New World drops

The sense of entitlement has grown too strong over the years... it's sad really. This game is a shell of it's former self. I still enjoy it... but there's no denying that the current player base is a helluva lot softer than the "good ol' days".

It is a GAME, not application for Navy Seals training. sheesh

Have you guys ever considered that CotF Tier 2 Raid gear will be superior to all of this T3 or T4 RoF Raid equivalent?

I welcome the opportunity to farm my Mage alt, Enchanter alt, and my new Heroic SK alt gear for FREE instead of waiting for it to go for a rot on a raid and spend DKP.

WIN for the group game
WIN for the raider's alt game
WIN all around... where is the problem here?

Yep and what will they upgrade CotF group gear with CotF T1 raid loot?

CotF Tier 2 Group loot....

With equivelent stats to CotF Tier 1 raid loot?

SOE have started something and it worries me where it will end.

"The game is so far removed from the original vision they might as well rename it. Six or seven years ago this thread would have had thousands of replies by now from angry raiders."

The game is finally starting to go back to the original vision. 14 or 15 years ago this thread wouldn't exist because it was par for the course. In the original vision of the game, raiding wasn't all there was and it was seen as something epic and an achievement in and of itself to have beaten Nagafen and Vox, or to have gone to the planes. The difference between raid gear and group gear was a LOT smaller.

Hell, in the original vision of the game, you didn't have to be in a guild to raid top end stuff. Pick up raids did tons of things. Pick up raids didn't start to die off until GoD really... and the beauty of pick up raids is that you didn't have the time commitment or dkp to deal with this stuff...you could log in, find people looking for someone 45+ to help them kill a Dragon! Or someone looking for some help to kill Venril Sathir for the next step in their epic quest. In velious you'd find a group of adventurers looking to kill Vindi, or go into the halls of testing to get new gear.

The whole concept of raid schedules, DKP, raid gear dwarfing the group gear, and gear being the only incentive possible for anyone to ever want to raid is NOT the original vision of this game. It's SONY'S vision of the game...as it wasn't until they started to boot Verant out that it started to take shape. Luclin was the first big start of the raider/grouper separation...with it really taking off in PoP where a top group geared player would have average 75 hp/mana on a gear slot that a top raider would have 200/200.

I'm not saying where the raid game has gone is a bad thing, or that I don't enjoy it...but pretending that half way through the start and now is the original vision isn't exactly accurate. If anything, all of these moves have been to bring the game closer together, which is a lot closer to how I remember original EQ than what I was seeing 7 years ago...

~MrGPAC

Typically, a raider might have 50% or more of raid gear.

So far, the trend is non-visible slots for this Rare World Drop gear.

You're (Yinla) seriously suggesting that:

A Raider with 100% raid gear will not have significant power/ability over a
Group toon with 90% group gear and 10% gear that is STILL below what the Raid toon has. (sorry if that was a little wordy)

I agree with Mr GPAC as well tho. They are just closing the HUGE gap between a fully raid geared toon vs a fully group geared toon.

Full sets of raid-equivalent gear for group content will never come. Raid gear will always be superior to group gear.

I think they are bouncing the idea around to create content IN BETWEEN a group & a raid... that's pure speculation tho.

And as long as it stays here - I don't think it'll cause a large problem. I
t's the "slippery slope" ,and the trend here, that's causing the backlash.
-R

Obviously, adding a very rare chance for raid gear to the group game is not going to kill established raid guilds. It does seem like it will have an immediate impact on more casual raiding populations, both family guilds that raid some and pick up raids......... populations that have a core group, but depend on adding a few random peeps to beat events. In other words, players who barely raid lose a bit more of their motivation and that loss will eventually effect established raiding pops.
Maybe this trend is good for EQ in the long run. It may help with retention of returnees and new players; though raiding has already been watered down significantly with too-few and extremely easy events. If the trend of narrowing the gear gap continues EQ does lose an important piece of what separates it from other mmos

One of the greatest things about Diablo 2 is/was that you can walk outside the Act 1 camp on Hell mode and kill the first skeleton you see, and it could drop the best item in the entire game. It was a 1-in-a-billion? chance of course, and each ladder season with thousands of players killing hundreds of thousands of creatures over the course of a year or more, only a very very small handful of items like these ever appeared to the public. It made a lot of the monotony of Diablo 2 actually awesome instead of tedious for treasure hunters.

This, in the same token, assuming these new world drops are indeed "ultra rare" just gives that extra tiny bit of excitement after every single thing you kill. It isn't enough to throw anything out of balance in this game. It is also a reason I loved just killing ANY named I ever saw in HoT/VoA for the chance at a nice Rucksack. Out of the several hundred, if not more, named I have killed in those expansions, I ended up with 1 28 slotter. I still consider it one of the coolest items I've gotten from a rare/named perspective in years, if not ever.

