I have been talking to players past and present on multiple servers and feel that the feedback I have received is important. Many players quit around the DoV era right after Sentinels Fate. Why is that? Why did the Heroic Community all but evaporate? The largest thing I have heard is about gear and difficulty. What was wrong with those in DoV? Well a few things. - Stat Inflation: the boost in stats was astronomical for DoV. overall for HM-Kael Armor The quested stuff from Great Divide was better than T3 Raid Gear from SF. What did this mean? It meant that players who were EM-Casual Raiders and Heroic Players were unable to do content at all in DoV. Sentinel's Fate Raid Armor (T4) had 104 on the Breastplate and 96 on the other pieces and at launch DoV the Quest stuff had 96 or very close to it. So DOV-Quested = Top End Raid Gear from the previous expansion. Anyone who did not raid Underfoot Depths HM was as the say "up the creek without a paddle." Players who were not raiders, but grouping players instead suddenly couldn't run Heroic Content without first slogging through Quest Content in Great Divide, something not all players enjoyed. Many quit. - Stat Consolidation: In TSO we had 5 stats (STR, AGI, STA, INT, WIS) then in SF we had those 5 stats but only two really mattered for your class and a 3rd one was relevant. For Fighters it was mainly STR/STA but AGI/WIS also helped other stats so you could mix-priest gear to up your Critical Mitigation or Agility to up your Dodge. Then when DoV came out stats were merged again down to two stats per class. There was no mixing of Gear anymore and there were much smaller and more bland drop tables. The only difference between ToFS gear and Velektor's Labyrinth gear was stats, nothing else. So to make a setting where there was Overland/Heroic/Raid progression stats were inflated (see above post) and that forced more people out of the game due to oversimplification and boring loot. - Overall difficulty: Because of the massive stat inflation and the introduction of Critical Mitigation to Heroic Zones everyone who did not raid, and thereby did not have Critical Mitigation was unable to do Heroic Zones. Raids were out of the question for most players till three months into the expansion. Whole guilds who were doing SF-Challenge Raiding folded because the new EM-Raiding was impossible for them without first slogging through the majority of content. - PvP Class Imbalance: Overall there were classes and actions that ruined PvP. Conjurors were capable of one-shotting any class in the game with Elemental Blase and pets did not mitigate control effects. So a pet could burn even while CC'd. When Flying Mounts came the exploit of shooting people out of the air for a quick death by forcing them into combat came into play. My PvP friends say many of their old friends and guildmates stopped playing because of how simply unfun it was to play unless you exploited the game. Those are the biggest things I have heard about why players quit in DoV. Gear was horrible in DoV and inflation was rampant. A huge portion of players were locked out of content and they just quit.
Didnt they remove crit mit like over a year and a half ago? also stat consolidation was a good thing, imagine trying to reforge and get adorns for 3 stats instead of 2 the largest chunk of people i know left because of 3 things, game going free to play, the constant changes to the characters between race changes, stat changes, mit changes, combat arts ect, and the dumbing down of the game. it is too easy now for me though, I am still enjoying it even with its flaws. Yes I agree pvp is in a horrid state on nagafen and bg's they need penalties
I admit I liked the stat consolidation they did in TSO, where you had two primary stats, but all others were useful. I dislike what they did with DoV where all except the 2 primary stats are no totally useLESS. Among other things, that made many buffs and debuffs less useful. Example: Agility buffs used to help tanks (with avoidance) as well as scouts (for dps). Now, if you're not a scout, an agi debuff is useless. Likewise, all stat debuffs had uses before. Wisdom debuffs always debuffed the mobs resists. Now? If the mob isn't coded as a priest, a wis debuff is useless... The biggest reason I've been hearing recently is lack of group content that is meaningful and interesting.
I personally feel like Sony quit caring about retention. Everything is just too easy and I see this happening again in EQN (no class dependency, no reason for alts). Ask yourself... if you had no reason for rolling an alt would you still be playing this game?
The problem is the lack of vision with the game, so many producers, so many different visions. Certainly tiering heroic content with an artificial stat was a bad idea, but you have to attribute this to a lack of consistent vision in leadership. SoE did a horrible job with stewardship of their own game.
