet again - so if you are doing the progression, great that works the same as live you'll level as fast as they did from that. If you are struggling with the progression or cannot get groups, well now your levelling is massively slower than prior expansions but you still only have a 12 week window before the next expansion unlocks not 12 months. It's a situation that requires really very small amounts of forward thinking to identify yet it has simply not been addressed. I try to avoid saying things like "the devs don't care" but at this point I have come to the conclusion that they deliberately stop paying attention to the concerns of TLP players that are in later expansions because they don't see the population that plays that late as worth enough to them to waste their time looking after them. TLP are not currently about providing customers with a good journey from 1-Live, they are all about milking the cash cow as much as possible & providing a "good enough we can get away with it" level of service, for as little effort as that requires. Now that will possibly get better over time, but my opinion of what the TLP concept provides currently is that it's benefits taper off a lot the closer to live the TLP gets and by the time you are in the final stretch of expansions you can consider yourself, your guild & your entire server a forgotten about demographic, you are no longer enough players to be an economic concern. I enjoyed many aspects of the TLP "Journey to live" but the obvious lack of planning involved was not one of them, the constant fight to get improvements made was tiresome by the end, no wonder so many quit already. If I was asked if I would recommend EQ TLP to a friend I would say no, it is an under-developed concept that has been poorly planned, poorly realised, poorly implemented & amounts to little more than a desperate and borderline exploitative attempt at monetising many players real desires to return to EQ or to relive the journey they took many years ago, but there is definitely potential in the concept that has not been properly iterated upon so that situation may change, give it a few more years of failing to meet that potential and the devs slowly building upon the concept before you try it, there is a lot of work that yet needs to be done to make the TLP concept truly worth your money or your time. It's only part-baked right now. EQ can do so much better than this and the players decades of loyalty deserves better, not just on TLP but on Live too, the TLP just highlights where all the holes are that should have been filled in but the money to do it was wasted on all those failed projects. TLP classic to PoP recycling - 8/10 (2015-2017) TLP journey to live - 5/10 (2015 to 2021)
Historically, the EQ franchise just pumps out mediocre content rather than fixing or delivering quality content. They just rapid fire pump out an expansion to cover up the issues of the last. There's only point in EQ history where they went back and fixed things was that era with PoP-GoD-era. The big name guilds actually got together with SOE and got them to delay OoW, and fix their broken stuff albeit not in 14 days. Guild Summit: http://thedruidsgrove.org/archive/eq/t-8094.html Omens Delay: http://thedruidsgrove.org/archive/eq/t-8000.html Hello Norrath! I wanted to announce that we've decided to push Omens of War back to Late August in order to give the EQ team time to respond to important issues that the EverQuest community is raising (specifically including the issues with Gates of Discord). We've heard some concerns from within the community that we feel are important enough to push back our next expansion and spend time fixing the problems you have brought to our attention. At the end of the day, we work for you and it's important for us to demonstrate that we both understand and appreciate that. We're also inviting many members of the community to join us here at SOE for a day to have a direct dialog with the development team about issues that are important to the EverQuest community as a whole. We've already sent out the invitations and are making all the arrangements. In addition, our EQ community managers will be coming up with a list of issues raised on the message boards so that we can come back to you with a specific list of things we're going to address. I'm sorry if you feel we haven't been listening and reacting appropriately. We do our best to balance all of the needs and concerns you raise along with expanding Norrath and giving you new and wonderful things to do in EverQuest, but we do make mistakes. We've heard you loud and clear. We have many things planned for EverQuest over the upcoming years, and our goal is to keep you happily playing EverQuest for a long time to come. The best way for us to do that is by first and foremost is by listening to you. John Smedley President, Sony Online Entertainment
I don't recall Overseer and P2W options being available during Kunark. Not sure how you can even relate the current state of EXP to the way it used to be with all the new variables.
That right there sums up what I hate most about EQ in ToV You are better off using Overseer twice a day than actually playing EQ (non progression). There is absolutely nothing I like about that situation I think its the absolute antithesis to how EQ was supposed to be enjoyed.
You can turn off the bright by going to options, display, advanced, then unclick allow 2.0 pixel shaders. You will probably want to turn it back on when you go to some older zones, but its worth it. I very much enjoyed the revisit to CC.
