So Far, CD Leaves Me Cold

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Almee, Apr 7, 2019.

  1. Almee Well-Known Member

    I am on my 7th quest, in CD, and it has me bored to tears. Every fight takes at least a couple of minutes and when I happened upon a named boss, in a building I had to visit, the fight took over 7 minutes.

    I've been at this now, for 6 hours, and I am ready to scream. I guess this is one way to make your content look like it is far more than it really is but I doubt anyone is being fooled.

    Once in the land area, there is lots of action, as everything seems to aggro on you, but the fighting is simply too long to be enjoyable--not to mention it is hard on the hands.

    I am going to so love going back to PoP with the toons on my other accounts. If things don't improve, in CD, I think I will just skip buying this xpac for my other accounts.
  2. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    The problem is probably Potency... or the lack thereof. If you have Mastercrafted Academic armor, you will have lots less Potency than you did in PoP.
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  3. Elskidorr Active Member

    Experiment up visionary, hit reforger and remember to infuse a bunch and your 40-45k potency will now be 65k+. Those minute long fights will be over in seconds. It's still pretty silly hoops to jump through but that should help.
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  4. Merriel Well-Known Member

    ...Or lack of Resolve, which definitely makes a huge difference.
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  5. Mermut Well-Known Member

    Resolve isn't useful for solo content.
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  6. Zeddicious Well-Known Member

    You aren't wrong here. Generally, I'd pick at the seams of the things you post, but I'm with you on this one 100 percent. As others chime in with "resolve" and "potency"... sure, that will make the fights go faster, of course. We're talking about the signature line though... the one where any brand new player picks up the gear from the lock box, and starts the adventure. Roll a templar or defiler, grab that gear in the box and go rock out one of the solo zones and try to clear it in what could reasonably be considered a traditional amount of time.

    IMO, a brand new player shouldn't need to have Mastercrafted Visionary armor, or 60k potency to bring the feeling / time investment down to appreciable levels.

    Zone utilization times might be "a thing" to bring up at board meetings - but inside for the players inside Norrath, its more of a bored meeting.. cuz, you know.. takes soo long to kill something... etc etc.
  7. Hartay Keeper of the Server Hamsters

    Are you talking about that mob that you have to kill to get the key for the jail cell? I gave up on that until I get some better gear. I went back and started to finish the KA and PoP sig lines.
  8. Almee Well-Known Member

    Hartay, I'm talking about the first overland quest where we have to grab scrolls. One of the towers included a named mob. I killed it but it took forever.
  9. Rhodris EQ2Wire Ninja

    I found the easiest thing was to do the side quests first, before starting the sig line. The side quests give you better gear than what you get out of the box at the start, and it makes a difference. I have not (and will not) experiment, infuse, reforge, whatever any of my gear, and it's not too bad now.
  10. Milchbart Active Member

    In CD every mob has a new potency mitigation. They ignore around 40.000 of pot. If your pot is lower, you are fighting without any potency and potency is in the moment the most important stat. It means also an increase from 50.000 to 60.000 doubles your dps.

    With new master crafted amor and jewelry, plus the normal bonus for deity, good adornments and AA-skills you are already over 40.000, but not much.

    Close to the entry of the library you can find tishans lockbox, with free new gear (mastercrafted legendary is better). You can take them multiple times and take the white and orange adornments. In this way you reach easier a pot value higher than 40.000.

    New food from CD is giving a lot extra potency.

    Your merc needs more than 40.000 pot too! Without he is rather useless. he can still heal you, but you can forget his dps.

    Resolve is not important for the overland zones, only in dungeons.

    Of course a good value of fervor is helpful.
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  11. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    That means you will be soloing and never grouping for Heroics. Which of course is a valid playstyle.
  12. Raff Well-Known Member

    Only thing in that gear box worth anything is the runes. Get the runes, go harvest your rares, refine & experiment to visionary. Then you can actually play the game...but you can't do Heroics. Oh no, not yet...lessee...plat infuse everything, break down gear, then salvage, salvage, salvage everything then turn those pieces into potency crystals...then harvest, harvest, harvest til yer blue in the face for rares to turn into MC gear weapons to then salvage into the those shiny things that upgrade yer main hand, ranged & offhand weapons...well you get the idea.

