So I don't understand what your doing here at all. I play everquest because I used to enjoy it. With the new xp mods for HA's that i tried out today i found out that if i am doing an HA and for whatever reason i have to end it early and cant finish it that it was a total waste of my time. I did 2 DH HA's and didnt even get a percent of real xp until i finished the mission. This is all fine and dandy if you have all the time in the world. I dont have all the time in the world. I play when i get a chance and sometimes thats in short interval's. To me it kills the desire to play anymore. Couple this with another crappy expansion and all the downgrades classes keep taking and its really like why do we keep paying you? I really hope you guys will revisit these xp changes and try to figure out something better because this is not a good system in my opinion.
I'm just going to throw this out there for you, feel free to leave it: If you don't have time to finish a HA, then don't start one? If you're short on time, find something else to do. As an analogy, can you imagine someone saying: I mean, honestly???
Point being? I'm level 94 and happy to finish in 45 mins, so I wouldn't start one if I have to log in 15 mins.
I really don't understand the change at all, it hurts those going for namers, those who tend to wipe out HAs when playing and not going for ninja wins. And it isn't like I can go back to RoF or sooner without taking a massive XP hit. I'm just hoping the prophecies of HA sellers comes true, as nobody has time to get experience this way I'd be thrilled to get ripped off this way.
Tested this last week. (Hey, I'm on Test). Picked one of the daily HAs, got the HA both on a level 105 and a 94, left the 94 outside the zone and zoned him in for the final hail + daily quest completion bonus. He got all of 3% real XP, and that's with the test AA bonus. Doing it with a different daily HA with the 94 in the zone, he got nearly 20% at the end. So the daily quest reward may also be scaled based on HA participation.
Thankfully, the rewards for the Daily HA quest isn't lumped into the reward from the HA. The reward for the daily scales off of the reward from the HA. If you sit outside for the HA, both rewards will likely not be good. Overall, I found it to be satisfactory. You might grimace a little bit depending on what 4 HAs you get, but after doing 3 of them, I bought 2 or 3 more ranks of class abilities.
For a casual player, their main way of gearing up is the currency from these missions. So they will start missions, something comes up (baby wakes up, mission takes too long and have to go make dinner or give your kid a bath, etc), they have to log, and they get nothing from playing. The more limited your play time the more discouraging this would be. A good reason why this was a bad approach to fix a perceived problem.
Except with the game of chess if you do not finish you can leave the board set up till later and come back. With an HA you have a finite amount of time to finish it. Sometimes you think you're gonna have time, and then you run out. That does not change the fact that before this patch a person could start an HA without time to finish it, and still be getting 'some' XP.
If you cant do a 30 minute mission (or even 1 hr molo) in 6 hours, well that's not the games fault. Also if you know you cannot dedicate the time to do the mission, go to a static zone, they still exist.
The reasoning for the change has to do with players like me. Specifically, heroic adventures scale with level. If left alone, Scouting Ahead would have been not only the best way to grind for this expansion, but for level 110, 120, hell even 200. No matter how compelling they attempt to make experience in the new expansion, there is simply no way to compete with trash that can be pulled in double digit amounts and beamed down. I abused this heavily, and as a result leveling to 105 took a matter of hours. It was a problem - even if it was hilariously fun. Like it or not, there are a ton of players who will resort to instant gratification at some point. I *could* have done it in thirty hours. I chose the more efficient route. It isn't as boring as you may think when you're blasting through Gribble at close to the 5 minute lockout and hearing that so, so sweet sound for AA's going off like a machine gun. From my perspective, there were three options that could have made sense: 1. Reduce xp per mob (chosen) 2. Apply the lockout upon entry, similar to how the one-off raids work 3. Stop CoTF Heroics from scaling beyond 100. None of these options would have been popular. They probably chose the best one - I can only imagine the fury of the forums on some of the others. My question isn't why - I know why. My question is 'why now?' This problem has been in existence, and they've known its been in existence, for a long time. We've had free reign on this for a full year now. I find it hard to believe they didn't see this coming. If they didn't, they're way more out of touch with the player base than I ever imagined. I still ponder why they did this with the release of TDS, associating the new expansion with nerfs that should have been resolved with a better solution long before we ever got so accustomed to the broken status quo. Riddle me that - a compelling answer would be great.
The best solution was to make 1 regular hitting/hp/exp mob pop from each flower, lower the ZEM in the gribble mission, and make a few minor adjustments on exp gains for any other missions of interest. The reality is, if something else doesn't scale well in the future in these HAs, you can still just chain a few different ones to get massive exp (people still getting 11% of a level on the gribble mission that some people can finish in 10 minutes, how is that addressed if you can find X other missions to do the same thing?). This just punishes the wrong people. Scaling infinitely was a dumb idea anyway. They aren't putting new gear for higher levels on older expansion HAs, so zero reason to not just have them max out at 100 for anyone above 100 and let normal eq inflation happen. Blanket changes to address specific idiosyncratic issues is always a lazy poor design choice, particularly when its rushed out with little testing. Find the problem, fix the problem, don't neuter entire reams of content, abilities, playstyles, whatever, because some people can smash specific content set ups faster than you anticipated.
I never expected them to scale beyond 100. Would not have complained at all with them maxing out and diminishing as you level. They were built for a level 100 cap and should have stayed that way. Would also allowed those that were not able to complete the 1 or 2 challenging ones an opportunity to complete achievements once moving beyond 100. Instead we get convoluted changes to stop those that brag about having already abused the crap out of them and now calling for them to be 'fixed' after they've done their thing.
Not sure anyone expected the HAs in CotF to scale beyond 100. They are consistently making poor choices to bandaid issues instead of fixing them. If I was a betting man it would take more resources to lock the scaling than the changes introduced. So instead of making progressive changes going forward they altered past content. Unfortunately on the next expansion they will have to make more adjustments.
