Changes with the February Update: Alternate Ability Grants for Gold Members and Ability Changes

Hi. It's been said so many times before. Please refrain from granting an AA boost. Optional is fine. But having a bunch of AA's for free totaly negates all the need for any effort. Esp as returning player I'm really looking forward to gaining every single AA there is and spending them as it was valuable pocket money. This concept of yours is like hmmm...
- stuffing yourself at a free "all you can eat" buffet and then you are feeling all full and lazy dont want to log in - errr go there anymore.
- loosing 100000kg at once and then your skin hangs all loose and you wondered why you actually started this chara- errr diet (was not intended to discriminate anyone, just picking an example)
so. please don't grant these AA's. If I wish to boost this, hot, if not, fine. Or heck, grant them to heroic toons.

First of all, I worked for the AAs I have. Now you are giving them away? That is deflating the value of my current AAs.
Second: there are AAs I do not want upgraded. For example the Viscid Roots AA. I want to park them and then release them when I'm ready. There are more examples, we need the option to decline a upgrade to a AA. While this could be a coding nightmare, you're the one proposing to change my game play with this blanket solution to another problem.
Third: do fix game mechanics that negatively effect server performance. Thank you.

Build on old expansion features rather than cookie cut the last when developing a new expansion?
Go 'way, what an idea!! Phyros for king!

To Piestro:

Thank You for your efforts in being the mediator between the Public/Customers and those you work with/for. Your efforts are noticed and greatly appreciated. Im sure you take a brunt of the flack, but again thank you.

15 years was a good run for Everquest, maybe there will be another landmark game that will stand out and stay the path to be unique among its competition. This game is being twisted and diced into something far from what the vision was.

Maybe there is hope for its future, maybe....
- split the classes back to their unique roles...
- make the patches fit the problem...
- have the folks that do the thinking there, think twice, act once...

1200+ posts on 2 subjects (this should be a sign)
- Letting Players Catchup that are new
- Solving Zone Disruptions

Be Dangerous....

I'd like to throw some "light" to those comparing assassination abilities. I'm not going to discuss in this post if they should be nerfed or not (I preffer them un-nerfed) but if they get changed in any way they should be all changed in the same way.

First of all you can't compare assassination abilities alone. You have to take into consideration the capabilities of the class using them.

Ranger: Headshot.

• Works only in humanoids: Bad
• Works on mobs up to level 88: OK
• Rangers have an awesome CC. They can AE root and snare. They can get almost any mob out of their problems with knockback & mem flush spells: AWESOME
• Rangers can assassinate from a long distance without even getting hit: AWESOME
• Rangers can manage without a healer merc increasing the experience they get: AWESOME
• Headshots hit hard, they can be improved with many ranger AAs and can 1hit or 2hit most mobs: OK

Rogue: Assassinate

• Works only in humanoids: Bad
• Works on mobs up to level 89: OK, a bit better than the others
• Rogues don't have great CC like rangers but they got some stuns and nice abilities to escape from combat: OK
• Rogues are forced to melee combat to proc assassinate and need a healer merc to solo: Bad.
• Assasinate hits really hard and uses to 1shot most enemies: AWESOME
• (I'm not so sure about this) Assassination doesn't proc so often as Ranger and Zerker's: Bad.

Berserker: Decapitation

• Works on any kind of mob: ULTRA-AWESOME
• Works on mobs up to level 88: OK
• Berserkers don't have neither the CC or escape from combat abilities like rangers or rogues do: Bad
• Berserkers are forced to melee combat to proc decapitation and need a healer merc to solo: Bad.
• Decapitation is the assasination skill that hits for lowest damage. You usually need 2 or 3 hits to kill an enemy: Bad

Considering "humanoids" are one of the most common types of mob out there I wouldn't say any of these classes is better at assassinating, they are just different.

there was, several of them in fact, over the last 2-3 years.

the polls overwhelming showed support for 'auto-grant AAs', and so they're implementing what the polls showed as being the preferred option.

Can we lock this thread for about 12 hours so I can read through it?

It's growing faster then I can read.

Please Forgive me this will be long.

First I am going to start with aa's. As someone who has played off and on for over 9 years I am both for and against the granting of aa's. I don't want to be given them, or have the entirety of my bonus eaten up by the free aa's. I want to be able to choose where they go and have to earn them. The reason I have quit other mmo's and always come back to EQ is because I always have things to work on. I understand the grant will not put me anywhere near max AA's but it will make getting the aa's I want much harder since the fluff aa's (the ones many people save until the end) will eat up my cap. I am not upset about the times I spent to gain the aa's I have and don't want them refunded or anything else like that because I understand I have had the benefit of using them for years. For the people who already have thousands of aa's , and even for those gaining them. Give them something they can use like a charm augment that gains stats every 250 aa's but that doesn't max its stats until you are at max aa's for your class.