I'll chime in to point out that back when WOW was released, every mob had a (VERY small) chance to drop "Epic" items, yet it didn't kill raiding.

If all casual groupers end up with one "raid chase item" for their primary main character... I can live with that, as some who raids multiple days a week in a higher end guild. It does give incentive, a chance, and excitement for a player to have a really nice piece of equipment.

Here is a potential issue, however- these players can essentially buy top of the line raid gear from the prior expansion. Raid gear that is only slightly worse than current top of the line raid gear. Buy spending real dollars on a Kronos, selling said Kronos on the server for plat, and buying the new world drops with their plat...they have basically bought power. And since this gear is all/all (in most cases) and represents the best of the best for a casual grouper for the gear slot in question, you can have players who theoretically can have 6 pieces of raid gear just because they have plat or dollars.

Now if these new world drops were no trade...then that changes things. Now luck and randomness determines success, not plat or dollars. Also the drop rate has to be so astronomically low for it to be not flooding the market. Tunare server, as an example, has three guilds that can acquire two cloaks each week from raids. If the new world drops are set up that only six cloaks enter the server per week (just like raid guilds) then that seems fair. But if 20 cloaks are being added to the server each week, now the market is flooded and it is no longer a "chase" item.

Compare veeshan's peak gear with old sebilis gear.
Compare hall of testing gear with NToV gear

the gap between group gear and raid gear has never been smaller... and the current group content definatly do not require stronger gear. at all.

slippery slope

We still farm R4 RoF for a reason, and we do not allow alts for loot on our main raids, so I can knock that on the head before we go there.

The first of raid quality items were from the MM and Naggy zones during Herriatige. SOEs arugment for having that was that it was only available for a limited time. Now we are faced with them adding the same quality of gear to CotF permanently.

The worry is if they see this as being exceptable that they will keep pushing the boundry more and more to the stage where there is no difference between group and raid gear.

As far as I remember group gear has always been a % of raid gear, have they suddenly decided they don't want this anymore and want the gap closer or are they moving us all to having the same gear and doing away with raiding altogether as there is only a small % of those who play who raid and the number of raids per expansion is shrinking all the time?

I'm fine with it aslong as they dont drop like candy like RoF gear off trash. It give grouper that doesnt have the time to raid a chance to improve... and maybe get them off the raiders back for a while. Good gears help but doesnt do it all for you... I was able to prove that point many time.

Even so i am some what addicted to leaderboards in every games that I play, my goals never been to be better then anyone but to play the game the way i enjoy it most. I let other people judge me when it come to that. I would rather have some other type of leaderboard then just a gear check TBH.

and game like Diablo and alike get you to play 2 months then it get replaced quick. The day EQ will ever get close to that will be the day to hang my cape without looking back.

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as opposed to an alt who wasn't in on a raid kill wasn't even online but gets logged on because the loot was bought with fictional currency that has no real world value? and now said alt has better gear and weapons than any group gear person for doing absolutely nothing, not even buying a krono.

Not everyone likes to raid. I still think this is a good idea and should not be canned because a very small portion of the population is worried about someone having something almost as good as what they have. Gear inequality is a big player in keeping people out of this game or from coming back to the game, it's why other games have moved to make raid tier gear accessible through more than just raiding.

There is no reason why one play style should be favored above another, and this is coming from someone who ran a raid guild in WoW for 4 years, and helped manage one in EQ for 2 years as well, albeit it was a long time ago during PoP era. This is a good change for the players of the group game of EQ, because goodness knows I don't have time to put up for raiding anymore, but something I can work towards for a couple weeks to get one piece of gear I could get in one night as a raider? Sign me up!

After 1 year, @ 20 a week, you have just over 1000 on the entire server. Consider how low that number is when you also consider that in 1 year those items will be basically irrelevant once again. In just the few days that this has been live, and considering it was on Test for at least a week with a few people putting in a LOT of hours, I don't think there is even 20 a week yet. Also consider that if there are 4 new specific items, that breaks down to a very, very limited amount of each individual item available. The number would have to get upward to 100 a week or more for several months before there would be any "flooding" and by that time, people have moved on to new content and new expansions. As of yet, in only a few days with people probably playing/grinding even more than normal for these items since they are new, I'm not seeing this type of influx.

Also since DE Ornament Armor started dropping off trash in just Neriak, I mean, people farm those HAs all day long, and there isn't a flood of DE Armor.

Idk, just a lot of hoopla once again over literally nothing. People read 1 thing and lose their mind and don't consider anything else.

Well if they are rare as in how the neriak ornaments were at first or as rare as oath of marrs were then it's not that rare I have a full suit of both of those. And if they are as rare as the cloaks were from nagafen (i had mine drop the first night) then again that's not rare at all. But if they are as rare as say the xorbb powersource (kileld all named in there 3 times with the ones that had confirmed drops 15 times or so) then that is a bit rare.