Multiboxing is a sign of a deeper problem with the game.

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Strawberry, Mar 14, 2022.

  1. Sissruukk Rogue One

    Our guild usually gets a group together for a couple of hours every few nights when this event is active, and just tell Genchat that we are doing it. We just leave the stuff on the corpses and let people pick through them to get what they need. Usually have a pretty good turnout.
    Metanis likes this.
  2. Qimble Augur



    3. Make the mercs not absolute garbage. Healer merc doesn't heal well, DPS mercs get out-parsed by a pally using sword n board, tank merc (from what I've been told, I haven't tried it myself) doesn't really hold aggro or survive.


    Don't balance merc ability around not wanting them to displace people in groups that think all you need to do to DPS is turn on auto-attack. Balance them around the actual content that exists so that people don't feel like pulling out a merc is a bad thing. (either that or make it so mercs don't soak up some of the experience so that even their marginal utility is better than an empty slot)
    Metanis likes this.
  3. FranktheBank Augur

    I think the only merc that really needs a buff is the tank one. And to lower the threat generated by the dps mercs
    Skuz likes this.
  4. Bernel Augur

    Have they ever re-evaluated merc strength and abilities since they were originally added in 2008? With max level being 85 at the time, mercs that were useful until 75 or 80 were fine. Most of the population would be around those levels and players could switch to grouping if mercs weren't working out. But now with the max level at 120, it's problematic having the mercs wimp out 30-40 levels below where most people are. Players have to look at alternatives like boxing since grouping at 80 isn't really an option.

    What they might want to do is re-evaluate the mercs whenever the max level increases. If they can ensure the mercs are useful until a person can get to the levels where grouping is an option, players wouldn't feel forced to turn to something like boxing. Players could still box if they wanted, but that would be more of a personal preference to do so.
    Caell likes this.
  5. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    Summoning was introduced more than a decade before VoA. It became more prevalent during VoA and later expansions, but always has been toned down after an expansion releases.
  6. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    That would require them to revamp how groups work, which is not going to happen.
  7. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    ... Every merc is the same level as the player. They also grow in strength with every level, just like players do.

    Every single expansion they have re-evaluated merc strength, especially the level cap increase expansions. The older and newer mercs are turned throughout expansion releases. At the start of an expansion, the mercs usually need tuned more, due to the lack of data before to know just how much, or things that were just missed during Beta.

    The tank/melee mercs from 1-70 are rather OP, and from 80 they are kind of meh, with the healer and caster mercs becoming preferred, though at some point the casters kind of fall back to about the same as the melee mercs as well. Even the Healers are not that great. All of this meh is intentional. They are meant to be there to allow you to do something, but not excel at all of it.
    Quatr and Bernel like this.
  8. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    1a. Not sure how much more that they can do to make quests and missions encourage grouping more.

    1b. I would not replace it so much as add a way for a group to drop something similar to a campfire, but only for porting to them.
    1c & 1d. No, what you are proposing here will simply result in people never upgrading their toons' gear. They will just rely on these systems to boost them until the get a max set of gear, because their will be no gain from improving gear until they have such a huge upgrade as to make it a massive jump.

    1e & 1f. This whole idea is the reverse of what needs to be done. Lower level players should not be being powered up to higher level stats and spells, higher level players should be given a way to power down to play with lower players. Shrouds for all 16 of the classes should be introduced, and they should be for every 5 levels from 5-110 (presently). These shrouds would be geared with a full set of the best group gear for that class at that level, with all the AAs that class has available at that level. This would provide players with a familiar way to play with the lower level crowd when needed or desired, without them having to figure out an wholly different toon that is an amalgamation of several different classes in most cases and doesn't play well.
  9. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    DoDh was great for pick up groups on Tunare. PUGs started to go down in quality around the time that EQ went F2P, but they didn't really start being something to avoid until after HC were released. PUGs had the most damage done to them by people wanting to change to classes they never played at all before or people who never even played the game before being advised to just buy a HC and learn from there. It was in between these two times that I saw the majority of people move from doing PUGs semi regularly to mostly grouping with known friends or guildies to only grouping with close friends and guildies.
  10. Vumad Cape Wearer


    Caster mercs were severely under performing during TBL. Did something change?
  11. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    Under performing compared to what? Actual players?
  12. Eaedyilye More stonehive bixies.

    Two healer mercs do very well. I use 2 healers as a part my 2 mage box. Unless I get ambushed by a lot of adds, there isn't a mob in the group game I can't beat.

