"...they will not change their decision..."

Also GoD was retuned already and on top of that in TSS characters became massively more powerful.

I have done Gates of Discord in several self progression guilds. We restricted ourselves to in era gear, levels (65) etc. We did all the content just fine. Grouping was no harder than anything in PoP or LDoN. Named mobs drop nice augs and gear on par with elemental gear. It's a blast even if you don't get to raid the high end content.

Omens of War gave us epics 1.5 and 2.0. After Anguish is farmed all the guilds fall apart. I have to grind faction again? And for what? Some AA that is okish? And the gear is not as good as the previous expansion?

What I would like to see is...

PoP/LoY - 3 Months
LDoN/GoD - 3 Months

That's 6 months at level 65.

OoW/DoN - 3 Months
DoDh/PoR - 3 Months

There is another 6 months at level 70.

TSS - 3 Months

I am going on my 5th try of Classic thur OoW. I really want to see 75+ raid content. I missed out on it the first time through. I missed out the second time when TLP were first introduced. I would like to see it now. I have done the group stuff, and it was a lot of fun. Now I want the raid stuff.

I am predicting it now...

Every guild will do GoD once to get on the Phinny Kill Boards. Then they will all move into OoW. Why not? It's better loot and easier to get. Not more fun. Just easier. After a month the server will be dead with people only logging in once a week to do their Anguish clear.

Population didn't actually drop much. After the vote finally passed it bounced right back up. Yes, some people quit--but there were a lot of new people that came to the server during GoD and OoW too, to replace most of the attrition.

And DBG probably wonders why they're ranked D- at the BBB.



Source

The problem has never really been that GoD was too difficult for large guilds. Uqua and Inktu'ta were beaten in record time, it took months (well into OOW) for guilds to beat Tunat in Tacvi, but that was one mob. Zones like Qvic were a loot pinata.

The problem with GoD has always been that group geared players could not progress in it and it caused a massive exodus out of EQ to WoW. You had Ukuns that would snare you for 50% and run off at selo speed, you have Noc and Kyv that procced dots that no group tank could survive and a Tipt trial that stopped groupers from getting through the expansion right off the bat.

When we did M'Sha as a raid guild, I was far more scared of dying from a trash Noc proccing his dot than I was of the raid mobs in Qvic. The mobs group players had to deal with were far far nastier than what raid guilds had to deal with.

These experiences don't seem to reflect the current state of GoD and sound more like what was experienced when GoD first went live. This was happening on Vulak/Fippy?

No, they're experiences from 2004. I did go through Gates a second time on a Live server, but not as extensively.

For example, I read that the proc, what was it called, Chaos Claw?...has been adjusted and some other changes have been made that might make these zones more manageable.

But I still think releasing GoD as a standalone is a really bad idea, I can not imagine groupers will progress through this expansion in any meaningful way. It's an expansion that caused a massive exodus in EQ, an expansion most developers would probably rather forget, it has really never brought anything positive to EQ.

If that's the case, why are so many players on here demanding to experience it again?

Again, that was true in 2004. It was NOT true on previous progression servers, and it will not be true this time around either. The content has gotten much easier and players much more powerful.

You have no imagination, then. They can and have and did on previous TLP's. I've yet to see even a single person who actually played through it on Fippy/Vulak who thinks it should be bundled. Everyone enjoyed it.

What's "many"? The "vocal opinion" on this forum doesn't have a great track record. A server that limited boxing would be dead in the water according to some, you were ridiculed for even suggesting it.

Now there is phinny, a server with seemingly the only community left in EQ where you can log on and where LFG and general chat is not dead. 99% of this forum was wrong.

This forum represents an extremely minute slice of the EQ Playerbase, and a slice that is heavily slanted into one direction. This forum has been on the wrong side of EQ history for far too many times for me to take any "forum consensus" serious.

99% of the players that don't post here want GoD unbundled. See, I can use this same meaningless argument too!

Please stop ignoring the testimony of all the people who have actually played through it recently. You can pretend this is still 2004 all you want. It just isn't. Things have changed. The game has changed. GoD has changed.

