Commentary: Are Epic 2.0 Quests Burying Players in Prerequisites?

Also, not every player (let alone every toon) has have to have the recipes... they just need to find people WITH the recipes.

Feldon...thank you for the article. It sure helps to see all the pre-req's laid out in plain sight...maybe fun for some....but daunting and overwhelming for some too.....

Having Mainchanged to an undesirable and unpopular class (Coercer) last year, to meet the needs of specific and rarely used mechanics (Charm & Power Feeds), I have been hit pretty hard by this Epic 2.0.

Swapping classes for the sake of my guild, and allowing progression and new kills, has now meant that I am obliged to go back and do over 400+ quests, involving endless amounts of trivial content and untold misery.

When I have done these quests multiple times over the years already on other classes, the desire to do them has certainly left me, and I feel my time in this game is coming to a rapid end. If it wasn’t for my guild, I would have left a long time ago. I grudgingly did the Zou'Ledilus faction, by doing 5 quests a day, and have now done SF faction, but I seen no joy in doing Bastion faction now.

I struggle to see how anybody at DBG considered these epics to be ‘fun’ as a concept. The only conceivable part of them which is fun is figuring them out, which could have easily been made achievable without the need for trivial timesinks in the form of pre-reqs. The sheer lack of KA Content involved in these epics is astonishing me as well. I think a lot of people would have prefered if the epic was running a current heroic zone 10x, rather than do 50+ repeatable. At least this would have made a quest feel slightly more epic, and less of a timesink.

Epic 2.0's were a huge selling point for this expac, and really they just seem like a failure as it stands. Perhaps I will be proven wrong when we all reach level 10, but my expectation is to find all of the epics very unbalanced over classes, and it to require multiple weeks of hot fixing to even get remotely balanced. As it stands at the moment, if someone asks me if they should come back for KA, I tell them No. (And anybody who knows me even slightly, knows that's pretty drastic for all the defending of this game I've done.)

Even my current raid main, who was created in 2004 and has 270+ days played and 3,402 quests completed, does not have all the requirements for Epic 2.0. I probably have done nearly everything at one time or another with the many alts I have, but not everything on every character. Many people have created high level characters to help out friends and guildies that skipped old content in order to quickly fill a needed void. I have been forced to neglect all my alts in favor of moving my main forward to help the guild.

It seems that being a good team player is now being punished with these ridiculous faction grinds.

I think the epic should be long and time consuming , however i do not find it any fun to go back to very old expansion to grind quests and faction , i was a 100 tradeskiller before this but many people have gotten extremly angered with having to be a tradeskiller for this epic quest line . They should have seperated tradeskill and adventure lines.
Also however nice the rewards from the quests are im annoyed with some of em , the shield for fighters? who needs that with the sig line reward? the mage reward with flurry on em?
also i find the clues in the quests vague at best

Wow that so pile of crap - I realized that **** load city quests need to be done (no fun by any mean) but after that - faction grind

Personally I don't mind the pre-reqs. I came to the party after RoK had finished, so my experiences with epics in EQ2 have always been doing old solo content and farming old factions. It was what I expected going in to KA. I also come from EQ1, where getting your epic (1.0, 1.5 or 2.0) was a real achievement and took entire raid forces showing up just to help YOU. We'd wait weeks to get an update and it'd be worth it.

Grinding faction in the hole isn't the most glamorous thing, but it wasn't so bad. Or doing the Thrael'Gorr quests, or the JW hammer quests. Besides one quest where we had to knock mobs down to 20% and click an item (hard to do when you're mentored, naked and still one-shotting ) I quite enjoyed them.

I do have to say the clues we've been given for finding things are pretty poor. I agree that finding updates is more of a zone by zone grid search than actually following clues.

The secondary reward for fighters is meh. But the charm was nice, so I'm eager to see what else we'll get.

I don't like the ascension level requirements. It's not a big deal for me now because we're still figuring out the quests, but it's going to SUCK for alts. I really think they need to unlock ascension exp for an entire account once the first character has reached level 10. No more daily scrolls, just go grind it out. But I doubt that'll happen.

Ascension levels are a major hurdle to completing these quests. Especially for raid main switching or alts.
To help make alts viable.
Once we hit level 10 on all 4 types on one character we should get an account wide full vitality to level 10 for all characters and ascension classes on said account.

