hello all. been out of the eq world for a while but i want to come back and i have a few ideas to help the love for eq. Step 1 AA and Burns. A while ago setting up your burns and timers worked or didn't work. Or confusing set up on how the burn will be at its best. I would ask to make a AA built in burn list that can filled up and optimized into one prompt. As if you can drag in one hot key and they all get activated with one push. No timers no need to set or pushing the hot key 40 times and hope they all proc. Step 2 a new community on making groups more streamlined. Lets say you like to find or kill a named for a certain item. Lets say your near the camp and nobody is there and your new group forming chat system would look like. Link of the item as a picture in the chat and to see what the interest of such item has been ranked in people that would need such item. So lets say you been wanting a aug for a while but no luck finding a group the old way, you can now click a item you need or want and the LFG would of item would reach people that are also looking for that item. Possibly an off platform way to notify people offline and to respond with a time they can come help. Step 3 new improved wearable items and ablities. lets think outside of the box and reach in to the applied matching armor from other games. like diablo 3 and division 2 ... wearing the same type of armor and how many pieces you have do some amazing things. I dont need to go into full detail but they would be a huge game changer. Also lets say some armor while worn gives you the ability to memorize a spell not of your class type. Only can cast it while wearing the item. Things like this would make a impactful change to the game. I have many more ideas that can help improve the game we love but it takes people to at least acknowledge improvements need to be made. Look at what they just did with server meshing. They had to keep trying something new and now that achievement is going to pave the road for future games. So please Daybreak Games I hope you look and listen and try to make the game I love even better. I also would love to talk to the people that programmed and designed MTG online. Im looking to do this with my own game.
I think you mean "armor sets". Like if there is a set of "Laurion Brew" gear. It might consist of Laurion Brew Necklace, Laurion Brew Face Mask, Laurion Brew Ring. Wearing one does nothing extra. Wearing two "Laurion Brew" items gives you bonus 300 Hit Points, wearing three "Laurion Brew" items gives you the bonus 300 Hit Points as well as plus 5 to all heroic stats. At least that is how I see it in other games. I'm not particularly a fan of this. I'm not actually really against this but it does make things more complex. Right now, as far as I know, the only bonuses you get for wearing "alike" armor are the Charms that give you better stats as you wear more visible armor pieces from one expansion.
AKA The "I win" button. This would remove player agency, what little skill exists, and a big chunk of the "knowledge is power" of your class that had been at the core of playing EQ. This would remove the point of having all the different abilities we have in the first place, if it is all going to be on one button then the devs might as well roll all of the effects of the "burn" into a single ability to begin with. You would no longer need to learn or care about your skills / spells / abilities or their timing any more, it would have all been done for you & now any random noob can just press their "I Win" button & perform as good as a Veteran of 20+ years. Where's the "fun" in being just as good as anyone else with no room for outperforming your peers no challenge in showing you are a better player, sure there is a risk you sometimes perform worse than your peers but better that than the scenario where you would have just eradicated individuality of player capability from the game. No Thanks, I think this is an absolutely terrible suggestion, it isn't even a new idea. Maybe reserved for the day when all of EQ's remaining Octogenarian & older players are sat playing from Geriatric care homes in their pyjamas & slippers. I'm not sure what you mean by "a new community on making groups more streamlined". A new Extended LFG tool that lets you schedule groups for certain times & days? I don't think the devs need to waste time developing a tool like that, players have many means at their disposal to acheive the same functionality and probably do it better, the existing LFG tool barely gets used any more as it is as players arrange groups via Discord or their guild forums. PUG are rare these days and very few players will actually play with people outside their guild. You could also opt to use the EQ Discord for your server for arranging weekly PUG times/dates, but don't expect a big response. We used to have the functionality of linking items we did not own in game chat via player-made link-bots in the past, I do not know how they worked or why they were removed but you used to be able to send a tell with an item name & receive a link of the item which you could then send to a chat channel or player. But these days you could just link to Allakhazam in Discord when posting your LFG/PUG request. The games this kind of system work best in have a vast array of droppable loot and the players are killing masses of mobs, vastly more mobs than an EQ group would kill in the same timeframe even playing solo. Prime examples being the Diablo & Torchlight ARPG games. EQ doesn't even come close to the kind of loot quanities seen in those games because of how the loot is generated in a completely different way, EQ's loot is individually hand made by a dev, Diablo & Torchlight use a coded item generation system for regular loot with the set items being the only hand-crafted pieces. In moden EQ all we get are hand-crafted item sets, we just don't have "set bonuses" on the armor items themselves, and instead a few of the charms have a "armor set bonus" usually one or two per expansion. I would be okay with the set bonuses being on the equipment items themselves & being expanded beyond just visible armor but perhaps EQ's code is not set up to do that for all equipment slots and only the charms have that set bonus coding. So we already have something similar to what you suggest, just by a slightly different means. Maybe there could be other types of set bonuses added to charms to expand beyond just the existing bonus but maybe that system or EQ's code isn't up to the task. Nobody has ever said improvements cannot be made, the issue is how long it would take, at what cost and what return on investment could be expected from it. A lot of things "could" be done, but are unlikely to happen because they would be too expensive to do with a game as old as EQ or would take too long to do with the current team size. No clue what you are saying here, server merging perhaps?