DoV itemization (ie LootBot) and, to a lesser extent, repetitive raid encounters and poor raid balancing killed my guild in DoV. I would strongly disagree with some of the reasons you listed (can't comment one way or another on PvP). Your "overall difficulty" points strikes me as completely false. DoV was the expansion that first introduced full Easy Mode raid zones, and the majority of those zones were basically loot pinatas (there were maybe 4 "Easy Mode" mobs that gave guilds trouble). Additionally, you could get Critical Mitigation via heroic content, and a lot of people preferred having some heroic progression compared to the progression-less heroic content we have now. Maybe you're hearing about Drunder, which was balanced very poorly.
I had a feeling that I would have missed things, I was touching on the largest things I heard talking to players. Ladymist: Critical Mitigation was removed mid/late DoV when Drunder came out. I am speaking of release DoV. It was a mistake to make it go past 100% because it locked out anyone who didn't have it from Content. In TSO when it was introduced only Raiders had to content with it, then in DoV suddenly Heroic Players had to deal with the pain Raiders did in TSO. However, Raiders have more tenacity for BS it seems. Mermut: stat consolidation was alright in TSO because all 5 stats still did something. Take your example of a fighter. In TSO/SF days the stats did this: STR: Power and Damage STA: Health and Physical Resistance AGI: Dodge Chance INT: Elemental/Noxious/Arcane Resistance WIS: Critical Mitigation Problem was they didn't itemize all 5 items very well in SF when it came down to pretty much 3 stats per class. They made it worse in DoV when they made it 2 stats. By consolidating the stats the limited how many types of Gear they could make. Say I wanted Avoidance, but the gear from Velektor's Labyrinth has WIS on the tank items for most of them, save a few pieces. Well then I should want Tower of Frozen Shadow Gear (which stat wise is similar but has different Blue/Green combinations. However, without the stat difference or mixing of blues every zone became a flat upgrade of the previous zone and power-creep became rampant. As reflected today SOE is fighting to contain the now over-inflated stats with everyone having caped out on almost everything. ZUES: It would seem they care little of retention, a critical mistake. It seems they try to reinvent the game every new expansion and those who remain are only the ones who seem to like the changes. That further dilutes the option. Part of an MMO is being invested in your character, the people you play with and your Community. By making everything simpler and "more accessible" so to speak they are removing that investment. In Destiny of Velious the stat inflation caused all the time players had invested in Sentinels Fate towards getting gear to become worthless. By resetting gear curves they alienated everyone who had been playing for years and they crippled the casual/heroic level of play so harshly that many mid-end raid guilds (the casual and semi-hardcore) to fold. Without the Heroic/EM-Raid Community there are pretty much three levels of play: - Solo - Those who still group for the token novelty of it - Raiding Guilds of which most are HM now because EM's are almost extinct it seems, there are what 6 per server roughly and then 2 top-guilds? My biggest concern if further making the game easier and simplifying it when players don't want that they want complex balance and choice so they may be invested in the game they play. EQN seems to be making that mistake already by limiting players. What is the point of having 70 Classes when I can only use 4 Abilities based on my Class?
The point about difficulty was slated more towards the 1st month of DoV when anyone who wasn't a raider was hung high and dry. I saw many guilds fold in that time period. It was compounded even more when Drunder came out. Once you had Heroic-DoV armor the EM was just that... Easy Mode. The transitional period from SF to DoV was the roughest I have personally experienced in the game. One thing DoV did right was a full EM and HM progression. EM Raiders could experience all bosses without having them be locked behind Challenge Mode.
What Estred said about investing in my character is the only reason I'm still even thinking about logging on. This game is painfully difficult to play now - not because 'it's hard' but because you have to wade through a mire of weirdness to figure out how you can play your character. I'm not even waiting for EQN, I'm that tired of SoE.
I remember DoV launch being extremely easy, with loot falling out of basically everything from Public Quests to 1-groupable Easy Mode raid mobs. I'm baffled by your description of being hung high and dry, but admittedly, I was a high end raider at the time. I also saw many guilds fold during DoV, but it had nothing to with content being too difficult (at least not until you got to Drunder). EDIT: Other factors that contributed to the demise of several guilds during that time: STA debuffs reducing every raid fight to a 1-2 minute burn fight, and the Sony hacking incident that shut down the game for a month+.
