Kander's Candor Questions thread! [Always Open]

1. Overseers seems to be a heavy theme in the game currently and Kander mentioned in Ep2 that you recieved good feedback on overseer with regards to its implementation if i recall correctly, is that referring to general comments made by players here and there? If so, would it not make sense to actually conduct an in-game poll to see whether people want this feature expanded rather than just basing this own on a few stray comments?

2. Regarding the levelling of the Overseers, are we to expect Overseers or levelling potions specific to overseer make their way on to the marketplace? Just like familiars and mercenaries? With players who are able to spend and be lucky on RNG on higher level overseers yielding the best results? If that is the case, how will you factor this in with a plethora of issues with RNG on pretty much everything in this expansion?

3. Class balances are coming in the April GU, what kind of player testing has been done (if any?) before they are dropped on to the live server? Did any of the feedback from players made its way into these changes?

4. Class balance is an absolute priority of this game (i hope for you too) and I am glad that an AA revamp is coming in the expansion. A lot of us would like to see our classes being unique and their own identity w.r.t what they bring to the group/raid. Right now, en masse, ascensions constitute the major dps to every class with class specific abilities playing second fiddle to them. Since there was never any poll in-game done to ask what players think of Ascensions, can we expect the balance to be restored? By that i mean, the ascensions becoming the secondary feature (like it should have been) to the main class and not the other way around.

I would appreciate if Kander is able to shed some light on the class specific issues if he can.

Thanks

So class balance is what's coming up (still listening right now and was wowed by this). And AA revamp.

So you're talking about things like AA's that give you 12 critical chance and such nonsense? Generally anything that doesn't scale? And what about the deity pet thing? Since the pet is a set number buff, it's not helpful at endgame. Can that become a % that scales? I used to always buff my deity pet, but now it's not helpful to do so. Maybe the deity pet can be a scaling ability mod buff? Because we're reforging out of AM to feed the DPS beast.

There's a lot of massive back and forth in stats in my main class, Warlock. Examples are in the Mage class forum, but here's one: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...-rift-5-is-better-than-6.592938/#post-6590655 I made a separate thread for each skill that had confusing changes made to it and they were not in the notes. I know Kander already said you're looking at changing how the notes work.

However, I'm worried about Warlock. I have been tempted many times to just become a Wizard and forget it. I should not feel that way. Do you agree, Kander? Shouldn't the choice of class be more of a preference, than a minmax event? If my dps were only 5-10% less than a wizard, that would be fine. I could live with it because I honestly don't think people should be obsessing over parse quite to the level that they are. But the difference is an order of magnitude I mean 50 million vs 500 million, just compare the skills tooltips of the two classes. And I have to have all sorts of buffs going to do good damage. Wizards have some buffs too, but not like me, I do very little damage if I'm lazy.

On a purely design basis, shouldn't wizard have the heal and shouldn't Warlock have the DPS? I'm not actually suggesting that you swap them. But I don't know how to fix this without referring to the overall design... "good" heals and "evil" does damage. Is that too simplistic? I guess a health balancing skill would work just as well as a Warlock, so I would not heal, but I could save my groupmate who's very low health and took aggro accidentally by pooling and redistributing all the health of everyone but the tank. If it affected the tank, we'd wipe because there are assumptions about how many million of damage the tank can take. And if I mess with that, then I wipe us.

OK that was thinking out loud, but I don't hate it. It could work with a full revamp of AA's. But please be considerate of your team. What you're suggesting is huge. Staff up for it please. And keep talking to us.

Tradeskills harvest levels.

I think it started to get really weird around Plane of Magic, and the levels of adornment materials became disconnected from the levels of the ordinary mats. It caused some panic when I knew I had deposited all my mats, but I couldn't find the adorn mats to see if I needed to buy some, grind a bit more, or what. That was even before the harvest levels were removed.

Suggestion/question: Would it work for use acronyms? Many of us use acronyms for the expacs... like TSO, BoL, CD etc... I'd have a hard time remembering which GU number = which acronym, but if you say to me KA or PoM, or CoE, or AoM, I instantly know where to go to harvest that. I might get fuzzy on levels around SS and CoE because I think that was 95 and 98, but if the harvest box has the levels, and the description has the acronym, I'll remember ok. If all the 100 stuff was marked by acronym for expac, then I could probably find it ok too.

