Changes with the February Update: Developer Updates

I sometimes forget just how many people only do Hotzone dailies to level up.
KISS = Keep it simple stupid.
So we know that the curve bonus is 10X at 0 AA and decreases linearly to 1X 4000 AA. (devs have confirmed this) So over those 4000AAs the bonus average is 5X. The fact is that this gift of AAs with help everyone (who is not Max AA ect) in some way.
-If you are looking for the most efficient way to maximize every single AA you should get to 100 and buy the AA lines newer than Underfoot using the bonus Xp curve. If you want to work on AA lines that are included in the AA gifting then you waste some of the gift in doing so but it might be worth in sometimes. So, Complete whatever AAs you want within the bonus and then use the AA gift when you are ready. This is especially true if all you do with most of your play time is do dailies and use Lesson. Keep in mind however that your character is much weaker for an extended time.
- If you play a lot outside of daily quest grinds it is more of a toss up as to when to cash in the AA gift. A character with 4-5K AA is a lot more effective at grinding and camping things outside of daily quests. So you may want to cash in the AA gift earlier vs someone who only plays the dailies.

I personally would grind maybe 2k through the bonus and then cash in the gift of AAs for most classes. I dont want to sit on my character for an extra month or 2 just to MAX them when i could be playing with them in other areas of the game rather than the same quest 100 times day in and out.

Whether you wait or cash in immediately you still have a very effective character for most content, (and the gift will benefit you in some way) the question is how you want to get there.

Technically .. the bonus starts at 900%, and drops to 0%. Add the 100% base that you are going to get no matter what, and you get the 1000% down to 100%. But, if you are talking bonus only, the average through the 4000 AA's is 450% (aka 4.5 times), not 500%. The total is 550% (5.5 times).

(a+b)/2 ... (9+0)/2 = (9)/2 = 4.5 ....
(10+1)/2 = 11/2 = 5.5 ...

There is many people doing dailies to catch-up. Not only with AA's but also experience. MM missions where like that too, and many other areas.

I do not blame one person to do these only. The reason why I feel so strongly about the POK Tasks are because it takes a 85+ person with at least 40k hps to touch half of the mobs out there in SL, WK, and Fear. (a tank type, with healer merc) no chance at all.

They are horribly over HP'ed for the lower geared player. You better have many AA's on Mana regen, HP's to the max if you get hit your done 12k to an 85lvl caster x4 sometimes if they quad = dead before you knew it.

I can fight in cloth and do well, but not against those SL/WK/Fear mobs.

Light blue my butt, they are with 500-1mill + hp each. They can quad for 12k+ on an SOD raid geared person.

I know I just got back like that.

If it wasn't for others I would never have anything better then POK Tasks to level up with.

So for the newer people just returning to the game, Continue to do the POK Tasks as much as you can 50AA's a piece for 86LVL (85+90+alt) Then get and make some friends asap, or find a guild doing the SL/WK/Fear content and get into a group and level to 100. After those AA's come around spec in the class AA's you need. AC/HP/MANA/Regen - damage avoidance.

Best advice I can give a person. I found out the hard way too.

I forgot to mention, also see if the Higher level players can purchase you some 85 to 100 Gear on those vendors in WK

Most are overloaded with Marks and cant spend them on anything of use.

I am even sure you might be able to trade them for PP to get the gear for you.

Hope that helps

Well said.

Players who want to 'experience the good old days,' who want to solo/molo their way through AAs in addition to their levels - they can simply toggle off the additional AA. This doesn't affect their playstyle at all.

People who want to get within shouting distance of where most of the social interaction, etc. is a bit quicker - they have that choice too toggling AA on.

For folks who seem to derive a lot of their enjoyment of the game from emphasizing the gap between themselves and others - that seems to be more of a metagame issue than an EQ issue.

Recently returned and glad I didn't get very far into it. This new plan works perfectly for me and anyone who just wants to enjoy the game as they want and not race to the end.

$15 bucks a year gets you the keys to the kingdom. Hopefully next year I get the next expansions AA's and anything else they want to toss at me for free. Sorry to anyone who wastes their time and money doing otherwise.

Made a forum account just for this. Piestro, If you wanted to end Sk's from swarming, all you needed to do was put a hit limit on MC. Nerfing the epic like this is a huge, huge over kill. I have swarmed on my Sk since MC went live and all your team needed to do was remove or put in a hit limit on mortal coil.

The extra nerfs to stuff like Leech curse is a wtf thing. It has a 50 min reuse timer and is not and never used for swarming. Do any devs play an sk? I bit over kill. Also nerfing our BPs? These again have 0 use in swarming because of the short duration and long recast timers. Oh and also they return 10% per hit.