I'd be in favor of removing most burn abilities. Strong burn damage is always balanced with weak damage outside of popping those abilities. Just generally makes the game feel not as fun, when you can't see your damage with normal abilities. This applies to the Synergies creating correct combinations, which reduces normal damage even further. In my opinion, it's really more fun to see your basic abilities consistently land rather than wait for abilities to come off down to do real, big damage.
That's not a good analogy, and I'm not sure which road you're trying to take it down. I don't think it's enjoyable in a 10 minute fight to do 80% of your damage in 1 minute. MMOs have this really bad problem with adding so many buttons and abilities that it detracts from the gameplay. There is some level of mastery that feels good, but I prefer it in the sense of resource management and positioning.
Its a perfectly good analogy, do you want your damage to have only one pace or do you want to be able to have some moments of higher intensity? Change gear, go faster, use up more "fuel" doing so. Sure raid design has at points in EQ's history become a case of cycling burns and "burn phase" and "burst phase" as parts of events has lost a lot of its meaning but I certainly don't think that removing burns makes the game better it just means instead of having a few gears we go back to having just 1. You're advocating for dumbing the game down to an even greater degree than the OP's "I Win" button suggestion, if you hadn't realised it.
Your analogy is very bad, and you’re misusing it anyways. If you actually want to use it as analogy, then you have to view driving as balanced around time. If the drive is designed to take 4 hours, the time spent going faster is going to be balanced with time going slower. If a class is meant to do 100 damage over a minute, but burns for 80 of it 10 seconds then rest of the time is going to feel terrible. It’s fine to have some classes play that way or gameplay for a class to accommodate that style but every class does that. It makes general moment to moment gameplay overly dull, and leaves the player to wait for the burns to refresh. If we’re going to be honest about EQ gameplay, people just macro/multibind their abilities into 1 key anyways. You’re just reducing some ability bloat. I don’t think button bloat for the sake of having something to push makes for good gameplay, and just leads to terrible UIs.
You're thinking about it all wrong. Do you have more fun driving along a dead straight town road at a steady crawl of 5-10mph stopping just for traffic signals or driving along a twisty country road where you are braking for corners, accelarating on the straights, overtaking the occasional lorry when it is safe to do so, all the while shifting gears up & down? Besides, the "burst" is as I already said largely meaningless with current raid design & the long lengths most raids run for. Moment to moment raid design should be pushing players to perform at their best not snooze along, doesn't mean damage should just be a constant zzzzzzzzzzzzzz, applying the burns at the right times should still matter, and if raid design is such that there aren't times to not be doing damage or not be doing your best damage as you are dealing with some other element of the raid it's not really making players think. Tank & Spank raids were pre-GoD sounds like you want to go back to that "simpler time". Nobody macros everything to 1 button, they have "spam bars" for a portion of their abilities, the faster refresh/cycling stuff, and there is an issue I call "dilution" where having far too many abilities means that all of your abilities become far less impactful as a result because your character's overall damage is spread over such a large number of things. I agree that there is too much UI boat and part of that should be reducing the bloat, but certainly not so severely that burns are removed. There's a balance to be hit somewhere between the extreme juxtapositions of just one button to hit & whack-a-mole city.
