I finally figured out why I don't like EQ post 70

There is a certain pace to the game up until 70-75. The skills that you have, things like healing, CC, debuffs, etc, all fit really well together with incoming damage and managing fights. When things go south, the time it takes to cast a heal vs how fast someone is going to die is really well balanced. That starts to go away in the 70s, and becomes fairly horrible in the 80s and up.

One of the things I hate about WoW, and why I don't play it, is because the skills you have, and the timing of the game don't line up. You have 30+ meaningful things you could do, and fights are over in 5 seconds, usually while you're stunned. This is exactly my beef with late game EQ, it turns into a twitch reflex game where a mistake = someone dead within 5 seconds.

If you put a party together in Seb, with era appropriate gear on, the pacing of those fights is to me, the best EQ balance wise. Things can still go wrong, and you can still wipe, but you wipe by attrition more than you do just getting insta gibbed. I have some really fond memories of fights in seb when it was current content, and ending up getting a couple of adds trying to break a camp. The ebb and flow of a fight like that, probably lasted 10 minutes or more, was amazing. There was time to actually use all of your skill set, instead of 'opps, got agro, dead'.

I've been wondering why I constantly feel like I'm hitting a brick wall whenever I get any characters into the mid to late 80s, and why I tend to keep starting over, and playing on TLP servers, and this is it for me. Every other MMO out there is twitch based, everything dies fast, including the player. EQ in the earlier levels is the only MMO I know of where fights can actually develop and you can run into things like running out of mana as a loss condition.

Oh well, problem solved for me I suppose. I'm just going to quit butting my head up against something I really don't enjoy. I love EQ up through PoP, and will happily play that with various classes until they shut the game down.

Congratulations

This game will never have what it had in the early 2000's. Instead of developing the game and staying current while actively competing with other games EQ stuck to its guns and milked their subs for every dime they could squeeze out of them. They have steadfastly refused to listen to their customers and developed a game that could still somehow be playable after years and years. Somewhere around 2005 I lost interest in the game because content/advancement was just a rehash of the exact same thing I just achieved just presented in a different package. I have come back several times throughout the years because I actually loved this game. I spent thousands of hours playing it and met lifelong friends because of it. The current company that owns this game has proven they have no desire to listen to the customer base and only see it as a cash cow to milk the last little bit of money out of it before its demise. Look at this realistically, their current business model is to release the content from 17 years ago.... Look at the live servers, that is where your current players are headed. Are you going to spend 3 years getting the current TLP players to a place that they are just as pissed as the current players that are waiting on content, class progression, character development and then simply shut the servers down when you reach a certain dollar amount that you needed to turn a profit off your purchase of the rights to the game? Somewhere along the lines someone on the TLP servers are going to notice that they are headed to a game that is no longer fun to play and they are gonna start jumping off the bandwagon.

TL;DR; Yeah, the mobs started hitting like freight trains, and SOE decided to take all the money and develop other games rather than reinvest in the game that put the company on the map.

Actually nothing here that can be reasonably debated, it is just exactly that way.
Wife wants to give it one more month, if we haven't felt the desire to play by then well that's it for the last go round with EQ for good (my terms, tired of this non-sense). If we do then time will tell.
DBG scrooded the pooch with the TLP debacle last summer and TBM following, all that new player enthusiasm and interest wasted due to no clear vision of doing more than cashing in for the least amount of creativity and expense from everything we have seen the last year in particular... you dont get do overs on that. Then there was the inexplicable Phinny conditions, to this day no real explaination has ever been released for any of these so one must assume the worst.

The original game and the first ~4 expansions or so were a real labor of love by all the coders/writers/artists/developers/testers who put work into it, and one can tell.

By the time level 70 rolled around, mudflation had started to take hold. The gaps in survivability between best geared (raid mostly) and average geared became huge and the only choice the developers had was to make the group level monsters hit harder and faster. Otherwise there would be less and less need to group together as single players would be able to facestomp level appropriate content.

With the additions of defiant/tutorial/hero's journey gear to the game and Mercenaries, the level 1-70ish players of today are much more apt to survive that accidental aggro of that 6-mob-room. Don't be fooled by nostalgia, there were many things during the early days that would "gibb" you in a heartbeat. Spectres, Sand Giants, Bards, Slate, Dragons.. someone training Venril Sathir to the zone in (dont ask me how). Those are just from my personal experiences. We spent an awful lot of those first years running for our lives, running back to find your corpse, exploring, running to your group meet up.

i don't want all those times back, but i still find the low level game really enjoyable and EQ still stands up well as an exploring adventuring d&d video game action masterpiece.

I think if they kept the Mac server around (but charged and let anyone play there) it'd be booming... F2P ruined that though. It was the perfect in-era server with all the original imperfections. Something that will never be recaptured, esp. with the state of TLP today.

While I don't agree that the "good" EQ experience ended at 70, I totally understand the OP's sentiment. Unfortunately, none of it matters [anymore].

Edit: Oops, my example of >Lv70 was still at 70 , that aside, there was still stuff I enjoyed a lot past that.

It is so sad that such a wonderful game turned into what it is today.

I have to agree with this. Healing and more importantly player damage mitigation hasn't been keeping up. The margin of error between life and death is small for tanks and for non tanks it's miniscule. Often, if I don't keep spamming my fastest heal it's a wipe. Agro shifts from tank for a second.. boom someone dead.

