Massive Nerfs Inc - Melee, Tanks, Berserkers

I think that the team will communicate, just not as quickly as some people would like. The sky isn't falling (unless you happen to be a Lions or Patriots fan). Making demands on how other people spend their off hours isn't going to get the intended results. Patience sucks - I hate it too - but there's a reason for it. I hope that Roshen is able to get with the team soon and address the problems that have come up, whether real or imagined.

People might have been content with the whole "off time" excuse if they had not run the beta during "off time". Beta is a customer interaction activity. Holding a customer interaction activity while shutting out the customer is kinda...what? Beats me why you singled me out. I wasn't the one who posted a petition online about this! I just want a bit more communication with fewer excuses as to why that expectation is unreasonable. Its not asking for a whole lot.

The whole evolution was just not well managed. People make mistakes...sure. Thing is, the track record of SoE from a customer's perspective is a bit less than stellar. There is always room for improvement around here. Plus, part of this might just be not so much that Roshen is terrible but that Piestro was very good. I give Roshen a C+ so far with Piestro being the bench mark. Perhaps when compared with the industry in general, Roshen gets an A+ and Piestro gets an honorary PhD.

Are we expecting too much? Probably. The market is geared to please those with low expectations. Especially with software I am guessing. Developers still have the ability to push out most anything they think we want since there isn't much market saturation. That or sell us into thinking we need their product and we have to take it or leave it.

Don't know how well your long-term memory serves you, but Piestro created some huge problems for himself when SOE decided to stop accepting Station Cash for monthly memberships. He did a much better job after that fiasco. The new guy is going to make his share of missteps too. It's a tough crowd to please.

That's why, in my post, I wasn't too worried. BETA for us programmers, is "Breaking Everything That's Active" to see what happens. I'm sure the beta server's used a lot for initial tweaks long before it hits test. It's likely just not open to a broader audience.

Changing furious ramp, for example, could have been for testing other effects (as mentioned), or a test scaling of additional ranks. Likewise with the change to Rest, a further change to the Wind line (maybe different timer, or quicker reuse) was going to follow. What we saw on beta was initial things added, and not really set in stone for deep testing (thus the Test Server).

Yea well I would have to dispute this VERY strongly. Many of us players know the game FAR better than many of the devs because we have been with the game for 15 years. How many of the devs can say that?

Not to mention one reason we always have nerfs is precisely because the Devs generally have no clue on how to balance things.

Another reason is that people whine because their class is underpowered compared to another class. This ebbs and flows virtually every class has been overpowered at one point and virtually useless at another. As a matter of fact I cannot think of a single class that this is not accurate for.

In general these nerfs really do not help with balance and only make players angry and over time just makes the game less fun.

As far as slowing the game down dear god why we have been there ... it SUCKED. Except for Necros and Shaman who excel at the long game.

I doubt "many" of the players have a clue how to put it all together even with playing the game for 15 years. It is like saying you know all about the iceberg in front of you because you see what is above the water.

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A more apt analogy would be a sailor who has been sailing for 15 years tells the captain there's an iceberg and the captain has to make a decision on if he wants to listen to the 15 year veteran sailor.

Shaman have never been "useless" in EQ.

Clearly you never tried to main heal with one when Crystallos was current End game group content.

Shaman had weaknesses with not being able to heal enough in comming damage, shamans always had a good secondary and tertiary role with buffing and damage output from DoT's. The inclusion of the group proc as well as an epic that scales on for eternity is another step in good decision. Clerics early on were well designed, then CH created a two tiered system and did dumb the class down and helped to create a schism and class identity. One of which was a lazy entitled branch that presumed it had ownership what it meant to be a "cleric," the other branch that had legitimate fear over change and were respectable about it, and the last group who wanted to change the class for the better. Overall, the death of CH brought about the inclusion of a better healing era and for a time better soloing and other such capacities. Luclin was an attempt to rebrand clerics but failed and took until TSS to actually have replacement mechanics against CH. Druids early on had the ill conception of being "solo artists and port duds" and with their populousness were equally troublesome to get into a "good guild." Until eventually the healing revamp after SoL and then again after various edit to make the class much improved.

Arguably, the core of these issues also comes from design of the content. There are times when burst classes excel when mobs have low hp, whenever mobs have high HP it's the stamina classes that excel. Overall, nothing compares to the pre-OOC rest periods and the 10 minute med breaks on raids was stupid and no excuse for it. Whenever you see a wizard return from WoW, log in for a single raid, and then log back out saying "Great to see you guys again, but oh God this game plays too slow" in the pre-OOC rest era.

