You must be confusing the xp rate on Selo with how efficiently you can grind xp with Dirge. On Agnarr, in the absolute best case scenario where you are only limited by mana regen (that is, zero pull time), you get better xp/hour in a full group of nearly naked fresh 65s killing slowly in Paw than you can get solo Dirging in the best spot. I have a hard time believing you can take 5 leeches and take all day to derp pull Plane of Fire to come even remotely close in efficiency in OoW. Requiring a bard have nearly BIS gear for an era to almost be able to solo as much xp as they would get carrying 5 scrubs in a group isn't overpowered. I haven't played OoW. Are you trying to say Plane of Fire is still the spot to go for xp in OoW even though it's 3.5 expansions later, requires a flag to get into, and better xp is already available in Paw without a key or flag before that? As far as I can tell Denon's Desperate Dirge was a marginally worthwhile option in maybe 1-2 outdated zones for any given era. There are just too many limiting factors on it already. I know of exactly zero bards that thought it was overpowered enough to roll a main bard to Dirge. Zero alt bards were rolled to Dirge. Bards get rolled to melody and follow on raids. People would try Dirge out to see what it was like then go back to their usual. The only people doing it did it because they enjoyed it as a play style. While I'm disappointed to see that some people were disrupting zones with it, it just doesn't seem like that's a good reason to remove it. Zone disruption is already against the rules, and there's a long list ways people disrupt zones and other players that exist on TLPs. If it really was nerfed for zone disruption that's a pretty big overreaction to for the size of the problem. If it was accidentally broken and just turned out to be a fun way to bring back a more reasonable moderated version of old bard swarm it should have stayed.
I was server first 70 by a wide margin (took 1 hour 50 mins) and I was dicking around with a group getting signets on the side between pulls instead of dying and divine rezzing like I should have. The top guild on the server was doing massive aoe farming with the most streamlined groups they could, and they couldn't beat a bard just aoeing Yxxta. Fire unlocks at lvl 60 now with DoN out. I didn't talk about grouping at all up there, just powerleveling alts and solo exp to get destruction glyphs for raids. No one is aoeing fire with a full group. You do it to get an alt to 70 with 300 aa in a day, or powerlevel your buddy. Paw is terrible exp in comparison. Everyone gets the same EXP rate on selos. A 20 minute pull in fire with lessons = 80 aa solo. You aren't going to ever get 80 aa in 20 minutes in paw. It got to a point where I was blowing destruction runes just to make sure the kite dies so I wouldn't have to dot at all while plvling people, and they'd be fully replenished every pull with 15-20aa to spare without lessons on. It was ~40 minutes to regen my mana back and do it again while sitting in PoT with lessons held, or with my alt logged off at my kiting spot in fire. I do have a lot of BiS gear, and of course max AA. Plus mana regen clicky AA from Tacvi. That is completely broken. You can't say it's not. When people cared about Paw (Everyone is in RSS/DoN now if they want exp) they'd brag about getting 80 aa after all day. Not in 20 minutes then afk to do it again in 40. I have no idea what the exp rate is on Agnarr, but everyone on a server has the same rate, so if I'm getting 15 times what I'd be getting grouping in paw for 20 minutes, then it's pretty obvious that the exp is better. Downtime is irrelevant. Even an hour of paw isn't going to get you anywhere near what you can get by blowing up the entirety of higher level PoF. Plus paw is a snorefest with awful loot. It's all irrelevant though. They are never going to revert this change. It solved all their problems on Phinny and wasn't ever intended to begin with. I welcome the change, since it will force me to group again for EXP once we have new AA to grind. I stopped doing that since it wasn't worth it anymore, and EQ is meant to be a grouping game.
I mean, dirge is going back to how it was about a year ago. And using dirge a good bard could still top the parse on VT clears (never on single bosses) using dirge when the max was 4 targets. The new zone disruption was real, and if I was a casual logging in for my slow grind just to see some sloppy bard take 20 minutes to pull and another 10 minutes to kill a pack of mobs, I'd probably want this changed as well. I'll miss the easy bard swarming exp, but I won't miss sloppy bards lagging a zone out while I try to play.
Again, you mostly just seem unaware that Selo has a fast xp rate. You know what's really fast on Selo? The xp rate. The numbers you're rattling off really have no relevance without a legitimate comparison. You're also skewing the numbers by only counting the time you want to count. I power leveled alts using "traditional" AoE to 65 with 300 AA with less than 30 hours played including quite a bit of idle afk time. I'm not gonna go out and say that I was bringing in 50+ AA and hour on Agnarr though because that's not true. On Agnarr the best xp was always in a group, period. You could get decent xp Dirging, but it was easily faster xp per hour to group in Paw. I know because I've done it. Fresh 65s would brag about the AA they got in Paw that was faster than ideal Dirging. Maybe PoF or Yxxta really did get that much better, but it seems more likely based on the rest of the BS you're spewing that it's just exaggeration and selective memory.
Dirging was great for, as mentioned, "solo" play with 1 other newb in your group to level up. Could you get 80 AA per pull solo? Maybe, I doubt it was 20 minutes however just due to the pull time moving around to gather mobs, evading bosses, etc. But regardless, it was good, and it is gone. The fact that to do that monster pull meant you had to deprive other people of utilizing the zone, even in other camps is why it's gone and won't come back (unless by accident). It got to the point where a popular swarm zone would start to stutter on pulls and immediately you just knew a bard was doing a pull. Fortunately for POF, the respawn was quite long so the offending primetime swarm bard would be forced to take a siesta.
