Re-tuned HAs

Holy cow the screwing up of HA goes to every expansion, trying to go back and do other HA for completion achievement, and as prev poster stated, getting some item that may be a few expansions old, as it stands its INSANE.
Currently doing any mission is out of the question, someone was just asking in general, has anything happened to raids....... nope the few raiding guilds out there seem to be coasting just fine. So as a few have stated its cake to do group missions as long as as you are raid geared and maxed or close AA, but for the rest of the remaining community............................ cant even go back and get caught up atm

I posted cause if you fix stuff please dont forget the hatchet job affected EVERY mission on EVERY expansion

When I first saw the patch notes for test, I was telling people in guild chat that I thought it was a mistake that the level of the mobs scaled at all. They were not totally the current level, but they did cast newer spells. When you do old content, it should be easier. If it was that DH was littered with campfires, there were two ways to make people do those less. One was the way they chose and the other was just to SCALE DOWN THE EXP when your level was above the original expansion's level. I knew this would mess up all sorts of achievements and getting people caught up.

My initial thoughts I expressed prior to the changes going live have been mentioned by several people in here. One that really echoed most of my thoughts was Bigstomp.

Bigstomp:

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I parked in wife's guild, but raided with Freelance. That had unique issues. I missed out on a lot of group stuff because some of the days I wasn't raiding, the guild I was in was raiding. I quit raiding in 2016. I also didn't play for about a year after finishing the Artisan's aug that summer. So I had additional stuff that was there to complete.

This scaling of stuff affects more than just the DH stuff. Prior to the patch, there was a guildie missing the mirror for TBM, we went to help out. The instance we did had the old scaled mobs (current levels and new spells, but not as bad as real current levels). I expect that that mission was affected too with the scaling patch. I know several of the instances that I lack stuff from have been affected.

I am glad I made a push to finish DH and Neriak hunter targets prior to patch. The last 2 Cooper missions and the guardian in the last Lark mission wasn't fun for the chars I had available to box. (Plus, I really stink at moving back and forth between windows to handle even two chars) Having to do that multiple times just to get Bloody Tome to spawn, sigh. Fortunately I did get all of those done. I wasn't able to get the Infernal Vortex to spawn in AH or would have been totally done in CotF for hunters in instances. I probably won't do more instances to get any missing quests/mission stuff in previous expansions with the current patch. There are some people in guild who would come to help. If it was one or two missions, I would ask. But the sheer number of things I missed out on would monopolize their time when they really need to get new members up to raiding level and capabilities. Since I still don't want to return to raiding right now, it does limit what is interesting to do.

The day after the patch, I offered to help out a lower-level guildie who was moloing a Gribbles trying to level up to join the raiders in guild. I thought maybe my being 110, would increase his exp reward. He said the reward was better, but overall the mission may have been too slow to be worthwhile because of my help.

Some instances were less forgiving for not having the proper class balance. Allowing friends with any mixture to be able to complete lower-level stuff should be fine. They couldn't do them when current, but at least they could as they level.

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My ideal solution follows what pretty much what Bigstomp laid out:

Scale down for lower levels. Don't scale up. I wouldn't even scale the mob "level" up like they did prior to patch. Reduce the exp for levels higher than the expansion. Hopefully, this would still allow higher level people to help out lower levels and allow people without the "proper" group line up to do older stuff that was too hard for them.

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I believe this would solve the issue of an old expansion being the best exp/time, yet still allow people to complete stuff without dragging the correct group back to do it.

Edit: Changed a word to "Reduce" above as previous work hit some filter. Not sure why.

Lots of complaining but I don't see any thanks for not banning people who used HAs to level!

But if it scales up they can provide fun content that everyone loves doing forever.

I read somewhere that the plane of fear/plane of hate-raids from TBM were using the scaling mechanic from HA's too. I would expect those to be over-tuned as well, I haven't looked though.

One thing is certain: No-one did those raids for XP.

Did this not effect pre-106? I may just de-level so I can go back and work on AA and progression.

Is it viable to get a refund for RoS as in less than 60 days of purchase the game was altered to be unplayable for me? Could refute on the card as "product not as advertised". I've been running missions everyday for a long time and purchased the product under the assumption I could continue to do so.

Wednesday - First day in a long time I didn't run any missions with my EQ friends
Thursday - First day in a long time I didn't talk to or see any of my EQ friends
Today - First day in a long time I won't login
Tomorrow - Who knows, I might go outside. (Looks out window dubiously - this looks like quite a challenge)

Gribble? Who is Gribbles?

I will be canceling all my accounts due to this... Hope it was worth it DB

I only went to all access membership to be able to use prestige gear/j5 merc to be able to do the TBM HAs, now I can no longer do them. So I have now canceled my accounts and will no longer support your company with my money for no reason.

This was the initial thinking behind HAs when they were introduced back when CotF came out, I think it was Prathum that explained the idea behind HAs and that they would scale to the highest level of the group and continue to scale with level increases. Basically content that would always be a way of exping, until such a time they decided to stop scaling them.


The problem is while some were undertuned with level 110 and needed a re-tune others had scaled properly and are now overtuned as they just did a blanket retune on every HA that was available.

Every HA available now needs evaluating and retuning appropriately.

