Re-tuned HAs

I never wanted to grind DH HAs, but they were the best exp (even at 110) and they were one of the only things that almost everybody in EQ was familiar with and could easily find a group and be social while doing.

But the only incentive to do them was the exp reward. For me, it usually took about 35-45 minutes to do all 3 and I got about 45 AAs for the effort. With lesson doubling that, it worked out to about 2 AAs per minute, once a day, for about 45 minutes. Sadly, that was the most exciting 45 minutes of most days.

If I try to farm mobs in RoS, it's much slower. An hour's effort there is lucky to net me 30 AAs, so more like 0.5 AA per minute.

But here's the thing: I don't farm mobs in EoK or RoS because it brings zero joy. At least the DH HAs were a nice reward for the effort and they brought people together. Now, there is nothing.

Not solo...

This is what they want to achieve i guess.

I disagree.
Railroading in an MMO is not ok, under no circumstances.

I also want to point out that with 5000+ new AAs, it would take almost 2 months of grinding the DH Trilogy every single day. Maybe I should be grateful that I won't spend my time doing that. Nevermind that I will lose one of the only consistent ties to the community. Nevermind that RoS was so empty and lackluster that we were all doing DH HA's instead.

Frankly, I just logged in and can't think of something to bother with doing. Even after taking time off for the holidays and work, the only thing left in RoS is camping contested mobs for the VP key or working tradeskills. Wow, what fun!

I have been ro ST many times and you are correct that the XP is very rewarding. But how do you expect anyone to fight there without a full group of top AA/geared players?

There is no sense in even trying to get there unless you have a GREAT group prepared for a multiple hour grind.

HAs were nice for the odd playtime when you must molo/box but not anymore.

I just have to wonder, what exactly was this change supposed to accomplish? I would think as a business that DBG's goal is to make things more attractive to players to get them to play more. This does exactly the opposite.

Before the patch: "Hey there's lots of stuff I never got around to back in the day, now I have a goal that I can devote a few weeks to finish up whenever I have some time to play."

After the patch: "Screw that stuff, it's just as super hard as current content for obsolete junk and crap exp. I might've been willing to do that stuff for the achievement rewards, but now it's just a waste of time and effort."

Not a single player is going to play more because of the new "challenge" of completing old content. Instead I have already seen people in my casual guild giving up today, calling it an early night without accomplishing anything because HAs are now not worth doing, and they don't have the time/ability to devote to current content camping.

DBG, you are doing no one any favors, least of all yourselves. You are going to lose players over this for no benefit.

Of the various CotF HAs i have done (don't think i ever did them ALL, with part I,II and II in CotF alone),
Gribble's were the most boring and "uninteresting".
But also the most straight-forward and short, so very rewarding in terms of XP over time, which kind of balanced out the dull zone and repetition for a while.

When i came back, guildmates dragged me in here and i enjoyed the speed-bump between leeching XP with Fragment-farming guildmates in SL.
They sure helped a lot to shorten that "catch-up time".
These days, i see quite a few people in them again, to grind out AAs for their chars since XP in EoK (compared to pre-release) and RoS is .

I have yet to them again myself after the change, but from what guildmates report, those times are over.
And now i have to take back my words from last summer or so, where i said that bringing up ALTs and giving them the needed AAs were easy.
It was (i did bring up my main from 83 to 105 and max AAs with some old progression in the 1st year and a whole bunch of characters from the 70s to max level with 5 to 10k AAs each in the 2nd), but i don't think i could repeat that now - even though i didn't do too many HAs with them.
Because these days, HAs are the only way that was left to "speed" some ALTs through some AA-grinding that they'd need to even just get near a raid-level.

