Wizards are a real class but they for sure could use some work as several great posts on suggested changes point out. Hit or miss depending on expansion sums up the class pretty much to me. And without Berserkers I would have quit after PoP & never came back, I've not mained another class since - maybe for a few folks that would be an even bigger reason they shouldn't have been made
In my opinion: The lack bundle or group pricing for membership and expansions is a long term flaw. Considering EQ makes most of their money on players with multiple accounts, we could use bundles for membership (e.g. pay for 2 memberships, get 1 half off) or expansions (buy 3 expansions for a slight discount).
I tried this but found I had to use a slightly different syntax to get it to work: Code: /chat #general Hello general-chat. The #chat or ;chat commands did not seem to accept the channel name with or without a "#" but the /chat command worked with a "#" at the start of the channel name. Good trick. Thanks!
Going back and forth between EQ and WoW does take some getting used to. For all that people diss WoW, it really does have great visual and audio indicators for situational awareness. In WoW if you're standing in the fire, you KNOW you're standing in the fire.
My main long-term grievance is with tradeskills. And yeah, this will be a not-so-partial rant. TL;DR bullet points at the end for those that don't want to read another of my novels. Now, from the beginning of EQ, tradeskills were a minor part of the game. Most of the items made with it in the original game were only useful for newbie characters, were utility, for flavor (literally, in the case of food and drink) and a couple quests. Velious introduced what I think was the first quest series that used multiple tradeskills and that produced a desirable item for multiple classes (Coldain Prayer Shawl). This would start to become a regular thing. Such as the Earring of the Solstice in SoL and Aid Grimel quest in PoP. That last one, the Aid Grimel quest, was a problem, in my reckoning, as it required 220+ in all 7 skills (requiring AAs to have been spent to do so), and much of the raid flagging for PoP (Through Rallos). I remember this well as I saw so many raiders pushing up the prices of supplies used to skill up in the bazaar and then dumping the products below cost as they worked their skill up high enough to make an uber quest item for themselves, not out of any desire to be a crafter. To this day, I still see some people talk about much they 'hate' doing tradeskills, yet they did them anyway so that they could get that BIS item. (Artisan's Prize, anyone?) The way gaining skill works was always an issue, but I think it was made much worse with EoK. Some skills could be worked up all the way to 300 with just vendor-purchased materials (even if really expensive to do it that way, like with jewelry), while others require a ton of farming. And the RNG can be really cruel on those last 20 points. At least the ability to 'make all' helped save our sanity and reduces our carpal tunnel syndrome. I have to say, though, but gaining skill based on the number of recipes "learned" was a misfire. Spending endless hours on high level toons obliterating low level zones for tradeskill components gets boring really fast. If live servers had sufficient numbers of players actually adventuring in those zones, then the bazaar would work to obtain what we need, but I've almost always been the only one in those zones when I farmed them. (It also peeves me that the logic of it doesn't work. If you gain skill from "learning" how to make something different than what you've made before, then you shouldn't get just as much knowledge by simply scribing the recipe from a book.**Suggestion at the end) Adding insult to injury, it takes 425 AA points to raise the cap for each skill from 300 to 350. Now for the main point of my grievance. Tradeskills were never made to have a consistent role in the game. They would wax and wane in usefulness. Sometimes they would be desirable in the casual/group game, sometimes to raiders, sometimes to both, and sometimes to neither. The methods of obtaining materials was never consistent. Foraging and fishing were always useful for obtaining food/drink supplies, but sometimes you'd need that for other skills. Whether foraged or fished, dropped, or ground spawn, sometimes things seem plentiful compared to their desirability, other times the rarity is obscene. Recent decisions along these lines are frustrating to me, as well. Particularly the need to forage in old zones in order to obtain materials for current food and drink. It is as if they want, or at least expect, people to use afk forage bots. Lastly, the mechanisms for making items have been really haphazard and inconsistent. While I was on a break from the game, it seems that they revamped the DoN cultural from how it originally worked, extended it backwards to low levels, and then continued that pattern up to The Darkened Sea. But then, there was nothing at all in tradeskills for the next two expansions (TBM and EOK - well, there were a couple of quest recipes in EoK, I think). Ring of Scale ditched the previous format and we got Conflagrant gear. That was a pretty solid system, in my opinion. Some materials were a bit too uncommon in the bazaar, mostly because they didn't drop from mobs people killed routinely while grinding xp (the reptile skins, mainly), but otherwise, good job. Those tradeable items could then be used along with a no trade raid drop to make them raid quality. However, then we got something different again in TBL which was copied for ToV and CoV. And, frankly, I don't like this system at all. The container model of crafting is not a system for making crafted gear at all, in my view. The item that a character equips wasn't crafted using a tradeskill. It comes from taking a no trade item you loot from a mob you've killed and then combine that in a container that a crafter made. That sort of thing was fine for Phlogiston, as requiring someone to personally loot something from a raid in order to obtain something raid quality makes sense. But in my mind, crafting things at a casual/group gear tier should be crafting a finished product that is tradeable and the end user simply equips. If they need to also personally loot something to make use of it at all, then why not just have that looted item turn into the piece of gear directly? The promised TL;DR summary: Tradeskills have no consistent place in the game, varying in stats, desirability, rarity, mechanisms of obtaining materials and the final items, and other factors in very haphazard ways. Get feedback and decide where they should fit and then stick with it. "Best In Slot" tradeskill quests simply throw a bunch of min/maxers into the crafting economy that really don't like tradeskills. "Good" tradeskill quest rewards that are neither better nor worse than what can be obtained by regular adventuring are more appropriate. Skill up paths could use some refinement up to 300, with the 301+ path needing major help. Especially reduce the AA requirement. 425 per skill to get to 350 is just ridiculous. My suggestions: Each expansion gets a quest where you make some items using material drops from the expansion. Scribeable recipe books would be the reward. The AA requirement starts at 20 points for the first rank that takes you to a cap of 305. Change it to not increase with each rank, but stay at 20. (Obviously, refund the points for those that already bought them at the current cost.) Materials should be more consistent in how they are obtained. If my suggestion above is taken, or something similar, then past expansions probably don't need any adjustment in rarity. But I would like current max level recipes to not use hours worth of items foraged or otherwise obtained from zones half the current max level. Go back to something like the Conflagrant gear system, rather than this crafted container model. Casual/group crafted gear shouldn't require a no trade looted item.