    For example, I did the mission Unity last night with my team. I had one of the target mobs which was yellow at 120 and 2 adds. I corralled all 3 with my tank pet. I didn't off tank with the RS pet. I didn't throw 1 heal or use an aegis in the battle. My pet was on 100% or 99% throughout the whole fight. Pretty much the same results with 3 mobs in any of the new zones, tier 2 included. Throw in a rare/named? Same results. With a named, my pet may drop to 75% when adds are present.

    My main pet is an EM 30, so there's that.

    My 2 healer mercs keep my pet up most of time. DBG's is better at killing my pets with an unannounced reset.
  13. minimind The Village Idiot

  14. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    You are forgetting something.

    Who will "shroud down" when being in that lower level shroud offers the player doing it nothing, and it costs them time they could be using on doing something that does benefit themselves?

    Because almost nobody does anything in EQ without some reward, and what is needed is a way for more players to be engaged to make the cost of the added system remotely worthwhile.

    When the original shroud system was introduced being shrouded still gave your higher-level character XP at that higher level rate.
    The EQ devs very rapidly nerfed that down to "level appropriate XP gain" because the EQ Devs are ideologically opposed to high level characters gaining advancement in content that is not the most recent expansion, also reinforcing that ideology was the move to reduce XP in last years or older expansions. And a few people found ways to exploit & abuse shrouds that did not make the devs happy.

    Also Powerlevelling is a far superior way to help a lower levelled player advance quickly and players can do that so effeciently they can get a level 1 (or 85) to 100+ in a few days very easily, even once L100 Heroics are in they'll find it far quickler to raise the lower levelled player with that Power-levelling approach, and grouping with a lower levelled player while playing at your main's high level still nets you AAXP so you are rewarded unless you maxed already, in which case you might use your alt(s) to do it so you still get something out of the exercise.You can also go farm augments or whatever with the lower level player tagging along and so they get XP while you get some small extra dps, a win/win.

    Fact is "Mentoring" or "shrouding down" is a complete non-starter if close to 100% of existing high level players are almost entirely disinterested in doing anything that does not also benefit themselves, and they should not have to either.
    So as a level 120 what gain would there be for you getting level 10, 15, 20 etc XP? That's like playing for literally no benefit to your own character, you won't do it, you thinking anyone would is idealistic at best but it is wholly lacking in pragmatism, your idea would be a compelte waste of money.
    So yes I fully stand behind side-kicking & against your Mentoring idea.

    As far as players not getting gear, it doesn't matter until their level is caught up with the rest of the players anyway, at which point they WILL see a benefit to gearing up & they'll feel the improvement.
    If you are Powerlevelling from 1-75 do you remotely care what gear the power-levelled player is in? No, it's irrelevant, same maxim applies here, only once the player is caught up on levels or if they are soloing/moloing does it then matter.

    You personally may have observed this on Tunare, but then maybe that server was unique & special & its players were unlike the players anywhere else.
    I recall very well the difficulties with DoDH because of how the spell progression in that game meant you ideally needed a fixed group of players to work through 1 whole arc together
    If you played DoDH at the time & wanted to complete an arc with PUG's you had to either choose to run endless PUGS that did not always advance your spell progression, breaking up before getting the mission you needed next done, or you only joined groups doing the specific part of each arc that you still needed, and with so many players needing different parts of each arc at the time it was absolutely horrible to get completed, I was among those lucky bastards whose main had a set group & got all mine done in order first time, I then tried doing them PuG style on alts, it was a freaking nightmare & I learned how hard it was for most of the non-raidguild & casual players, the populations on most servers took a big kick to the morale & PUGing in general never recovered from it.

    You could not do the arv progression out of order & advance, you had to do them in a stricty 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th to get the actual reward.
    Doing any of them out of order you got nothing for that out of order mission, so if you did 3, 4 5 before you had done 1 & 2 you would need to repeat 3 then 4 then 5 in that order again to get your spell/ability.
    Why were Mercs brought out in SoD? Population issues on many servers made forming groups much harder, it's nice that Tunare didn't even need them until VoA.