My solution is this make the mountain of aa's smaller, speed up the rate of gaining, and reduce the cost on some lines. Automatically grant some of the stat, resist, regen, heath/mana, and run speed etc... aa's. Most of the general tab and a little in the archetype teb basically. Just let players gain those as a bonus as they level like the increase base mana/hp/end etc we currently get. Reduce the cost of other aa's the either everyone takes first or saves to the end. Such as the trade skill, foraging, mystical attuning, combat agility and stability etc... so that maxing out those lines doesn't take hundreds of aa's.

Now on to gaining the aa's faster. Increase the cap of stored aa's to 100 for everyone, then make the dailies give out more experience but only as aa experience, and let us do more then one. Say I take my 86 beastlord with 3k aa's and somehow malo the level 85 daily make it grant 40 aa's. But then allow me to do the level 80 one for say 20, and the 75 one for 10. For level 90+ make each 90 daily give 20 as well as the 85, and then 10 at 80. Also you can increase the aa gain experience cap to 6-7k aa's half of what most classes have at max so it is easier to catch up.

On a side note here I think all classes should be able to effectively malo in content designed for their level. As much as I hate to say it EQ has become much more of a boxer/solo game. With that said people who either because of play style, time constraints, or people just waiting to find a group should not be forced into older content just to find mobs that they can kill.



Now onto the nerfs. I totally agree that something needs to be done about the problems to server performance caused by swarm killing. However I am not really happy about any of them other then the sk/mage ones. And really the sk has to be paired with a mage for them to cause a problem from my experience. My solution is simple and covers all classes. Make it so no detrimental ability or combat ability can effect more then 10-15 mobs at once. Leave the abilities as they are other then that. That way while everyone might be nerffed, and I am sorry I will admit I don't know about all the classes. Everyone should still be able to perform their roles as they are now in group/raid situations or close to it, but it should hopefully fix the server problems.

If you want to give some classes more power on some of these abilities then you still can, but in a different way. This will go with my last suggestion. I will use a rangers head shot as my example because I am most experienced with that. Keeping head shot as it is with all the restrictions add in a new aa line, but have it take over where head shot leaves off and give it the lower proc rate of 2 per min. That way if I want to help lower level friends, or grind aa's, or if people want to power level others it can still be done. Then if someone wants to take the new line to use of higher level mobs for when they are out solo/malo/grouped in higher content for the added benefit they can.



Another idea I have that goes with with my last suggestion which I will get to shortly is this. If possible add in instanced versions of all zones for groups 75+ without doing any quests, but to avoid people farming loot remove the named/bosses. This is because I am sure we will still run into wanting to mass kill in zones, or just for the times popular zones/ areas are all being used by people. This way if someone wants to farm trade skill mats, group with friends for the fun, do a quest that doesn't require a named kill but does require camped mobs they can. It also gives the people wanting to mass kill for experience a place to do so without disrupting the rest of the server population without any excuse not to do so. Also if the people in these instances cause server lag issues I would think it would be easier to pinpoint and address with any punishment you might see fit to use. This could also give people a reason to go to unused zones to see things they haven't such as raid zones that aren't used anymore but they would like to see.

Now for the last thing which I have seen in other people post about in this thread. Every class should have some type of head shot/decap ability. Make them restrictive like head shot is with humanoids, but give some classes undead others animals etc... Spread it around so everyone is not trying to kill the same thing. This way if people want to try and get friends to join them in the game, or grind aa's etc.. they can while not being restricted to a few classes. If a low dps/defense class wants to do these things they should be able to not forced into waiting hours looking for a group or boxing to gain some experience. Killing something 10 levels lower then you should be trivial for any class.

It's a "we need to do something and we have a workable plan, let's show it to you guys and see what you have to say. We can't do nothing, but we definitely want feedback before we make changes" type situation. So in between.

There's a lot of posts, and any decisions made by the team need to be made after significant discussion. It's not like in a couple hours we can say "eureka, that's the solution" because we need to consider how any change impacts everything in the game. Right now we're in more of a gathering feedback and ideas kind of mode.

I've been doing some mathematical analysis of the thread. There are two issues being discussed which makes it more complicated, and I haven't brought our tools to bear yet, but I can already tell you the feedback isn't one sided. That being said, one of the big reasons we posted this well before the patch was to have time to take your feedback (pro and con) into account. We need to do something about both these issues, our plan as posted does that but we are considering the feelings and thoughts of our players.

PBAoE groups are far less of a problem right now. If you look at the list of abilities you'll see we considered many of the abilities and don't see them as problematic currently. If that changes we'll have to potentially re-evaluate that situation.

