Unbeatable Server? How to make end game last...

It wont. All the TLPs are based off 'live' servers. Any core change will carry over.

My initial interpretation of this was to make all NPCs killable yet have no respawn. You're literally killing the server.

Agnarr doesn't need to be harder, that's not the target this "arrow" is aimed at. It's the casual a pace as you want, you'll never fall that far behind or go into Discord or beyond server. I think it's a viable enough concept in the current timing of progression servers (being where the rest of them are at).

A future progression server with "hardmode" ruleset is a good idea... maybe not one people actually play on, but a good idea. I do think a reduced level cap to beat the era could work. Yes it probably breaks some classes (resists) or at the very least causes some different play tactics to be needed. Can you beat Vox in original era gear with a raid that maxes at level 37 (or whatever)?

Maybe as an event server thing it could be tried. Month one it's level 30. Month two 35 and so on. Global rewards for beating it... maybe even work like those trivia games where if you get it right early you get more points.

I'll add, as it was brought up in the thread, that the economy impact of load balancing has been interesting, though the recent changes probably mean Phinny is the biggest flood of "rare" gear we'll ever see on a single server.

I actually really like this idea. We're too powerful! Not sure if the better implementation is to lower the level cap or just apply MotM of varying levels on all mobs in the game. Might be able to draw some players to this server, but maybe not any new players who aren't already subbed...

The endgame on Live is pretty good atm, just sayin'..

If they wanted to make the endgame harder or unbeatable or whatever, they have to go the blizzard route and have different tiers of motm. Maybe have an AOC offer two versions of Naggy or something. The harder one drops an extra piece of gear or two vs the regular version. Just like LDON adventures. They have hard and regular. Instead of adventure points, you get an extra cof or something, or an extra red scale. The hard version would obviously have to be substantially more difficult than regular.

Since Motm is just a buff on an instanced raid target, I don't think having tiers of MoTM is impossible but I wouldn't hold count on it. Honestly just keep splittin' and see how few players you need to do a raid target.

*I'm referring to endgame on a TLP server.

This is literally what they already did for Phinigel...

As Hdizzle alluded to, DBG already found an almost perfect mechanism for scaling raid difficulty and providing appropriate rewards and they did it almost completely by accident. Split raiding allows you to decide how hard you want the encounter to be and get appropriately scaled rewards.

They could make some significant changes without impacting live. For instance, tie the melee innate dps aa's to TDS unlocking, so that it wouldn't impact the game on the TLP's until we reach the point where it was originally added. That would reduce melee dps quite a bit without impacting live at all. On spells, make the current level 1-60 spells rank 2 and have them sold in PoK when PoP unlocks, then make weaker rank 1 versions with old damage amounts, have those sold in starting cities. Problem solved, spell damage reverted to appropriate levels for TLP's with no impact to live. The devs have shown they can address some of this sort of thing in ways that don't impact live--for instance the mage pet nerf. If they can nerf mage pets and have the nerf go away at ldon, perhaps they could do something similar for player dps across the board. Or, throw an motm style buff on everything that would reduce incoming damage by 50% or whatever they calculate is appropriate.

Of course, there's little chance they will do all this, but they could if they wanted to.

I remember back in the day (PoP era) our guild skipped Vex Thal which was perma-camped and went straight to the Planes. It was a challenge and we needed some creative strats to get it done undergeared, but it was a blast!

That makes no sense. As others have pointed out in the thread, when the game gets challenging people just quit.

Here, I'll fix it for you.

Every time I see this thread I think the subject reads "Unstable Server... How to make end game last?"

But I'm a little dyslexic.

The AAs you're referring to were put in because of the TLP servers.

No, they most certainly were not. They were balancing changes on live that happened to impact the TLP's. From the original test patch notes (which explained their thinking in a little more detail than the live patch notes) here: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/test-update-08-12-15.225907/

The patch notes go on to mention how the aa's scale to 105, and lists the discs that were changed to correspond with the aa's. At the time, Ragefire and Lockjaw were in Kunark and half the discs they updated weren't even available. Some of them are still not currently available on the TLP's except for Fippy and Vulak.

plenty to do in end game....farm kronos . I wonder how the Kronos value will be affected when the server locks to a certain content? Plat will still be farmed but at a slower rate than another server beyond that expansion, forever.