Can we not increase the level of mobs in old expansion missions?

I haven't tried the others, but I'd love to know if anyone has beaten Anashti Sul, Damsel of Decay since the retune. I've tried it with a max AA warrior and found it completely untankable. Chain healing on a druid and cleric I went down at 95%.

I do feel more powerful, yes. At 108 I can molo things in EoK that I couldn't at 105, and I could do it before I started getting gear upgrades. Everything else in the game--aside from HA's--is now easier than it was. RoS content is new, that doesn't count. We all know the new content will be hard even with new levels and AA's. It will take a few non-level expansions for content in the new level range to become easy.

I don't want to say I don't care about RoS, because that would be inaccurate, but the content I'm worried about and currently working on is everything that existed before RoS. Most of that is easier now, and that is what I wanted. But I had to get RoS to make that happen, and so I do care about RoS. Maybe someday I'll get to fight there too. Still working on picking up EoK T2 armor.

There is a large number of people who in addition to farming AA or RoS tier 1 group gear, also would like to farm augs, achievements, etc. from previous expansions and those can require HAs. This is now completely miserable to do though, regardless of our character "feeling" more powerful outside - inside those HAs you feel significantly weaker (years after the fact).

I would disagree.

My son and I went through some HAs while leveling some heroic toons, primarily Gribbles and many TBM missions. There were step-ups at 90, 95, and 100 where the missions got a bit more difficult and then got easier as we continued to gain levels and gear. I have not done any heroics since the patch because 1) I would rather scratch my eyes out than keep doing Gribbles, and 2) I am focusing on leveling to 110 and getting enough AAs to get my dps where it needs to be.

My opinion as someone who has a lot of skipped content that I need to complete eventually is these missions should scale to 110 the way they always have. Whatever DB wants to be limited (xp, drops, AAs) should be where they limit, not by radically increasing the difficulty starting from the early 100's. That they haven't acknowledged what would seem to be fairly obvious to much of the player base makes me wonder who is pushing the new normal and why? These missions were never intended to be anywhere near the commitment in time and effort they have been turned into.

Keep the dps checks and raid mechanics and mob difficulty in the raids. Keep the 2 to 3 players with merc content just that.

The radical increases in difficulty don't even follow a specific power curve for player characters.

For the time being, DB will still get my money as I play on Agnarr right now, but I haven't touched by 105s on Vox since this happened. And I doubt I will. When Agnarr reaches PoP and we killed Quarm, I guess it's finally over after 19 years.

The non-level increasing expansions is very likely the culprit to the issues of this thread. Despite not increasing levels, each successive 105 cap expansion had to increase npc strength. That breaks scaling as each time they do that, what constitutes a 105 npc changes. A 105 npc in cotf is not a 105 npc in eok. Each expansion had it's own baseline for npcs. HAs build off that baseline and scaled them up based on that given expansion's percentages. Having 4 expansions of power curves for overlapping levels of npcs is what is broken.

HA scaling is broken precisely because they did not raise the level cap sooner to provide a smoother transition between npcs of a given level from expansion to expansion. In order to have level 110 npcs of sufficient difficulty to level 110 pcs, their system requires an ros baseline npc be used (a level 110 named from the tds/tbm era is a joke compared to a level 110 trash mob in ros). That meas that level 106 npcs gain ros spells. That means that as they scale down from ros level npcs, the baseline used for scaling is much stronger than the previous ones, even as you go down to level 100. Their scaling system was obviously not designed with the idea of freezing the level cap for so many expansions. It assumed a more consistent scaling of npc power based on level increase expansions versus buffing the same level of npcs expansion to expansion.

One possible solution would be modify their scaling code to use different expansion templates for different level ranges of participants. That would at least keep players that are 105 from getting beat on by ros powered npcs. That would only solve an issue of smoother scaling though. I think most players agree, however, that older progression tasks should become trivial as time passes. That requires a different solution. Perhaps capping scaling. Or perhaps modifying how exp rewards scale while leaving content on older templates that become more and more trivial despite the levels bumping up.

Their design did not account for how their working budget broke the expansion cycle. I don't blame them for taking time to discuss and come up with a solution. They need to figure out what the intent of HAs/scaling content is going forward and determine how that works with the code they have and what is easily changed in that code to accomplish said goals.

It's not just that though segap, there are definitely mobs that when scaled up in TBM HAs and the like - are harder than 110 named in RoS. There is something off with the scaling after the last patch that made adjustments to it. Lastly, it's find to discuss it and figure out how to move forward but the primary complaint here is leaving them in their current state while doing so.

SQL table named ExpansionTable:
ID ... int, no null
ExpansionCode ... varchar(5)
MaxLevelAtRlease ... int

Code:

Code:

public int GetMaxLevelAtExpansionRelease(string expansionCode){
 
    if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(expansionCode)){
 
          var model = entities.ExpansionTable.Where(x => x.ExpansionCode == expansionCode);
 
          return model.MaxLevelAtRelease;
 
    }
 
}
 
var maxLvlOfExp = client.GetMaxLevelAtExpansionRelease("EOK");
var lvlToSetMobsTo = highestGroupMemberLevel > maxLvlOfExp ? maxLvlOfExp : highestGroupMemberLevel;
client.SetMaxLevelOfMobs(lvlToSetMobsTo);

It makes perfect sense to a programmer. They are two separately developed sub systems of code. The game designer is just choosing which sub system to use when implementing their design.