The /command, ;command, #command is a little crazy /tell foo.xegony should work. Instead I have to remember to type ;tell foo.xegony
As Rondor noted I messed that slash command's syntax up it's actually /chat #channelname messagetext I remember digging around a lot of websites to re-discover that, and only a tiny few had it listed I knew it existed from when I raided back in the day but after a 7 year hiatus I had forgotten it by the time I came back in 2015. I know what you mean with the /tell - ;tell - though, "if you don't use it you lose it" it's a legacy of of the old chat system code.
Don't get me started on this, my biggest annoyance is Klandicar, lots of emotes about Klandicar doing things and he does nothing!
I really like some of the zone music, much of it is really great stuff - it just gets repeptitive after so many hours in some zones no matter how great it is
Most people having sound off in EQ has nothing to do with MUD's. It has to do with early EQ having repeated types of mobs you killed... all with the same sounds. Laughing skeletons being the driving force for a LOT of people turning off the sound and never looking back for a lot of people.
turn off auto join general chat channels , add general to your auto join if you actually like to be in it
Wow. That could be annoying. I do have text display for tracking but sound? Its like every other second.
I think they should just quit developing Everquest entirely and focus on Overseer! I want to join my Overseer crews in real time and do those quests with them while playing any agent I choose!
Longterm flaws? They rarely go back and fix old issues (this has been less of a problem since TLP but still a thing), when an issue is presented with a class or whatever and say a new spell line is created to address that issue, there's never any backfilling. Or I should say they really stopped doing that in any significant sense after I want to say DON. It makes playing through from a lower level kind of grating if you become accustomed to certain spell mechanics. My favorite classes all have this issue paladin/cleric/chanter/druid/wizard it extends across the classes generally and really makes the sub say 85 game kind of ehhh boring. Which is sad I really enjoy just running a little box group through old stuff. They also wait forever to address SOME class flaws, or imbalances, but it seems if there's a disparity in the players favor it gets nipped up pretty quick. The mechanics of healing also kind of ehhhh, having 3 of a particular spell line eating up spellgem space is silly though this isn't just a healing issue, but its glaringly obvious. Like just get rid of the recast on Remedy/Reckless/Rejuvilation, adjust the base a tad, and call it a day. Nobody is casting Vida/Light/Mending why waste a spell. Which brings us to another issue, pretty much every casting class, has spell lines that are just utterly unused because they either don't fit the meta or in some cases were never any good to begin with. Either make them useful or why waste dev time and CRT time naming them?
Over time, combat pacing has become too spammy, less tactical, and more zzz. That's fine in some areas, but not all. Need at least some RNG for mob adds, occasional fleeing mob, occasional see-invis, mob AI that varies a bit more by mob type, etc. I like the wandering snake in CoV Dragon Necropolis that comes by every hour or two (long enough to forget!). Not sure if that was purposeful, but it will catch you off guard! I think the mobs that trigger things on death can add some spice and tactical play (bats that spawn two vamps on death in TOFS is a great example).
Good post, I think that prior to the advent of this many active TLP servers the dev team(s) of the past focused on issues mostly during expansion building, if something wasn't addressed during or shortly after an expansion it was often left to "stagnate" and ceased becoming an issue for most players, this has lead to a backlog of unaddressed things that were simply "expansioned out" of being relevant. Now we have TLP servers all those old problems cropped up again, necessitating a rework through a lot of issues that had been ignored in the past and had once again reared their ugly heads into relevance as it was now "in era" content for a whole new population of paying customers that were identifying all these problems that had been pushed under the carpet. A lot of things did get addressed having been brought up as concerns by the players on Ragefire, then Phinigel & Selo and a lot of issues not addressed for those servers got addressed a bit later, but there will probably always be more things asked to be fixed as each new TLP passes through the old content. What I think that means is development's tactic of stagnating class balance no longer works at all, they have to address things far more immediately rather than procrastinate about needed changes, if they delay too much or don't fix it in a timely fashion at all they will just piss off a whole bunch of players that come along later only to ask, why didn't you fix this when the live players told you it was borked? Case in point being the Broken Mirror HA that are still incomplete reversions and are still over-tuned.
My biggest beef with sound in the game are the environmental sounds that aren't tied to the environmental sound files. Take for instance just outside Neriak in the revamped Nektulos. The wind howl there is INCREDIBLY loud but not tied to the enviromental sound files (meaning it still activates even with the box clicked off) so the only way to silence it is to turn off all sound. This same mechanic is repeated in every revamped original zone. The same is true for any NPC forms (skeleton cackle, specter hum, etc) - its impossible to isolate these sounds and their default volume is far above normal.
