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

No sense in me going into detail about how this will effect SK abilities. Many have chimed in on this already.

I would suggest that you really READ and THINK about what this nerf does to SKs from a raid perspective - specifically our epic.

There is really no need what-so-ever to touch our epic if you want to remove swarming NPCs from the game. In fact tbh it wouldnt hurt my feelings at all if you removed Mortal Coil from our abilities or at LEAST put some hit counters on it.

You developers really need to remember something. You have given SKs many tools/aa for AE agro and self procs to tank multiple mobs at once. If you nerf epic and the ability to gain LTs off ripostes to survive then what was the point of it? Look at the big picture for what you're doing before making such a rash decision.

Nerfs drive people away. Content keeps them coming back. For EQ to survive we need one of those two courses of action to happen.

you people are out of your minds no offence. You talk about AA's being the issue but there's one factor you neglect to mention. THE MONEY! being able to slaughter hordes of mobs produces a massive amount of PP. Your rewarding everyone that's taken advantage of the Plvl system, by making the money the've made be worth a huge amount more and the poor poorer. not to mention PP was/is what Krono's are what selling for and that farming PP is still the best way to buy them.

I sympathize with the fact that your servers are getting lagged out due to people swarming, nobody like that, but are you really telling me the extra sums of money you make on Krono's don't cover your systems?

Lastly, I was ticked when you nerfed Earthshaker pulls, I knew why, but the truth is the only thing that kept me playing back then WAS the ability to swarm, its soo freaking cool! no other game has anything like it, and it takes skill and it means you have to allways pay attention or die, and best of all people love you for it, they give you PP and still love you for it.

If this game still had a viable GROUP system id say go for it, but it doesn't, real groups with real humans rolled over and died years ago, mostly with the invention of merc's. what allways made EQ special was it was build around the idea that people needed each other.

Lastly, the lure of swarming is what brought me back to EQ after being gone for so long. If you are truly going to make this change well ive said it before, but I think it really will be a death blow.

OMG!!! First you put in that defiant armor so newbies wouldn't have to camp junk for hours to get an oracle robe or banded armor! I was livid over that decision. When you put in the low aaxp bonus that made me really angry also because I was just barely over where the bonus ended. The fellowship XP sharing didn't help me either because by the time I was in a fellowship I had all the good aa's done. Now I find out there are newbie quests in the tutorial and Cresent Reach that are miles ahead of anything available to me back in 2000 when I started. People getting to play for free irks me as well because SOE has stolen hundreds of my dollars and countless hours of my life.

This post is completely sarcastic but is here to demonstrate (and sorta mock) to people that if the status quo is that important then you really need to do some self analysis and think about your life.

Would these changes really hurt you or are you simply *** hurt because of some petty garbage?

Just setting the record straight on rogues.

I have almost every class to at least lvl 90, a rogue has no ability to swarm or even get good XP from it.

-you need a humanoid zone, almost all zones are no humanoid
-you are going to kill light blues, because assasinate caps out at a certain level
-it only works well every 30 minutes for 1 pull because of counterattack that fires a BS from a riposte thorugh knives return strike

Rogues have no ability to swarm, comparing rogues to SK is ridiculous. In fact every class that can wield a 2 hander is better at swarming than us. Including classes like monks and paladins.

glad i quit paying for this game a long time ago and just play for free everyonce in awhile on test. Sk nerf makes it where i don't even want to log into gold member status on test. Its a massive nerf to our tanking ability and its a nerf on our epic at that. Can we get big lifetaps with quick recasts now?

I have heard several people mention "increasing the AAXP bonus" which is, sadly, a point of confusion created by the developers in retrospect, because they didn't know how to (carefully and tactfully) explain the AAXP penalties they had already implemented, so they added these "bonuses" as offsetting mechanics. Now... here's a novel thought... if you want to make it easier to get AAs, how about removing those (10 year old?) AAXP PENALTIES???? Or is that just too easy? Hmmmm?

You know. AAs come pretty fast until you hit about 2k or so, then they slow down by about 50%. Then, at around 3k, they slow down even further, then at 4k they creep to a crawl. <-- these effects are certainly not due to "bonuses", they're due to penalties, penalties for having a large number of AAs.

Take two toons of the same level (e.g., level 90). One with zero AAs (freshly PL'd to 90), one with 4k AAs (a hard-grinding player type) and group them together to kill ONE white con mob. The one with zero AAs will get a full AA for the kill (if not more). The one with 4k AAs will get 1% of an AA. <-- due to penalties for having so many already.

So, you want to make it easier for people to "get caught up"? REMOVE THE PENALTIES.

Seriously, what universe do you live in? I've been playing since 1999 and I disagree with you completely on all points. The grant AA is good for the game as well as most of the nerfs, except for the Rogue. I'm all for it.

I agree with the SK/Ranger/Rogue/Zerk/Mage nerfs as it will acctually force people to group up again and not rely on a beam or swarm till 100,
no folks who don't like grouping wont they will just make boxes and adapt.

Yeah, the people posting in this very thread about how it would affect THEM is something that doesn't exist. Sure.

Yes, you are being intellectually dishonest.

If someone spent time recently playing this game for the first time or returning it and enjoying it and then felt everything they worked for was invalidated as their level 85 with 1000 aa main jumped to 6000 aa and their level 85 with 500 aa alt jumped to 6000 aa, and felt, "whats the point" and didn't log back in, that is bad.

It has nothing to do with feeling what they had was given away. Its because what they did and enjoyed doing was a waste of time in the middle of the process.