People quitting don't put gear up in the bazaar. This is an anomaly, or maybe a beneficial circumstance for someone wanting SK gear. It may be that someone only wanted to level a SK for swarming, and now that that is changing they don't want to level a SK anymore.

Unfortunately the solution he proposed looked good, but doesn't address the core issues. We've looked at tons of possibilities.

There's a definite psychological difference between seeing a huge number of AA to grind (even with a big bonus), and seeing it roll in every level. We're not changing people having to earn AA, we're just changing how it will be done. In our proposed plan the AA are earned as part of leveling. In the type of plan you reference AA are earned at a vastly accelerated rate that's just as fast. The difference is all about perception.

That's pretty much exactly right.

quote="LostBoy32, post: 3044396, member: 404587"]WHOA Hold on here... I'm an SK... So I'm addressing this from our side... I get the swarming thing... you want to end it that's great more power to ya BUT by removing life taps from ripostes you are completely gimping us in raid/group situations... If you want to stop SK from swarming GET RID OF MORTAL COIL PERIOD. We dont need it. Its a useless ability EXCEPT FOR SWARMING. Take it back! Give us Killing Spree or some equivalent but for Innorruks sake leave everything else as far as SK are concerned alone.[/quote]
Our goal is to make these changes without significantly impacting SKs in normal situations. Can you elaborate a bit more on why you think removing only MC would be sufficient?

When I came back to the game someone explained how to swarm as a cleric to me. I earned the requisite AA, and was able to do it after about 15 minutes of trying. It wasn't a big learning curve, just something that I had to find out about. My gear wasn't very good, so I swarmed in lower level zones for a while, but eventually I was well enough geared to swarm in level appropriate zones.

The problem is that swarming causing server lag, which causes other players to be unhappy. That's pretty much the whole problem.

Not really. Usually if a mage pet is out tanking warriors on a raid it's a healing issue, not a tanking issue. I've been on raids where we used pet tanking. It was a nightmare.

Any specifics on the nature of the concern? Can you give us any more detail?

It's not necessarily completely obvious when an issue is going on. Because zones aren't completely separate a player swarming in zone a and another player swarming in zone b can have a combined negative effect. You don't know why the zone seems laggy, since you happen to be in zone C. You just know it's not responding as well as you like.

We're not doing this for fun, we're doing this to fix a problem. Currently things aren't working. That's why we need to fix it.

We're here for the duration. I unfortunately have some PTO planned to take care of a personal matter, but I'll be checking in even while I'm out.

You're right in a sense. But what we're doing here is that sort of adjustment (on a bigger scale). The fact that we waited this long and let the problem grow is problematic, and we've acknowledged that error.

Cleric swarming isn't super popular, but any kind of swarming contributes to the same problem. The Shining line however is a bigger problem, because it makes every other sort of melee swarming significantly better. Want to make SK swarming more efficient? Get a shining buff. Same with every other type of melee swarming. That spell line is a power multiplier, and probably one of the single most powerful abilities in game.

There's no difference now. How do you tell right now how someone got their levels, gear, and AA? You can't really. You have to rely on reputation and observation of how they play.

Good post. It was something we talked about in planning, but I'll bring it back up as a subject of discussion.

While I'm thinking about it, maybe the change for decap is as simple as making it only work on humanoids like Assasinate and Headshot do. I can't say I'd be thrilled with that change (its nice to have two zerkers clearing trash at an accelerated pace when my buddy and I farm SoD Tower...where the trash has a ton of hp)...but I never really understood why they weren't limited to humanoids like us. Or remove the humanoid restriction for assassinate and headshot, lower the proc rate as you want to do, bump the level of mob affected by the ability to be equal to the player's max level, and call it a day. As I mentioned, 2 headshots in 60 seconds is only about 6k dps, so it would be a boost to dps on level 89+ mobs, but not overwhelming at that proc rate.

I'm seeing a lot of negative feedback here, mainly to the AA grant portion. The most successful plans are the ones that keep things simple. I suggest three items as an alternative to a lump-sum granting of AA points...

#1: Drop a 1000 AA pack in the marketplace. Can purchase only once per character. Sony need to make money to fund a great game. People won't get upset over 1000 points, they are getting upset over 4000. Increase the number a bit as expansions release. Players now have the choice to grind them out at no cost or get a "reasonable" boost using station cash.

#2: Grant an experience bonus for gold/paid members. This can be in the form of a passive % bonus to exp. Or, ...grant a new AA that behaves like a second "Lesson". This encourages paid/gold membership in the game. Again, it funds Sony. It goes away if you drop your gold/paid status.