This change to HAs, combined with what's been going on in EoK and the XP in RoS (factoring difficulty/killspeed in) is indicative of a try not only to herd us into RoS but also to "make the expansion last longer" simply by slowing down overall XPing rate to me.
Even though, i am sure the mains - at least the raiding mains and "hardcore casuals" - will be maxed again sometime in spring.
But i am loosing interest already, and i am all too uncertain if i will actually play during the summer as i did the last two years, leveling/developing ALTs after my main was done; currently i am leaning towards a "it's not worth it" and that i'll just spend a krono sometime in between to prevent my DKPs from being wiped.
And if that sounds overly negative, then that's most likely because i AM quite negative about this expansion and changes like this (not to mention the tanking nerfs last year) - and yes, there hav ealso been some changes i have welcomed, but they're quickly overshadowed.
They're heavily relying on people's social in-game ties for subscriber's retention instead of interesting content.
:/

Honestly, the exp rate in RoS does not seem any worse than it was in TDS (which people also complained about compared to CotF a second level 100 expansion). Keep in mind that EoK was the third expansion for level 105. The exp rate increases with every expansion. The insane rates we've gotten used to were a side effect of not having level increases while new content was scaling rewards.

EoK exp seems about the same to me. From 106-107, it was nearly the same as topping off 105. As levels go up, more exp is required per level. You outlevel the exp curve staying in old content. The EoK AA rate does seem about half of what it was at 105 despite killing much faster.

I would have preferred the old HAs just be capped at 105 with diminishing exp rewards. They do have value for casuals to do something for an hour or so. They also still matter for catch up progression rewards for returning players as well. This hurts both the casual crowd and the returnees without really having any positive benefit for anyone. A poorly thought out decision in my opinion. Those that took them as the easy route to 110 have already done so. The reactionary response just punishes those that use them for other more legitimate means.

Yep.
People ask for "challenge" and what they get is not nameds/events that are involved and challenging, but mobs that hit harder and have more HPs than the variable can even hold - patched to max HPs the variable can hold.
Which obviously means that either EQ will be 64bit next year or this was the last expansion they planned on doing - there is no HP left, no more "challenge" the way they seem to define the word.


And i fully agree with

too.

CotF is a whole expansion based on those HAs, basically.
It gives Hero's AAs.
Are we really supposed to do guild groups again for 5year old content?
(i could hardly interest anyone last year, what should make this more likely this year?)
For summer (once RoS was "done") my original plan was go to back to CotF where i haven't been able to box "the doomscale horde" and do it with the additional levels.
Guess i have to scratch that now and "bribe" some people into helping me with this old .
As i said above, that summer-absence is becoming ever more likely instead.

General chat was moving faster than main chat window with the entire combat log. I have one question for the devs. Why are you focus out attention on old content whe the new content has plenty of bugs that need fixing in RoS?

For the love of all that is mighty... PLEASE put the specialization augs on the vendor... or, make them drop FAR more often. Making these HAs tough now, is going to make farming the specialization augs that ONLY drop in the HAs very tough.

I have currently ran over 50 WK missions trying to get the evocation aug for an alt, without luck. Making the mobs tough now will significantly increase the amount of time required for me to get the aug for alts.

I personally could give a rat's hind end how much xp they give, either way. They are boring after about the 3rd time each, doing them... I can't imagine why anyone would do Gribbles 100+ times... Definitely isn't what i'd ever consider 'fun'... NOBODY should be forced to run particular ones several hundred times to get a rare drop from a rare spawn.

Please, put the specialization augs on the vendor...

They can do tricks with mechanics such as hp locks, insane AC/resist values, high hp regen, mobs that respawn on death, mobs that heal, etc. Depending on how messy the code is, another possibility could be to insert a damage quotient between the damage done and the hp removed from the mob. That way players would see big dps numbers, but rather than subtracting 1000hp for a 1000dmg strike, it could just remove 100hp from the mob's bucket if such a quotient was set to 10.

This game is old. Continuing to expand it runs in to legacy technological issues. Nothing that can't be worked around with some creative thought.

I wasn't around for TDS - i only came back after TBM was released.
Every release means harder-hitting mobs though.
Even being in full TBM raid gear at the time, when EoK came out i had *issues* in the spider caves without "real" CC until well into EoK, when i had gotten some bette rgear and most of all more AAs.

In RoS, while i haven't bothered to buy any new gear yet, i have gotten my relevant AAs and kill-speed (with the same group) is still only about comparable to a FM-giant pre-release, but with less of an AA instead of over 2 that they gave per kill.

