Tears of Ascension and Ascension gating new players.

I agree that the gating needs to go, now that we're less than six months away from the next expac. Those who haven't gotten all four of their ascension levels yet - or even one - won't be able to complete it before the next expac comes out unless they log in every day from now until then, which for a lot of folks is not doable. Anyone starting late is SOL and won't be on quasi-equal footing apprentice spell-wise when the next expac comes out.

By the way, it takes three scrolls as a member to do one KA Advance Solo daily mission and earn all points. That's three days waiting for a single quest for roughly 2m points. You get twelve scrolls per week. That's 7.2 million points total you can earn... by doing three quests a week. The whole "We did it, suck it up" is a ridiculous response. The reason you did it is because DBG wanted to purposely slow people down and force them not to reach 4x4 in a month, something the general consensus hated and vociferously voiced complaints about, as the numerous threads about it can attest. There's no purpose in continuing a forced slow down over seven months later. People who need to catch up still need to grind a ton of axp - the amount is the same as the "suck it up"ers did - and you can only earn good axp by doing daily ToT or KA quests, so there is still a gate by day. Getting 4x4 won't give anyone special gear or their epic 2.0, that still needs to be earned by drops and doing quests; nor will it give them grandmaster spells x4 without spending thousands in DBC. Removing the Guided Ascension gate does no harm to those who have toughed it out. Instead, it gives help to new and returning players to catch up and have the ability to enjoy current content with their contemporaries.

I could have ignored KA entirely, & not having it would have made no difference whatsoever in what I'm doing now, & honestly, it hasn't added enough "fun" to the game to have made the purchase worthwhile. This is actually the first EQ2 expansion that I've actively regretted buying, & it may very well be the last one I buy.

Neither do I, but at the same time, the "effort" should be more clearly related. Because I can't see a single good reason why the Greenmist HQ should have been required, when to my knowledge no previous expansion has ever made completion of ANY HQ required content for the progression of the newest sig line.

You can tell us all you want that "I did it, everyone did it, you need to do it too" but that doesn't mitigate the bad design decision that required you to do ancient content. IMO, it's nothing more than a lazy, slap-dash method for the devs to "ensure" that old content remains "relevant."

I'd agree with a lot of the extra quest lines being added, there is a lot of randomness in there that I'm not looking forward to at all.


The ascension gating is a tiny speed bump in comparison to the rest of the epic 2.0 questline, this is from someone who has started late.

My major problem with it all is that it requires multiple groups, normally that is a good thing, as with the previous mythical questline people were encouraged to run dungeons and get together. It gives plenty of reasons for other people to want to tag along, even if the loot is just for alts (better even if there are tokens from the dungeons).

Now I'm wondering how to ask 5 other people to head over a remote area of the world for a long and very hard fight for the 1 in 5 chance to win mediocre loot, it doesn't make sense gameplay wise since for others its more of a chore than something fun.

It is not a one off either as I need to do that several times, since the loot focus has gone to the battleground replacement there are not enough people around Norrath to help out, even better the best loot reward from the battleground replacement requires the epic...

I do actually like a lot of the expansion, but the unfriendliness to alts and the over reliance on charitable friends to always help people out are big negatives for me. I'm seriously questioning now if I should just give up and wait for the next expansion to reset things, don't get me wrong, I don't want gear to be given away as that just gives a treadmill feeling, but this one leaves people behind who were not there from the start.

Yeah, I help people with there epic updates maybe 4x a day. Mainly noobs who have a harder time getting a group. me and my friend cofeee can duo most of the content now. So we drag them along for w/e.

So the complaint I'm seeing is 'I can only burn as many scrolls as I have, and then I gotta wait 18 hours to get my net scroll, and waa waa that just is TOO long.'

Deal with it. Quit trying to make it so it can be ground out in a day. because you take away the 'time gating' as you put it, either your going to have to nerf the everloving hell out of group zone asc xp, or you literally CAN do it in a weekend at the MOST. Or, conversely, they'll have to make the ascention abilities massively less powerful, to go with the actual effort your putting in. the point of the Tome being so powerful is because of what you have to do to get it.