Please consider the goblin, the plant and the pony when you make changes to nomenclature. I know you will, but it was worth saying.

Let me add, Chrol is my hero, ever since he was on the forums over Christmas eve, that was superheroic, ...also... Zany is good, it's a nice break, thank you for breaking the mold occasionally.

Is there any talk whatsoever of publicly releasing the code/game files so that the community can start creating fully functional private servers? Many of us are still extremely unhappy with the current state of EQ2 and would like to try to create servers that are more faithful to the original game or re-imagined for a better gaming experience. The popularity of TLE servers have shown the massive desire for a classic server, however the current formula is unsustainable and strays further from the original balance of the game with each iteration. I have this bad feeling in my gut that the original code is long gone and we have been left with a "best guess" in regards to classic expansion balance that seems to be deteriorating over time. Many of us would like to see the original mechanics when it comes to crafting, travel, EXP rates, corpse runs, difficulty, loot tables, item balance, pvp, etc. which is nowhere to be seen in these TLE servers. There is a small army of us waiting to jump on any opportunity to create custom servers that can offer these things and any assistance from the devs that actually have access to the code would be a huge help. With P99 being sanctioned for EQ1, there is already a precedent set for allowing private servers. Will this ever extend to EQ2?

Even with PvP being the red headed step child of Eq2 and often being neglected (which has been the main cause for its demise), it still has a dedicated fan base. We all still strongly believe that a permanent/ish pvp server will be successful as long as it receives necessary attention after release, just like any other server.

If for some reason a pvp server can not be brought back into the game or at least not any time soon, could we please please please get the 3 original battlegrounds back (Gears, Ganak, and Smugglers) on live servers or tle or both?

Census is near-and-dear to my heart and to the hearts of thousands of EQ2 players who lookup their characters on a daily basis on EQ2U, Dragon's Armory, Kulavvy's Tools, JeffJL's Collections Utility, and many guild and individual sites.

EQ2 is very well supported in Census, however some newer systems are not so well-represented. Is there a possibility that these can be added:

• Mercenary Levels on the mercenary collection
• Planar Weapon information on character's equipment slot list
• Overseer data possibly in a new overseer collection.
• Mount Equipment possibly in a new mount collection.

If players are able to see the mounts, mount equipment, mercenaries, and overseers of other characters, this may actually drive further sales.

I would love if they re-opened the player studio on the market place. Any chance at all of that happening? They had some great stuff in there.

While I'm personally understanding of your difficult situation being under-staffed, I want to ask in what world... how can you pitch that an overseer mission, with its 1 sentence of flavor text and (gasp) potentially some static art in the future, constitutes a passable substitute for the quests in Everquest? I want to give you personal feedback, that it does not, not even a 1/100th of. We get that creating an Overseer mission is factor of 10x faster. Ok, but these are apples and fried-cockroaches you're comparing. You can just be honest and say, "We don't have the manpower to do quests any more guys, because EQ2 and stuff", not "ok, we found a reasonable compromise". I, at least, would respect the former.

I don't know what this positive feedback regarding overseers that you received, but i'm dubious about it. Most "positive" i've ever seen around these forums was person2's response in the following context:

person1 - Overseer feature is boring and uninspired. It's a silly side-game that takes no skill and adds nothing to the in-game world. All it is a poorly veiled shortcut to pass things off as "content" and a convenient vehicle for a few additional spots to insert DBG cashshop buttons to expedite this or that, preying on peoples' addictive nature to anything with a reward.

person2 - Shrug, it's free loot, i don't see what you're complaining about.

To be clear: person2's response is not endorsement of this feature that maybe sounds like positive feedback? And it certainly by any stretch of the truth can't be interpreted as a green light to use the Overseer feature going forward to implement content that in the past was done by having a rich and vibrant in-game world.

Is there gonna be a portal added to Seru to get to the Planar weapon essence zone? (atm have to go back to CoV or Library)

Is there gonna be a way to get to our Seru house via Seru itself (so many closed doors that could have been used for this), would be great to be able enter from Seru and exit into Seru (not a portal but clicking a door preferably)

Is there anyway you could make the Seru Fabrication Hall an actual open door altogether after you have finished the questline, zoning into it is annoying and having it as an instance just seems to lack flavour, having it more open to the community would be very nice, its a beautiful area that we should be able to craft altogether in (yes i know we zone into the same instance but not the same feeling)

Are we ever gonna see a new food/drink/peat to feed our Burynais etc in GH's for shinies? Or even have the burynais etc give us latest shinies or even bump it up to last exapnsion shinies?