Was this ever the case though? Is there a time that bards could be consistently in PoF while other people are also consistently in PoF? Sethisto sounded like he was saying it was happening in OoW but then said they've moved on to other zones in DoN. So is it happening at the same time or not? If so, how is this different than the other forms of zone disruption that remain? If it is happening at the same time that bards are in the same zones that are relevant to others, why does it have to be a total nerf to the point of removal? Rebalancing (maybe cutting back the power or damage/mana ratio a bit) to keep it mana pool limited to otherwise obsolete zones seems like a better compromise. That would maintain some form of relevance in the older zones, keep the xp gain in check, allow bards to solo if they can't find a group, and keep a fun play style in the game. Say the mana cost went up 20% instead. Would that be enough to push the bards out of PoF while others are still using it because they don't have the mana pool to make it worthwhile any more?
You keep talking about rate, but the rate doesn't change dude. On selos a person in a group gets X aa an hour compared to a solo bard getting Y aa an hour. On Agnarr a person in a group gets X aa an hour compared to a solo bard on Agnarr getting Y aa an hour. It's slower on agnarr for both people, but the rate for both of them is the same comparison as selos. Solo/duo kill and 100+ mobs at a time is going to be better by far than a group that kills 50 mobs in paw in an hour. Server EXP rate has nothing to do with that. Is agnarr some magical conversion that adds a gigantic bonus to group? I'm 99% sure every server is a flat % with a small group bonus %. Soloing/duoing will always give higher exp per kill. There is no BS here. Paw has been EXP for bards since it launched on Selos compared to just pulling all of valor (caves, undead, frogs, worms, etc to the top and aoeing it all with the field was around 35 aa) and blowing it up every 40 mins. Nothing is going to beat someone wiping out an entire zone solo. There aren't even enough mobs in paw for a good group to always have something to kill. It sounds more like you never truly experienced what your class was capable of during the PoP->DoN era. Fire and Yxxta were absolutely insane EXP. There is a reason why I was server first compared to groups racing to cap. Yxtta was 70+ mobs and every pull was 2 levels. It only took 3 to go from 65-70 with aa to spare. EDIT: Here is a screencap to prove it's not BS from back when I was doing Yxtta: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/595058597348638720/606722637187645460/JOIN.JPG If you were getting almost a full AA per kill in paw, more power to you. I know my class was broken, and I leveled a ton of characters because of it.
As far as I know they have the same % bonus for grouping. So you would be wrong unless they have different xp/kill limits but I doubt that based on testing I did. Full Valor in a perfect scenario limited only by mana regen and zero pull time was worse xp per hour than grouping in Paw. I did enough of both to even fill spreadsheets of xp gain/kill, test group bonus, pot bonus, and event bonus. I have a feeling you're forgetting to include all of the downtime or even pull time and not comparing apples to apples. You keep giving meaningless examples like getting an AA per kill that have obviously skewed your perception. Sure groups have challenges for coordinating and setup time or AFKs, but it was still clearly better to group. If things changed in Yxtta or Fire later that's fair, but it could be balanced to be reasonable like it was on Agnarr rather than outright removing it.
I already gave you downtime. It's around 30-40 minutes for fire (though once I got my mana regen aa I was 75 mana to start the pull before fire repopped so it was much faster, never timed it), probably 20 for valor since it only takes half a mana bar. Valor has been irrelevant since Discord though since Yxtta was so much better in every way, and with fire in even yxtta was slow. Valor is my 55-60 stop that takes one aoe to get the alt into fire. Usually in a DZ just to make sure no one is killing anything. Valor takes about 10 minutes to pull if you bring the cave to undead and take it all to upper field. Before fire/yxtta I could get a good 3 pulls out of valor with lessons up before it wears off (afk in tranquility). You can't keep uptime like that in paw. My alts have a single lessons ticking from 46-70 and 300 aa just camping them next to my kill spot. And yes, I'm showing AA per kill, because when you put 70 mobs in there (yxtta), or 100+ in fire, it's a huge amount of EXP for very little work. There isn't a better way to show it. It takes ~20 minutes to get a good full pull in fire of the bosses are up, 10 minutes if they aren't. Valor felt like a waste of time once Yxtta arrived, and when fire unlocked with DoN it was open season on leveling alts. It was already insane for farming destruction glyphs. This is broken. Almost a full AA a kill with 100+ mobs all killed in 10-20 minutes is broken . No paw or anywhere else in current era is going to beat that. On agnarr it's what, half of selos? So half an aa a kill. Paw is also halved, so just compare it directly. Not to mention the convenience. In paw, you need to sit there mindlessly autoattacking/pulling for hours. In fire/yxxta, you spend 10-20 minutes getting the AA you'd get in hours of paw, then afk and do other stuff. I don't think we are ever going to agree with eachother though. This needed a nerf, bad. I've never seen such insane leveling that absolutely outpaces everyone else in an mmorpg, and I've been playing them since PBAOE kiting was a thing in old EQ.
If the mana went up 20% that would just help keep away group geared bards from the best zones. But the raid geared bards were doing valor in era, fire f1 maybe in era or next, so really it not going to do anything substantial imo. It was good while it lasted and I got a taste of it. But for now it's looking like I'll have to take part in that whole mmo part of eq again when it comes to exp. That's not really a bad thing.
This is only wrong by an order of magnitude. Nice try though. Maybe when you're done trolling for bard nerfs you can call for some nerfs to Selo xp.
I agree with this statement. I quit original EQ right around the PoP era so now want to go back and start over from that point so the TLPs are the only way for me to do that.