Answer: You!

"Every HA available now needs evaluating and re - tuning appropriately".

Nah, just put HA's back to where they were. I don't trust any re - tuning they might do. HA's at certain levels just flattened me during lvl 75 to 105.

I'm thinking more and more the intent was they thought they were fixing the HA's for us. They didn't realize some players like me enjoy out leveling content before I do it. DBG doesn't want me doing that so a big part of my enjoyment of the game is gone overnight.

As it is now if I level to 106 I gain the RoS expansion but lose the HA's from several other expansions.
It has me looking at other games on Youtube and is certainly cause to consider cancellation.

One that that remains the same is Whulfgar trolling these boards and people constantly feeding that troll. His comments are always the same.

The "I'm so wonderful, be like me" posts from people because Gribbles steps on their toes somehow are right on cue.

I agree with your last paragraph, so not attacking your post, but that group setup would destroy just about any content very quickly. EoK raid gear is better than RoS T2 Group gear as far as I know, so you are already going in with more than any grouper will have in the next year. Then you have a tank with good damage, and a real cleric so some damage added there with certain combo heals spells. Then you tack on the four caster dps classes. The druid is the only one who might not see full potential due to mobs dying quickly, but they are high dps along with the 2 mages (and pets) and the wizard. Not to mention the average group isn't going to be AE'ing everything down, which is much quicker.

I think most group geared folks can probably run one Gribble, pop Lesson at the end, and still complete the other two before Lesson ends. I know I could do that with about a minute to spare when I was a 107 Monk in group gear, paired with a 110 Monk in raid gear. Maybe that's too much or too easy and could be adjusted. But the average non-raider group isn't running it anywhere near as fast as you could with that specific group.

I believe JK Rowlings wrote seven Harry Potter books. I am confident she would be upset if she spent all that time and energy and focus on book 7, only to see people continuing to reread and talk about book 5.

So I get the devs perspective. They made this expansion that they want players to play in, not to continue for four years at Gribbles.

However I fully agree that old content should be easier as players become more powerful. Some of the fun is going to a zone 30 levels ago that used to kick your butt and now you can kick its butt. Nostalgia, revenge, achievement checkmarks, a clickie... players at 110 do not always want to do level 110 content.

What needs to happen is for the heroic adventures to go back pre patch in difficulty, but severely reduce the XP one can obtain from them. This way your goal is nostalgia or revenge or achievements, and if your goal is XP you do current content...

It seems like a change of this nature would solve the most problems, and also keep the most people happy. Expansion content should remain relative, in both experience gain and item reward, to its corresponding level cap.

It's very reasonable to see why people that are going back to finish achievements or farm for unique items in old content (4 expansions and 10 levels dated), are upset when suddenly faced with 110 levels of difficulty. The ability to return to older content for completion or farming purposes has always been a mainstay of EQ.

However, I believe it is also unreasonable that people can level to 110 in CoTF. There needs to be an experience penalty or fall-off after 100 (or 105 for TDS/TBM). Much of the back and forth discussion here has revolved around gear. "Raid gear can do this, group gear can't," etc. I would argue that it's more about following the path of least resistance, and being rewarded for it. Following the release of RoS, the top raid guild on my server had dozens of characters sitting in the Thuliasaur mission all day, every day, until they were level 110. Obviously they have the gear and skill to do other things (and at a greater rate of xp), but it's much more safe, lazy and easy, to sit afk and let 1 mob continually respawn into you, and come back when you're max level. This is the type of thing that needs to be addressed, and it revolves around experience gain.

For those that feel level 106-110 content is too challenging, and need more AA to prepare, you can either remain at level 100 or 105 and farm AA before moving on, or utilize the abundance of non-instanced content throughout the various expansions. For example, at 110, much of EoK is significantly more trivial, and still yields good experience.

In closing, I feel that the larger scope issue here, is that it would be immensely helpful for the Daybreak developers to communicate with the player base what the design intent and decision making is for significant game changes. This type of context for patch changes (nerfs or buffs) is commonly used in other games, and would go a long way toward clarifying what direction EQ is headed.

Very much agree. The issue isn’t that these were getting stomped pre patch. It’s that they were getting stomped *and* still giving a pretty decent hit of exp 106+ for ridiculously minimal time/effort/risk. We ran one the other day with a monk tank and mostly alts/mercs and it took us ~25 minutes to run all 3 (lesson still had something like half the buff available afterwards when done) and it netted my 109 mage 15% of her “hell” level. It seemed pretty silly.

Getting some current exp in old content is fine for the prior expansion or two one would think, but CotF is now 3-4 years old, probably out of the reasonable definition of “current”. Didn’t they already do something similar once before, too? Increased mob hp/ac/lvl/whatever, around when they made the dumb exp solely from the chest changes?

They've needed to kick the kids out of the basement on this one for awhile so to speak, it’s just crummy timing doing it in the middle of a pretty small and casual un-friendly expansion launch.

Hear, hear.
This "Sound of Silence" is really not helpfull.
However I recieved 3 mails today that DBG dont want to behave awkward:

We’re sad to see you go xxx.
We won’t be clingy and awkward; we’re simply providing confirmation that you have canceled your All Access Membership.