    Was damage to Pugging done in HoT or when HC came out? I have no idea as I wasn't playing then (hiatus 08-15) but PUGging was DEAD before SoD on many servers, certainly on the one I was one.
    And on Phinigel TLP PUG really only lasted to Omens of War, but that didn;t surprise me as I expected PUGs to die out faster on a server made up of players who had also played live & grown more insular & isolationist over time, maybe worse each year for the TLP that followed too.
  15. Qimble Augur



    A single paladin can heal players more effectively than multiple mercs without even trying. Unity mission is a weird example, those mobs don't hit appropriately hard for their level. I think they're somewhere around EoK or RoS levels? I have tried cleric mercs repeatedly through the years. Anything I can heal myself through while tanking I can still kill. Anything I can't do solo I can't do with cleric mercs. The AI is just does not cope with the way players actually take damage. Pets having different mitigation than players may make those mercs more reliable for you, I can't say since I'm not a pet class.
  16. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    The people who are not willing to shroud down are also not going to group with people who have to be leveled up to them, because they perceive no benefit to them. The people who require a benefit for themselves to do anything, are not going to "waste" their time doing a mission with someone who magically got leveled up by the game solely to do that mission. Further, you'd be surprised at how many people would actually be fine with temporarily lowering their level and doing old content.
    Also, there are gains from being shrouded. While the XP is very minimal, there is content in the form of achievements, such as hunters. Doing the hunter achievements this way is more entertaining for most people, as opposed to doing it alone at full level, and it would not really be any faster. Gear and levels are not the end all be all of benefits and accomplishments in EQ.

    It is equally likely that your server was unique and special in making PUG not-viable. It is entirely possible that your server had more than average number of selfish on it.

    DoDh was full of PUGs, and the whole spell lines actually made it easier to get than most others. Now maybe if you came into it a few years after that expansion came out, then I could see how the missions in it might have been frustrating to get done with PUGs as people might only need certain parts of the lines, and then ditching after theirs. But when DoDh came out, as well as the following couple years, the spell lines and the key missions always had people doing them.

    PUGs were not at all dead on most servers when SoD came out, most actually had a resurgence during SoF, and it carried strong through SoD. During UF it dropped a bit due to the difficulty, and more people getting tired of SoD. The start of HoT was another resurgence of PUGs and that carried on through the beginning of Call of the Forsaken. HoT, VoA, and RoF all had content which was PUG friendly. It was a few months into VoA that they changed to F2P with a subscription option, and at the start you saw a lot of iffy PUGs and such as people adapted to the F2P model. People started being a bit more cautious with PUGs, but it was more of people giving them a try and leaving if the group was crap. CotF was a more difficult expansion at the start, but also introduced Heroic Adventures which were great for grouping and some of which were rather easy group outings. It really was only in the middle of the staggered releases of that expansion when they released HCs, and over that summer you started to run into people with toons at max level who had no idea how to play them at all. There were also a lot of other issues that the game had at that time, and the changes just before TDS came out upset a lot of people making that game not start out as well as expansions previously had. By TDS's release the rule was more that most people grouped with guildies and friends. They might ask in general or zone for anyone LFG, but typically it just was to see if anyone was LFG that someone in the group knew as a good player. Since then, there are occasional LFGs and PUGs, but the lack of PUGs has more to do with no one choosing to make the group with random people. Each person either has something that is the only thing that they will do or has something that they outright won't do to the point that what to do becomes a problem.
  17. Eaedyilye More stonehive bixies.

    A PC is better than a merc, no doubt about that. With my 2 mages, 2 mercs work great. They worked fine even doing hunter in TOL even with adds. When we get the heroic upgrade I might add a third mage. I wonder if 3 healer mercs would be overkill? I might just use the "rouge" DPS merc when I add a third.
  18. Windance Augur

  19. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Huh?

    Hypothetically-speaking, if Side-kicking was added yesterday and today you are playing in ToL and invited a player in who then gets boosted up to your level and they are playing alongside you while you farm an augment how are you not gaining a benefit?

    How are they wasting their time if they can do the mission? What have they lost by having a boosted player join their group for that mission?

    I would indeed be surpised by anyone doing that when Powerlevelling is a clearly superior use of time and any time I saw a player who wanted help levelling that was invariably the preferred method for all involved parties.

    I truly cannot believe anyone does this.
  20. code-zero Augur

    PUG's were garbage by the time Luclin released. LDoN helped a bit since you weren't necessarily stuck when you found yourself with a bad group once a mission was over. Later on Monster Missions helped since you didn't need to depend on players actually knowing their classes, just how to run the simplified mission characters.

    If you take these facts into account you can see what works to fix grouping and what doesn't. Boxing isn't the real problem and it never has been