Are Tradeskill writs coming back for higher lvls?

oh just remembered something I wanted to ask as well:

Are you ever gonna advertise and push Everquest 2 again to get people interested, I dont wanna have another merge?
I miss the days when you could buy the hardcopy from the shop or online

We actually advertise quite a bit, but it's targeted by interest and usually looks for old players or new ones, so current players aren't going to see the advertisements as much. If you have specific suggestions since that is one of the areas of responsibility I handle jointly with someone else feel free to send them to me in a message. Not everything can or will be implemented but you may have an idea I haven't thought of.

Possibility of condensing similar spells/buffs or simply removing excess abilities? This would certainly make balance easier.

(I mean this in the least elitist way possible but) how is balance being determined when the "average" player does not do a "good" job navigating the myriad of abilities to cast let alone come even close to min/maxing gear, stat, buff, and cool down management? To be clear, I do not negatively view people who play sub-optimally.

The discrepancy between someone who understands these things and someone who doesn't is absolutely massive. Is this a gap that we could look to shrink? Regardless, what is the target player level that you would like to see balanced performance from?

Kander,

Can you promise these AA changes won't affect TLE like every live expansion/GU has before? Every time you do a Live Expansion or a Game Update, TLE change's extensively. For example, these changes Blood of Luclin on live enabled class profession abilities on TLE such as Tyrant's Pact from Wizard, and Teachings of the Underworld from Necro, and Signet of Intellect from Illusionist's to stack for weeks until I reported it; I question if I hadn't reported it if it would've been fixed. Why do you not know that this change affected TLE. You fixed this upon my feedback, not allowing the Intelligence buffs from the three classes to stack, much like the standard was prior the the Live Expansion; but left other changes from Blood of Luclin in. Examples include Ultraviolet Beam and Hunker Down. Why do these changes happen to apply without consulting the players/or even knowing it happened on TLE servers. Why do you release patch notes from live but not say TLE is experiencing these changes? It's annoying every patch for me to have to test every ability to see what has changed without your notes.

I for one found it great that the Intelligence buffs did stack, this incentivezed a class like Wizard, which as of now has no massive power feed to the group like Warlock, or a strong STR/INT debuff like Warlock/Necro to be useful to my raid. As of now a necro is not only topping the parse, but also offers an extreme stat debuff, a tank bolster via Siphoning of Souls, and a incoming damage debuff. A wizard now offers... ? Ice lash and damage, which doesn't really compare to the other two classes. I've actively considered running multiple Illustionist's (a utility class) over my Sorcs. Why is it that enchanters are parsing within 10% of my sorcerer's on single target, and offering synergism's/much more power feeds? With Tyrant's pact stacking I could really consider running a Wizard versus another lifeburn necro, but now I just roll my eyes as the unbuffed necro vs fully buffed wizard gets outparsed by the buffless Necro.

How do you plan on buffing a wizard who is fully buffed being unable to outparse a necro? You nerfed Manaburn on Fallen Gate, eight target fusion, and Fiery Blast, how do you now expect this class to compete despite a myriad of nerfs?

Several abilities, such as Adrenaline when RoK hits the Berserker class; makes any other tank as an off tank seemingly worthless. We have feedbacked this for two TLE's now, is now the chance you will actually answer us feedbacking this? You've removed the Shadows Endlines from Brawlers and moved them to the Prestige Tree's but didnt' account for TLE's abilities such as Indomitable Will from Bruisers and Bob & Weave from Monk's are no longer existing, yet you leave in Wall of Rage, Furor, Stonewall etc. Why? I touched on this earlier but it's a serious issue without set bonuses especially. Brawlers were getting serious uncontested avoidance from set bonus' that is not non existent.

Why does every tank get a solid defensive endline in TSO except for brawlers, the already weakest Tank in TSO. Do you plan on finally adding these things back? Or plan on brawlers being extremely useless?