The SK epic has no reason for a nerf like this. It is HEAVY handed.

Please reconsider. Sk's are already a bottom feeding class.

Actually they are giving them a false bottom cut off. Those people with 3-5k AAs have maybe 1-2k AAs in the 4-5k worth of AAs that they are going to be giving out when they give out all of UF and older AAs. I've been against auto-granting AAs from the start, but really at least when they originally announced it they were talking responsibly about it and only going to give people the AAs that they actually needed; not 3k worth of AAs that they don't.

sad to say but its the nature of the game.

there is no support apparently for expansions like TBS that can cover level ranges 1-100 and satisfy both casual groupers and hardcore raiders.

and design directed towards the higher end of difficulty such as underfoot ( asked for by players ) actually resulted in the collapse of many mid / lower lvl guilds and loss of people.
design, directed towards the low end resulted in much the same.

new / returnees / etc for the most part power through the lower levels with a merc and defient gear to 80 then focus on doing the same for aa's while getting the expansion armor. sadly the lower lvl content has been mostly unused except for tradeskill items / rare drops / and giggles.

soe trying to create incentives for groups / lower levels has mostly been a failure.

MM's - except for using TA's / and repeatedly for AA's , and have been basically unused since the xp nerf.

same with the omm. unused since nerf. and everyone got the good items from the merchant.

shrounds very limited use - goblin rogue for sneaking around. and used for exploiting to get a task. never caught on for the "grouping with a lower level friend " it was desighed for.

content such as the "arena game" in brells went unused after the novelity wore off.

I'm sad that soe is apparently writing off 85% of the game content, that's the way the player base has changed.

it used to be all about the journey. now its about gaining levels / AA / gear as fast as you can.
most of the player base is focused at the high end and in the end zones.

Please reflect on this bit of logic - They need to make more money so are bringing in Heroic Chars - They need the Heroic Chars to have a basic set of AA to get them going (can't be a hero on 0 AA) - They need to appease the player base a bit about this so they give us the same AA's - Mean while nerf biggest means of people PL'ing so there is no competition for their Heroic Chars, if you want a high level char quick then you have to buy it from them. So imo don't expect too many changes - in fact if it was my business decision then I would have presented a very tough set of changes to begin with, all the time knowing how far I would fall back to appease the masses and make them feel grateful by the end. Then just to cover their back - We are all getting moved to an all access plan instead of an EQ subscription (very generous - but why if you need money badly?) which as far as I can see is the fall back if Heroic Chars don't work and they have to "Sunsett" EQ then there is no need to offer reimbursement of any kind to any body as it is not an EQ subscription you now have, and there will still be some other SOE games you can access.

If money is so tight that they have to do this then why bless us with a "free" pass to all games ? While I am sure that each game has it's own budget each year and is expected to make profit - at the end of the day it is all money coming into SOE. But this option gives them great flexibility as to what to do with games without the customer base being able to have any leverage - it is a very well thought out business strategy!

Quilix,
YOU ABSOLUTLY UNDERSTAND IMO.
Everyone should read this over and over like a mantra!
You pose a question earlier for me. This is my answer. I have subscriptions totally over $1,000. I am a long time veteran. I mutlibox and have a small army. I have probably spent over $10,000 in expansions and subscriptions over the more than 10 years (since kunark actually). I have no issue with what I spent. I was rewarded with fantastic content and gameplay (I think at times their cs was lacking, and the gm decisions did not go my way, but that is not part of this). What irks me, is how they approached this. I think they could have approached this another way. Management may have conceded somewhat to the class nerfs . IMO, it certainly looks like they have not budged on the autogrant. It is their way, or the highway, and the guise of we like feedback. They never put a MOTO up. General chat should be filled with talk on this, and it is not.
In the movie the Godfather, if you got kissed on the cheek you knew that was not good. You, at some point, will we wacked.
IMO, management just wacked the years, (or decade) the veterans has spend EARNING their AA.
I am waiting to see if they throw a bone to the veterans.
I may not continue my subscriptions because of this lack of transparency. Fool me once, but you will not fool me again!

Xianzu - I agree that a lot of the AA people using this are going to get is fluff. Far better would be separate templates for each class. However, I am doubtful that SOE has enough developers, with enough detailed knowledge of each class - preferably backed up by current game experience - to come up with a 'no fluff' template? Color me skeptical on that.

To quote an econ prof from years ago, is 'maximum utility subject to budgetary constraint. I think that the choice the devs face is a) develop templates that will come out some months from now, and the time cost reflected in less other content being developed, or b) chose this approach of granting all AAs.

Perfect, meet good (or at least less bad). Duke it out. I think that this is how we got to where we are on the AA grant issue.

