Add a new tier of heroic char on live

Please add a character level boost that is actually current, 110 with standard auto-grant AA. I would much rather pay DBG directly (even an inflated rate) for levels than someone who set up an autobot PL service for the guaranteed result and cost estimate. The game takes an absolute ton of time to "catch up" a fresh 110, so you're not losing much there.

What's to gain? Money, more inclination for newer players to join the game, switch servers (many servers dont allow you to xfer toons off) in search of new raid communities etc. I for one would be infinitely more inclined to start boxing and paying multiple subs if the time sink of bringing up 2 to 5 more toons was "mostly" nullified.

Who does this help? You, money. Newer, returning, and transitional players.

Who will stand against such a service? Dummies, old guard hold-outs with oodles of free time to "earn" stuff (except for that RL exp), people who are making a killing (that you should be) off of a really simple addition to your game.

Food for thought, let me know when you want my money.

Honestly, xping a character from level 85 to 110 is not too difficult. There are a few strange hell levels such as level 109.

This subject has been brought up before but I seem to recall that the official response has always been in the negative due to some technical issue like difficulty in coding or server-side response.

I'd like to see Account to Account transfers restored before Heroic Character upgrades at this point tbh.

There is some article out there that suggest that another HC is in the works. My guess is the HC will either be 105 with TBM AAs or EoK AAs depending on launch window.

Nah. time. It is time consuming, and controversial, to make "appropriate" characters at each level. I say "controversial" because there are widely varied opinion on what the "proper" gear set is.

Additionally. While, for experienced player, starting at 110 is "okay", for a new player, they have had ZERO chance to learn the class or the difficulty of the modern game.

We also get a significant amount of push-back from some players "I had to walk up hill, both ways, in the snow, with a 75lb backpack, a broken leg, in a hurricane! Why do they get a shortcut!"

And Finally, there is a desire, mostly ours, to make "tutorial" content, so starting players would have SOME instructions, and that is even more time consuming, AND again, difficult and more time consuming since to really help, we would have to customize it to class.

So, there are many cons to go with the pro.

What is more likely, is to do a level 100 version. These would have at least SOME time to learn the class before going to "end game" content. (none of this sentence is set in stone! Could be 105? Not in any way decided.)

The basic fact is. It's *NOT* a small project. Additional content or not. Additional content only increased the scale. And, while there is code work, that is not the limiter as much as the large amount of work to make the characters.

And the suggested shortcuts we've seen sound like a poor player experience ("Just take the 85 and level boost it!")

I feel like the best way to do it is to bump up the level of heroic characters every time they slip below the minimum level required to group with a level capped toon, since it takes like 2 or 3 expansions to go up 5 levels that leaves a lot of time to deal with figuring out all the heroic gear and whatnot

edit: as far as a tutorial, why not futureproof it by giving them level scaling instanced starter-content using the scaling HA system?

You also have to remember that, assuming there will be another level increase to 120 at some point, heroic charcters will no longer be able to group with max level characters when that happens.

If the purpose of HC's is to allow new and returning players to immediately jump in and group with their max level friends and guildmates, then that concept will go away with the next level increase after ToV. So, something will have to be done to ensure that heroic characters retain their value. A boost to 100 for HC's will help, but a more permanent solution is required...something that will automatically raise the level of HC's when the level cap puts them outside the grouping range.

I don’t think a 5 level bump to heroics every other year would be an effective enough use of dev time. I would much rather see a 10 level bump to heroics that sustained for 4 years. That said, if new heroics were launched at level 100, it would be 6+ years before they were no longer able to group with max level players.

As for appropriate gear, I think this is something that the community could probably help a ton with. I don’t think it is actually as challenging as believed primarily because of the existence of “armor sets” for each class that match in power to a particular expansion. That generally handles the items themselves and then only need to be supplemented by augments. Furthermore, as long as your armor templates don’t include TBM+ armor, you don’t even need to worry about slot 5 augments.

My personal recommendation would be to introduce heroics at level 100. The armor would be the exact equivalent of Call of the Forsaken T1 armor, or ___ of Latent Ether. Heck, don’t even make new items, just give the heroic characters their exact CoTF T1 armor. The non-visible dropped equivalents could easily be identifiable by the EQ community as well. The only customization required would be tank-specific masks and pet class earring.

Augments would be more challenging to implement. You could consider granting a set amount of CoTF currency and direct the player to the CoTF augment vendor in Ethernere West Karena to select their own, or ask the EQ community to make a magelo profile with a recommended augment set based on RoF / VOA drops.

Lastly, there is the question of: “Who buys Heroic Characters and what are they used for?” Based on Ngreth’s feedback, DBG is positioning the heroic characters as both for new and experienced players. Maybe I’m biased, but I’d say the majority of heroic characters are purchased by experienced players adding a box rather than a new player revisiting EQ. I’ve purchased more than 25 heroic characters (2 more this morning!) because the time investment saved from MPG trials and DoN progression is worth the $30 to me. The majority of the time commitment required from the Devs seems to focus around the new player instead of the experienced player, which I suspect is the minority of Heroic Characters purchasers.

What if you compiled a new "Hero's Journey" for those levels to get people use to the game at that level. Is there content in the later expansions that is solo/molo, etc. that might be able to be strung together to give people a group of quests to get their feet wet?

That should save a lot of development time.