#3: Increase the bonus for characters with less than 4000 AA's. Make them even faster and easier to get, but still make them EARN the points. This protects existing characters' investments in time and effort spent. Increase this number cap as expansions release, keeping it about 1/2 way between zero and average max AA in game.

The combination of those three items will go a long way to promote your long-term player base, bringing in new players without alienating existing population.

I want to thank the Dev team for all the thought, hard work and effort you're putting into the game we all play and love. I hope these suggestions bring some value,

-Daarklight, Guild Leader of Five Rings, Luclin

ok - I have read many people who don't like the idea that they earned AAs in the past only to have those same AAs granted to them - how about a "Earned AA Bonus" ... If you are granting the toon say 5000 AAs as a level 100 and the toon earned 3000 of those AAs before the grant that would earn the toon a 3000/5000 or 60% bonus and the could be 60 AAs you would grant towards new AAs. - Just a thought

So how about getting creative and having some fun rather than nerfs



Add a bit of script on the server monitors to trigger some repercussion for overloading:

The God Caziklag Tells Uberswarmer : It would appear that your actions have caused mayhem amongst my people, you have been cursed with the Negativity buff for the next hour of in combat time. All mobs killed within this timer will grant negative XP.

Imagine that coming up when you were running back to your PL camp with 200 mobs in tow - quick tell to person being PL'd "For gods sake don't fire the AOE - run for the ZL"

So many ways to deal with the issue that don't involve a lot of effort and major changes to balancing

Means people could still swarm small scale - but even too many people doing this in too many zones could trigger the servers wrath

Works on mobs up to level 100? Since when?

I completely understand. I have no desire to even log in anymore. Why get the grind going when the grind is about to no longer matter? What pride can I have in my characters when other people will have the same accomplishments with zero effort?
I'm not playing EQ anymore right now--I'm just watching this board, hoping against hope that the Devs will come on and (1) apologize for the worst idea I've ever seen them float, (2) assure us that autogranting AAs will never, ever, ever, ever happen, and (3) beg us not to leave.
This news has crushed me.

OK, I'll put in my 2 cents.. my main being a SK. I have lots of 100s, 1st box set (cleric, shaman, enchanter, ranger x 2 all maxed AAs) 2nd box set mages x 4 all maxed AAs) more 100s (bard, bst, berserker x 2, necro and a wizard). I have never EVER swarmed, beamed, HS or any of that cause I felt it was cheap. I would level my characters by doing tasks, burning lessons, working on hunters, working on tear, working on burden of truth, working on bloodstained shoulders etc....

AAs = Like I said I have many characters that are maxed AAs, it doesn't take long if you know which tasks to hit. I really don't mind if Sony gives people the fast track on AAs, but there has got to be a better way then just giving it to them? For 1 take the timer off the dailies so they can repeat them as much as they want. Increase the xp bonus in hotzones, allow people under level 85 to gain xp from grey mobs. There are LOTS of ways to give people the fast track with out giving old time loyal players the finger.

The nerf = I could care less if you nerf swarming, like I said I feel its cheap. There are lots of ways you can fix swarming without destroying classes, ex SK, the class I love.

1) 10 mobs = a warning, 20 mobs = DT. Awesome idea as long as this doesn't effect raids.
2) 10 mobs = ok, 20 mobs = some mobs loose interest and don't agro. This is good for raid and group and instances.

There are lots of ways to fix this issue without even touching class abilities, it might take longer for the fix, but again why the need to give loyal players the finger? I have just recently canceled my acct for my 100 cleric with 25k AAs because lets face it, with mercs its less work for me when boxing. I love my SK, so if I log on after patch and my Shadow Knight is just a shadow of himself, I WILL cancel ALL my accts, as I have no interest in player any other characters as my main.

These issues do need to be fixed, you powers that be just need to reconsider the matter in how you fix them.

Rogue assassinate is capped at level 88 the same as ranger headshot and zerker decap. Not sure where you got that it works up to level 100. The last rank of it was added well before players could be level 100 - by your logic rogues have been able to assassinate yellow-red cons for quite some time and that is just false.

Now that I have vented, I like a lot of what people suggested.

• Improving the "Looking for Group system" to be more modern.
• Adding in quests that grant new players massive XP or AA's respectively.
• To solve the "Swarming Issue" when a certain amount of mobs are pulled, have them all clear off the players hate list so they are unable to attempt Swarming.
• Not to Familiar with what "Beaming" is. Some tell me Mage's pull a bunch of mobs and run in circles blasting mobs. Unsure of what to recommend as I did not know this existed until today.
• Give players an instant party Queue system, system should consider class, but not required.
• Hand Napkins to Loyal Ever quest Players for tears of joy they will give

I like this idea. At least wed still be earning our AAs and youd be rewarding gold members. But you wouldnt be taking away our desire to play hard. It would just take the edge off.