Thoughts on item stats simplification

I think there is an opportunity to simplify the stats on items moving forward. My short explanation of why to do this is ease of players thinking about gear, and re-entry of players that left the game before it got as big # and in depth as it is now, and focusing dev effort on creating more variety of choices that we can easily see the choice in.

1. Put all stats, resists, mod2s and effects commonly put on gear in as AA (or make some of them specific innate grants of hitting a level).

2. This leaves heroic stats and AC/hp/mana/endurance as the only stats on gear, and unique effects (which should be rare rather than every item templated for that slot).

As long as the inflation of heroic stats is kept in small increments the numbers become very reasonable [with room to play with caps and having a reason to stack a heroic stat being a part of gear selection]. Then you can make multiple versions of the same item where stats are n, but each version has a different stat that is n +3. Shopping and item selection in an all/all gear template world (for nonvisibles at least, and 4 versions for the visibles to maintain historic restrictions if that is needed).

3. Next steps could then be heroic resists, with a very small implementation #. So maybe expac #1 you can get +1 to +3 to a heroic resist based on your gear tier.

4. Far enough with this you could even do heroic AC/hp/mana/endurance (and just make the base many thousands of HP currently on gear a default improvement of hitting the new level in the expac).

*this is the rough concept, I'm sure refinement would be needed

TLDR: if the current common stats/effects shown on items were made innate (either as AA or for hitting a specific level) then only heroic stats (including some not implemented yet) would show. This would be smaller numbers to figure out as players, and allow an easy opportunity for the devs to create a range of gear options suited to a player wanted to stack certain things.

somewhat agree with this.

Once you get used to it, you simply realize most of the stats on the gear is useless or not worth looking at (either because you are way over-maxed, like resist... or because they don't do anything for your class, like kick modifier for caster... or Hcha.)

the only thing you really look at is the HME / focus effect... which is pretty standard per piece.

But for a new player (is there anyone new in EQ at this point?) it sheer amount of stats could be intimidating .

I mean, they are consolidating AA that we dont want them to consolidate already.
I certainly do not want any more AA consolidation so that we can put stats that are already on gear onto the AA instead.

Multiple problems with this idea:
1) Do you realize how many items are currently in the game that would have to be redone? That would be a massive amount of developers time which is in very short supply. This by itself is a show stopper.
2) How do you think most players would react when they logged in and their previously Item-Of-Uberness now gave them +3 Heroic Strength instead of the stats they are used to seeing. That's probably not going to go over to well when you wipe out everything they've worked for.

Are over-cap stats usfull against debuffs?

if you have 1200/1000 MR, and are hit by a -300 debuff, does that take you to an effective MR of 700 or 900?

That's the thing... you don't redo anything.Then you don't break anything old or have to spend time on it.


You simply move the inflated stats/effects off of the gear moving forward. The dev effort is put into the heroic caps being meaningful and something that works for the next 10 years. They get to develop heroic resists, regens, AC, HP, Mana in very small (but powerful) steps with logical caps that make tuning your gear what you put the thought into --this could even result in players swapping out sets again (which allows for an armor set keyring feature in the UI).

You'll want to drop the massively statted piece of gear for the new gear with +1 of the new heroic AC because your innate stats (and what you can "fix" with AA) are already way over any useful cap of the nonheroic stats.

This could even be introduced a few slots at a time. If shoulders are the only spot to get +1 heroic AC in the next expac along with +___ (baseline) of the current heroics with no other stats or effects you would quickly have the playerbase understand that there is 5 shoulder items in the new expac and all of them are big-picture better for your character than the current mass-statted ones.

Unsure, but moot point unless they add a ''super mega malosini'' spell on random mob.

Usually if they don't want something resisted they give it a -2000 resist check, and if they want it to be seldomly resistable they'll give it a -900.

Yes, over-cap resist stats are useful (theoretically...more below). In your example, you would have an effective 900 MR. Most of the times mobs don't hand out debuffs...their spells/abilities have negative check mods on them (same as player spells). A mob effect with a -300 magic check leaves you with 900 MR. A mob effect with a -150 magic check leaves you at 1000 MR (cap).

In the real EQ world, devs now know that players are way over the cap on resists so they put in ridiculous negative checks when they want effect to succeed. Which basically has put resists out of much of the high end content (don't get me wrong, you can still resist stuff...but it's almost binary at this point).

Simplify is a word people use all the time but somehow forget the real meaning in execution. I'll make specific comments below, but you are not simplifying anything...you are changing stats. It may make things easier for folks...it may not. But at the end of the day, we pretty much have the same things we have now...that's not simplification.

Also, players will spend time thinking about gear choices, whether the system is "simple" or "hard". That's one of the shticks with EQ...without the gear choices, might as well be playing something else.