Simply pointing to the available content that can be consumed solo/molo (assuming the higher expansions gave some of that) would go a LONG ways to getting people oriented in the game.

Creating the new heroic characters should be really easy. There aren't that many variables: set level, autogrant AAs plus extra to self spend, the big job of equipment, set flags, set faction, (anything else major that a beta buffed character would need?)

Teaching people the game is wholly an independent issue. The "teaching" aspect is aimed at a subset of players that would buy the new heroic characters.

You are right that it would be extremely complicated if you tied teaching the game to new heroic characters. That creates an exponential new level of funding requirements. That line of thinking definitely explains why one Dev said it would be equivalent to making a whole zone in an expansion. That makes sense now. Thanks!

What if time spent in the teaching vein was spent working up a "suggested content" feature?

You (all Devs) have developed an AMAZING amount of content over the years. So much of it is hidden and/or hard to find. A "suggested content" tool would introduce a feature to point people to consumable content for the new heroic characters and be a great feature that could help any and all players at all levels. It might help with funding justification as it would apply to a much wider target audience.

the idea that what makes the most appropriate gear set for a given class at anywhere 100+ is difficult is ludicrous. The vast majority of players in each class at 'max level' in each expansion have used essentially the same gearset for many years now. Autogrant handles the AAs, so no need to worry about those....
The only real variety one sees is in the aug set and in what's available to the character.

There's obviously more than just 'pick the gear' involved in creating a heroic toon from the developer standpoint... I just think it's a cop-out to lead with the 'it's too hard to make the characters' excuse.

Hey at least it's on the radar.

It's interesting that you hear negative from the "we went through the drudgery" etc etc crowd but really when you think about what a level 105 with progression would do with gear on par\level with the former 85 heroic, it's just not gamebreaking. There is so much more for the newly minted 105 to do or newly minted level 100 if thats the case.

Ultimately its about the health of the game NOW. Not some epeen deal that is backward looking. You could drill down even further and question so many QOL changes in EQ in the last 10 years and question those with the same "uphill both ways, I did it the tough way, etc, etc" reasoning.

Make the new heroics level 105 with pink dyed armor (since 85 was green machine gear) The new heroics will do and work to anything length to get out of that armor ASAP

A big problem with not boosting to current level - 5 is that if you aren't high enough to group with max level characters it's tremendously difficult to find a group. Trying to molo as a fresh heroic character you don't know what to do with is much more difficult than being high enough to tag along with some randos at the current ez-mode grinding spot.

My opinion is that if all you did after ToV was:

1. Boost heroics to 110
2. Give heroics a set of conflagrant gear
3. Give heroic characters AAs up to RoS
4. Forward heroic characters to these guides: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...o-i-help-my-raid-friends.251148/#post-3695501

You'd give new folks a good starting point. There's no tutorial, UI preset or anything that will really ease the transition more than giving a new player a character that can find a ez-mode grinding group.

Conflagrant or something similar that the devs can copy pasta on the level 105 would I think be "easy." I do see how creating gear from the ground up is an itemization nightmare.

I like the idea of a 100-105 Heroic Character. My concern is they've now included a 85 Heroic Character in the premium versions of Torment of Velious and I'll bet people will complain about the discrepancy so we'll foresee the upgrade towards the end of the year 2020 at the earliest?

appropriate gear is just tier 1 gear (tds?), everything is all all now a days for non vis except the 3 classes that need a pet earring. as long as there's gear in every slot and the pet classes get a pet focus there's not much really to decide gear wise.

Just leveled a shammy over the past two weeks. Used most of three weekends and Thanksgiving holiday plus some xp pots to get it done... probably 50 hours. Really wasn't difficult, just tedious.

Leveling up a new heroic character has never been much of an issue for people who box. Gearing them never an issue or big expense for those that trade skill. I know of people that obtain max level max AA on characters with less than 30 days played on character.
For someone new to game or returning that doesn't have friends to help out it is a totally different story. I agree with the desire for heroic to be raised so that a new character can group with max level characters but beyond that .... the dev time and resources would be better spent on other projects than something that is easily obtainable through game play.

Good point. The shammy was PLed by my max mage and chanter.

I always thought it would be cool if there was an advanced tutorial where players could learn about the various abilities their class has and what they do. It'd take a lot of work and way more effort than I'm sure the company would be willing to invest in it at this point in time (or ever heh).

Some basic ideas:

• Have healers try to keep some NPC (or multiple) alive
• Have enchanter and bard classes mez waves of enemies attacking (could have them despawn once they stay mezzed for so long)
• Warriors and knights aggro enemies to keep them from killing NPC casters
• Pulling classes could try to tag a single enemy and pull them into camp alone (would fail if multiple enemies made it close enough or had aggro on multiple before you brought it into the target zone)
• Do so much damage to a target in a certain amount of time with recommendations on how to do so

It could get into the usage of discipline and AA (once stable enough) as well.

There could be a story context wrapped around each lesson. The main story could be something like veterans re-training for modern combat to get back into battle and fight against some threat or evil invading the lands.

Yep.

Pictured below is a person with a single level 100 character trying to level high enough to join a GMM grind group.

FWIW I advertised both in guild and in general for underlevel toons to come join in the PL fun. Had quite a variety of different players join me during my grind sessions. It was fun! But still... tedious.