They made these spells as powerful as they are, the Tome as powerful as it is, precisely because of the 'time gating' and how long it would take for you to earn it. People have been fussing about 'Oh this expansion killed alts' ********. I got alts that are working on epic 2.0, and have almost finished their first ascentions WITHOUT the damn bauble. So it's not like it can't be damn done. will the bauble make it faster? sure. but I see it as a bonus, not a requirement that they do.

and what fights in the Epic 2 are 'long' fights? the only one I can even remotely think of is the Priest one in GD. the rest of them die in less then 5 minutes if you have even a halfway decent group at this stage. that's not a long fight.

Every time they come up with anything that takes longer then a day to do we get these threads of how it's going to drive people away or stop new players. then those same people fuss about how they got nothing to do when the pendulum swings the other way.

As to quests not needing an HQ before? there were epics that needed Heritage quests before. epic 2.0 needed them. the entire storyline was built out of the Greenmist HQ story, and helping Rile claim his father's throne. heaven damn forbid you actually have to do something earlier related.

I want people to have to go back and do earlier things. I want people to see just how deep the stories go. not just raid and then leave for X years when the class they pick isn't the FOTM, or when the raid bosses are on farm. and I'll admit I have that bias.

I came from Eq1. when 99% of the game REQUIRED a group. when there were corpse runs and level loss. when people that left for months couldn't just jump back into the high end in a few days. when people that played classes that weren't super powerful, but liked the class, just toughened up and worked through the bad times to get to the good times. You stuck with the game even when it was your turn in the proverbial barrel becuase you enjoyed the game, or the friends you made on your 30 minute boat trips or your hours upon hours of dungeon crawls. it was hard, when fights were long, when a raid boss kill was a thirty minute+ slugfest and everything was contested and camping was a thing.

So when people complain about fights being 5 minutes as long, and having to wait between scrolls, and act like that such a game breaking drive people away thing, I admit I'm first to roll my eyes at the instant gratification feel of those complaints. SO if they want to make things more 'difficult' or justify things being super powerful with time sinks or prerequisites to make you at least TRY to appreciate the stories some, then I say more power to them.

and if that means the fair weather player that leaves for years at a time can't just jump in and hit the ground running and doesn't like it? well tough. maybe you should have stuck around then. the people that change characters the second they stop hitting the tops of parses? too bad. maybe be willing to play a class when it's NOT the super powerful one.

and the time gating for ascention? suck it up, buttercup. if that's all it takes to break you from this game, then I'm sorry this game just might not be for you at this point.

I understand where you are coming from. You don't want to make it face-roll easy. But with the hundreds of other options out there for video games this game isn't going to appeal to the new player. I'm guessing you're more or less of a solo player with your attitude, and that is completely okay. My only intent and goal is to increase the player population. not make it face-roll easy.
Getting ascension scrolls and using the XP isn't hard by any means Rainmare. It's not hard to take two seconds to log in grab a scroll and spend a little time in solos grinding the EXP away. But to gate it behind a 3 month wait is Ridiculous and there is no justification for it this late in the expansion. Sorry you earned your "Tome of the ascended" the hard way and you would be envious if people got it faster, but sometimes we just have to stop thinking about ourselves for a change.

I'm not trying to change the difficulty I'm trying to change the system. Don't get it misconstrued

I'm completely open to other options that dont take 3 months lol

This is complete bull, and your typical exaggeration.

Neither the spells nor the Tome were made that powerful because of the time gate. They were made that powerful to make you want them, and the time gate that long to make you stick around and keep playing (and paying).

No one is realistically going to get even one level 10 ascension class in a weekend, let alone all four. Not since the contested experience nerf. The heroics and solos do not give that kind of absurd experience gain, and even if they did the heroics would require a really solid group to power through them that fast. How many new or returning players do you know of that can get a high dps group to drag them through heroics for 48hrs straight?

Give me a break. The scrolls need to go, sooner rather than later.

That's all fine and dandy but future expansions will be tuned to assume that players have this tome. So it won't be a simple matter of returning with the new expansion and somewhat being able to get started.

We are talking about some thing that's in the best interest of the game here maybe they should have asked a bit more about how the player base feels about gating mechanics in there notional survey ?

I love this idea Ashandra. A survey would be awesome

You are completely misinformed if this is what you think people are saying. Nobody here is complaining that things take a while. People are commenting on the fact that gating mechanisms aren't actually PLAYING the game. It's just forcing you to "play and pay", as stated above. So they can suck money from you while you "pretend" to be doing something. KA is FULL of the same grinds over and over again. Nothing is fun, and you don't really feel like you are getting anywhere by doing the same thing over and over again.

