Why can't DBG solve Mage Pets and Monk Fists on TLP?

None of this changes the absolute fact that Monk DPS is completely unbalanced on TLPs and it is actually warping boss encounters at this point. Prathun, what are you doing to fix this situation?

So... roll a monk and enjoy it?

I disagree. You assume that because monks top parse (and in "YOUR" opinion, way over parse everyone else) means they are broken.

The reality of the situation is that if monks were broken like you claim they are, people would be going and doing raid content with a raid force made up of nothing but monks. Fact is, that's not the case.

Monks are powerful. Yes. Monks are not broken.

The raid guilds I have been on during my time on Ragefire, Phinigel, and Agnarr have had on average 3 monks on raids. Sometimes there are up to 5, and sometimes there are as few as 1.

If they were truly broken as you suggest, there would be 10 to 15 monks on raids regularly.

Fact is, monks are powerful in the Classic to PoP era of Everquest as it stands today. They weren't always this powerful, but they aren't "broken" powerful now either.

Please stop hating on the DPS of another class just because of jealousy.

And, for the record. I have a 60 monk on the Agnarr server that I raided on from classic up to Velious. It was a fun class, but I ended up leveling a necromancer to raid instead. Think about that for a second. If monk was so "broken" over powered, why would I choose to play a different class?

I could have sworn that calling for a nerf of any class was a forum violation.

It's interesting to shoot down someone's argument as anecdotal and then replace it with your own anecdotal argument.

My anecdote is that I played in a guild on Agnarr that had roughly 10 monks per raid, and my guild on Ragefire had at least 5, but usually closer to 7 or 8. We mowed down every mob, except Gore...she was a PITA.
In my experience. people main changed from monks to another class, not because monks weren't overpowered, but because they had to compete with 8 other mains to get any decent gear.

Main change to a rogue or paladin and you can get fully geared for 1/10th the DKP of a monk.

It absolutely blows my mind that they've still not flagged Innate XYZ AAs for all the Melee classes as a TDS AA. This is the prime issue with TLPs and Melee dominance. Not monk fists.

These were AAs introduced in the 21st expansion, meant to balance Melee vs Caster DPS at level 105. They have no business being on TLP servers.

QQ. Suck it casters lololol.

Before MOTM, mages were insanely overpowered for raid content, and there were tons of them on every raid. Nobody main changed away from mages because they had to compete with other mages for raid drops.

If monks are overpowered and having more then a couple means you can't get raid drops because of inner-guild competition, then how come did the vast majority of mages pre-MOTM not class change away seeing as there was TONS of them on ever raid?

I think your reasoning might be flawed.

Clearly the devs decided that melee classes were vastly under powered in classic-pop eras.

Again, this thread is nothing more than a "call for a nerf of another class" which is 1) in poor taste, 2) not based on any real pressing game-breaking issues, and 3) against the forum rules.

Why it is being allowed to continue is beyond me.

When something came into the game doesn't = when it was needed on progression. Some things it took years for thinking to come around and sort out.

As players, we have seen "the vision" of this game shift in many ways over the years. Most of that has been good.

When one class is clearly outpopulating others there may be an issue. This is not yet the case with monks, arguably was a bit with enchanters in classic, has been at some times on live servers with mages (in eras many progression players won't have seen).

Current progression is aimed at recapturing players for a fun journey. This has involved significant retuning/adjustments along the way. I find the current progression game to be the best under level 75 EQ has been in years (I happen to enjoy the TSS 1-75 content as well, but it is more like a giant tutorial with a few tricky bits if you want to use them... and sadly made mostly irrelevant by defiant gear).

Melee power, if it is an issue, really only impacts fun at the raid level. The argument can easily be made that raid content needs to be encounter-specifically tuned harder for progression already. Maybe this means some raid npcs get a new line of melee-rune buffs... maybe some raid bosses get to be melee-immune for a duration of combat --maybe the melee-immune rune only dissipates after a certain amount of spell damage is done to it... Maybe Vox needs to develop a slight weakness to piercing... I'm sure there are other ideas. Tactics, combos, use of obscure things in some class toolkits.

Instead of calling for wide-spread nerfs to classes or groups of playstyles that will harm the fun of the playerbase at large, let's improve the spots where balance matters in a precise, surgical way that increases raid challenge.

The Devs are constantly tweaking when content unlocks. Several recent patch notes have included lines about this raid being available after expansion X unlocks or this NPC being available after expansion Y unlocks. Progression servers are a work in progress and they will constantly balance and fix things as they discover them.

I don't think they decided to leave it in for balance reasons. They just haven't looked at these particular AAs on TLP servers at all. I think it's pretty clear AAs introduced in the 21st expansion of EQ shouldn't be available on a TLP server in DoDH, let alone PoP or Classic. Especially one that confers so much power.

This is more than just a raid issue. Group players do more DPS as well. It allows everyone to consume content more quickly and it also allows people to complete missions or fights they shouldn't be able to because they should run out of mana or not be able to burn down mobs as quickly. People love to claim DPS reductions are just boring because mobs take longer to die. This is false. Mana concerns should often come up for fights in the group and raid realm. However when things just evaporate due to absurd amounts of DPS, this is almost never a concern.

It's not a nerf. This wasn't something players had in these expansions. It's just a suggestion to have a more accurate progression server/experience. I understand these servers can never be exact replicas of the expansions as they existed in the past. But this is one of example of a pretty glaring difference in the difficulty of the game when comparing then and now.

The devs have said many times on these forums that the TLP servers are not classic servers. They are not intended to be representations of the game as they were in era. Many things have changed over the years, and as such, these are anything but actual representations of what it was like to play through these eras when they came out back in the day.

