It's a fair point on live, I'm on TLP approaching the bad gap years between melee and casters. We don't upgrade once every year or so, we do it every 2 to 3 months, or our guilds die. Recent changes have given casters a further bump already. Zerkers and rogues are starting to disappear, monks will soon.
No one's mad about free epics. 1. It's bad news for anyone who likes to take year+ long breaks to skip boring expansions. Unless they want to get facef***ked by a_large_rat in 2025. 2. It's annoying for folks who quit raiding who now get to delete their weapons' Type 7/8 aug 3. It's annoying for folks on free-trade servers who farmed ungodly plat/Krono to buy gear that is now worth nothing. The majority of a free-trade server's economy is buying/selling of raid gear. There's a reason why literally no game developer does stat inflations. It's like stepping on the accelerator with a brick wall in front of you.
Not having BiS, because it's a little worse and using weapons, that are equivalent to using weapons from 5 expansions or more ago, are completely different things. The raid weapons were still way ahead of the group weapons, so you were fine using them for an expansion or two on an alt. You weren't doing max dps, but still much better than average. But when a group 2h sword for the SK, is 300 more damage, than your T2 Raid weapon lol, well that is a completely different situation. Because a back or face item does little to nothing for your character. What do you gain a couple thousand hps that you never use? Those are just for something to do, make the numbers a little bigger to make us happy. The upgrade to weapons is massive and makes a very big difference. I don't even bother with the chase items on my alts, you wouldn't notice the difference either way.
Part of me agrees with you, but not for the reasons you mention. The change to the game code that allowed the ratio increase was supposed to go in two years ago. I think, based only on that, asking for a retroactive weapon ratio upgrade is probably justified.
Exactly. If they did the upgrade, because the mobs in LS were going to have way more hps or some reason like that, then I could see the change, for LS only weapons. But they are doing it, because they fixed an older issue, that caused them to create weapons, that were underpowered. I just think it's silly to have a class, suddenly jump up in power like that.
Asking for that is a good thing, the problem is the complaints that it didn't get done in beta when they already have a limited amount of time to get expansion content done.
Clearly they design weapon strength expac by expac, and even separately for every weapon! Its unlikely they have a slider to adjust all weapons in game. Its no easy task to change everything all at once. That said would you give up 2 zones in LS to get upgrades for past years?
But this whole weapon damage situation is a one time thing. When the next expansion hits, the weapon damage fix that we're seeing now will be in place and raiders can go back to ignoring the "filthy casual" weapons. This "problem" raiders are complaining about is just for this expansion. Why are people complaining that much about it? When the raids open up, you'll be dropping those group weapons for the new raid weapons anyway, so what's the problem? That you have to slum it with group weapons for a month?
Same complaints as WoW moving epic gear to leveling greens. People feel invalidated for the time they spent. They'll get over it eventually, but the butt-hurt is understandable and predictable.
Valid point. It's no easy task and consumes resources. I'd prefer they work on the current expansion bugs and content than reworking prior content. But I do still think the ask for retroactive weapon ratio changes to ToL and NoS is justified. Whether it's worth it...that's a different argument.
Silly, maybe. But they're threading the needle here between doing what they promised whilst avoiding spending weeks poring over spreadsheets for older expansions when they could be doing other things.
Kinda. Your point is that their feelings are hurt and their feelings are equally important as the facts are. Which isn't true. Thier hurt feelings aren't valid. They are upset because what they had lost value in a new expac (where all old gear always loses value), and want to take things from other people so they feel better. They want to hurt all melee (especially group melee) so they feel important again. Thats not cool. Its also the core of their argument. Hence their feelings are not valid. How about a better argument. Rebalancing weapons from the last several expac is a large task taking alot of time. Are they willing to give up 5 of the 8 raids in LS for that? That time budget is gonna come from somewhere. Since its only raiders who want it, it should come from dev time that only effects raid content. I garuntee you that not a single one is willing to lose anything that affects them. This isn't about helping them. Its about selfish entitlement.
Who said that it would take a lot of time?? All they need to do is update ONE field by a percentage on the older weapons. If that takes a lot of time, then this game has a pretty crappy database. I get it, you don't raid, you don't care. What are we taking them away from lol. Just because it's something doesn't benefit from, you think it doesn't matter. Doesn't mean the people who put a lot of time and organization to raid, shouldn't be upset. It's not about entitlement, it's about putting in time to get something, that you want to enjoy for more than a short time. It's about a lot more work to get all new weapons for your main and alts, when you could have just given them your raid gear, after you upgraded it. If you play on a server like FV, then people who don't raid, get to buy raid weapons as people upgrade them. Now those weapons are junk. The chase weapons are junk. Anything before LS is junk. Classes will suddenly have this massive jump in dps at level 120, why?
Unlikely. If they could have done that they would have. They really arent doing this to spite you. You seem to think its stupid that they dont. "it would be so easy". But in fact you have no idea how the game is coded.
One field? Across how many different weapons, and 3 different tiers for each expansion, but does that include caster weapons. Or do theirs stay the same because of the original issue. Assuming I can count that is 73 different weapons for group weapons NoS alone, 1H, 2H and Bows. I raid, ALOT. Every tank, melee and hybrid in my guild is upgrading or has upgraded. Not one has whined about old NoS weapons not being as good. The reason is we don't care. It's is about doing more damage that's why we use weapons. Period. The old weapons are still not junk, it makes them not as valuable as some LS weapons depending on your class and your personal philosophy regarding the weapons. For example, I as a SK have a T3 LS 2H, but a raid T3 NoS 1H, because when I have to tank, I want as much AC as I can get. My DPS isn't going to matter that much when I have to use a shield, but me being dead will. So the LS 1H sits on my trophy wall. Again the point ALOT of people are making and you are seemingly ignoring is, raid weapons were ALWAYS going to be not as good as new weapons, it has always been like this. OG Kunark weapons are better than Vanilla weapons, Velious beat Kunark, etc etc. It just happened more quickly this time. But guess what, ALOT of casters are still using ToVelious 2H, Wizzies are still using RoK belts because they are better DPS. The entire point of EQ is the gear treadmill, everything will be surpassed by a different item sooner or later. Almost no items exist in game that aren't replaceable. Those that do exist are so rare/powerful the possibility of a nerf is a constant threat, or will NEVER be replicated (epics).
The only difference between the changes in this expansion and most is that the weapons get replaced on expansion launch instead of on raid launch. Also there is more work then just changing a field in the database as they need to spend time reviewing the changes to make sure the increase is a proper amount as well as testing to make sure it is reflected properly on all the weapons that got updated.
If you had ever programmed anything, you know that "can't you just" means triple the time + 3 weeks. Everything is always far more complicated than non-programmers understand. Much less an environment like eq which is hacked together and 25yrs old. As proof? They would've done it if it was a 30minute job.
Going back and upgrading existing items is a non starter. They are simply not going to do that for several reasons. It would trivialize content that still earns level appropriate exp. It would tie up resources on an already completed project. It would set a bad precedence. I am struggling to see the issue here. These new weapons cant be used until level 125. Their presence in game in no way effects characters at a lower level.
The new weapons can be used at 121, just the TS and top tier ones are 125. It would not trivialize older content, the melee weapons were supposed to be better, but there was a bug stopping them from doing that. That's like saying the new content is trivialized, because of the massive weapon boost. The mobs there are the normal upgrade from expansion to expansion. They didn't increase the mobs hps by a lot, because of the weapon changes. Also, they DID say they were probably going to go back and adjust the older weapons. I'm sure that is in their plans at some point.