    Oh yeah...and then chivy, crack the whip, beg & finally put your foot down to try and get your guildies to actually do all the above?

    On the other hand, we did finally run & complete a T1 Heroic with a guild group yesterday.

    That said...no wonder pugging is dead in EQ2.
  13. EmJay Well-Known Member

    I play a ranger. When the current expac launched, I jumped right in wearing all my old gear from PoP, 35 resolve stuff and all adorned from the previous expac, and I had no problems getting through the sigline. I equipped gear as I received it from finishing the quests and kept moving forward. When I ran into my first overland named, yes, it was a longer fight, but still I had no problem defeating it with my merc at my side. Even that dropped something I could actually put on. It made the game challenging again which I enjoyed.

    The OP seems to complain about everything little thing. Nothing in this game seems to make her happy. Makes me wonder why she is still here. /shrug
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  14. Rhodris EQ2Wire Ninja

    Correct. I don't group. I don't do heroics. I think (from previous posts Almee has made) that neither does she. So there is no point to going through all that not-fun grind for nothing.
  15. Almee Well-Known Member

    EmJay, there are a ton of things I like about EQ2 which is why I still play. And, as a systems analyst, I was paid to find the flaws in programs that needed to be fixed. That meant not only finding bugs, in the program, but also evaluating the program from the user's viewpoint and finding areas that needed improvement so that using the program was intuitive and wouldn't cost businesses, or governments, a bundle in training and help-desk costs.

    Generally speaking, my comments aren't meant to be a put down of DB's efforts (though frustration can sometimes flavor my comments) but rather an effort to make the program more accessible and enjoyable for a larger pool of players than just the people whose lives revolve around the game. There really is a wonderful, real-life world, out there, so most players have to juggle play time with the responsibilities of living in the real world.

    Daybreak isn't the only game developer having to face this reality. I posted, earlier in this thread, an article about how governments are starting to clamp down on online gaming. Excessive time, spent on gaming, is now considered a psychological problem that requires treatment just like any other addiction.

    Therefore, it is important for game developers to get ahead of the government and make the changes needed to keep government from regulating the industry like they are already doing in China. Self-regulation is always the better way for industries to go but, unfortunately, they often lack the discipline to regulate themselves so government steps in.

    I fully understand the government's concern about online gaming and its addictive powers. Intermittent, positive reinforcement is a potent, behavior-modification tool. But it has its dark side as well, when abused.

    I think the foundation, of EQ2, has lots to offer far more people that it is currently reaching. The two main things, holding the game back from appealing to more players, are the time sink and complexity. If DB can get a handle on those two issues it will make for a better game for everyone.





  16. Bhayar Well-Known Member

    To throw my two cents into the mix, I much more preferred the TSing side of the CD expansion than I ever did in PoP. While there were some differences in mobs levels between the two xpacs, and I had to make some adjustments in gear, I didn't find the solo part of the sig line all that daunting. I don't consider myself to be a hard-core gamer by any stretch. Casual gamers who didn't do much in PoP, have low to moderate spells and CAs, and little work done on their ascensions are going to struggle big time. People can say resolve doesn't make a difference in solo, but I found having MC gear with 60 resolve made a huge difference in negotiating the content with the chest armor from the library. Only thing I used that for was grabbing all the adorns. And now, with the max resolve showing up on weapons, it makes it easier. All of that said, I also said at the beginning of this xpac that it was going to be difficult for a casual gamer to enjoy this. And by casual gamer, I'm not talking about the amount of time you play the game, it's how you approach it mentally, meaning where I find people struggle it's because they've had to make a conscious effort to devote time to harvesting and background work like making infusers and they're not willing to do it. There's a trade off for players in this xpac. It's a little more difficult than just dropping by and blazing through content, yes, but the flip side is, the whole game isn't a vacant parking lot 3 months after the xpac launches like it was in PoP
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  17. Dead Alt Account Well-Known Member


    IMO, the complexity and time sink are deliberate. The complexity is mostly due to the devs' perception that adding more and more unnecessary character mechanics is enjoyable content, which it is not. The time sink is to get people into the cash shop in order to shorten the time sink to accomplish the content and generate additional revenue. This is the business model and it likely will never change until the game dies.
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  18. Milchbart Active Member

    @Bhayar
    Of course you are better with the new mc gear, but it has nothing to do with 60 resolve. No mob in overland has any resolve. The difference is only in the higher potency.

