What is your controversial EQ hot take?

However, it is also players who push that perception with any developer effort going to something other than raiding being flamed. Even if the item being worked on is being done by developers who do nothing with that type of content, the very fact they exist is derided as being worthless. And this is a problem not just unique to EQ, other games have the same issue.

It's also an issue on TLPs with players insisting that one cannot continue to or past Luclin without being in a raid-focused guild and the race for raiding to get full BIS before the next expansion is all that matters.

8 events are geared for raiders. 7 zones of quests, collectibles, missions, etc is geared for group play.

How are 8 events too much content?

2 missions, both of which are stripped down raids. The second is soo bad that it doesnt even have the bug fixes of the actual raid. Nothing actually made for groupers, just afterhought poorly tuned raids.

There's a ton of content for groupers, what are you talking about? Have you not noticed the partisan and merc lines, the evolving necklace, collectibles, etc?

The missions this year were rushed, extremely poorly done, and haven't had a second pass at them. There was so very little time put into them that we are lucky to even have 50% of the standard 4 missions. Have patience, they'll be fixed sometime between January and August. There's only like 4 devs who work at the company any more who work on this stuff.

I no longer am a raider and am pretty casual. My guild is 6 people with a bunch of alts that have been playing together for 20 years. We finished the 2 missions and the merc/partisan lines in about 4 days on at least 2 characters each. Not saying that raiders shouldn't get content, but they have been pushing raid content over group content for a while and this expansion it swings pretty heavily to raiders. having only 2 group missions is pretty bad. The drop rate on the evolving neck is atrocious (and don't act like raiders aren't going after it.) Collectables? really? yeah, cause running around collecting glowing things on the ground is what every grouper has been asking for.

Over all people have been complaining about the abysmal exp when killing, the casuals and groupers have been begging for the return of setting up at a camp grinding exp while waiting on named to spawn and instead we get... collections...

That will likely never return due to people running automation and leaving their characters on 24/7.

As for raider vs grouper, no one is happy with LS as far as I can tell. The raids are worse than the missions, we didn’t get as many as last year, and the group missions took not even a week to beat the intrigue out of, now they’re just required grinding. No rares do anything resembling a challenge, and it seems to me that mobs are still hitting as hard as they did in TOV, and groupers now have raid+ weapons, so there’s minimal benefit to raiding for better gear.

If next expansion is like LS I’m pretty sure EG7 will be losing some customers.

Someone actually understood the assignment. A+

It was once stated McQuaid wanted to give Rangers Feign Death, but he was afraid the fall would kill them.....lol

Pulling is a stupid mechanic that EQ players weight too heavily. It’s just training mobs with style.

LS is yet another in a very long line of cut & paste, cookie cutter, assembly line expansions. There are zero innovations, content-wise...just like every year.

You could take all merc/partisan/missions for each LS zone and drop them into 7 random original EQ zones, adjusting for mob names, types, and levels, and you'd get exactly the same result.

I've given up deciding if an expansion is good or bad, because it's EXACTLY the same as the previous expansion and just not worth the discussion.

If you zone into Fear, the mobs pull you!

Frogloks are the Jar-Jar Binks of Everquest

The same people who pay for TAs would also pay $150 for the new GTA game...

Based on the pathing in EQ, water should not exist

Pretty sure nobody here would see that as controversial.

Is it really water? The absence of toilets does cause one to wonder.

i like water zones, and think there should be more of them, and that they should contain critical items that everyone wants, and pivotal progression tasks, and also, run-on sentences are TIGHT!

Not just that, showers and bathtubs!
Imagine flu season, not a single person in all of norrath has EVER washed their hands.

I've only played back in '99-2002, again in 2015, and now again at the end of 2023 / beginning of 2024, and haven't had a chance to catch up to the latest expansions yet (furthest I got was finishing HoT group content; currently playing with a group of friends and slowly moving through TSS / SoD achievements), but my attempt at a 'hot take' is: while quest design, zone/mob artwork, in-game storytelling, tradeskilling, class active and passive abilities, and mob fight mechanics have gotten much more interesting --- also, Achievements with meaningful rewards are awesome, and a great way to structure exploring a game world that has become as vast as EQ's --- on the other hand, item design in EQ has become much, much less interesting than it was in the first few expansions.

Equipment sets for each class or archetype that are clear and unambiguous upgrades over the last set are simple to design, but I miss having tons of reasons to go to out-of-the-way zones to hunt for specific clickies/procs/etc (often with serious gameplay-warping consequences, like Slow or Snare procs on warrior-usable weapons or something, or the haste clickie from Thought Horror Overfiend; as another, more obscure example, I played on a PvP server in the past, and spent a lot of time trying to find a weapon I could give to my pet that would self-proc a DoT to automatically break mezzes), and, honestly, I kind of unironically miss a lot of the gear being less obviously designed with purpose, and sometimes having almost random stats on it.

Oh, and for a two-fer, 100% agree with this. Kedge Keep is my favorite classic zone

And, maybe a three-fer: I have a love-hate relationship with mercs that tends towards hate. They're probably an unavoidable necessity at this point, but I really dislike how trivial they make most low-to-mid-level content, and how strongly they discourage grouping with people you don't know. It astounds me how much stronger even an apprentice tank merc is than an equal-level tank in full Defiant. Have mostly been combatting this by just fighting content 10+ levels higher than us, but it's kind of a bummer to have that highlight how much less necessary the PC-driven characters are.

While I'm at it, one more, even: the major story in each expansion seems to always be very large in scope. The stories would be more evocative and tighter, and retain more sense of mystery/awe in the world, if more expansions focused on events smaller in scale (but explored in great storytelling detail), rather than every expansion having some kind of world/universe/multiverse-influencing effects. This might be hard to reconcile with the very linear increase in character power with EQ levels, though.