having played a TLP from almost start to finish, i can say early eq1 is just a completely different game then live eq1. Both fun, but pretty hard to compare. If you dont like modern eq1, fine, dont play it, but dont mess it up for people that do like it.
we misunderstand my point. rollback to 60 as a number, not to kunark era. keep everything that EQ has become just cap and reduce the numbers. take the current live spells and stats and just cut them in half and make it a cap, keep everything we have now. then going forward just add content, story, and maybe gear/items. maybe even vault some old game content and zones. orc belts to level is not questing and has no story value. We had to level past hell levels with wall groups. the quest for the orc belt was not something most got excited about, not even sure it can be called a quest. EQ added quest mission == change, EQ removed hell levels == change, EQ added PoK and bazaar == change, EQ added companions == change, EQ added housing == change, EQ added instance == change, EQ removed sit-to-med == change... play WoW if you like it, don't make EQ1 wow, ESO, New World. i would like to think EQ can change a little more before it's done.
One thing that might be interesting, but of probably no practical value, would be down-scaling of high level characters to level so the common zone mobs would be a green or light blue con, instead of the current grey con. Your character would be roughly level comparable to current players doing experience in that zone. Just a thought, nothing more than that.
I don't like the idea of scaling everybody back to level 50 or 60, that sounds like a lot of work and like, 0 payoff (Shadowlands was awful, WoW made a mistake with this). However, I do think that scaling back your level & gear for missions would be kinda fun. Like having the option to level down to 100 for COTF missions or something could be interesting. Wouldn't waste content resources on this, but it has potential.
We need a real shroud system. I want to shroud down to "Young Jumbur", if I feel like working on Hero's Journey with my ancient main. I don't want to be a goblin, I want to be myself! And for the OP, if you just dislike the huge numbers. Would a simple UI-mod that divided every number by 2, not solve the problem? It could be a very simple optional UI add-on for the client. Just pretend that COV is a level 62 expansion.
If you have the resources to pull off a level squish the results can be helpful. A new player looking at the game is going to think catching up 60 levels is a lot easier than catching up 120 levels.
Forget all the scaling nonsense. Just get rid of the XP penalty for older expacs. Nothing like killing a few hundred light blue mobs over a session and making 2 or 3 AAs.
Well said! If people want things to be more like the WoW, then play that game. Don't pollute ours. After all, and repeat after me, "“You’ve ruined your own lands, you’ll not ruin mine!”
Not a fan of normalizing levels / stats. Only exception is critical chance. Right now it's so easy to hit the melee crit cap that itemization impact is getting flattened. Wouldn't mind seeing some diminishing returns on crit "rating", but that's kind of a minor gripe with EQ stats.
I think the idea has a lot of merit. Improvements: New & Returning players would have a much more welcoming experience. All 27 expansions worth of content could be relevant and enjoyed by all, not just the latest 2 and the first 4. Would no longer spend the majority of our time in each expansion simply grinding to replace what you have with near-identical items, spells, etc. (essentially just recycled gear/spell/ability content). Instead, we would get to focus on the story, environment, and other NEW content. In theory, devs could spend more time developing actual NEW content and not just coming up with new names for the same item that was invented 20 years ago. Problems: Change is scary.
To be clear, we're talking about normalizing, not backtracking. I'm not a fan of losing any abilities or anything I've worked hard for. I am a fan of eliminating the mindless, never-ending power creep and content recycling, and I'm tired of pretending that they are somehow "new content". I don't find it fun any more, but worse: it actively prevents me from returning. Imagine a world with no more grey mobs, ever. Imagine a new expansion that didn't presume replacing every single piece of gear. Imagine a new expansion that didn't consist of repeating the same 8 hours of content 15x just to get access to the next bit of content. OK, that last one was just a dream. But we should at least be able to imagine a better game, shouldn't we? That shouldn't be a crime, should it?
Even with WoWs rollbacks, you’re still playing catch up every expansion. You’re still chasing the same upgrades as you were before. Nothing changes. Just the numbers look different. Even their tiers upgrade 4 times an expansion. Every raid tier that comes out increases your gear cap which in turn increases your stats, and levels and gear. If: holds true, then you don’t have an issue with continuing onto to level 120 and doing 5 billion damage. Because 60 = 120 and 100 = 1,000,000,000. They just look different.
Let's just imagine the new expansion instead of being level 120 is level 60 and we stat-squished everything else. From now on only the most recent expansion is level 60 and each year the prior year's expansion becomes level 55 content too, you are still going to be grinding 5 levels and all the aa from the new expansion every year. So you can go to any zone in any expansion from Kunark to CoV and the gear which drops from group & raid content in all expansions of EverQuest is either statted the same or has next to meaningless tiny incremental increases? So you can go to any group zone and all the mobs are going to have close to the same hp/ac/damage tables? So you can go to any raid zone and all the events are going to have close to the same hp/ac/damage tables? So you can go to any zone & expansion from the past 21 years but the Experience gain in ALL of them will be close to zero or actually zero, at 56 you will only gain "meaningful" experience and AA in the new expansion zones. What does that mean to a *new EverQuest player though? You played on a live server for 54 levels gradually increasing your available spells and AA but then you hit 55 and BLAM! now you have about a gazillion new spells and AA and your character is now so drastically and massively different to play compared to how it was at level 54 that you are completely overwhelmed? You now have a simply vast knowledge gap to try and bridge and lets face it no guides anywhere about what this enormous set of new spells, AA and abilities means for your now radically different playstyle. You now also have access to 21 years of zones, quests, progression achievements, raids, and gear that are all level 55 now! So you may as well remove every single gear item from Live servers that was made between Kunark & ToV because CoV gear will be the 55 gear. Every single spell made between RoK and CoV that had a level 51-55 RoK version is removed and all of the spells that were new lines added from PoP to CoV are pruned to a single spell of that line and reduced to level 51-55 RoK levels. All those AA are going to need a massive pruning effort too, take all the lines that existed in Luclin back to luclin levels, everything else that was added will need to be reduced in line with that and retuned down to level 51-55 This stat squish would take years to pull off with no real benefit to the game as a business, an absolutely enormous investment with next to no payoff. You also just made TLP servers completely pointless, there's half of your playerbase & 40-50% of your revenue gone. You could build EQ3 with a far smaller amount of dev hours required for this I reckon.
A better idea would be to roll back everyone to level 1. Delete all gear and banks and inventory too. Now everyone is at the same level. Groups galore! An even better idea would be for the next patch to just delete the Everquest folder and delete your account. Now you have to make a new account and rebuy all the expansions. Look at how much money DPG would make by doing this. An even better idea, maybe the best idea yet, is to stop making EQ like WOW. Let EQ be EQ.
This is a TERRIBLE mindset. WoW is EQ's competitor, and if they are doing something right that is attracting a lot of players, then maybe EQ should do it if it doesn't take too many resources / things away from the experience. Competition breeds greatness, no competition breeds complacency.