I enjoy painting. I don't sell the paintings. I don't go around posting pics of them on facebook. Its something for me, for my enjoyment. All the sudden someone magically makes it so that every single canvas produced will immediately print an outline of the image in your head without your ability to say "no thanks". But hey, you still get the ability to color it in, right! Isn't that most of the game?

That has absolutely nothing to do with sour grapes and everything about changing the rules mid game from something you like to something you don't like as much. And you dismiss it as petulant childishness because it doesn't agree with your one-sided superlative statement. That, quite simply, is being intellectually dishonest.

You want to claim every single person that has a concern about their gameplay or gameplay in general are "waxing poetic about a gaming experience which doesn't exist"? Well, I think its a heck of a lot more likely that you're the one waxing poetic about some magical fantasy world that doesn't exist where scores of people are going to come running to this game because they can fast forward to the part of the game that is the hardest and most prone to people quitting, because now they can't do any AA and instead are forced to do the harder task, leveling, and they STILL have the same gear issues they had before.

Enjoy that fantasy world.

The only people really taking advantage of this change, as it was proposed, is people wanting to play around on an alt on a class on a "try it out" thing, people wanting to main change and get through it quicker, and people wanting to box more alts without having to waste the time doing a lot of core AA.

I see absolutely no logical basis for claiming its going to help the population or anything in general, regardless of your fantasy about people that you apparently think exist in significant numbers that:

1) enjoy the game enough to play it and pay for it, but
2) don't enjoy it enough to do MAYBE 2000 aa that are "required" to get through content when we have 1000% accelated AA exp curve

Let's be serious, those people *maybe* used an excuse of "too much work for AA", but they will quit just as fast with "too much work to level to 100", or "too much work doing all those missions" or "too much work to get gear" or "too much work to get augs".

Yeah, and I'm the one talking about fantasies? Get a grip.

Please don't destroy our class

I think I love you.

You didn't listen to my post about Shining Bastion at all clearly ................................... and no I wont let this go ngroth until I get some sensible dialogue about this.

just finished reading some comments. I have this idea, Your making changes to classes as Piestro said

*Quote* That being said, things which negatively impact server performance (and therefore the experience of EverQuest for a very large number of people) can’t be ignored. Please try to keep that in mind when providing your feedback. Feedback which is explanatory or solution oriented is always more helpful than simply saying you don’t like something.*Quote*

So, I'm asking the GM's to try this please...do this Gently, Nerf beams first. Everyone complains about them, and they are the most grossly unfair to leveling end game, which is what your boosting everyone too. Then take a look at your Servers for a few months, and see what the damage is, and the load that is being put on because of lag.

Don't pull such a massive change all at once.

Will my silver accounts with over 1000 AA be able to reassign the refunded AA they get?

84 pages and counting. I can't keep track of how much popcorn I had to pop to read every page of delicious, delicious outrage. My microwave even broke. SOE, you owe me a new microwave.

Okay, I can understand the nerf for beaming. Why not just put in a spell recourse that snares the caster (doesn't it currently short-term blind them)? Beam pull reaches caster, /splat, mobs go back to spawn point happy, rez for caster.

Okay, bad example I guess. I've never played a class with beam ability, I just play a gimpy L85 ranger with 1kAA (Silver with AA capped). Yes, I use HS, but not to PL or swarm, and quite frankly its annoying enough just waiting for it to fire that I'd be better off doing something else. I purchased the highest rank I could after Lost Gnomes was the premier Ranger AA instance, and then the HOA line of spells was nerfed along with which mobs HS would affect. /sigh I haven't seen a ranger pull great amounts of mobs since then, unless you count my OMG-Vinelash-Druid-Exodus because I've done something stupid while duo'ing. Now, that's entertainment!

Granting AA? Neat idea, but I can't say if its a good one. I can understand the reasoning, though. But just handed freebie AA? Nice exploit, SOE. Go ban yourself! /shrug Where's the incentive? Just increase AAXP gain to ungodly amounts so people are still forced to do SOMETHING to get it.

Sorry, been a busy day, lots of meetings. Killed Lord Inquisitor Seru for the first time (after making my Arx key, haha!) which was trivial...but dang, was fun seeing him. Off to Khati Sha!

pull Innate strenght and the likes out as with deffiant armor and the likes they are just a wast of AA's as you will pass what ever cap increase they will grant

... what?

which is an invalid argument because the "opt out" thing got traction with the devs - so, you just opt out, and problem solved.

how was it a waste of time? that's a statement which assumes itself but has no evidence supporting it.

except for the fact that there's a high chance you'll be able to opt out of it, so... no, not really.

no, i want to claim that you specifically were waxing poetic about a gaming experience that doesn't exist in the wall of text you posted which i was replying to when i said that.

seeing as how the definition of a fantasy is a story revolving around something that doesn't exist, and something that doesn't exist is the basis for pretty much everything you've been saying, yes... you are most definitely talking about fantasies.

You are listening, but we are watching...always watching... *slips back into the shadows*

Thanks for keeping us updated.

You don't have any real experience with the Rogue class do you? If you did, you would not agree to the nerf.

I would argue rogues are less good swarmers than monks and warriors. I can pull a massive train on a monk or a warrior, if you have a 2 hander..you riposte is going to rip right through your train. If you your riposte disc, which both warriors and monks have, training is really fun on a monk or war.

I think it's good they limit swarming, but many classes not present in the nerf have the ability to "swarm" too. Including classes like paladins.

The only class that can truly swarm are SK. Because not only can they swarm, they can stay alive for extended periods during their pull, monks, rogues, warriors,..can not.