So Far, CD Leaves Me Cold

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

  1. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    With your Ascensions, note that scholars can craft your Journeyman, Expert, and Grandmaster upgrades with (reasonably) common materials. You have to have a scroll page for Adept and Master, but these can often be purchased on the broker. (You have to scribe each spell level in order, alas...). With each upgrade, the Ascensions become quicker to cast and do more.

    Did you do the Days of Summer quests for the panda in Sundered Frontier? They reward Ascension boosts, among other useful things. The quests are dead simple.

    On the NO-TRADE HEIRLOOM gear, I started a [BUG] thread on one item doing that! The two tags should never occur together.

    The step up from PoP to CD was, I think, too steep. DEFINITELY the step into CD Heroics is too steep.

    However, the advice about getting mastercrafted Academic gear in all 21 slots, and experimenting each piece to Visionary, is still good. You won't be replacing that until and unless you're running Heroic instances. Academic gear has 60 Resolve per piece, x21 slots is 1260 Resolve, which is enough for T2 Heroics. The reason people say to experiment it to Visionary is because there's not nearly enough Potency, so experiment at least 3x for Potency, then imbue for at least Potency and Crit Bonus so your spells actually hit and damage the mobs (or heal, if you're a healer).

    Reforging is something you will tend to need to do with any sort of armor to shift stats around. If you take a look at your toon on Dragon's Armory, you can hover over each stat and it will tell you what the soft and/or hard caps are, if any, and what that stat does. CD armor has no Crit Bonus... it's all on the jewelry. And ABMOD is mostly on selected armor bits. Stats that you will almost certainly want to use Reforging to fix are Reuse Speed/Recovery Speed (I can't recall now which it was, but I started with zero in one of the two), Accuracy, and Strikethrough. When you have stats that are over hard cap, they're a good candidate to reforge to move some of that stat into something useful. If you have stats that don't benefit you (say, Haste for a caster) those can be reforged into something more useful (for example, a caster wants Casting Speed).

    Stat mechanics are also not transparently clear. Through experimentation, my guildfolk have determined:
    • Non-healers: 1 Fervor = 12 CB = 250 POT = 200K ABMOD
    • Healers: 1 Fervor = 4 Crit Bonus = 40 Potency
    Where do you get this stuff?
    • Fervor you get mostly from blue adorns, mount gear, and some orange adorns.
    • Potency can be had via white adorns, orange adorns, and potency infusion.
    • Crit Bonus has been, for me at least, a matter of upgrading jewelry via drops.
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  2. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Quick, hopefully easy question: if I have no Ascension classes (no interest whatsoever) and no Mercs (ditto, though the chance to torture Qho and Raffik were just too tempting for me not to unlock that, finally), should I just sit out the last few expacs we've had and just stick to crafting and decorating? ;->

    Uwk
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  3. Dead Alt Account Well-Known Member

    You may be able to do the solo quests, but that's about it.
  4. Milchbart Active Member

    @ Uwkeke
    Go to sundered frontier, close to the Combine spire. Ask Yun Zi and do the very easy and very quick quest line. You get a lvl 5 ascension boost. Sorry, but that is really a more than easy way and ascension is now really helpfull. On lvl 5 you have already some good damage spells. You also get a deity boost for crit Bonus, pot and Stamina, a cyan adornment for pot and a good merc for free.
    Go to the library and take gear from tishans lookbox multiple times. Loot the adornments. After this easy job you are prepared to run all CD solo quests including sig-line.
    Again sorry, but CD is not extremly hard. Every new X-pac in the past was challanging in the begining. This is the basis of the game. Everything else would be boring.
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  5. Nelie Well-Known Member

    Don't think this is anywhere near accurate tbh. According to Caith on discord,

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  6. Bhayar Well-Known Member

    @Milchbart
    Based on a quick scan (and I'm willing to admit there's some slop in the figures), potency difference between a set from the box and MC gear yields less than a thousand potency. That's not overly significant when you're talking 45000 potency plus on gear.. There is a difference when all that MC is infused however as mine was at the time.
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  7. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Heh...now I know where everyone who mutters about "now EVERYONE is a bloody caster" gets it from. I'm just a simple country berserker kitty. ;->

    But I'll give it a shot at some point. Thanks for your advice, all! :)

    Uwk
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  8. Naramee Active Member

    using ascensionspells makes Things die easier, but it still is boaring, cant help it not much fun here anymore
  9. Beee Well-Known Member

    100% agree this is nonsense …. and you can use unattuner on these items :eek:

    not correct - depends much more on your stat

    A Fervor rise from 0=>100 is really a doubled output
    A Fervor rise from 200=>300 only adds 25% more output

    So on a high fervor level you see no difference fom 1 fervor.. even 45 from pact makes sometimes no huge differece
    Thats's why fervor is not as worthy as you think
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  10. Almee Well-Known Member

    Sogapa, I had no problems killing things in PoP--even the named mobs. That was one of the things I really liked about that xpac. All 12 of my main Maj'Dul toons completed the adventure timeline with no problems--even the priests.

