Moving Around Terror of Luclin Now Much Harder - Intended?

Due to the changes of shades to undead, most ToL zones now have a mix of undead and non-undead throughout the zones. Moving now is very difficult without getting aggro.

This is a big change from the way ToL was upon release. Such a large change to an expansion is without any explanation. Is this an unintended side effect upon which the dev team will work to fix or is this the 'new normal' of making it hard for people to explore and play in the expansion?

Even the 'easy' zone of Maiden's Eye can be a challenge to move through now. Yes, it is possible to move through it using various methods, including moving slowly while making sure to not go near any mobs, as well as fading upon gaining aggro.

So, is this an intended increase in the 'challenge' from the release of ToL?

there are several previous discussions about mob body type reconciliation and consolidation, some of the (ok, many of the) mobs in Everquest were incorrectly identified. Developers are working on changes.

Today's patch notes hilight some mobs are already changed. I'd suggest click follow on those existing threads, make your input there rather than being one more solo poster. Be sure to like OPs to give issues a bump.

I understand your point. I was just hoping for a basic statement of Darkpaw's intent here. I've seen various posts about body changes and such. I've never seen a flat statement of, "Our goal is to have ToL have the same risks of movement as before the body changes". Or "Our goal is to accept the fact that moving and playing in ToL will be more hazardous than upon release and while you can report your concerns, we are not planning to make it as it was".

Perhaps I should post this on one of the threads you refer to. But they seem to be talking about individual changes and not the overall focus of ToL and the overarching goal of the development team in addressing the fact that ToL is different now, in a major way regarding movement and adventuring there.

I accept that it might be my fault for not reading the many threads and trying to figure out which one might be best for this. But I would appreciate a basic statement of intent. I believe I'm not the only one confused about what the dev team is trying to do to ToL.

Agreed. It would be good.

In my opinion, there was no definitive intent to make it harder or easier. They just accept the outcome as it happens. In recent years modern expansions tend to have a mix of live and undead monsters in a zone. Restless undeads of ToV had life neighbors, like golems and gargoyles in Velk's in ToV - quite hard to navigate zone without a dual inviso. Or even a portal zone like Crystal Caverns has live drachnids, which frequently ambush unsuspecting travelers with IVU.
Undead othmirs and sharks neighboring walruses and mermaids in Cobalt Scar in CoV and so on.

In fact, I was initially surprised by how easy it was to navigate in ToL with just a common invisibility. And now I have to go back to tried-and-working travel with a bard or two casters in the group for double invisibility, same practice as in the past 2 expansions.

Now, trash mobs seeing through double invisibility were a problem, and DPG seems to have fixed that. The current mix of live-undead I would consider as just going back to normal.

Originally, even back in Terror of Luclin beta, people asked, "How come the shades are not undead?". The answer from the devs was (paraphrased), "Shades are minions of Luclin, the Maiden of Shadows. They are her creatures and are not undead and they come from the Plane of Shadows."

Now that lore has be thrown out and they are undead. Or at least their body type now is, which is, in gameplay terms, the same as being undead.

Or at least some shades are undead and some are not, as I discovered trying to move though Shadow Valley with invisibility to undead and some shades did not see me and some did.

The update on Wednesday said, "- Updated shades in Terror of Luclin to consistently use the undead bodytype and akheva to consistently use the humanoid bodytype.". Why "Undead" type and not the "Magical" body type?

Here are the body types now in the game:

• Special damage targets - Greater Akheva, Draz Nurakk, and Zek.
• Animals - Non-magical living organisms, not plants, not quite humanoids.
• Construct/Elemental - Conjured, Elemental, or animated matter, including Clockworks.
• Dragons - Draconic creatures (Dragons, Drakes, Wurms, Wyverns). Excludes dinosaurs and Drakkin.
• Extraplanar - Death-Touching creature, typically the Avatar of a God.
• Giants - Large bipedal creatures descended from the creations of Rallos Zek.
• Humanoids - Living non-magical sentient bipedal organisms.
• Magical - Magical creatures and anything that does not fit into another category.
• Plants - Potentially sentient living photosynthetic or fungus-based non-animal organism.
• Undead - Deceased souls, optionally corporeal, distinct from animist spirits and other magical beings.

Yet, even though they made clear in the lore that shades are not undead, they made them Undead instead of Magical or something else. Or even Construct/Elemental, since they are the 'element' of shadow, you could consider them Shadow Elementals.

This really seems like they have no overarching goal or focus on how they want to deal with the new body types and Terror of Luclin. And just throwing things against the wall and seeing what works and what issues arise.

Note that besides the abandonment of the lore, I have no issues with them being undead. After all, several classes love fighting undead and I'm all for them having that. My issue is mixing them with live creatures in ways that now makes moving and playing in Terror of Luclin much harder.

It seems like in the design phase they were fine with things one way. Now, five months after release, they change it. So, is there a method to all this? And could they please share it with those who have to play in this environment?

This is a general error that has been put into the game.
And it is just as bad in HoT, which I believe is a new expansion for 2 servers, which have been made real bad for them.
Changes like such should never been done such outright, but instead 1 smal change at a time.

Road from lower hot to pofear is too hard. and should be reversed a

Does sound just like the original (TSoL) Maiden's Eye with monster traps and most mobs seeing invis which also was a problem for rogues. I think that the devs just do revamp the whole game by correcting old flaws that massed over the years and that most zones are being affected not just ToL.

God forbid you have to use your Pacify line of spells or kill few mobs before you reach the camp spot to afk away.

They want you to train zones, give NPC's a work out.

Not in travel paths.

It's more the difficulty in moving through zones for people. KV being the best example. It seems a bit much to ask people to find a bard, or fight their way through a connection zone to get where they are going.

CoV, ToV, etc had clearly defined travel paths where you could circumvent undead or living mobs to get to where you needed to go. Or if you want to try and get a few collectibles. People are fine with needing to change invisible types, to navigate, but having such an equal mix of mobs in all areas of a zone makes it a little to difficult for travel.

The basic root cause of EQs problems stem from people not being able to achieve things without an extraordinary amount of help from higher level/geared characters or a static group of people that agree to play at certain times. The basic frustration of a lot of people is that this is never addressed or if a concern is addressed it is almost to make the game _more_ inaccessible.

problem is that dbg ignores the complaints people come with.

The move around in me is hard, The shades should be live so people can move around without dying.

And as someone said, during beta it was mentioned that shades should be itu and the devs said no, so why the change suddenly ?

Oh and shades in vt are now si, even that they were made no see invis

At least it is not as bad as when halfway through either EOK or ROK they decided to change VP so that you would become KOS after a few kills in that zone. So glad I had done all the progression stuff on mage before those changes...

Generally speaking, if the players are complaining about tougher gameplay changes the developers see the change as a gameplay value-add. Whether this drives player satisfaction or not is completely arguable. Making travel more cumbersome definitely makes me appreciate arriving at my destination. That said, changing travel dynamics mid-expansion is a poor decision. It should have been this way from expansion release.

But my Bard tells me not to worry. She has it covered.

Or ask a rogue for corpse taxi. The current price is 3k pp.

There are two live mobs near the SV zone line that could be moved a little further into the room on the right. As it is now, they definitely aggro and the shades join in.

Grouping beyond KV isn't worth it anymore, you spend more time recovering corpses of those trying to join your group than actually killing NPCs.

If they cant/wont fix KV then maybe they should give wizards a port to SV.