Nice ninja fix to plane of storms

*** Progression Servers ***
- Corrected an issue where out of era AAs could be purchased on progression servers.
- For the first two months after Planes of Power first opens on a server, the giants in the Plane of Storms that normally carry Esoteric Medallions will carry more of them, and other giants in that zone will have a small chance to carry their own medallion.

I'm not playing on Aradune but someone please lmk what that did to the morale of the various bot armies

Yeah i don't play on Aradune either, but seemed like a nice change having gone through that hot mess before.

I know it's not a popular opinion, but this is a bittersweet patch for me. I was always on board with the plane of storms challenge. It forced your guild to work as a team to contest mobs in open world, which directly improved guild cooperation and comradery.

I experience this on Phinny (and Live but it wasn't as contested in live) with the previous versions of picks, and it wasn't that bad at all. Casual guilds were easily flagging on week 2 of PoP, they just needed to zone in and try it.

Later expansions in the game you get straight up blocked waiting for x many clears before your guild can get to the next tier, I don't think elemental access like this needed to be sped up.

In this day of EverQuest, guilds become less and less social, with more people leaning on their cliques or box groups, or your zerg guilds where people know ~20% of their guild at best. I don't think this is something Darkpaw needs to solve for, I just think having some open world contention on events improved guilds and forced you to get to know people more than just Raid and then log off.

Phinigel was a much nicer environment, I also had a blast getting my Storms access done on Phinigel.


On Selo's the bots were in full swing and getting a kill was neigh impossible unless you're entire guild was there helping.

On Mangler it was the same thing, swarms of mage pets popping in on top of you and KSing then they'd advertise in general chat that they had 3 medals for sale 2 krono each!

It's not a team building exercise, it's a nightmare bottleneck that is exploited for WEEKS after the expansion opens. With the botters destroying the key pieces if they don't sell just to keep the market locked down. Who the hell wants to force their entire guild to sit in Storms to compete with these jerks?

Good change.

Only way it could be better is if it wasn't limited to the first 2 months.

the botters might have liked old storms on old servers but I promise the botters on aradune were the ones crying for this change.

They did not want to compete on aradune in open world.

If you like challenge & competition so much why aren't you on Ragefire?
If the Open-World race is what gets your gaming juices flowing why are you on any TLP with AoC at all, why aren't you all crying for a no AoC TLP server?

I smell something......bovine.

Going back to the early days of EQ, when everything was flowers and rainbows, and we loved corpse recovery and exp penalties. The first memories I have of negative things in EQ that caused problems were all related to races for mobs. It's when the real contention between players started, and nobody should ever miss that.

It wasnt bad on phinny but every TLP after was horrible. On phinny you could hold a pick open with 1 person. Later TLPs the casuals got screwed because people would bring charmed frogs which you can't dispell anymore and DPS race you on the named you were killing. After which they would proceed to sell the loot rights in front of you and even try to sell them to you.

So you're telling me Enchanters are still OP even without the ability to spam AE stun?

Watching Atabishi rage in Discord over this fix is hilarious. And if Atabishi hates the fix, it makes me like it more.

Great change. Thank you for listening.

I wonder what they deemed to be a sufficient number of medallions.

There are 3 camps, 2 mini-named per camp, 6 hour respawn, 3 medallions per mini named and everyone needs 2. So 9 keys per 6 hours or 36 keys per day per pick. A guild generally needs about 2 days worth of medallions to flag their guild.

I will be very amused if it is only 4 or 5 medallions now instead of 3. Something like 12 medallions would almost completely alleviate the issue.

Nevermind.

sounds like the non named giants can drop them now as well, which always made sense to me that they would.

Great change.

There was nothing remotely fun about sitting in Storms for many days, holding picks open, standing around 4 hours for a spawn, and then DPS racing for 60 seconds.

Well there are plenty of people that would disagree, the people that find that to be "fun" and "engaging" tend to be concentrated in a few guilds though.

This is a good change for those that aren't in those guilds and don't enjoy that type of play.

This change is whatever, neither good nor bad in the grand scheme.

It helps the guilds full of terrible players who couldnt split their raid force down for dz's if they were unable to dps in open world at all. Of course most guilds had no problem splitting down and getting done in a week or 2 so this really only affects the lowest players on the chain, who are likely to get bored over the 5 months of PoP and quit anyways