Feedback about Heroic Adventure Difficulty

Are Heroic Adventures (HAs) supposed to be extremely hard? My wife and I are recently back on Firiona Vie. We've having a blast with 12 years of content that's new to us. Then recently, we tried some HA's for the first time. Here's what happened over three days.

• Day 1 - Clayton Teek -> Dead Hills - "These are impossible. Yellow mobs that just crush us, in groups of 3 or 4. LOADING ... PLEASE WAIT."
• Day 2 - Clayton Teek -> Bixie Warfront - "Oh, how cute. These are fun. Wonderful Art. Let's do another". And we did. Another and another and another. We had a blast!
• Day 3 - Clayton Teek -> Dead Hills -> Skulk the Madaxe -- "Hmmm... Well, it's a different quest, maybe this one is okay. ... LOADING ... PLEASE WAIT."

The first pull in the Dead Hills HA's includes 3-6 mobs that hit our level 90 tunes for 31k. I found this thread, which reported this as a bug (https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...ing-in-the-broken-mirror-on-tlp.270182/page-2). I understand it's not a bug.

The dev asked us to report it as feedback. So here it is.

Our feedback: Half of the HA's are great fun. Half are impossible for us. Please either designate which are which or give the hard ones another look.

Thanks for your time,
Subscribers on Firiona Vie.

They don't really seem to care, and the one guy that did care left. I don't think they know/remember they promote the HA's via the Teek brother in PoK. It's old content, but it's actively being promoted.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/ha-scaling.246549/

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/ha-scaling-in-the-broken-mirror-on-tlp.270182/

So, did you do more than the ones you quoted?

The reason I ask is, two of the three you mentioned are about the hardest HAs there were in CotF. The only other ones which could be a pain (depending on a LOT of factors, obviously) were the ones (as in, 1 each) in Tower of Rot and Argin-Hiz. Come to think of it, there was one in Neriak Fourth Gate which had a nasty 3-4 pull.

The rest? Eminently doable, with just a little bit of patience.

Main advice: Steer clear of DH, except for Gribbles, obviously (easiest HAs there are), steer clear of ToR and AH, and you should be good. That still gives you about 26-30 HAs to choose from

I think the "Cooper" HAs in deadhills were supposed to be very hard.

Etwk HAs were the easiest ones iirc...

Are you using any CC? According to your post your pulling the entire pack of mobs....so not a bug or over tuned. Some of those HA are scaled up in difficulty.

HAs were supposed to be for 3 players and 3 mercs, sadly when they decided to rebalance them for higher level chars they made them far too hard at lower levels. They have tried rebalancing them a few times since and still haven't got them right, TBM named are hitting 10K harder and spells are landing 10K for more damage than they were originally, yet the gear for that era hasn't been increased to counteract the increased damage.

Maybe when the next TLP server gets there they might get round to fixing them. They certainly haven't been fixed for those on live servers.

Call of the Forsaken Heroic Adventures have 2 or even 3 tiers of difficulty that are not immediately obvious in game.

Unless you have done some extensive reading up about them on sites like EQresource & Allakhazam, Allakhazam in particular is worth reading pages of player feedback on as this will often give an indication of the difficulty players have encountered on them you really won't know what you are dealing with in terms of expected challenge.

Both EQResource and Allkhazam have "progression" guides for expansions that will show you what tier each mission is considered to be in:

For example - https://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/eq:Progression_Through_Call_of_the_Forsaken

What you will learn from that & from your experience playing through the missions is that the earlier HA on that list will be quite easy the ones further down the page will be significantly more challenging.

Reading the information on such community websites as these will better equip you to deal with the individual HA but also give you some handy guidance on whether your group will be able to handle the challenge each presents.

That said the difficulty of the HA in CoTF was raised up in the past, this might be what you are seeing.

If you get as far as the HA in The Darkened Sea & The Broken Mirror you will need to bear in mind that these were "upscaled" to level 110 in the past, the spell damage tables for these HA were reverted back to their original values, but the mobs levels, melee damage, HP & AC values of the NPC have not yet been reverted, they hit for way more damage than they did so originally, I myself have made several attempts at getting these reversions completed but they remain outstanding as of this post.

You can read more about that: HERE

You can thank HA scaling. The worst design change EverQuest has ever endured. MORE RISK. SAME REWARD.

The reason the HAs are so difficult is because they are scaling to the next expansion's stats, spells, and abilities. Darkpaw doesn't care enough to fix it. In their eyes, the evil, dastardly customers are using old content to level up. Devs hate this. So as a disincentive they made HAs scale to the latest expansion at your current level -- EVEN IF YOUR SERVER HASN'T UNLOCKED THE NEXT EXPANSION.

This means for HAs:
CotF scales to TDS
TBM scales to EoK
RoS scales to TBL
ToV scales to CoV

Neat, huh?

As true as this is, mobs should not be hitting a lvl 90 for 31k. I have a lvl 90 sk, decked out in the highest hp raid gear in the game for 90, and fully buffed she has like....85k hp. 31k hits sounds like something a lvl 100 or 105 should be taking.

Which doesn't help those on TLP servers or those leveling up on live. Unless they plan on upgrading gear so they can be completed at the levels and gear they were aimed at.

CotF should not scale to TDS, CotF was max level 100 TDS was max level 105.

My experience on Phinny was at level 100 when CoTF unlocked the HA were not too bad.

The HA that came with TDS were crap, they had absolutely crap XP compared to the really decent XP in CoTF HA.