Straight stupid ****** decision, please sell off the IP to someone who understands it and will take care of it.

your experiences from 2004 are not reflective of the way GoD currently is, and was on fippy, as many people are trying to tell you. you dont seem inclined to even want to listen to the experiences of other players

GoD is a great expansion, and if you dont think it offers anything to groupers, i have to doubt your claims of even playing it back in 2004. there is tons of great group content, with good rewards. it was just too brutal back on release. that is not the case any longer.

GoD was not fun for groupers, the first hurdle to even start ikkinz is KT trials, and we literally had to drag recruits through KT trials with our raid characters. The chaos claws procs from kyv and nocs were horrendous on our tanks, and those were raid geared. In 2004, there were 0 groupers in those zones, none.

The claims that it's now this super accessible paradise for groupers, I have very strong doubts regarding those claims. I do not recall reading any patch notes that there had been major changes, correct me if I'm wrong.

(and yes I did GoD, we dragged half the server through KT and Ikkinz trials, thanks for the suggestion I didn't)

I also disagree with "GoD being a great expansion". Great for who? Certainly not for EQ that managed to lose a massive part of its population.

It wasn't fun for us who stayed either, seeing guilds fold and friends leave.

What's so great about an expansion that even developers admitted was a failure? OOW made things right, but by then EQ had suffered enormous losses from players leaving to play WoW

(WoW, a game ironically designed by former EQ players in high-end guilds, disgusted with GoD, leaving behind page after page of rants from NPC swallowing quest pieces to .. shocker.. them standing up for groupers who quit because they paid for an expansion they couldn't use)

Did you play on the Vulak/Fippy era of TLPs - or any other TLPs in this era for that matter? Do you currently play on Phinigel - Is this conclusion based on the original iteration of GoD? I'd like to hear more about your GoD experiences and history.

The initial launch of GoD was hard, make no mistake about it. The removal of the requirement for everyone to have the trials done, reduction in their difficulty, along with mitigation and game mechanic changes make it a pleasurable expansion.

I lead guilds on both Fippy and Phinigel. The game is vastly different from it's original iteration in difficulty, and your assessment doesn't align with what I and the overwhelming majority that wants both of these rich expansions unlinked. All the leaders and community members I've spoken to are strongly against this linking.

It's like saying in Velious, "Luclin content is too hard for most guilds. We're going to launch both Luclin and PoP at once!"

You simply can't link two highly valuable expansions. Luclin is too rich of an expansion in itself to skip like that. You've got beastlords, a new race, and essential starters for long term quests. The same is applied to GoD - we've got Berserkers that need time to mature, the legendary BiC quest, among others.

LDoN is standalone expansion, which in itself is a slap in the face to the community. Augments are great, but no where near as a leap as GoD.

No I didn't play GoD on any progression server, neither on Fippy or Vulak. Maybe GoD was retuned and is now far more accessible, it's possible, I'm not saying it's not.

Maybe you should listen to all the players that DID play it after it was retuned then, instead of insisting that you know more about it than we do.

There have been, on top of a direct retune of Gates that made many of the encounters far easier, literally hundreds of small and big changes since 2004 that have increased player power tremendously. There have been at least two major tanking revamps that have resulted in mobs hitting far less hard in Gates, across the board, than they did in 2004. I can directly testify to this -- I successfully tanked Tacvi mobs in Gates on an alt warrior in a mixture of primarily group gear and a very few pieces of Plane of Time and Txevu gear. By the end of Gates he still had a mixture of about 1/3 group gear, 1/3 plane of time, 1/3 tacvi, and he was able to tank Tunat successfully on a number of occasions. Full 3 minute duration of defensive without dying usually. Even at the start of Gates with zero raid armor I had no problem tanking most of the group content--did the full progression for group keying before I started getting much raid gear at all.

There have been huge revamps to player DPS, as well. And even since we played through it on Fippy, there have been more boosts -- in 2014 for instance they gave an innate aa to all melee dps that flat boosts all damage by something like 40% at level 65. Since then they've been revamping dot classes to increase dot damage significantly. And those are just in the last two years. Mobs just melt now compared to 2004.

You can believe this or not, but you'd be pretty foolish to keep insisting we don't know what we're talking about when we played it more recently than 2004, and you haven't.

I played on The Combine all the way through until we merged into Druzzil Ro when we caught up with live. I can tell you that GoD is tuned where it should be and should be separate from OoW.