That being said, I think that sometimes y'all underestimate the technical level of your customer base. Let's face it, the vast majority of your customers are nerds/geeks, and a good number of us are likely programmers as well. My career is programming, and I doubt I am alone here

Final Fantasy XIV handles this in an interesting way; equipment has an 'Item Level', and content is locked/scaled to your average 'IL' so that even without level cap raises, they tune content for how the player has progressed.

You are not alone.

Unfortunately Level 105 is not equal across all expansions. So, in addition to maintaining level, you have to maintain other criteria such as mob stats during those eras (AC, HP, spell lists, etc). I get that this is just a sample snippet, so not going to pick nits.

Oh yeah that was definitely not intended as final code

Can you imagine what we could accomplish if the Everquest client and server code was an open source project. With the sheer number of programmers that likely play this game, we could re-write the whole thing eventually. But, then you know there would be a gazillion back doors and things like bankers showing up in Befallen that dupe plat.

Taking the old Group geared not 1 raid item on alt warrior of mine an for posterity .. I am asking everyone which exact HA's were you unable to run what so ever ?

A Guildy of mine just said he ran an HA (the fate rewards something something) an said it was do able.. just not in the 10-15 minutes he used to run it in .. an his grip is not that its not "broken" its just that it no longer is beatable in what my guildy would call "reasonable" amount of time.

So I am breaking out Redstone .. (grp geared every stuff not 1 raid item on, an not even finished with his Defensive AA's) to run test on the EXACT .. HA's you all say are "broken" and unable to do at all.

So please tell me which HA's are you guys speaking of exactly please an thank you?

From HA,
DH: Captain Cooper. Excavating for an aswer or Descending tower.
In Neriak: Lark, any one. Sealed Gate ought to be fun.
EWK: Estle: the Other Brother.
Bixie, Naturalist: They are everywhere!
TBM, for laughs, We Make our own Rewards.

Have fun.

TBM: Anashti Sul, Damsel of Decay (which is an HA, although also a progression mission) I think is the most challenging post patch that I've tried. Not that the boss hits that hard for a 110 tank, but the vastly beefed up boss hitpoints, combined with event mechanics, makes this now quite crazy if you don't have extreme dps support.

Just did

Dead Hills : Disrupting the Ritual.

Grp make up.
Warrior - Lvl 105 , 12,367 AA all EoK T1 or T2 gear. No augs in any slots. (not all mitigation aa's are done)
Merc Cleric - 105, 12 Merc AA's in general improved mana.

Alt Wizard - 110, 13,250 aa , all EoK T2 geared. No Rk. III's. (no augs any slots)
Merc Wizard - 110, 250 AA spent in general tab of merc aa tab.

Alt Druid - 110, 25,171 aa , EoK T1 grp gear (no augs any slots)
Merc Wizard - 110, Max AA. (up to EoK expansion, nothing past)

Start time. 6:00 central, End time 6:32 central.

30aa gained 30 min .. every mob in the HA was yellow / red .. an every pull came in doubles at times triples ..

Yes the mobs hit harder then before .. Yes .. the time to do each individual encounter (read HA) takes way longer .. all in all with alts not 1 raid item among them .. not even augs on any 1 of them .. in any single slot .. in EoK gear ..

Dead Hills HA is still trivial..

I think the list of HAs to try has been clearly laid out in posts above. You did an effing GRIBBLE. Whoop de doo. Leave the gnome alone. Go check with Cap. Cooper instead.

@ whulfgar, just out of curiosity, what kind of dps is your "Sub par" group doing firing your wiz alliance with your 3 wizards?
I would be willing to bet that your group set up even in sub par gear is out dps'ing most casual groupers and boxers by a fairly large margin. with that set up including the druid I'm pretty sure just about any content you do is gonna be trivial with the exception of ros. and once those toons are geared and auged that may be trivial too.
but for the most of us, we aren't capable of the dps that your slamming and that makes things much more difficult.
my opinion for what its worth is there should be content for everyone, and these changes make things much more difficult for those already struggling, and barely hinder the folks able to blast through content.
I gold sub 3 accounts and buy expansions for 3 every year, and make occasional store purchases and consider myself a casual.
its always been my practice to do everything I can get done in a new expansion and when I get stuck
go back and finish stuff I couldn't finish before in older expansions primarily for the hero aa's and odds and ends augs and such.
go as far forward as I can until I hit the next hurdle I cant get over then go back to current expansion after gaining a few upgrades and some aa and trying again. rinse and repeat.
things as they are kinda sticks people. cant progress forward cant progress backward.
and they are left wondering what possible path is there to take.
as for me, I'm not out of options yet, but others are right now....
and that is not good for the game. I didn't mean to write a book here so I will stop now.
this is my opinion and the way things look from my perspective, take from it what you will or don't.