    I still think it has a lot of time wasters, in the xpac, but overall I've liked it enough that I plan to take some of my other 100s through the timeline. I generally enjoy doing overland questing as long as it isn't a monochrome zone and PoP offers a good way to level up to 110 plus get 3 ascensions to 15 and one to 10+.

    As for the white adorns--I got them off the armor and weapons, in the chest, but I haven't been able to use any of them with the new stuff I've earned through quests. The say they will go on a number of different pieces of equipment but when I try to use them it says I don't have anything that can use them. Maybe people are using them with crafted gear or maybe there is something everyone else knows that I don't know having stopped playing for awhile.
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  11. Rhodris EQ2Wire Ninja

    Don't forget you have to unequip the gear and put it in your inventory to be able to add the adornment (which is a completely daft system).
  12. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    I agree; all the adornings I've tried before level 100, that was exactly how one did it: found the thing one was wearing at the time and socketed it in, basically. :-/

    Uwk
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  13. Milchbart Active Member

    Maybe Geomancer is the right ascension for you. Geomancer makes crushing damage. To hit with a hammer or a geomancer spell is more or less the same. The geomancer is just doing more damage and on higher levels you get one or two spells only for tanks. I am a paladin. I have all ascension on lvl 20, but actually I use only geomancer. It takes endless time to bring all ascensions to lvl 20 and it is almost impossible to bring all ascension spells to grandmaster. To focus on one ascension class is much easier and for sure enough for soloing.
    Geomancer has also a buff what increase your fervor. Even without using ascension spells you increase your dps in old fashion combate.
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  14. Uwkete-of-Crushbone Well-Known Member

    Sweet!! Okay, will do. ;->

    From one plate wearer to another, thanks for the advice! :D

    Uwk
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  15. Synistra Active Member

    I think the real takeaway is that it's kind of ridiculous for new or returning players to know to get all this potency and resolve. Entry level into this game shouldn't feel like a huge uphill climb to do Signature Quests, especially the first one after the library entrance quests. When I went back to Live before the TLE opened I was slogging through until I found a guild and they helped me get caught up on what I needed.

    There are multiple glaring issues with new player/returning player acquisition and keeping them around (the term for that escapes me atm sorry). I am also one that would normally roll her eyes at the OPs posts and pick them apart because most of the things she seems to say (imo) are super negative, however this time I think she's absolutely right. There should be a linear progression for gear and making the sig questline require visionary experimentation, blah blah blah just for mobs to not die at a snails pace does not a fun returning experience make. Unfortunately the guild I joined only had 1 group out of around 30 people who were able to even do Heroics, good luck getting anything done in a place like that. There's many walls that new and returning players hit and the game will die a slow death with people coming and leaving over and over until they're broken down.

    Complexity in a game can be fun, tedium is not. Everything shouldn't fall over when you look at it, but nor should solo, non-named fights take 3-5 minutes per kill. There's a huge disconnect and it shouldn't be up to players to fix that at 15-40k per piece of gear. That is, if they even know what to buy. The gear in the crates is advertised as being perfect for starting the quests...it's not.
  16. Rhodris EQ2Wire Ninja

    I think the word you are looking for is "retention".
  17. Jabbso Active Member

    Great post and I agree completely with it.

    I was very close to returning a few weeks ago but the in the end I was just so overwhelmed with the hurdles needed to jump over just to do heroic instances.

    I read a few guides to starting CD and it just seemed daft:
    1) Get refined rares
    2) Make all new armour and jewellery
    3) Experiment on each piece 5 times
    4) Infuse it

    Oh and if this wasn't bad enough the T1 heroic stuff isn't even an upgrade to the Mastercrafted armour (or so I've been told). I literally do not understand CD progression and how you get to T2 heroics. It really does seem a farcical expac to me.
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  18. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    The signature quests can easily be completed using the gear from Tishan's Lockbox. It's only if you want to do heroic or raid content that you need a certain amount of Resolve... there are NO Resolve requirements for overland content, not even the overland PQs.

    And "entry level" shouldn't be 110. It should be level 1 and naked, IMHO. We get waaaayyyy too many people who use a level booster to jump themselves to end game who have no idea what spells or AAs they have or what they do or how to even play their class.
  19. Synistra Active Member

    On paper this may be true. There are no resolve requirements for overland but we're not really talking about resolve when it comes to the CD sig line, we're talking about Potency. I can tell you it took me for ever to kill a yellow no up arrow solo mob in Plane of Fire or whatever it's called now on a brand new toon with gear from the Panda and Tishan's Lockbox. It wasn't until I got the Visionary gear and jewelry and other stuff that I was able to complete the Signature Questline in any sort of timeframe that didn't make me want to delete my character and the game.

    I had no idea how to fix it, until I asked around and was told what to do. For a game that desperately needs more players, you'd think things would be made a bit more transparent and better for them when they do come back/get here for the first time. If the Tishan's Lockbox junk was good for anything other than the adornments it supplies then you wouldn't have newbies being told to get player crafted gear to do anything.
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  20. Synistra Active Member

    Thanks! Had a brain fart! <3
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