When you guys bump up the Ascension levels again, it will only be up to level 10 and we will need to do the scroll thing until said next level cap.

Yes welcome to Gatekeeping: Ascending

The answer to the title of this thread is YES

I'm certainly not in love with all the gray content and multiple faction grinds. That said, I can handle it on my main although I'm definitely doing some grumbling as I'm in the middle of any given step of the process. Where I feel stuck is alts. Because of the new version of deity tithe I have felt behind the curve even on my main all expac so far. I saw so little value in the base deity points before KA that I had put next to nothing into them instead choosing to spend on the clicky buffs/attacks like DoW, etc. I've read that the red names are looking at the deity point system but until something more concrete is known I simply will not devote the huge amount of time needed to do the prerequisites and requirements on an alt that could otherwise be spent on my main trying to grind tithe points out.

With the introduction of this expansion alts are dead and buried. I worked hard pre-KA to get four alts good and ready to have fun in this expansion. Now, I am just logging one of them half-heartedly, thinking it may be some use several months down the line, while my main is waiting for guild groups to progress the Epic 2.

This is a good thread with what id call great feedback. The timegating in this xpac is having major consequences and no matter what DBs plan with is was it is backfiring severly.
I can struggle through the prereqs but ONLY once. I am never going to lvl another crafter again for example. By killing alts they are also killing grouping. Tithe and Ascension are also two huge reasons for why more then one character is not possible for most people. But that is not this threads topic so im not going to dwell in to that further. The prereqs have chased my two RL friends away from this game and if more of these grey factions or full timelines are discoveed along the way im afraid Ill leave too. Its tragic and its boring and thats not why i play games.

My friends list look something like this during the peak hours of when i play:

Online
Online
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline
Offline

This is very off putting and the message is very clear.

Why not work on the alt while waiting? Why not try pugs for epic updates?
I've been frustrated by steps here and there on the epic 2.0s. (Personally I think the RANDOM body drops off the last names in heroic zones is a horrid idea. It is frustrating enough for some zones that only one drops so if 2 (or more) of the same archtype is in the group at least one of them has a wasted zone timer.) When I get too frustrated though, I change gears... either to an alt or to work on something else with the same toon.

I thought it's a hit piece written by a disgruntled player who runs a yellow journalism blog.

RNG off of the last names was on live during the peak of the game. Honestly I am not sure why we went away from that. Now everything is do X, Y times, in order to be rewarded 100% of the time Z. Then people turn around and question why everyone is out of stuff to do in march/april??

Epic quests are supposed to be EPIC. Expect to work your tail off for them. They've always included faction grinding and completing old heritage quests. If you want the epic you have to work for it. I guess too many got used to having it handed to them via Epic Repercussions to understand what an epic truly means.

My beastlord did a lot of stuff while leveling up but I still had a lot of faction grinding and old heritage quests to do which I had missed. I want the epic so I knuckle down and do it. While I was pretty put out over the level 100 crafting requirement; I knuckled down and leveled from 12 to 100 crafting in two very long days.

My various toons who did the Epic 1.0 had a variety of heritage quests, killing grey mobs, collections, and (of course) heroic dungeons. Same thing here. May be more of it but it's really the same kind of thing.

This is going to require work and yes that means doing old heritage quests. By the way, I always mentor down to the lowest level which will give me the quest.

It's an EPIC quest. Expect EPIC requirements. You may not like some but that's the way it is with an epic quest.

Oh yes. About the obscure clues. That's also typical EQ2. Such as convincing a dragon to voluntarily give some of it's own blood. That's not new with this. 95% of the players just bring up the walkthrough which someone else sweated blood figuring out and have everything laid out in front of them complete with coordinates for where to go for each step. That of course means most EQ2 players are indebted to people like Feldon who actually work on figuring it out by the way.

Even yellow journalism serves its uses... when higher ups are ignoring dangers because of the sand in their eyes... (darn silly ostriches!).

For gear, yes. For epic updates though? If so it was changed before I joined back before shadow odyssey. Still, it's frustrating all get out in situations like epic updates.

I took a glance at this and I do believe it does not show everyone. There are people I know who are level 8 that are not on the list. I am guessing there is a possibility it does not show hidden characters.