Doing only regular XPi can understand that observation.
I too grinded out 106 to 107 in EoK, but i also did a few AAs "in between" with my box and found that the - easily comparable - AAXP has gone down far more than /con would account for (giants were still db at the time, while at 110 most are lb and only some are still db).
I then unpacked some lvl105 ALTs and did a painful slow giant kill with two of them (no raid gear on them) to find that the giant that gave 2AAs without lesson/vitality and 5AAs (capped) per kill with full vitality before release gave only about half that after release, again with full vitality.
I "had to" activate lesson in Addition to the capped vitality to reach the 5AAXP per kill cap again (yes i did that intentionally, since i wanted to see if the cap was still there or not; it had seen some discussion on these forums prior to release).
So there is, from my first-hand observation, definitely some XP nerf involved.
And since this happened with every release i have experienced so far (even before my many year long break), they can deny it as much as they want - the pattern is still there.

Yes, HAs have value - not only for casuals but for anyone with a limited playtime.
(and i am not even talking about the Hero's AAs now)
Because by the time i have set up a group, moved to a camp spot and done some killing, i usually had done a HA just boxing it.
I do not know what prompted this upscaling - but if it was the XP over time, then this is putting the cart before the horse. As you said, reducing the XP reward should have been "it" then.
I suspect though that the true reason is elsewhere to be found, namely in the above-mentioned herding people out from old content and into the new. As if the static zones could support the whole population anyways without forcing them into bugged or non-functioning /picks...

Using HAs for the XP they give is nothing illegitimate in my eyes.
But you are right: as with making raids progressively harder over time (as they did in both TBM and EoK), this is only hitting those that are still "at it", for whatever reason.

These old missions in past expansions shouldn't scale directly the same as ROS. People go back to old content to do gain exp with less risk. We don't expect the gear to be the same because it's old content so it should be freakin easier. This totally hosed my ability to lvl up my toons since I don't raid. Getting groups is a joke.
This was a horrible idea. I'm definitely canceling my second account and hopefully I'll get some sense and cancel the main account. Great job testing your changes DBG. Your testers should be canned if this was done on accident and the person responsible for making the decision to re-tune the content should be fired. Really dumb idea.
Raiders won't care that much but groupers just got hosed.

They're doing all of that already (OT raid for example, aslso OT group mission if not done the burning way).

Yeah, but as you said:
Their "creative" answer to "more challenge" is... more HPs, more mob-DPS, more mobs, more AEs.
Stuff where one person can single-handedly wipe a 54person raid without trying.
Not good old scenarios like sisters or similar where actual cooperation of teams on different assignments were needed.
Or, for the group content, the answer is more mobs, more HPs, more DPS and static zones instead of instanced ones so people step on each other's toes.
Oh, and let's not forget anti-AFK mechanisms...
Yep, that's "challenge" to them.

Mobs are a bit overtuned. They are flurrying and constantly maxing for 33k on T2 EoK group gear. Perhaps this is not a problem for higher end folk. Not a fun experience for the casual crowd. The usual modus operandi.

An old mission should get EASIER. If a mission was tough at 100, it should be cake at 110. At least just offer missions with two modes - easy (original level mobs - for progressing stuff you missed and hunter) and hard (for xp and loot).

Yeah I spent two weeks farming these damn things and one of them was during increased rare spawns and still have yet to get one. I can get the one from Roon and Shoon to drop and rot and the one from bixie to drop but the one from WK HA's seems rare at best. The only instanced item I have tried to go after more with no luck is the invulnerability clickie.

I just don't get what was so wrong with the previous system. Players were happy; I was happy. People enjoyed HAs and looked forward to the content. Gribbles was the only reason I was able to get back into the game again, as it helped push me through times when I was severely undergeared and lacking AA. Now, that pathway is closed.

For Fel Foilage, I just don't get what the point is by making the content so incredibly difficult. If the devs concern is making an addicting game that people will play as much as possible and pay as much money as possible to win, then they are failing right now, miserably. People who beat group content aren't going to magically poof and quit. They're going to farm gear, make money, farm AA, make alts, do old progressions, farm items and RAID!!!

The whole idea of me being able to one shot lvl 95 content but yet getting 2 shot in the HA (of which drop some laughably bad gear) is an obscene joke. I can't, no, I WON'T be paying for this change. This change has to go or I too with it.