The TLP experience is getting to play through the content in era as Everquest is today. There's a huge diference between playing Original Everquest content in classic and TLP. That's intentional. The devs have said as much on these forums over the past half decade that they have been making TLP servers.

The only close to classic experience you are going to get is on a P99 server. DBG acknowledges and permits the P99 servers to exist because they have no intentions of making a classic server here.

People really need to understand that these are not classic servers. We don't have naked corpse runs. We do have maps. We do have the find feature in game. We don't have slow experience rates. Raid mobs in original content through Planes of Power are not the same as they were in classic (MOTM, etc). Raids are instanced with access-on-demand ala Agents of Change. etc etc etc and Melee classes do hit harder than they did in classic.

That's the point of a TLP server. It's old content being relived through modern Everquest client and rules.

Therefore, any argument that is based on "it wasn't that way in era back in the day" is defunct. That is not an acceptable argument when it comes to a TLP server. There has to be an actual reason for something to be considered "broken" other than just "that's not how it used to be".

There are plenty of things that are not how it used to be. Anybody remember wizard's blasting down dragons with Mana Burn? Yeah. That was classic. That is not in TLP. Should we complain that TLP wizards are broken because they can't one shot a dragon with a party of wizards anymore? No.

Therefore, I still contest that monks, other melee, and mages are not broken as they stand today on TLP servers. They are exactly where the devs want them to be for THIS EXPERIENCE.

Mages don't really need gear.

Monks can survive mostly without gear as well, but melee gear is always fun to have.

And Druid and Shaman DoTs were exactly where they wanted them until this last patch. They constantly tweak things.

They limit every other AA to unlock based on expansion. This should be no different. It's likely just an oversight that they don't realize the full implications of because they don't regularly play on these servers. I'm sure they'll flag them to unlock in TDS eventually, just a matter of when they do that.

Risiko, you obviously play a monk or melee DPS class, and as such, are biased. You cannot and simply will not see the forest for the trees.

I understand that they cannot tune every little thing to be EXACTLY like it was back in the day. BUT, they can and have shown evidence of making balancing tweaks when they are required. This situation, regardless of your BIASED opinion, needs to be addressed.

Raid encounters and group encounters have been dumbed down and the experience has been warped going all the way back to kunark due to overtuned monk/melee damage profiles. We on Phinny naturally assumed that this glaring difference in player DPS would eventually even out a bit by DoDh. It hasn't. In fact, it has gotten worse, MUCH WORSE. Raid geared monks/melee do 2-3 times the dps of a full burning caster on average, and when a monk full burns this number spikes up to 4-5 times that of a full burning caster.

Now one can say, well what is the harm in that? Well the problem arises when you have 6 monks and now the raid mobs die too fast to be a challenge. You are already seeing a massive amount of caster classes abandoning their toons and re-rolling monks and other melee dps in general because of this issue.

Darchon has the right of it. The silent TDS melee AA changes need to be re-scaled for progression servers. They had scaled them already and now we see a MOUNTAIN of evidence showing that scale needing some tweaking.

Part of the problem with just flagging the innate aa's to a later expansion is that when the aa's were introduced, a lot of melee dps burn discs were nerfed at the same time, so that melees would have the same burn dps as before but higher non burn dps. If you just get rid of the aa's completely, the pendulum will swing back the other way and melees will be pretty worthless. Which, I'd guess, is why they didn't just flag them to TDS in the first place. It would end up being a big nerf, not just on the TLP's but on live for new players leveling up.

I think they could significantly lower the % at levels 50-85 or so, without completely eliminating the aa's, and it would be far better balanced. But again that would impact not just the progression servers but live as well, so I'd guess they would be very hesitant. Already enough (legitimate) complaints from live players that the TLP's keep causing live nerfs.

not as simple of a fix as you make it seem, scaling the innate melee % aa's

all the bonuses up til lvl 60 kept melee's approximately where they should be.

PoP things started to show signs of skew, but more towards the end when melee were getting decked out in full time gear+ldon augs

GoD is when it started to get laughable. Especially in full burn situations but the base% bonus hadnt changed since pop... its the addition of new skills, cleave/fero, max heroic stats and veteran bonuses that magnify the increased base dmg. and absurd accuracy, the removal of motm.

Omens was silly absurd because it was more of the same added bonuses + an increase in the +base bonus, and then casters got hit with mobs that had incredibly high resist rates

--I guess my point is that a sweeping change or reduction would be hard to hit the right balance. they would likely have to adjust multiple aspects of melee combat to find the right tune, with their bag of easy implementation fixes being limited. Finding a balance is a pipe dream, just look at the way dot changes have gone. worthlessly weak > overpowered > worthlessly inefficient > overpowered.

autoattack accuracy is too high, auto attack crit bonus modifier is overtuned with the combination of current crit rates and the innate melee aa's.
not sure if its possible to separate the avoidance/hitrates of autoatk and skills (kick,bash,frenzy,backstab,tigerclaw) would be nice to see those stay the same, and autoswing hitrates be throttled back some

not denying the disparity/imbalance. but would argue that adjusting base melee dmg up/down would not allow for fine enough adjustment of balance.

There is no way you can believe that statement. A lvl 3 pet nuking for 478 damage is completely and utterly broken. You can one shot things up to 20ish, and then past that 2 shot with your own nuke.

Might as well start off warriors with 5k hp or give clerics complete heal at lvl 3.

Maybe it's time for a protest. If Mages and Monks are so problematic, how about a day where everyone rolls as one of those classes to make a statement. When everyone is playing these two classes, maybe DBG will see its an issue.

Ok. That is broken.