Logged on an alt on Skyfire and level 20 gear stat are like 4 sta 4 main stat. Casting speed is also very low now. I assume that DBG decided that only way to play was to buy a lvl 100 heroic ... This massive change affecting anyone below 90 was not even announced. The harvester cloak is now level 1 with no stats, even the harvesting and transmiute/adorn bonuses are gone. It was hard to do something worst that DoV itemisation (with hate for mage and block for priests) but they did it.
The TLs are supposed to have reitemized gear. Those sound like TL stats. There's supposedly a new dev tool they're using to customize TLs and Event servers. Offhand, it didn't originally sound like these changes were meant for live. I'll bet there's a bug right now. I'd /bug it in game, and mention it in the technical forums. The devs do look at that stuff.
Patch notes seem to indicate it was done for TLE (done with TLE in mind), but meant to be implemented on all servers (done with TLE in mind, but not exclusively for TLE). Difficulty of encounters also was looked at according to notes. Eg: " Low level itemization has gone through a full update to coincide with an encounter balance update. While this update is designed with Time Locked servers in mind, it coincides with an encounter difficulty pass to verify that progression meets expected standards.
Well, to be honest, on the F2P servers, you can literally sneeze on a mob still wearing grey gear from two tiers ago and have it fall over. I just assumed this was intentionally done to rocket people to end game, so they could start feeling forced to make cash shop purchases to keep up with spell research, ascensions, runes, etc. I would thoroughly test it and give yourselves a month or two to acclimate to the new standards before pronouncing a final judgement. Daybreak has bolted all those P2W systems onto EQ2's end game for a reason, and they aren't just going to make it so incredibly hard to level that no one will ever get there again, lol. Daybreak has added the end game gates that they have because need free players to pay for *something*. I know some of the people here on the forums sub and stay on their old home servers-- I always did, too, up until recently. I only moved to FG over Frostfell (real life finally gave me some real time to play EQ2 TLs). However, game forums traditionally only reflect a tiny subset of the most hardcore of any game's population, and it is clear from the increased rate of P2W gates that have come about since EQ2 went F2P in 2012 that most F2P server players are grandfathered silvers who aren't paying jack.
This was actually meant to do the opposite I think. Make it more like it originally was where you absolutely couldn't take on a mob with grey gear that much lower and have no worries of dying. 1-50 in the original game was not a pushover, DoF did an itemization/balance change that even made the original game harder, later on they did things that made everything a lot easier in the name of getting people to higher levels faster. Now with TLE though they're seeing renewed interest and value to the 1-50 part of the game.
Oh! I hadn't thought of that! I suspect in this case they have seen a large falloff of the end game population due to the bolted on P2W factors in EQ2's current end game. Probably many of the people on the F2P servers just roll a new character once they ding L95 or whatever, instead of continuing on to L110. Heck, I tend to do that rather than deal with all that ascension/spell research/rune nonsense and I'm usually subbed gold! Therefore, Daybreak has now taken a different tact to get all those F2P server free players to pay money: They have made HQ items gold sub only, and they are making the lower levels of the game more challenging, so players actually feel like they require that HQ gear, or they feel the burn without it. All of these gradual changes do support what I have said all along: Devs have got to eat, too, and the server bills must get paid somehow! I'd rather see a rebalanced game that isn't quite so pushover easy anyway, though. I still doubt that the F2P game has had such increased difficulty that no one ever will get through it again, even without HQ items.
I agree that toons were "quite" overpowered, my level 36 SK had soloed all the Orc grozmiak Trials till the penultimate one (this including a group trial for which Eq2wiki comment was that you needed either a group or to be 44+). Now, after the adjustment she can barely solo even con ^^^. The reason for OP toons is that people have to solo till the max level, that is why the gear for kaldim should have kept specific, applying the massive to change to all the servers is like saying to people buy an heroic toon or go away. I have 2 heroic vouchers and some 280aa one that i will never use ;-)
Nerf, not nerf. That has been the problem for years. Learn to play a toon one way, nerf bat hits, and relearn to play the toon till the next nerf bat comes along. It gets really old after awhile.
Thats the cycle for every single MMO that has been released with the exception of very few sandbox games so how its a credible complaint I cannot see.