The healing game has been in transition for a long while. The main heal used to be a big 10 second CH.. now healing is geared around raining down a cloud of burst heals in various forms. I think it is stressful to play a healer because of this.

Let me also digress and talk about the way things were... there was a time during Omens of War where I think healing and player survivability felt really awesome. For good tanks, I could throw on an Elixer and promised and it was enough to keep him up. For lesser geared tanks or non tanks, I could do the same cept I would supplement with direct heals. The kills were a little longer but if *it hit the fan, there was actually time to react to the situation as a healer and other classes could do their thing to control the situation. Now it seems like you just get mowed down in a second. I don't think people have enough chance to use their abilities that aren't instant cast to control situations.


I see them spending a lot of time with all these DPS nerfs and making people unhappy. I think they are focusing on the wrong part of the game.

DPS = Fun.
Dieing in 1 second = Not Fun.

How about finding what is Not Fun and fixing that stuff first?

Are you serious? 99% of the people in the game are level 105. The current content is designed for level 105 despite the "scaling crap". If you never get to the show, how can you comment about the state of current Everquest?
If youre struggling to level up past the 80s, I cant imagine what the problem is. I used to molo tank mobs in the Dream Feerrott on my BERSERKER in the 80's! If you've never played a berserker, you might not understand how easy content must be for them to be able to tank.. anything.
Honestly it sounds like youre just one of the thousands of cases of people that have the quitter mentality that is so prevalent in todays "easy mode video game" era. If you cant win or get a participation award everytime you play, you get unhappy.
What the hell is fun about easy content? There is no long term sense of satisfaction when you ROFLSTOMP all the mobs that you come across.
I am just really having a hard time understanding your entire thought process here. Original Everquest was challenging, that is what made it great. You claim thats what you love the most about Everquest but the new game is too hard and that is what you dont like? Sounds pretty bassakwards.

Hit the nail on the head.

I don't think that there was any sort of "labor of love"
I don't think the original developers ever expected it to last more than six month.

Look at Luclin, pretty inventive but in retrospect it's obvious that they had a serious brainstorming session to come up with anything at all past Velious.

So no, level 70 wasn't a break point, it was where they were struggling to keep the game up and running at all.

I prefer modern EQ to old EQ, although both have strong points. In old EQ, the challenge was the world and monsters. Lack of safety, maps, information.. you had to camp out and go to casters realm or allakhazam to find out where to buy your spells, or ask someone in game. The game played very slow, players were slow to move around and NPCs took longer to kill. A fight with 8 monsters was an epic feat if it wasn't a wipe.

The trouble with classic EQ now is that none of this stuff is secret and mysterious any more. Everyone has a lexicon of EQ information at their fingertips. People already know where to get all the best items and experience, how to do the quests, and how to play their classes. If you've ever played on a TLP you'll find the community extremely top-heavy and toxic. The difficulty of playing classic EQ moved from learning how to play, to dealing with hackers and unpunished aggressive players. TLPs are extremely popular and that's great for the people who enjoy playing there, but for me the magic is lost and cannot be recaptured.

In modern EQ, the difficulty is in playing your character instead of the content itself. I can pop a healer merc and kill something, as well as many other players, but that doesn't necessarily mean I do it well. Each class has 30+? abilities to understand and know when to use. Learning the best way to use these abilities and when, and how they synergize with other class abilities is the most fun part of EQ to me.

For old vs new EQ healing, old EQ healing (as a cleric, DRU/SHM hardly qualified as healers) was way more stressful than it is currently. You had to manage your mana use; timing and landing CH in group content was challenging and was different for every tank you grouped with. If you landed it too early, you were wasting mana and your group would have to take more med breaks. If you landed it too late, they would die and you would have to med extra long to do a rez (on top of the whole group thinking you sucked). On the other hand, in raids you would be stuck pressing your CH rotation key for the whole fight, often staring at a wall. I have no fond memories of ToV as a cleric, all I saw was the wallpaper. Once TSS came out, CH finally died and it was like the game finally came to life for clerics in raid content. Things have only gotten better for them since; I find current raid healing to be very fun and challenging.

The funny thing is I find myself agreeing with both sides here.

The game has changed and much is good. But I also remember some good things we don't have any more.

In general, EQ is still great. The problems with EQ are many and most revolve around the fact that SOE / Daybreak has never invested the money back into the game. If we can get enough decent content put out there is still plenty of life left in the game.

I like everquest.

1- I understand now why you are always posting how Snare or Debuffs are important...Next time, tell the OPs you are not playing current content.

2- What about Hard LDoNs? Original PoP? GoD?

I stopped playing when the mercwars could not keep up in Degmar Castle progression. The inability to mezz so many adds in TDS just reinforced that decision.

And there it is. The person who shows up to tell us how easy this is and we must be special needs and we should go quit if we can't keep up.

This game just sucks post 65 and post 70... it just no good. Go back and balance this for solo players. It's bad enough the zones weren't as strong post OoW let alone the game balance.

I spent this last weekend power leveling a warrior to 68 and wow. The care,balance,and beauty of older expansions was amazing. Just spending 20 minutes in a classic zone was more satisfying then spending any amount of time in a post-70ish EQ. Looking at what EQ has become since the golden years was incredibly depressing. The only thing equally depressing was me and my girlfriend watching Fuler House and seeing the cast members 30 years older. Ugh. Where's my beer?