This. I enjoy having options that increase my DPS albeit for even a short bit. Not having anything to push would be rather boring. And some times it's fun to blow all the CDs that'll stack for a few minutes and other times it's nice to spread them out and keep them on constant rotation.
They did armor sets with the old Emblem system. It was terrible, it removed all choice in gearing because there was only one correct combo.
This is weird coming from a class that is almost entirely played mashing 1 button and cycling 3 burn keys...
How so? The status quo is already bad enough what the OP suggests is even worse & what KushallaFV seems to want is even worse than what the OP suggested, I want the game to move in the other direction. I don't want the game to be brainless whether that is mashing 1 button to activate 9 abilities every 12 seconds or mashing 1 button to activate 1 ability that fires all 9 effects every 12 seconds or 1 ability to fire all of my DPS burns that is going in the wrong direction but so is "whack-a-mole" EQ2 style combat which is where we are at already. I would rather reduce the amount of abilities & have them feel more impactful when they are used than a smorgasboard of abilities each doing tiny barely noticeable amounts of damage. Rather my Berserker was doing big chonky damage when he swings his axe & fires a few abilities than operating like a lawnmower & killing things via a thousand papercuts through a long laundry-list of tiny damage activated effects - this combat dilution through spreading damage across dozens of triggered abilities is what makes combat feel bland.
Now, you're talking about the design of the road. You're shift the discussion. Answering your question though, no I absolutely loathe winding, curvy roads with low visibility. There's always someone not staying in their lane making the drive a lot more dangerous. You're literally just repeating back to me things that I've said, positioning, movement, and resource management. Burns are great, they feel fun and it provides a great way to strategize for events. I've never said remove them just not to balance every class based on burn timers. Stay on topic, I've never advocated for that design and routinely praise events like Mearatas. Yes, spam bars which are abilities for the sake of having abilities. It's bloated to be appear to be full of options. Most set-ups are like 3 burn buttons and multiple abilities tied to a spam key. Yes, that's why I'm saying the current design weights too heavily towards "burns" resulting in the rest of the gameplay feeling lackluster. It's similar to Borderlands 2 requiring enemies to be slagged, Diablo 4 having to build around applying Vulnerability, Monster Hunter Iceborne needing to use the clutch claw. I like how you say this, but then immediately express the point I'm making in the next two paragraphs. This is exactly what I'm saying. You need to feel noticeable damage with your normal abilities, but they're balanced to hit like wet spaghetti to account for the damage done doing burns.
Ya almost no one does. That's not the discussion we are having here. The game is currently in this state and while it is in this state it shouldn't require a PhD in SPAs or sifting through class discord of varying qualities to figure out which keys to multibind (that multibinds are the way, because social macros suck).
You've completely confused me here. I say I don't want a brainless "I Win Button" 1-button burn and you're saying that's weird because I play Berserker? Do you think Berserkers should want an "I Win Button"? I say I don't want Brainless "Whack-A-Mole" combat either, and you're saying that's weird because I play Berserker? And you're saying we aren't even having that discussion, but then say we shouldn't need a PHD to work through the large amount of abilities to figure out what to multibind. Aren't those 2 things the same discussion about ability-bloat? Perhaps you can clarify your intended message.
You literally did say remove (most of) them. Pants on fire? I think you are mistakenly conflating regular combat ability bloat with burn damage. I do not think the regular combat abilities are balanced to account for burn damage, never have been, nor have I ever seen a dev say anything like that. The regular combat damage is just spread across the large number of combat abilities outside of the burns which is why I used the term "dilution" a smaller number of abilities that hit harder AKA "more impactful" is in my view more preferable to a vast array of abilities "hitting like wet spaghetti".
OP wants the mash key + burn key to be easier to make. You said you don't want the game to become even more of an "I Win button", which I said is funny, because you currently play effectively a single button class. Currently, in the game we play now, most classes function with a mash key, so it should be easier to make said mash key. Yes, in an ideal world, we cut down the bloat, but that's outside the scope of the OPs suggestion and an entirely different issue. It should be very clear to new heroics and what not that they should be using a multibind and make it very easy to make said bind. Currently, you essentially have to be told by some 3rd party that multibinds are a thing and that they are superior to social macros and how they work.