I am only reporting what others have said. My personal opinion was that DoV Launch wasn't hard, I was a Mid-End raider (T2/T3 and EM UFD kind of stuff). So there has to be something else but in part there has to be some truth to the fact that many players have said the above to me. Mostly it's the Heroic Community that had problems adjusting to DoV Launch and I do remember attempting ToFS within the 1st week without grouping with Raiders. It was brutal in some fights for those who are not raiders. I believe this to be prevalent because Raiders inherently seem to have better knowledge of what their character class can do in a fight. This can be from having the right AA or Adornments to things like Cast Orders and Timings of Spells with groups for optimal DPS output. For example, I know that I should set my Time Warp as an Illusionist to overlap a Wizard's Fiery Blast because even though FB doesn't double-cast every other large spell the Wizard will cast during FB does double-cast. A non-raiding illusionist may not know that if they have a Wizard with them and just spam TW whenever they feel like it. Same as they may cast spells that do not do maximum DPS over another, such as not canceling out their own Nightmares or Brain burst because they want the full DoT + the Termination damage. So if you didn't raid and only had marginal understanding of how to play a character DoV probably seemed much harder than Sentinels Fate was especially because in SF we had the ability to level past Sundered Frontier which was a level 85 zone, so the quests got easier as we went and as we geared, this was not the case in DoV unless you sat in on PQ's and got gear from the Raiders/Groupers who did them either by participating or leeching.
Wasn't The Vigilant and Erudin Royal Palace brutal for non-raiders the first week of Sentinel's Fate? This is the first time I've heard DoV launch difficulty cited as a reason for anyone quitting. /shrug
I wanted to add I think spell researches contributed to the decline in grouping. It took some desire and need out of it. The chance to get an upgrade you needed or a valuable item to be traded with others. Now there is very little of value from heroic farming, just mounts, and it should be no surprise that the only zone of interest is the one that drops them. Move one of the mounts to another zone and you would see an uptick in grouping. Put some coin drop items to sell to a vendor, and more people might group. Or I dunno, itemize so group zones offer better rewards than solo loot
The difference is that those were top end heroic zones (at the time). The overland mobs in DoV, especially those ice urchins, hit like trucks for toons who weren't in raid gear.
This is odd, because when DoV came out my characters in quested and mastercrafted gear had no major problems with it. Well, the solo content anyway, going into group instances and raids in SF solo gear would've obviously been more of a problem but I wasn't stupid enough to try that. Honestly I had more problems with RoK at release than DoV. DoV didn't have my 'zerker down in the orange against a single no-arrow mob, nor was getting a second solo mob on me a guaranteed death like it was when RoK launched. DoV, by comparison, was fairly easy to deal with.
Let's doooo the time warp agaiiiiinnn... This thread is 2-3 years out of date. Stat Inflation? It's unfortunate, but once you get the new gear, does it really matter? You have the higher stats and the question comes back to: Can you kill the content or can't you? Stat Consolidation? Nobody on the EQ2 team for the last 2 years is in favor of it, and they're trying to add complexity and interest to gear. Group and raid gear is created by hand and has not come from any type of Lootbot program for over a year. Overall Difficulty? You're 2 years in the past. Drunder got mega nerfed and Crit Mit removed a long time ago now. Also since DoV came out, almost every heroic zone now has an Advanced Solo version. Actually heroic zones went from having a really challenging progression to almost NO progression. Even casual guilds can clear every heroic zone. PvP Class Imbalance? Massive amounts of changes have been made to try to balance classes in PvP, including almost an entire GU dedicated to it. But of course nobody's ever happy and people continue to claim that "PvP never gets any attention". They should come back and try it again. We've had 2 (soon to be 3) expansions since DoV.
This is the biggest thing that caused a massive down-tick in my grouping. Even in DoV (with the rare mobs in zones and EoW), I had a group of friends (about 10) that regularly grouped. We usually ran at least a few zones a night, depending on schedules and who was on. We did a bit of grouping after Skyshrine came out (even aftter getting everything through the access quests) for a chance at the mythicals and an uptick when (the now old) Sleeper's Tomb came out.. By the time CoE came out, there was pretty much no motivation to run the instances. Aside from the mounts in HE, the best loot in the solo instances was better then the best loot in the group instances.
Yes and SOEs response was, oops, wait 6 months and we will address this with the next expansion. Then we wonder why people leave.