Will focused casting, manaburn, lifeburn, fiery blast etc. the myriad of overlapping live changes finally be fixed on the TLE server's? Manaburn is useless, Lifeburn parses as much as 15 Assasinate's from a Assassin yet having the same reuse, Fiery Blast does worse than strike of consistency, and Manaburn does less damage now than in 2007 when players parsed a 1/5th of what we did now, how do you plan to address these issues in threads already on your forums?

Will the uncontested block issue finally get fixed? The difference between wearing a raid shield and heroic shield is equivalent to roughly 2% uncontested block, yet you're trying to shove progression into raids via Avatars. There is no real gear upgrades from heroic to raids to prepare you for these mobs, so why bother going from heroic to raids to contested's? It doesn't seem like any thought/challenge went into these. These are in a constant limbo of being broken to where we need four tanks cycling, or they're simply a serious dps check you can't meet the tank cycle/dps check at the same time.

The same goes for mitigation, having full fabled gear means nothing when Hunker Down, the only time a guardian actually takes incoming damage, you have a guardian hitting 20k Mitigation via Hunker Down on TLE. In comparison the next highest Tank: Monk/Berserker has 8k Mitigation. The nearest tank can hit 8k at most. I've found stacking every single mitigation buff on the Guardian raises his mit 2-3k brings me little more than a 200-300 damage reduction on the average hits incoming, after Hunker Down is calculated. Which doesn't really matter when the mob is swinging for 10-14k. I just wonder why brawlers not only have a lower avoidance report but also lower mitigation. Where is the class design/answers that we've asked for two TLE's now.

Will this mean you're actively going to look into class balance on TLE regardless? As it stands Bruiser/Paladin/Zerker/SK/Conjurer/Predators/Defiler/Dirge/Coercer's are mostly useless in the grand scheme of things. This once again has been feedbacked since Fallen Gate. Is there plans to for the first time to ask for class feedback on TLE (five years later btw). Or do you plan to once again never ask, then ignore all feedback?

You nerfed Confront Fear, then never considered Healer Rezze's give no sickness meaning Confront fear is useless in it's original state prior the conversion rate. Other than giving reuse to potency; what value do you think Dirge's offer on TLE? Why do you think we ran Dirges on Fallen Gate? We could've experienced a higher crit rate in the group through Don't Kill the Messagner with troubs, and had group Reuse in Sentinel's Fate; plus harmonization for longer temps meaning a higher overall avoidance report than Percussion of Stone. I'm trying to remind myself why we ran dirges for anything but Confront Fear bots, by TSO percussion of stone equated to less than 1% of the avoidance report.

Avatar gear at the moment is un-itemized sans the script that you run on really anything, do you really plan on us to fight the hardest content in game just to go get gear we won't wear over heroic gear? This seems problematic. I already sent in a list of gear fixes for all this gear, which was ignored, much like the other gear stuff we sent in.

Is there any plans to answer the future of TLE's, will they finally be properly itemized/have balance despite three TLE's now where you shift itemization on every single one of them to end up in the same place, will this one/the next one finally be when you actually take the communities opinion into play in your design scheme?

Some Questions from me:

1. Can we get a list of what the stat caps are and pinned to the hints and tips forum?
2. Can we have the personal ward ability work properly from the AA tree for priests and Mages
3. Will Coercers get some serious love in the class balance?
4. Have you thought about getting someone in to make your tools to make quests better? It sounds like a designers nightmare.
5. Will you remove the must be a group mechanics from Pop and CD? (ie requires a tank)
6. Did Ttobey eat all the Tatertots(whatever they are, don't have them in Japan)?
7. Is there going to be a merchant for rare-non tradeable stuff that we can buy with our alts with a reasonable amount of tokens for if a character has acquired it before?
8. With the melee description can we have the needed mitigation for the current heroic mob level instead of player level in the tool tip?
9. Can you make the overseer gear crushable into some sort of token so we can buy the stuff we really want from a merchant or something?
10. Can we have some more recent stuff for the Loyalty Merchant?

1. Will there ever be class parity between Monk and Bruiser? Monk is one of the strongest classes in the game while Bruiser is among the weakest. How does that happen. There were some changes at the start of the expansion but it didn't go far enough. Then there were some bugs and Bruisers ended up getting stealth nerfed again. I will resubmit the bug report in the hopes it gets looked at.