    @Dead Alt Account
    You are right when you say the mechanics became to complicate, but I believe devs recognized this problem already. Since PoP and even more in CD the way to find a good gear is much easier (at least for casual gamer). Many of the "blue" stats became unimportant. You have still flurry, haste or ability modifier, but they are not any longer important. Most of the gear in CD has no ability modifier. With many stats like crit bonus, casting speed or reuse speed you reach soon the hard cap and you can forget them. Today it is enough to look at potency, fervor and of course you need ascension. That sounds not very complicate in my ears.
    Maybe a bad development of ascension spells is one of Almees problems. Some ascensions on master are helping a lot to burn down the named.
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  19. Almee Well-Known Member

    I am working on leveling my last ascension class to 15. I'm currently at lvl 11, and all of those spells are the lowest level, so I'm sure that has some bearing on how ineffective they are.

    I killed my second named, yesterday, and it went much faster now that I have done a number of quests and have better gear. Still, I see little point in imbuing, adorning, and experimenting, to make better gear, when it is replaced so quickly with better gear.

    And, speaking of better gear, one of the things that frosts me is that drops claim they are heirloom and non-tradable What's with that? How can they be both? I tried putting one of the drops in my shared bank and got a message that it couldn't be put in there. What's the point of having named mobs drop class-specific gear that isn't heirloom?

    Obviously, it is either a programming error or someone didn't think it through very well. Fortunately, this is the only bug, or mistake, I've encountered so far which is pretty good.

    My main concern, with CD, is the uphill learning curve required of new, or returning players. I spent hours going over Wiki notes, and watching videos, after encountering my first mob in CD. It was pretty overwhelming and I'd only been gone for 4 months.

    Just figuring out the library is a major task to those who are directionally challenged. I'm usually pretty good, at such things, and I still get confused, at times, with which areas are upper or lower and their point on the compass. But having all the important stuff at the 4 points, on the compass, is a huge help.

    And I'll say one thing for CD--it is really innovative. DB has finally come up with a way to keep us busy for a very long time without making it seem like drudgery. We do a lot of running, but it is only for short bursts, and then we are doing something again. I like this far better than having to fly long distances like we did in some expansions.

    If the rest of the timeline is pretty much similar to what I've done so far, I think I might come to like this xpac's adventure line. I still think they should limit the time spent killing mobs, at the beginning, as I think that will discourage new, and returning, players. They could do that by doing a gear and spell check and adjusting the power of the mobs appropriately. I'm not saying they should make it too easy, but having to cast spells, dozens of times, per mob, is insane.
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  20. Sogapa Active Member

    Almee, I suggest trying to get to 45k potency. Others have said something about 50-60k, but 45 is all you need for solo. There's no need to do all the infusing, refining, reforging, or experimenting for the solo content. I know in the past you have mentioned that you play exclusively solo. There are good tips in this thread about how to increase your potency, and pulling the 100 pot white adorns from the lockbox will help you for sure. Unmodified mastercrafted should get you close without the adorns.

    I say 45 for the simple reason that potency mitigation does not seem to work quite the way someone above indicated. It seems to work kind of like resolve, where if you are at or above the value for the content then you can effectively play the content, but if you are below the value expected for the content you will not be effective.

    On my primary harvesting toon, in his harvesting gear, he has around 35k potency, and the fights, when I mistakenly engage the mobs take about the amount of time you describe in your original post. If I put on a mix of harvesting and adventure gear, he has around 45-46k potency and stuff dies in a reasonable amount of time. Not as fast as if I put on all of his adventure gear, but the fights aren't near as painful as when in full harvesting setup.

    This was true of PoP as well- at 25k potency the solo overland took forever to kill anything, but at 35k stuff died pretty fast. I am a bit fuzzy on the specific numbers, but this is not new with CD.
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