I love the expansion! I hate that its not accessible to most! (reqs & zones too hard)

I'm sad that we are only a couple weeks in and theres almost no pugs going on. This is the time where everyone is LFG and the channels are non stop chatter. It's quite dead and I believe its due to how hard everything is, most are not raiding, most are not even doing T2 heroics for that matter. This needs to be addressed we are far to early in to die out. I'm all for working for things and I never shy away from grinding out stuff, but there is some major balance issues here with the content that needs to be ironed out asap. This is poised to be one of the greatest expacs we have had in a long time, just need to get sorted, sooner than later.

The box of 'starter gear' proves they know most people didn't get gear last expac.

The zone requirements and stat changes say they don't want most people to do it this time and they like that model.

I bought it because it wasn't that much money to try, but already the grind is so overpowering. So many other games where you just do stuff and get stuff, this game has always felt like you needed better gear than the zone drops to do the zone.

I was grinding out the sig line, and realized that it would not give me gear to get in heroics.

Buying MC 'might' get me to baseline, but what's the point of that? And the wave has already crested it looks like to me.

Enjoy your Expac! If you are in Heroics, you are their customer. I guess.

If things are too easy to achieve, people don't value them. I think this time the step to heroics is a little too steep, but we're already seeing updates toning down certain aspects of some heroics.

The big thing that most people are getting hung on, I think, is Resolve. Yes, you need a certain amount of Resolve to play the heroic zones. However, you also have to have 60K Potency or so or you're going to be ineffective.

It's pretty easy to get geared to the Resolve requirements, but then you have to evaluate your stats, and boost Potency and anything else that's low via adorns, deity (aka plat) infusions, infuse with dropped or crafted infusers (you can use infusers from Thalumbra forward). If you are going for mastercrafted gear, make it from refined ores, then experiment on it to boost stats.

Yes, all this fiddling around with getting the stats up after Potency can be a PITA. But it's what we have to do to get into zones where better gear drops.

Doesn't help that Potency Mitigation is hidden.

Potency mitigation: Hidden mechanic.
Healing Debuff: Hidden mechanic.

Just waiting for them to follow eq1's lead and aknowledge a "luck stat" does in fact exist.

I mean, market place luck potions would be all the rage

It's not even just the resolve thing, people are getting the resolve but still can't handle the content. Things are way to hard right now. Right now we need 2 healers, 1 tank, a chanter (most do not dps much) and that leaves room for only 2 dps. It was hard enough just to get a healer and tank sometimes, now we have to have another spot taken by specifics

Over the past few years they have changed heroics to be more like raid encounters, its not really a play it your way, its play it their way or you cant do the content.

There are both pluses and negatives to this way of designing content. I would say the decline in population tells us that its more negative than positive to players, but I am not a dev, nor do I have access to the numbers they have. I guess they know what they are doing? I dont really have any positive things to say about this design. I am about as happy with this as I am trying to find an advanced tradeskill book. I have yet to see anything that hasn't been for accessions.

I don't care for it myself but I have enjoyed this expansion so far just being solo. I will not be doing heroic dungeons for this nor the last expansion due to the mechanics of heroic dungeons and the lack of classes required at the same time on test. Its my choice and I'm OK with it I guess.

Okay, first of all, what you said right there was a direct contradiction. Secondly, people that spend a good amount of time in the game and play it at a high level mostly enjoy some semblance of a challenge outside of raids. Why would you run heroics anyway if you don't raid and want them to be loot pinatas that just take longer to kill? Some people like having little milestones to achieve things instead of just plowing through easy and unscripted dungeons that take 0 skill or attentiveness.

Exactly!

So you consider mana drain and healing mobs scripted? Every boss that doesn't have a knock back on it I ask for 20 mins because it just drains my mana and has a ton of hp not much fun other then that I'm enjoying the xpac

Because EQ2 is an MMO designed to be played with other people. Remember, people are talking about HEROIC content here, not raid content. There are 4 tiers of raid content for you to enjoy. It has never in the entirety of the game been this difficult to access and play heroic content.

I'm sorry but when you have a good group and 2 healers can't keep the group alive theres a balance issue going on. I do like challenge but this isn't fun right now. The lfg channel is reflecting that as well.

The difference is that before if you decided to do a heroic dungeon with a friend or two you took your chances, the fights were challenging and sometimes unable to be completed but we had fun in the process.

Now its like you are NOT ALLOWED to do a heroic dungeon unless your group meets a certain criteria like all 6 people, have to have a tank etc... there is a check at the door when you meet the first trash mob that can and will one shot you for being there. If it were a raid zone or a fight with an avatar I can see why you were required to have a certain number of people, but this is a heroic dungeon. If we managed to pull it off and kill the mobs then great we earned our reward.
Its stupid!
I don't know of a nicer way to put it.
The game designers seem to have lost track of this with the new requirements. This ranks right on up there with the initial removal of the starter islands and the Golden path.
LOL, how did that work out for them?

Next time try reading the whole sentence. And if this is your argument there are T1 heroics, solo versions of all those zones, tons of quests, old raids, decorating, crafting, and plenty of other things for you to do if the tiniest of scripts is too difficult for you. We are 2 weeks into the expansion and you guys are crying because T2 heroics aren't loot piñatas. What a joke.

Either the group isn't as good as you think, you're missing a script element, or you aren't geared properly.

The OP isn't referring specifically to T2 heroics, but all heroics. As for the rest of your comment... solo, solo, solo, solo, solo and plenty of other solo things to do. Reading comprehension, son.

Even though I've been a member for over 11 years, this expansion might do me in. It feels like we are going backwards. The resolve requirements are so high, the 3 fervor for 17k of potency was a joke of a trade on our potency buffs, they didn't reduce the mitigation for heroics for KA, and I am upset they are essentially going to make us give up or mythical, something that we worked so hard for, up to a 55 fervor ruin.

Just like we outgrew the Prismatic 1.0 (from Darathar), the Prismatic 2.0 (from the God King), the Qeynos Claymore, the Epic 1.0, etc. This is progression. There will be better stuff. Lots of people use their treasured special weapons of bygone days as appearance gear.

Maybe you all just need to upgrade your mount gear

From a returning player's perspective, who last played in the TOV era, and have gotten at least two toons from that era into the Myrist Library content (and the free level 110 I got from buying CD), I can attest that if there is any information in-game on what infusions are about, I've missed it.

I suspect the reason why is that a TOV era toon is 95, and hence goes to Tranquil Seas (and very happy that my Velious era toons are allowed in!). Where we level to 100, so go to the latest expansion zone that allows level 100 to level - Plane of Magic. At level 100, we can no longer level in Phantom Seas, Thalumbra, or Kunark Ascended because of the big jump in experience requirements between 99 and 100.

So we miss information about infusions and ascension that those zones might contain. The instant 110, or course, is even more clueless.

Yes, we see it in game, such as seeing things like "infusable" on our gear and "Show Ascension Experience" on our experience bar, but I totally get why some people might think it's invalid to read out of game spoilers, or more likely, expect it soon to be explained.

But it's not.

Returning vets and new people alike are left clueless, unless they decide to search it online. I pretty much expect having to do a lot of research when returning to old games like EQ2 and Anarchy Online and do so when I return to them, but returning to WoW does not require it, ya know?