EoK HA were absolutely crap too, they took far too long for the amount of currency that they gave.

The really problematic HA were TBM HA - it was these that were (upon TBM unlocking on Phinigel) 1-shotting TDS raid-geared tanks.

This was mainly due to the change of December 18 2019

Prathun reverted the spells, left the company before reverting everything else needed.

3 TLP servers had to endure TBM HA being over-scaled as the dev team were busy working on CoV - we have had 2 patches since that gladly focused on Epic 1.0 issues but neither addressed this outstanding problem.

I totally agree with OP.

It doesn't matter what scaling the devs have adjusted or what expansion each is based on or what spells you cast or your group set up or your strategy. The Gribbles, Russell and Mad Max and Bro Estle are very hard for the normal average player. I noticed that all the players I grouped with who had no problems in any of those were raid geared and had done each HA numerous times (that helps tremulously as far as figuring out how to run it)

I did the same as you, and detoured to the Bixie HA as those were the only ones I could handle. And did those till I was throwing up bixies. Then I was able to do some of the ones from Marla in Tainted Karana.

Then I moved on and started the progression for TBM in Plane of Health.

Went back to those other ones and was able to handle them much better.

To me it is very similar to the logistics that you can buy a level 85 character and the first thing you want to do on him is fight in Feerrot or get the J5 but that zone is a little rough for that level.

So hang in there, just because your group cannot do what other players say is easy - keep in mind they have been at it much longer. There are just some players that jump in and overpower everything and then say how easy it is. There are others, like me, who just find a zone we are comfortable in and do stuff there.

Solid post, but this kind of ignores that DPG actively promotes the usage of HAs from 75+ as a path for returning players. Clayton Teek sends players directly there. This is supposed to be the comfort zone.

So ... not arguing with the idea of scaling. And I concur that it's one of the laziest design decision in the history of EQ.

But I had thought that the scale was to the expansion at the end of that level bump.

So CotF scales to CotF (but those under 96 still have big issues because the algorithm for scaling is not right)
TDS and TBM scale to EoK
RoS scales to TBL
ToV now scales to CoV (which I should test as I have enough logs to see if the damage output in the missions have changed at all)

Is there a post that says what you are saying that you can reference? It is definitely possible I missed something.

I feel the comfort zones are the hot zones from his cousin, Franklin which take you up to level 95.

Once a player has those under his belt he should be ready for Clayton's.

And they do promote those and many other paths, like Heroic Journey

And they need to have some zones the overpowered level 75 can play in or they will complain.

I posted about this a few years ago when they made the changes Skuz mentioned. Flat out, it sucks, and the changes were stupid. It's not the HA's themselves that are harder, it's the mobs that can be as little as one level higher and suddenly hit like a later expansion.

At 108 in a CoTF HA, there are blue mobs that destroy me in seconds. Single pulled, slowed, and still dead in seconds. That's because they are on the RoS tables instead of something earlier. I get that there were abuse issues and that the easiest changes to make will likely be the solution, but this one didn't work.

They should have nerfed the exp gains at higher levels, that's what they were trying to stop anyway. I'm just trying to finish progression in lands that are 3 expansions behind the gear I'm wearing and 4 expansions behind my level range. I can't just get more people my level to fix this, I need people who are geared to survive RoS to fix this. That's a big ask for completing old progression, from a level 100 capped expansion.

I like HA's, they are fun. I like going back to do old progression, also fun. Not being able to complete old progression when you have reasonably out-leveled it, not fun.

What you posted doesn't make any sense.

HA's aren't comfort zones? They offer daily bonuses on a rotating basis and quality gear rewards that suit the level. Hot zones after 75 do not reward adequate gear, and defiant gear is not adequate for the current HA tuning without receiving max level buffs.
Hero's Journey is good up until Mesa, then it's cumbersome with tradeskill required quests, raid mobs, etc.
There's plenty of content available for a twinked level 75.

As far as I am aware TBL, TOV and COV missions aren't HAs they are normal missions which don't scale. I'm not even sure if RoS missions scale, something in the back of my mind says not.

This HA issue is quite tied into the Progression system & the "nerfing" of XP from older expansions which took place in the 100+ level range

The XP in expansions in the 100+ range has been messed around or monkeyed around with under some oddball ideology surrounding making only the most recent expansion worth doing for live players, but the knock-on effects that has had on TLP has been at times slightly detrimental and at other times stupid & brutal - that's why HA got upscaled to begin with, it fitted the developer desire of making going backwards to level a non-viable solution.

This seems to have been started a while before level 100 though, borne out of the knowledge that in SoD - when they first experimented with mob kill XP being absolutely diabolically bad in the first half of the expansion - that players went back to SoF to gain the XP for level 81-85, because levelling in SoD's early zones was so bad players baulked at it.

ToV was when this change in direction/ideology around level XP finally finished maturing, and the f**ked up HA that happened en-route were just collateral damage, in my opinion at least.

Since EQ went into SoD it has been going downhill in terms of rewarding gameplay outside of this
"lets's railroad players into our hyper-linear progression system no matter the damage it does to the way the game feels" effort that has now fully finished destroying what open feel EQ had remaining and turned it into a completely different game.

It's like they took World of Warcraft's Quest progression system but then stripped out all the solo content that made that actually work properly.

They also tried some nonsense in TDS, where after you hit 101 it nerfed experience gains from past expansions.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/so-xp-nerf.217282/page-13