What do you do for the 1-50 crowd? The folks happily playing on the progression servers now because they want to choose between a breastplate with 15 AC or one with 50 HP...what happens to them?

Granting AAs gives them too much and changes the experience but not implementing means you are trying to maintain multiple code bases for stats. I'm pretty sure the devs don't want any part of multiple codebases. I don't think you fully understand how much of a non-starter this point is.

So base stats and resists are gone. That's a big change in the early and middle game. But what else have you really removed? The important mod2s are now heroic stat based anyway. I assume that hp/mana regen will just be converted to permanent aas? I guess you have taken spell damage and heal amount out (we can agree clairvoyance is not something people actually care about right?).

There's actually not really that much of a change here...normal stats and resists haven't mattered on gear since the level 50s with defiant gear. I'm not sure I have looked a piece of gear in 25 levels and said, you know this has more stamina or more poison resist so I'm going with that. You are adding unique effects (what?)...I guess like the ones belts have? Great...more confusion over what to use...oh yeah, and you cannot bandolier the slots out.

Huh? What is this different than now? And the whole point of heroics was there was not a cap (or at least a meaningful one in game for the foreseeable future).

Great...now we have to either camp more named to outfit a group or be extremely disappointed when we are getting + Charisma gear instead of...anything else.

What do heroic resists do? Where is the code for this coming from?

If I'm reading this right...you want to make each expansion increase by 1k or more in hp/mana/end? And I thought gear inflation was already bad enough...

TLDR - You don't like regular stats and resist showing up on gear now and you think it should be removed...

...which is a fine request. Doesn't bother me, but I'm willing to listen.

I have never encountered someone returning/new asking me what do all the regular stats and resists do. It's simple to see and easy to explain. It's everything else that makes EQ a third order differential equation to solve for someone's particular preference. And you want to talk about more of these...no thanks.

And please do not expect the Devs to make gear choices simpler...they have never shown the ability to do so. In fact, they get off on making new and strange gear choices every expansion. If you want to make things simple, get them to use a spreadsheet with values and just tick n+1 each new expansion. I wish they'd do that...would solve a ton of fixes needed later on. But they like to make the new stuff new.

Why in the World should they Waste time on this ? It gives zero value to the game, just lose resouces that could/should be used for somethign a LOT more worth.

It's not that I don't like a given stat or effect. I just think the balloon has puffed up over complicated and should be made simple looking again. Maybe a simple toggle "show stats on gear if that stat isn't at cap" would accomplish the same thing I tried to articulate in the original post?

Classic until Velious we had a very traditional table-top RPG style stats style for items. Bane damage, focus effects... all the way to mod2s heroics and so on have really cluttered that, combined with stat inflation we now have more stuff on a single item slot than a player from the game's heyday would have had in total for their whole character. You also had to work to cap out multiple stats and could make purposeful choices based on how you played the character.

The sheer numbers have become boggling, and the naming of some of the effects, as well as whether you even need to work on most of the stats at all. New items are showing up at Zam that are all/all (which is fine) with no real obvious reason for choosing A over B. Once specific slots became typical of certain effects we lost a pile of the item decision factor... at that point the effect should just be an AA or augment for the classes that need it, then gear choices open up wider with the same dev time currently spent making the same number of items (as your choice wouldn't be for the effect) as one example.

Having to think about gear choices is good flavor, when those choices are meaningful. Heroic stats could be the way they bring purpose and variety back, with the added bonus of the numbers aren't that large and could be even smaller for the not-yet-created heroic stats. Plus it gives the devs something new to do for the next expac [raid boss tier 1 casts an AoE that you need heroic resist fire +4 to resist and that resist only exists +1 on some gear that you get from that expac]

My suggestion does nothing to the under 110 game (so no work redoing stuff). The (rough) concept is to obsolete the classic stats through mod2's entirely so the 111+ characters work on a limited range of heroics, that could include heroic stat versions of a few things we don't have yet (resists).

You realize 18 was the cap for most stats in traditional table top rpgs at the time.

So the entire 4+ paragraph rant about it is based on false info.

18 was not easily obtainable across all your stats in table top to my recall. Your choices mattered to how you were hoping to play your character. We now have really complicated looking item stats windows in EQ but arguably less reason for all of the stats.

EQ settled on 255 as their 18, then 61+ we got 5 point increases and all sorts of stuff down the road. I'm not challenging the wisdom of starting at 255 and inflating from there (because redoing pre110 is not going to happen).

Look at http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=129224 it has 32 stat/effects things to consider when comparing it to http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=129223 (examples borrowed from Missjackie's post on Allakhazam). 32 and how many of them will actually matter for a character geared up reasonably in the previous expac's gear?

12 or so choices that really matter, that you cannot max all of in era = more choice. More reason to make gear that is different because the difference would be significant, and it would be simpler (which has advantages).