2. Cobalt Crates: Can we get more items placed on the cobalt merchant such as bonus infusers and the celestial Mercenary? I don't mind spending money on these crates but things should be more reasonable.

Maybe, but be careful here...

I hope we don't end up "Dumbing the game down" for those you deem "average". I enjoy digging into the abilities and testing AA specs and reforge builds and how they affect my DPS/Support and builds in general. It is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for me. If you take that piece of the game out, it would ruin it for me and I am quite certain many others. I want the game to be appealing to more players and just because someone doesn't care if they know how to min/max doesn't mean you should shred it for those who do. It is fine to have both styles with the system in place. As you call them "Average Players" they have fun the way they play and I would never knock them for it. But if you want to be the best you should have to put some work in, not just be able to mash buttons. If you could just mash buttons and everyone did it exactly the same it would become boring as hell, don't you agree? EQ2 should never be a button masher for the end game min/max player. Just sayin...

^^^ THIS!!! I have nearly 5000 of the new coins. Don't need the mount and still no Merc. I am sure you will understand where Obano is coming from in this request, right Dreamweaver? I think it is a fair request, not something crazy over the top...

One thing I would add is the armor that is given in every crate, why not make it salvageable, transmutable, or allow it to be sold for a minimal amount of status. I mean this is not giving anyone any more advantage than what the mount or Merc or bonus infusers you get in them are worth. Actually not even close. Maybe something worth considering as well...

Can we maybe get a new hotbar on default ui specifically for zone clickies?
Can we get quest gems etc heirloom instead of no-trade to make more alt friendly? Have over 100 of each type on my main that are just useless atm (unless you do wat you previously did and make them so u can gamble for gear with them)

There is no presence of this game on many gaming sites, look at the top ten list of mmo's from pretty much any gaming site..I really dont see EQ2 listed anywhere, not even an honorable mention, the only news I see from this game are changes in leadership or people saying to stay away..which btw has increased a fair amount since the BoL release.

I dont know how your marketing works but if I am looking for a new game to try I hit the gaming sites and look at the pro's and con's of each game and decide from there what I might like to try next, or word of mouth from what others are playing...this game has been out 15 years and when someone ask me what I play when they find out I like to play online I tell them EQ2, they say.."whats that"? Thats after 15 years of being here.

Dont take this as complaining or attacking as its really just an observation...whatever y'all are doing currently isn't working. The best advertising is word of mouth, and with what has been done to things like crafting and the P2W aspects of this game, I wouldn't dare recommend it to any of my friends

Oddly, WoW seems to be right up near the top on many sites...what are they doing right that we are not?

There are a lot of shut ins in the world, not just in the US either. And some people with health issues have become spectacular members of some gaming communities. The term Fibro Warrior is good, but I feel more affinity for Fibro Jedi, a real person.

The person who taught me how to speed run the old Kunark status quests had Fibro. She preferred it to crafting and leveled a lot of guilds that way. That was a long time ago.

We have always been here...

Other cross pollination interests:

1. Society for Creative Anachronism

2. New Agers who like fairies

3. Computer students who wonder if computer graphics can really be learned in one semester, as part of a CS degree. Also, mathematicians who love math but aren't likely to find work in it unless you hire them someday.

The path from computers to games to fantasy roleplay is a well worn one.

Edited to add more ideas.

Well people like to win and they like to pown others. Both of those things are easy to do in WoW. This is a hardmode game to a larger extent. It takes longer to become good at it, even if you were once good at it in the past. Some of that is down to the tooltips issue where a person's stats tooltips aren't even accurate.

I hope the AA revamp is part and parcel with making the stats tooltips accurate once more. It's not just the conversion messages, but there's stuff in there that isn't in use at all, and just try to figure out whether 35 block actually helps you or not. If a person could block but isn't wearing a shield and their class requires a shield to block, then it should tell you that clearly. For instance.

There are some basics that are broken. It's hard to say "ok everyone come play this game... oh, uh, watchout for all that stuff there, it will be fixed... someday." Kind of anticlimactic. Bugs are inevitable, but they should be more minor than AA's and stats tooltips.

What you said, I heard it almost word for word from a person who played back in the early 2000s. He was amazed the game was still going. He looked nostalgic and I bet he went home and looked for his old login. Think of that person trying to figure out the game now.