Riddle me this: This game is called "Everquest 2"... How many quests are there in Kunark Ascending?

We got one small overland zone that barely has 30 quests in it, which we feel forced to do to get a BiS item, also in these quests involves a faction grind. Aside from that there are mindless daily repeatable quests, they don't give faction with anything but they give a couple marks that hardly buy anything useful, anything that is any good would take months of mark grinding to get. We get a couple of PQs that are very unbalanced, where there are like 2 or 3 classes that one shot mobs while everybody else does nothing.

It honestly feels like there are more COLLECTION QUESTS than actual quests in this whole xpac. And every time they introduce "new content" we get expert zones (the same content but with a boost, even the gear is the same but slightly upgraded) and proving grounds, which nobody seems to actually be enjoying.

This expansion has almost no content, the ascension gate only adds to the problem. The gating mechanisms are here to make us believe that this is actual content, or that there is so much to do when there really isn't.

On the 2nd step of the fighter epic, some random named in Kael with a heavy stun+fear+disarm and break gear and I believe a deaggro too, or maybe I was just feared/stunned for too long.

We had 4 real people and 2 mercs, the healer was a warden alt, so when feared/stunned only the dots could be ticking. The merc rezed the healer at least once, but we wiped at 6% when my shield broke and I didn't equip a new one fast enough. I guess with a non-druid healer it would have been okay, unfortunately no answer to the lack of wards/reactives.

Seeing the fight was about 10-15 minutes at that point we stopped there, really too painful to try again. 2 of the people were mains with lots of raid gear, my tank was semi main, mostly raid gear and the healer about the same. I'd be back in there if that was the big boss fight to claim the reward, but it wasn't, it was some random named as a small part of a questline to get a reward I'll likely not be using. Unfortunately most of the people in the raid group are not bothered helping now, maybe I need to get a better raid group? But I shouldn't have to rely on charity to progress in the game.

I feel epic 2.0 is more of a chore for others than epic.

Murf- get your people at range. Makes the fight much easier.

On the original topic- it would be nice if there were some sort of "welcome back" pack of scrolls people could get. Just to remove the two month barrier between coming back and actually being able to do anything worthwhile.

I say do this. Players whom have ground out all 4 ascensions to max and have their tome should be able to buy the tears for alts. Tear should work like the double ascension bug and the xp just roll over like it did during the bug so a players alt can grind out all 4 ascensions faster than 3 months on an ALT. 100p plus all the status to buy a tear doesn’t make it very cost effective if it only gives 7 mil.

This will accomplish two things. Make new players or at least ones whom didn’t put in the time to grid out all 4 as implemented so as to not belittle those of us who have, and second it makes ALTS more viable since you need at least ascension level 9 to finish epic 2.0. Grinding out max ascension on a alt is killing the same in terms of playability.

Just for giggles: I got my Magician to 65th level while soloing about 80% of the way; the only reason I ever did any grouping was in Lost Dungeons Of Norrath, because of the Diamond Prism of Companionship. Had it not been for that, I'd have probably solo'd 64 of those 65 levels.

EQ1 only "required" a group if you were going into dungeons, & sometimes not even then.

Now go back in time and try that with a non druid healer, scout, or tank.

While this is offtopic mostly, the attitude shown here is the attitude that kind of ruins any change. "I got mine, so go get yours" even if "I got mine" was because the person was lucky enough to be there for either of the two ascension bugs. Or even if the "i got mine" person ends up playing on a server by themselves because it was too time gate-consuming for returning players to catch up.

I never tried to imply anyone could do it -- merely that some could, which sadly was the biggest problem EQ1 had. I can tell you that a well-played Bard could probably do a lot of what I did; I know this, because I know people who did do it. But I wouldn't try it in the old days of EQ1 with anything other than a Druid, a mage class, or a Bard.

I definitely agree with you, however, on the "I got mine" notion.

Don't think the issue is wanting it for free or easy mode. It's not about it taking time.

It's about being forced to STOP. I don't mind that it takes a while - I mind that I have to hurry up and wait. That is...not fun.

There is plenty of grindage and time sink to go around. Epic 2.0 pre reqs. PG tokens. Tithe. The ascension exp time gate is just, in my opinion, unnecessary now that we are 2/3rds through the expansion.