The historical problem since the class balances begin with content design and original class vision and the mutation therein between "what ought to be" in the numbers and the quality of play experiences as compared to other games in the market. Everquest arguably early on had low quality play experience, but high quality social experiences with the novelty (also anti-social behaviors, but I digress). As the game has shifted the quality and competition has increased to keep the game alive.

The biggest issue with the anti-downtime problem is that inherently The Vision had seen downtime as a necessity, as the market has shifted and expectations and preferences for on demand action to maximize play time with an older play crowd has become more of the norm. It is not so much instantaneous gratification, but rather that time is more valuable online with more options and competition for time.

I believe the inherent review over downtimes and how much should come from the preference of the players. You can have difficulty in a game and still have save points and resets in single player games. Some can also say that a Plane of Hate corpse run the first time or a few times were enjoyable, but other days were just idiotic and stressful. They may have built relationships and common purpose early on, but that comes with a younger age demographic and a time period long gone.

Everquest's core demographic and market has shifted over the last decade from people who have a great amount of time towards people who have a low amount of time on their hands and a preference not to spend the rest of their lives in a game waiting for bars to tick back up. This was an older argument as well whenever OOC rest was added to the game and arguably what the timing was necessary to add to the game. As well as whether mercenaries should be added to the game as well, which I recall was actually a Frodlin/warrior idea to begin with that has shaped the game in different ways to create "Moloing."

The game has changed for the better, but with a lower and more stratified population there are islands in time. As the demographics age in the game, time is much more valuable to maximize fun. This is why increasing rest periods and decreasing activity time do not correspond to the expectations in today's market with WoW and other such games.

The problems today are from extremely large numbers and the calculations inside of the system that a legacy problem. The spell and item design system are very difficult, class balance is a myth. The question is one of "fun" and the perception of fun and value to join groups and be socially accepted as a class. There was a time whenever a human warrior would be considered weak, while a barbarian or an ogre would be considered better because of the gear availability. The same goes for an agnostic ogre warrior I once knew who bemoaned his plight for not taking on Rallos Zek out of faction concerns.

I for one am not totally convinced that the game is "far gone," but to explicitly understand that more action oriented and high combat tricks and the like are what is wanted. Lowering the length of time that the game takes to play encourages alts and other areas of the game to shine.

Perhaps it is time to look at the direction and a "Vision" that plays faster than what is seen as "glorious."

Since I'm not in a hurry to get to work and have time to formulate a real response...

Why on earth would you want to hamstring recovery abilities during beta? Why test content with gimped versions of yourself? There could be a wisdom here I'm not seeing, but it seems to me you need beta to be an accurate representation of what you might see on live side. If not a direct correlation, at least some kind of scaling. For instance set it up to be done with 3 groups instead of 9 and have the actual live content be 3 times harder.

I don't think anyone with any grasp of how development goes has a problem with having a test ground to see how things work, the fact you're using the beta server for that is fine, it doesn't particularly matter. But in the current environment of nerfs we've been living in lately I'm sure you can see why people would expect this to be pushed live, specifically because of the lack of responses from Wednesday to Monday from your side of the fence.

Furious rampage is only one small portion of the anger you've seen from this thread. This all boils down to the rest ability and how the change we're seeing on beta will completely break raiding. Rest is vital to keep a raid going without having to wipe and start over from the beginning. Melee players specifically already feel we suffer enough from death penalties as it is, quite frankly rightfully so. Most casters have a way to gain back mana quickly and they can also use modrods, and worst case a cleric can throw a QM at them. That's if you completely ignore the various quick mana regen abilities that are leaps and bounds above any endurance regen.

Melee aren't running around looking for increases endurance regen, we've been making do with 21-29% endurance if we die and living with it. I hope the warrior stances don't end up being what I think they may be. Personally I would suggest they just be passive AAs depending on equipment. If you've got your shield out have a passive increase to the things the stances increase. Same for 2 handers, and dual wielding.

I don't disagree. But.. Sometime the more "organized" a communication is, the more that means parsed, spun, and respun, to say all the right words - yet tell very little.
To stay with the given analogy (such as it is)
A quick (off the cuff) post, even if by a Dev. or a Roshan that was sitting on the moog, that just said "Relax people, none of this stuff is getting pushed anywhere near Live until we all talk - OK!" - would have done a lot to diffuse the "growing mob with torches and pitchforks". That simple really.
-Rat

-------------- actually i have played one as a main since i started playing in 2002 and in fact did heal in crystsallos and if you think all a shaman can do is heal then obviously you don't know jack about the class at all.