You know about the LFG tool, right? Nobody uses it lately, but that's a different issue. Maybe it needs upgrading.

As for compensating you for losing the ability to lag the servers and disrupt zones with your swarming groups? Well, how about this: when you are not making the zone unplayable for everybody else with your swarming, more people can come play in it, and it's easier to find a group.

This has to be one of the best posts I've seen!
Obsoleting "old AA" by setting the cost to "1" - would solve the entire problem of "the mountain of work" needed to "catch up", yet still allow players to earn and chose how they spend their AA as they grow.
I hope someone at SOE sees this, and says "That's so simple - why didn't we think of that?"

-Rat

Yes.. I clarified later that I was not directing my comments at Piestro personally - but at "corporate tactics" as a whole.
He's in the very unenviable position of having to "sell" the changes that are often pushed by the bean counters. We can be glad he at least had good input in a lot of meetings.
It might be nice if they actually went to the forums first. ie Stating the mandated results, and the reasons why, and let the huge brain trust here come up with proposed nerfs / changes to meet the required design paramaters. You can bet that the 100's of people here can out-think a handful of developers in a room. (This not meant to disparage the intelligence of the Dev's at all, but reflects the overwhelming numbers of minds here.)
Just look what Dynn came up with, quoted in the post I did before this one!
Simple, meets all the design intentions - and overcomes most of the flaws with the proposed AA grant.
-Rat

I wouldn't necessarily say 1AA is anywhere near the right cost, but a constantly decreasing price (dependent upon the age of the expansion) would be better to the current plan.

The deign parameter is given as "free" or "super easy".
1 is the closest to meeting that parameter. (emotions aside).
-Rat

Leechcurse Discipline will now fade after 350 incoming hits.
Epic effects (Reaper Strike and Lich Sting) now fade after their owners deal 800 melee hits.
Leeching Embrace (a breastplate effect) now fades after its owner deals 180 melee hits.
Leeching Touch (another breastplate effect) now faades after its owner deals 360 melee hits.
Mortal Coil now has a hit limit of 1320 incoming hits and will trigger Mortal Residue more often (currently 8 percent; needs further testing). Extended Mortal Residue's duration to 28 ticks to prevent chaining once it has landed.
where are these going to go? in the song window or will they take up buff slots?

It's been good to see a lot of new users registering for the forums to chip in on the proposed changes. Welcome, all. Stay a while.

I just spent a couple hours skim reading through the entire thread. I'm probably one of the target audience for this AA grant update and although not in favor of it - and if it were still possible to make it go away I'd try - I do understand some of the reasoning behind it and why the devs feel it necessary.

I played EQ from Kunark until sometime in 2006 at which time I left for EQII which I played for several years until the last couple years where I've been floating from game to game never really feeling like anything was right for me. A few days ago a friend said he had logged into EQ and wanted to play again so I came back right away. My main is level 75 with just under 1k AA - that was a lot when she left but a drop in the bucket 7 years later. .

So, it is clear this AA change is happening. That isn't really debatable at this point - the decision is made. So now it is my 'job' to figure out how it will affect me and what to do about it. I'm just really uncomfortable with the whole thing. I would be so much happier with a x amount of free AA every level type of giveaway but that was already ruled out. While reading through the thread I really tried to pinpoint where my anxiety is coming from and I think one person touched on it. I'm fine with passives being given out - for some reason that seems more ok to me. But the activated abilities - especially the class ones - seem like they should be earned one at a time. How will I learn to use them all correctly if they are just thrown at me? It really feels overwhelming.

I'd like to echo the couple people who suggested leaving class tab out of this. It can always be added later but once you do it you can't really take it back. If - which I think is most likely the case - it is already too late for that proposal then please at least develop some sort of cheat sheet per class for all activated abilities you are tossing at them. People who are serious about the game are willing to do some research online but I feel like it would be a nice gesture from the company if you made it easier for us. You can't hand a child a shotgun without teaching him gun safety... granted that is an overly extreme parallel but please do our future groups a favor by sending an email in game (for people who don't normally check the forums) with a link to where they can find information on all their new mystery abilities.

I'll do the research and figure it out and be a good cleric - or leave the game if I get too frustrated to bother - no matter what you do but so many people are going to get a lot of new buttons. Help them with knowledge to use the new power too please!

You don't have to opt in, if you feel like getting everything at once is somehow going to be detrimental to you learning how to use things. Alternatively, you could opt in, get all the AAs you don't have, and come to these very forums, go to your class' sub forum and ask a bazillion questions on any single ability you want. Chances are, someone will help you. That's one of the great things about EQ...the community is there.