I know they have other attributes, but a group only has 1 spot for a healer... At that time it was a PITA to try and main heal as a shaman, So much so it made alot more sense at that time to just invite a cleric and be done with it.

Granted Ill agree with your statement Shaman have never been down and out, but then neither have Chanters, Bards, or Clerics, or myriad of other classes.

I think you're misunderstanding what 'Beta' is (Google has their own definition...)

Beta is for finding those weird crash/critical bugs by putting the product into the hands of a random subset of users.

It's not for design/spec changes.

^this. Just this.

I don't want to tank anything; what I *do* want is survivability from AEs, Ramp, etc. (and of course, the ability to extend that survivability to my group is a bonus .

Communication is key. There has been a tremendous lack of it. Vague politician statements are as bad, and possibly worse than nothing.

Making such a short Beta, with nothing given about what is supposed to be the changes, and just expect everyone to 'guess' what's supposed to be a change and what isn't is ridiculous, and they should understand how ignorant that was, so hopefully it won't happen again(and still, unbelievably, there is nothing posted in beta forums about what is 'intented' class changes and what isn't).

It would be too easy to make simple, concise statements from the devs about their thoughts, about everything, then get some feedback from the customers BEFORE a concrete plan is implemented. Then, they could choose what they feel the best course of action is, from a large list of presented solutions.

The difference of options between 4 people attempting to provide a solution vs 400 is fairly significant. The 'surprise' factor has been gone for a long time, as far as what to expect, for all classes. Go ahead, tell us exactly what you want to 'allow' then ask us how we'd like it implemented, then choose from those possible solutions.

If they feel an adjustment is needed in X area for Y class(es) then say so, and let us give you possible solutions to put the characters back in line where you think they belong.

The statements similar to 'just because it's in beta that way, doesn't mean it's going live that way' are not justified. The last few betas, numerous upon numerous bugs, issues, and problems have been brought up, and still nothing done, and it gone live in the same exact form that was a problem and brought up as such, in beta. It'd be too simple for someone in beta forums to give a list of issues seen and resolved, or issue addressed, but felt that it was 'working as intended' and going to be pushed forward that way.

Telling us that it's not productive to bring to live forums remains to be seen. My dollar is on that at least the rest nerf will be looked at now, and would not have, if only left in beta forums. Again, this is based from recent past betas, where NDA applied, and issues largely ignored when only posted in beta.

I'm fully in agreement with experimenting and doing research (it's the wholeraison d'être for where I work), but during that short critical period it is acting against the intention of beta: for players to identify the bugs and flaws in the product that is about to be pushed live.

So changes intended to go into beta should be made in beta. Changes made purely for internal research should be delayed until beta finishes (ie now). It's not an overly long delay to suffer.

Changes made purely for research should be made in beta when you have a core of people interested in testing current content. Waiting until beta is more of a ghost town than it usually is makes zero sense in my opinion.

Mages being mildly nerfed to just "very overpowered" down from "extremely overpowered" is no comparison to breaking the game for half of your raid.

Bards had bad design before /melody was implemented, it was a brutal class to twist through on the hands. Granted bards were experimental in design for the game and had their own unique system and still maintain their own unique status within classes.

Enchanters go through times whenever their crowd control abilities aren't designed well as well as their tools were not upgraded for sometime. That really hurt them, but a few years ago some visionary player leaders and some work with developers over time was able to update the class from legacy problems.

Clerics were poorly designed for healing with CH, that's just a fact. When WoW was designed, the original Everquest CH cleric was considered bad design. Clerics weren't fully actualized as a class until leaders like Lluianae came out and basically said that the whole class needed a rethink as well as leadership from developers. The developers hated CH, clerics had a love-hate relationship with CH, and healing mechanically stagnated in the spell arena.

Druids had it all over the board, there's really no need to contend that.

Shamans had a lot of good design early on, and their community with people such as Samanna and Tharkis and others had a definitive impact on keeping the class up to date and good.

The reason why certain classes simply are not extinct is because of the good relationship, some classes such as Shaman had good design and an awesome spell package from the start. It was a complex class that could deal with a lot of realistic issues. Clerics were shoe-horned into CH and terribly designed. Druids mostly as a result of bad design were also hamstrung for a number of years.

Melees have historically been late bloomers when it came to power, and only get more powerful from raid weapons. Casters were and still are in some cases early bloomers. Equally, the melees have been much more about trust that has been fostered from good advocacy and numbers based logic. Strong advocacy begets good ideas. Most classes didn't arrive where they are in the modern era without a long political debate.